Cities pledge to reduce emissions and fight climate change—but do these commitments measure up? The transport sector makes up nearly one-third of urban emissions, a factor influenced by distances traveled and modes of travel. Most cities focus on policies to reduce emissions from modes of travel, such as encouraging residents to switch from personal automobiles to public transport.
Land use policies need to be integrated with transportation measures in order to reduce transport-related emissions.
Cities that fail to incorporate land use measures actually see an increase in transport-related emissions. To better understand how cities are addressing transport-related emissions, I investigated climate plans in 12 U.S. cities to identify and compare: 1) level of emissions reductions pledged, and 2) policies and metrics to reduce transport-related emissions. The analysis focuses on a small but diverse group of U.S. cities, and recommendations may be extrapolated to other cities in a global context.
Urban transport systems can help cities solve climate change. But it’s just one part of the equation. Photo: Pixaby
The leadership and initiative of international and U.S. cities were highlighted throughout the UN climate conference, COP21. Over 700 global mayors gathered in Paris at the Climate Summit for Local Leaders, which took place parallel to the official UN negotiations. Global leaders at the Summit, including Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, espoused the importance of cities in driving and advancing measures to reduce climate change. Their message was loud and clear: cities cannot wait for mandates from state or federal governments and must instead be trailblazers to move the climate agenda forward.
The emphasis on cities was a break from previous climate conferences, and reflected the global recognition that city actions to address climate change are instrumental—but insufficient—for meeting international climate goals . International city networks, including groups like ICLEI—Local Governments for Sustainability and C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, play an important role in championing and building capacity for cities to action on climate.. A subset of this group present in Paris was the Local Climate Leaders Circle, a delegation of 12 U.S. cities representing the diversity of urban areas in the U.S., from Des Moines, Iowa to Santa Monica, California (see map below for complete city list). These cities were identified as “speaking out as champions for climate action in national and international policy forums” and are the focus of my research on transport-related climate strategies.
Over one hundred U.S. cities have committed to addressing carbon pollution. Their reduction pledges represent the equivalent of taking 62 million cars off the road, equivalent to a quarter of the 253 million cars on the road today. Cities typically commit to climate change mitigation in order to meet a state directive, or to respond to local leadership or community action. The projected emissions reductions are driven primarily by cities with long-term targets (i.e., 2035-2050). In the U.S., 62 cities have set targets to meet the federal goal of 26-27 percent reduction in emissions below 2005 levels by 2025, and 33 local governments have targets to reduce emissions by 80 percent. Figure 1 below shows how targets and timelines in the Local Climate Leaders Circle compare; nearly half of these cities meet the federal emissions reductions goal.
Figure 1. Emissions reductions targets for Local Climate Leaders Circle cities by year and anticipated percent reduction in emissions. Cities with long-term emissions reductions targets have greater emissions reductions goals. Image: Emily Wier, Yale FES; data compiled from CDP & city Climate Action Plans
Setting specific and measurable targets is the first step in mitigating climate change. The next and critical part is figuring out how to reach mitigation goals and establishing indicators to track progress. Cities have a suite of tools available to mitigate emissions associated with urban form, which includes transportation planning, zoning, and behavioral-based policies. Geographic and municipal boundaries impact the policy options available to mitigate emissions resulting from each of these drivers. Even though mitigating emissions from transportation and land use could be an important aspect of city climate plans, few cities adequately create and implement measures to reduce these emissions.
Tackling transportation emissions
Transportation and land use—how we move around and build our cities—are two of the largest sources of city emissions. Nationally, nearly one third of carbon emissions are from transportation, but there is much more heterogeneity at the local level. Transport-related emissions can vary from 5 percent (Chula Vista, California) to over 50 percent (Grand Rapids, Michigan) of a city’s total emissions (see Figure 2). The presence of a metro or subway system, commuting distances, connectivity of transit options, and spatial composition of housing and jobs has profound impacts on city transportation emissions.
Figure 2. Percentage of total citywide emissions due to land use and transportation average 30 percent, but vary between less than 5 percent and more than 50 percent. Image: Emily Wier, Yale FES; data compiled from CDP & city Climate Action Plans
Through climate policies, cities can encourage residents to swap their cars for public transportation, make it easier to live closer to work, or support more efficient fuels. For example, a bike sharing program and electric vehicle charging stations in Columbus, OH, helped reduce the city’s emissions by 3 percent—the equivalent of taking 19,000 cars off the road. Investments made today in transportation infrastructure, housing stock, or other mobility options have long-term consequences for future emissions. If a city invests in low-carbon transportation infrastructure, it will be locked in to a low carbon emissions scenario that will make it easier to meet climate targets.
Cities tackle transportation and land use in climate plans by proposing to reduce emissions associated with vehicle transportation in two broad categories: 1) reduce vehicle miles traveled by promoting alternative transportation options or promote no- or low-carbon fuel sources; or 2) reduce the physical distance driven through land use policies. Mitigation measures in climate plans typically focus on the former category to reduce the carbon intensity of vehicle use, such as encouraging the use of electric vehicles or creating bike lanes. The two most common interventions proposed by cities in the Local Climate Leaders Circle are transportation policies to improve biking and walking infrastructure. Eight out of twelve cities implemented these policies to try and get people out of their cars and using alternative transportation.
Five of the cities analyzed integrated at least one land use policy within their climate plan. A standout example is Oakland’s Energy and Climate Change Action Plan, which begins to integrate land use consideration by reducing vehicle emissions and the physical distance driven. The integration of transportation policies and land use planning is designed to encourage more people to live closer to work and to use safe and efficient transportation alternatives. Oakland uses transport-oriented development to encourage housing development near transportation nodes and along high-use corridors. Street design optimizes bike, walk, and bus rapid transit infrastructure. Regional transportation planning incorporates the needs of Bay Area residents and plans growth targeted to promote sustainable development.
Do the numbers add up?
Some cities are getting it right. After Oakland’s Energy and Climate Change Action Plan was implemented in 2012, the city’s transportation emissions decreased slightly. Other cities that integrated transportation and land use planning in their climate plans, including Atlanta, Georgia and Columbus, Ohio, also reduced their transportation emissions.
Other cities are not doing as well. Transport-related emissions increased by around 18 percent in Boulder, Colorado and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania after they implemented their climate plans. These cities did not integrate transportation and land use, and instead implemented measures to reduce emissions solely associated with vehicle transportation. Boulder and Pittsburgh adopted policies to support hybrid vehicles, alternative fuel use, and an increase in bike lanes and associated infrastructure. But these measures alone are not enough to shift the city toward a low-carbon transportation pathway because of the exclusion of land use measures.
In developed or mature cities, infrastructure lock-in, including transport systems and land use patterns, directly impacts emissions trajectories. Due to the inertia of the existing built environment, it is more difficult to change residential patterns to aggregate housing near transit nodes or along multimodal corridors. The suburban sprawl that characterizes much of American cities and subsequent car dependency will require large shifts in the built environment and the way citizens think about their transportation options. Government policies to bring about these shifts are challenging because the policy options are decentralized, often logistically difficult, and are often reliant on personal behavioral shifts.
In creating climate plans, cities identify emissions reductions targets and measures to achieve those targets. These targets are often not associated with a specific performance level or directly tied to a policy measure. The Des Moines Tomorrow Plan identifies a goal to “provide multimodal access in the region” but it is unclear how the city aims to achieve this goal. Multimodal transportation, which integrates a variety of transportation options (e.g., bus, train, bicycling) into a transportation network, is vague—what type of multimodal access is proposed? How will this be measured? What defines the region and where investment in multimodal access will be centered? Greater clarification and specificity is needed.
Other plans, such as Santa Monica’s 15×15 Climate Plan, are more clear and direct—Santa Monica has a target to increase ridership on the Big Blue Bus by an additional 200,000 annual passengers, which is both measurable and quantifiable. Creating policy measures that are both actionable and quantifiable is tied to better success in achieving emissions reduction targets.
How can cities improve their plans?
Although many cities have reduced overall emissions as compared with baseline levels, the transport-related emissions are increasing in several cities where integration of land use and transportation measures have not been included. As cities develop Climate Action Plans, how can these plans be strengthened to ensure that transport-related emissions are effectively mitigated?
Track progress to meet goals. Not enough data is provided by cities to evaluate which land use and transportation measures have been implemented and whether they have yielded the anticipated emissions reductions. It is recommended that cities identify metrics to analyze with respect to land use and transportation, and establish a standardized reporting timeframe. A checklist, such as Oakland’s 2015 Implementation Progress Report, could be created by each city and inserted into an online portal to mark whether a mitigation measure has been implemented, the date of implementation, and emissions reductions associated with that measure to date. The data feedback helps create a reinforcing cycle to identify policy measures that reduce emissions and those that need to be modified.
Link policies to mitigation measures. Mitigation measures are too vague and do not correspond with programs or projects that can be implemented and tracked. Currently, many mitigation measures outline steps to “encourage,” “explore,” or “expand” various emissions reductions steps. The Grand Rapids Sustainability Plan outlines clear targets and measurement indicators, which are completely absent from West Palm Beach’s Sustainability Action Plan. Mitigation measures should instead be clearly linked to policy measures, or otherwise separated into ‘Policies’ and ‘Suggestions’ along with the appropriate policy instruments. This would facilitate better implementation and transparency of the legal framework and create more actionable policy measures.
Make data transparent and available to the public. Data should be readily available, downloadable, and transparent to allow for public engagement. The creation of a portal with baseline data, emissions reductions targets, policy measures, and progress reports on the city website would facilitate better public awareness, accountability, and transparency of the climate plan and its implementation. Boulder, Chula Vista, and Oakland have tracking reports and inventories available on their websites, but the data is not standardized. The scope of a central data clearinghouse, such as Carbon Disclosure Project, could be expanded to make data public and transparent.
Incorporate more land use measures. Measures focusing specifically on land use are disproportionately omitted from climate plans. About 17 percent of all measures in plans focus on land use measures. Four cities have adopted no land use measures, and three others have one land use measure each. Where they do occur, they are siloed from transportation measures, even though land use and transportation are intrinsically related. More mitigation measures aimed to reduce the total miles driven would be beneficial in climate plans; the integration of climate plans with regional plans presents opportunities to change zoning regulations to increase mixed-use development, promote the co-location of housing and employment, and ensure basic services are within a given distance of households. Land use measures are more successful when integrated with transportation policies, and combining these types of measures creates a cohesive development trajectory.
Cities have made progress to address climate change through the implementation of Climate Action Plans, and continued efforts by cities to reduce emissions will be critical to meet these existing climate commitments. However, the process and means of implementation need to be improved because many U.S. cities are not meeting their targets. Although this analysis focused on U.S. cities, many of the findings can be extrapolated to cities around the world that face similar urban challenges. On a global scale, land use policies need to be integrated with transportation measures in order to reduce transport-related emissions. This is important for growing cities, particularly in Asia and Africa, which are not yet locked-in to a high-emissions trajectory. Mayors and city officials in these rapidly urbanizing regions can learn from both the successes and challenges that U.S. cities face in implementing effective low-carbon transportation and land use measures.
When world leaders gather for the UN Habitat III conference later this year to design the New Urban Agenda, there is a strong incentive to link the theme of sustainable cities with climate commitments made in Paris. The New Urban Agenda presents a perfect opportunity to share lessons from cities on how to incorporate transportation and land use policies for low-carbon development on a global scale. Addressing climate change in cities necessitates innovative transportation planning that considers not only how people move in cities, but also the land use decisions that greatly impact carbon emissions and the future sustainability of cities.
Alisa Zomer is a Research Fellow at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. Her research focuses on urban climate change governance and sustainability policy at both local and international scales.
Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Steve Brown, SydneyPeony poppies tell me a great deal about landscape. They show me how landscape is as much personal as it is urban/rural management tool.
Martha Fajardo, Bogotá The Latin American Landscape Initiative acknowledges landscapes as essential components of people’s environment.
Carla Gonçalves, PortoLet’s make the invisible, visible by launching a World Landscape Campaign that helps to share and spread landscape initiatives.
Liana Jansen, Cape TownThe biggest challenge we face in Africa is capacitating existing professionals and academics within African countries.
Monica Luengo, MadridThe city is being transformed vertiginously; we need a new approach from the perspective dynamics of urban landscape to meet future challenges.
Claudia Misteli, BarcelonaLandscape initiatives are like living cells: they have much more power when they group to form something bigger and more complex.
Osvaldo Moreno, SantiagoThrough a green infrastructure planning approach, our cities can be more sustainable and resilient living systems.
Laura Spinadel, ViennaI am constantly confronted by PRIVATIZED public space which is marked by Big Brother and the fear of what is different.
Ken Taylor, CanberraLandscape is not static; it reflects changing human ideologies over time.
Menno Welling, ZombaAs in Zomba, Malawi, officials may opt for immediate benefits, rather than the elusive prospect of increased economic potential from landscape preservation initiatives.
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.
What are “landscape initiatives”, and can they transform how we create cities and their surrounding regions?
Key to the relevance and context of this roundtable is the very meaning of the word “landscape”. One dictionary definition reads “all the visible features of an area of countryside or land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal”. But this definition is not nearly comprehensive. Where it fails is in the limiting effect of the words “visible” and “aesthetic”, because in fact the word landscape conveys a richer meaning that includes, of course, the aesthetics of nature and the out of doors, but also the organization and design or infrastructure, the biophysical and social services of ecosystems, the livability of communities, and the justice aspects of how our living environments are (or are not) democratically decided upon and created.
Indeed, in recent decades, the concept of landscape has surpassed its limited traditional meaning, which was intimately bound up in the visual perceptions of open space. Today we speak of landscape as a system of services (e.g., ecosystem services), as an expression of social relations, as balances of designed open space and wild, and as a result of everyday experience—that is, as a superposition of layers of many meanings and values embodied in a particular place, and which is central to a place’s identity. To use a line from The Nature of Cities’ mission statement: “[cities] are ecosystems of people, nature, and infrastructure”. In other words, they are landscape in a complete and integrated sense.
How can we build such an important constellation of concepts into the planning of better cities—cities that work for people, communities, and the environment? Such a challenge requires integration of many streams of thought and action: design, ecology, sociology, psychology, governance, law, justice, inclusivity, and participatory democracy. It’s a tall, but critical order. The so-called Landscape Initiatives are a way forward. The European Landscape Convention, agreed upon in 2000, was the first international treaty to be exclusively devoted to all aspects of landscape, and it is the touchstone for many similar efforts around the world, some of which are described in the following contributions. These global attempts at the broad value and meaning of “landscape” have similarities, but also take locally adapted forms. And they can be central to creating cities with the attributes we crave at The Nature of Cities: resilience, sustainability, livability and justice.
Breaking down binaries: landscape and personal heritage
Landscape is not a helpful term when it is used to separate city from country or urban from rural. To confine the term to one or other of these poles is to enact age-old Cartesian binaries in Western thinking. When I think of my home city of Sydney, for example, I recognise that more than 30,000 years of Indigenous occupation has come before me; the suburb in which I live was, until the twentieth century, productive farmland. Thus, in an historical sense, rural landscape (“the bush,” in Australian slang) versus urban landscape is an artificial construct.
Landscape initiatives are most useful when they have relevance to individuals and relate to people’s feelings for places, things, and practices.
I argue that the idea of landscape is useful for recognising and exploring personal or “unofficial” heritage; that is, places, things, and practices valued by individuals, families, and small groups. This is because landscape can be used to refer to the physical environment, processes of change, sensory experience, and perception. To my mind, these different aspects of landscape are most evident in domestic gardens, whether associated with farmyards or suburban backyards. As Australian scholars Lesley Head and Pat Muir show, planting and working in gardens serves to entwine people with local nature-cultures.
I am currently living between homes—moving from a 350m2 suburban property in Sydney to a 56 hectare (140 acre) bush-block near Canberra. Typically, the latter would be characterised as a rural landscape and the former a component of an urban landscape. However, I have always recognised the suburban block as a landscape in and of itself. It was a place where my partner and I created a wonderful garden (and life) with plants for eating and admiring.
An example of the latter is the fiery red peony poppies that we grew in the garden. My partner inherited a container of seeds from his much-loved maternal grandmother, Doris. They grew in profusion in our garden: dense copses of stems up to a metre high with silver-green leaves and topped with spectacular, fire-engine red, pom-pom-like flowers. Year after year, each spring, the self-propagating plants emerge to re-announce their brilliant presence. The poppies mark a celebratory connection with Doris and are a direct connection to a loved family member, provoke sensations of warmth, fun, and happiness. In Sara Ahmed’s words, they are ‘happy objects’.
For me, the poppies are in themselves a landscape, one that entangles past and present, people and place, urban and rural. They are material things imbued with affective power and bound to the physicality of place (our garden). They have a capacity to recall the past (e.g., stories of Doris, sharing seeds with neighbours and friends) and to shape the present (providing a welcoming presence when returning home). Through growing peony poppies and creating a garden, connections are created to people and places—a personal landscape of attachment.
So what do poppies have to say about global landscape initiatives and their benefit to cities? For me, landscape initiatives are most useful when they have relevance to individuals and relate to people’s feelings for places, things, and practices. Landscape is neither defined by scale (large or small) nor reliant on binaries such as city/country and material/symbolic. Current initiatives by global NGOs to produce an International Landscape Convention are therefore challenged to find a balance between creating a holistic planning tool and ensuring relevance to people’s everyday lives, whether they are lived in cities or in wide open spaces.
For now, I am off to plant peony poppies in the new garden.
Martha Cecilia Fajardo, CEO of Grupo Verde, and her partner and husband Noboru Kawashima, have planned, designed and implemented sound and innovative landscape architecture and city planning projects that enhance the relationship between people, the landscape, and the environment.
It is clear that we stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history: we must choose our future. We are living in a time of intense change in the way we value our lives. There is an amazing revival taking place as society, governments, and stakeholders begin to appreciate the true value of the LANDSCAPE.
That landscape represents a direct experience of the everyday life of people explains the growing global interest in landscape.
The rise of potentially devastating problems, such as climate change, ill-conceived urbanization, water shortages, and biodiversity loss means that transboundary cooperation in landscape has become imperative. Nowhere is such cooperation more important than in Latin America.
Landscape visions for Brazil.Landscape visions for Bolivia.Landscape visions for Argentina.
Today, Latin American society is fully aware that the pressures are a threat to numerous resources, both natural and cultural, and that among them is the landscape. Therefore, we felt that we needed to move forward to stimulate regional and local initiatives through a resolution establishing the landscape as a holistic tool for the planning, management, and creation of sustainable development; in protecting the past but shaping the future, we must recognize the vital connections between government, people, culture, heritage, health, and economy.
Latin American landscape and habitat professionals, together with the academic sector and civil society, initiated the Latin American Landscape Initiative. LALI aims to foster the recognition, valuation, protection, management, and sustainable planning of Latin American landscapes. The initiative acknowledges landscapes as essential components of people’s environment, as an expression of the diversity of our shared cultural and natural heritage, and as a foundation of our identity; it acknowledges the special capacities, responsibilities, and leadership possessed by civil society when intervening in landscapes; and it commits to supporting the elaboration, execution, promotion, and communication of the Declaration Action Plan through the LALI Clusters, Landscape Charters, and members.
Latin American Landscape Initiative forum meets in Buenos Aires.
That landscape represents a direct experience of the everyday life of people does a great deal to explain the growing interest of the local world in the landscape. It is time to re-focus on local solutions and innovations. The local realm is increasingly viewing the landscape as an engine for its development and a way to boost the level of citizens’ self-esteem, identity, and quality of life. Cities around the world are already acknowledging the value of landscape for urban life; they have shown that investing in landscape and green areas can enhance economic prosperity, health, and social well-being.
From the European Landscape Convention, we have being inspired to see that physical improvement cannot stand alone. Many people care passionately about their landscapes and take pride in their distinctive character and diversity.
“Cities, towns, villages and the landscape are a reflection of their social, political, economic and environmental context. Consequently, any improvement should be part of the well-being of the people. Cities, towns and villages must make efficient and sustainable use of land and other resources; be safe and accessible by foot, bicycle, car and public transport; have clearly defined boundaries at all stages of development; have mixed uses and social diversity; have streets and parks, spaces that respects local history, the landscape and geography; and have a variety that allows for the evolution of society, function and design”.
Goals and objectives of the Latin American Landscape Initiative.
This is the vision that we link with the European Landscape Convention.
Then, and only then, will the pride we feel as landscape professionals be matched by the quality of our contributions to this world.
The European Landscape Convention (CoE, 2000) has reinforced the role of democracy in relation to landscape, increasing the knowledge and awareness that common people have about their right to landscape and to be a part of the decision making process. Being that landscape is “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” (CoE, 2000), what fascinates me is that we cannot rethink landscape without acknowledging the experience of landscape initiatives that are not only designed by landscape architects, geographers, and urban planners, but also by the common citizen.
I believe we need to create a global partnership platform—a World Landscape Campaign similar to the “World Urban Campaign” from UN-Habitat—that helps to share and spread ideas and dialog about landscape.
Cities are witnessing rapid and dramatic changes. New urban territories are not only short of public spaces in terms of quantity, but also in terms of quality. Across the globe, we can find a variety of landscape initiatives in which people are engaging both with themselves and with their communities to protect or improve the common good—the landscape—and, as a result, improving the quality of their lives and of their neighborhoods, enhancing the cities they live in.
If we look carefully, we see that citizens are conscientious of the importance of landscape and that their everyday landscapes are a part of their identities. As a result, people are becoming “landscape changers”, trying to improve the urban environmental they live in, presenting solutions to challenges that today’s cities are dealing with. Landscape initiatives are crucial because they strengthen citizens’ awareness for landscape.
I think that most of the landscape initiatives that we can find today—not only those working at the city scale—are an active response to urgent needs and demands by citizens, in which it’s crucial to engage the stakeholders that have the duty to protect, manage, and plan our landscape. In my opinion, for landscape initiatives to succeed, it’s fundamental to link them to other stakeholders, cooperating towards a shared vision and strategy for our future landscape (regardless of whether we are talking about the national, regional, or urban scale), driven by a participation and proactive process. Bottom-up processes will be the key to transforming our cities—of course, there are many challenges in implementing a collaborative process and there are also many difficulties in defining operational mechanisms to implement it.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that nowadays, these process have already started and progressively more citizens are engaging with landscape initiatives, aiming to reflect on their past, present and future.
“Southwest Landscape Forum—Rethinking the implementation of the European Landscape Convention”: example of a landscape initiative organized by CIVILSCAPE and Evolving Landscape, CRL at Serralves Foundation in Oporto, Portugal, 2015, http://evolvinglandscape.org/.
I would like to thank TNOC for the opportunity to take part in this roundtable and to discuss these issues, and I cannot finish without throwing a challenge that I think could be very useful to all landscape initiatives around the world.
I believe we need to create a global partnership platform—a World Landscape Campaign similar to the “World Urban Campaign” from UN-Habitat—that helps to share and spread individual, corporate, and public initiatives that protect, manage, and plan landscapes by promoting dialogue, difficulties, and knowledge about our future landscape. Any volunteers?
Liana Jansen is a registered professional Landscape Architect and an accredited Professional Heritage Practitioner with 15 years experience in the design, planning, and conservation of landscapes.
There are a number of landscape initiatives in operation in Africa. The authors of a study published by the GlobalCanopy (2015), identified 73 such initiatives in 32 African countries, most of which have begun in the past six years. Most initiatives were motivated by and have invested in agricultural production, ecosystem conservation, human livelihoods, and institutional strengthening.
We must strengthen professional networks and host planning and events in Africa itself.
One of the largest and most recent is The African Union New Partnership for Africa’s Development, or NEPAD, which launched the African Resilient Landscapes Initiative, or ARLI. This initiative will be implemented through forest and ecosystem restoration, biodiversity conservation, climate smart agriculture, and rangeland management. ARLI will capitalise on previous experience from Africa-led partnerships such as TerrAfrica and work through various existing platforms. The initiative will be implemented through the African Landscapes Action Plan, prepared by African Union NEPAD and partners from the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative to advance landscape governance, research, and finance through priority actions that embrace all land actors and all sectors (NEPAD 2015).
In a study done by the World Agroforestry Foundation, Hart and colleagues found that integrated landscape initiatives in Africa are investing heavily in institutional planning and coordination, but they have had mixed results engaging different stakeholder groups, especially the private sector (Hart et al 2015). The authors of the Global Canopy study offer many recommendations, but the most applicable in my opinion are the following (GlobalCanopy 2015):
“Adopt integrated landscape management as a key means to make progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals at national and sub-national scales. Governments, investors, businesses, and communities adopt integrated landscape management approaches within their policies and plans, implementation strategies and reporting processes.
Empower local stakeholders to design sustainable landscape solutions that meet their unique priorities and contexts. Recognise and strengthen local organisations and institutional platforms for meeting, sharing, consulting, acting, and monitoring in landscapes.
Build capacity and facilitate learning among key stakeholders for better outcomes in integrated landscape management. Develop learning systems for emerging leaders in integrated landscape management to actively share and discuss lessons from successes and failures. Establish multi-objective landscape monitoring and data systems for adaptive management. Convene multi-stakeholder dialogues to deepen understanding of landscape management and encourage cross-stakeholder communication. Build long-term interdisciplinary research partnerships between universities and landscape initiatives.”
The biggest challenge we face in Africa is often not the amount of organisations operating on international funding, but capacitating existing professionals and academics in countries such as South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Botswana, etc. The professionals working in the development sector—architects, engineers, and landscape architects—are actively working on projects not only in their own countries, but also in wider Africa. In my experience, they most often work in silos, not being aware of other professionals operating in the same geographic area and most certainly not aware of organisations involved with landscape initiatives. We must strengthen professional networks and move away from decentralised events and planning in Europe, England, or America, and hosting such events in Africa itself.
NEPAD. 2015. NEPAD Launches Initiative for the Resilience and Restoration of African Landscapes, available online here.
Hart, AK, Milder, JC, Estrada-Carmona, N, DeClerck, FAJ, Harvey, CA and Dobie, P. 2015. Integrated landscape initiatives in practice: assessing experiences from 191 landscapes in Africa and Latin America, World Agroforestry. 2015 Climate-Smart Landscapes: Multifunctionality in Practice, Published Report.
Monica Luengo is an art historian and landscape architect. Honorary member of the International Scientific Committee of Cultural Landscapes, consultant, and lecturer on cultural landscapes.
When I have been asked to participate in conferences on urban landscapes, I have often realized that the organizers intended me to speak only of parks and gardens—of “green” in the city, literally. Therefore, perhaps the first clarification we should make is this: What do we mean by urban landscape?
A landscape approach will be the basis for improving both cities and the global environment.
In recent decades, the concept of landscape has surpassed its traditional meaning, which was limited to the view of a natural landscape that becomes a mental construction in the mind of the observer, which subsequently becomes a critical perception of the territory (European Landscape Convention, 2000). And still further, today we speak of landscape as a system of services (e.g., ecosystem services), as an expression of social relations, and as a result of everyday experiences—as a superposition of layers of different meanings embodied in a particular place, which acquires a particular identity. Thus, a city, or its urban landscape, is made up of an amalgam of territorial, political, cultural, social, economic, and environmental layers.
From this complex view of the landscape—particularly the urban landscape—and because of progressive environmental (and landscape) degradation due to multiple factors, there have been many new initiatives exploring how landscape directly affects the welfare of people and their sense of identity.
These initiatives are born at multiple levels—international, national, regional, or local—since landscape is affected by both global (climate change, migration) and local factors; they are dependent on specific territorial policies. In 2000, the need to address these different spatial scales inspired the European Landscape Convention, or ELC, which includes both the countryside and urban areas. The Convention aims to contribute “to the welfare of human beings and the consolidation of European identity”, and has become an important element in the quality of life of populations. The ELC intends to promote the protection, management, and planning of landscapes, and organizes European cooperation based on the understanding that the landscape knows no borders.
Following from and rooted in the Convention, numerous strategies, national plans, and landscape laws have been established in most of the countries represented in the Council of Europe, and cities have established their own Landscape Plans.
General view of the “Morro da Providencia” favela, one of the most violent of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, taken on August 20, 2008. The French photographer identified as JR is launching a project called “Women Are Heroes”, through which the photographs of women, relatives of the victims of clashes between the police and drug traffickers, were placed in the facades of the houses. This project already took place in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Kenya and Liberia, and will be taken to India, Cambodia, Laos and Morocco after Brazil. Photo: VANDERLEI ALMEIDA/AFP/Getty Images
The ELC has had a large influence since 2000. Although it is not compulsory for cities to create a landscape plan, the strength of the ELC has inspired many cities to reconsider the urban landscape with new legislation, rules, or guidelines. Such legal and regulatory work has made cities healthier, safer, and happier places to be. Various actions have been implemented: reducing risk of flooding, planning inspiring environments throughout the urban fabric, taking measures against climate change, enacting biodiversity plans, and even plans that combine all of the aforementioned. This is the case with my own city, Madrid, which a few years ago adopted a landscape plan. Unfortunately, there remain many examples, as is the case with Madrid, in which the “landscape” plan is limited to mostly architectural or aesthetic aspects of the city, largely ignoring people and the complex strata of lived experience in the city. Our collective concept of the “urban landscape” is evolving, but still has some way to go to achieve a consistently holistic view of the urban environment as a matrix of people, built form, and nature.
After UNESCO adopted the Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape in 2011, we have seen the great challenge of the conservation of historic cities and their identity for years to come. In brief, the policy suggests abandoning a purely architectural or monumental view of the city, replacing it with a landscape approach. The idea for a possible Global Landscape Convention, another UNESCO project born at this time, has also experienced many impediments to progress. On the other hand, the innovative Latin American Landscape Initiative and MED-O-MED, or MedScapes—referring to the Mediterranean—has found surprising success.
Traditionally the domain of architects and urban planners, the city is still an uncharted area in which to experiment with these new ideas of landscape—ideas that promote an understanding of the urban phenomenon from a holistic point of view. The landscape idea views cities as processes, as dynamic entities in which both the natural and the built play important roles, but many other factors, including people and communities, also have vital influences. Moreover, in today’s world, we must not forget that cities are extraordinary meeting places, places of coexistence and of exchange of values in incredible settings of cultural diversity. Today, during an age of significant migration to cities and among countries, the evolution of cities continues or even is accelerated.
The urban landscape of our cities is changing and transforming at a breakneck speed, and, at the same time, we are faced with severe environmental degradation. Undoubtedly, a landscape approach, in which dynamism is one of the key and appreciated characteristics, will be the basis for improving both cities and the global environment.
Social communicator, journalist and social designer, interested in how design, communication and social innovation can shape and reshape a more resilient and sustainable future. A strong believer that empathy, creativity, cooperation and the force of landscape opens up infinite opportunities to build better societies, more connected to nature and people.
A landscape initiative is like living cells. Cells have all the equipment necessary to carry out functions of life. A cell can move, grow, transform, adapt to changes in its environment, and can even replicate itself. A cell has life in itself, but cells have much more power when they group themselves to form something else, something bigger and more complex.
People are the meaning, the instrument, and the main objective of the Latin American Landscape Initiative.
This is precisely the character of the Latin American Landscape Initiative, or LALI, an initiative launched and ratified in Medellín, Colombia, in October 2012. LALI is a living organism that aims to stimulate, at global, regional, and local levels, the recognition and the position of landscape as a fundamental objective in order to protect our past—our heritage—and to configure the future in a more coherent way with nature, people, and their landscape. It’s a bottom-up initiative that, from the knowledge, the experience, the persistence, and the endeavor of people and entities, has been able to weave a large network throughout Latin America for the benefit of the protection, management, planning, and recognition of the landscape.
One of the requirements of an initiative such as this one is leadership. Although these initiatives should be organized in a transverse way without a rigid hierarchy, a leadership or co-leadership of someone, several people, or several organizations, must be present.
A second key factor deals with the idea, the message, that the initiative promotes, as well as its content. For instance, the Latin American Landscape Initiative organized itself in different clusters; although they all deal with different topics and disciplines, all of the clusters are related with each other and need the energy and power of the others in order to go forward. Clusters such as Education, Civil Society, Good Practices, Catalogues, Publications, and Communications are, at present, the core of the initiative.
The LALI Network.
A third key element, and a very important one when we talk about landscape, is certainly transdisciplinarity. The diversity of approaches and perspectives (from architecture, geography, ecology, arts, publicity, etc.) enriches landscape projects and multiplies all synergies. But it is noteworthy that the LALI initiative could not work without the support and commitment of civil society (in the end, LALI comes from Latin American civil society). People are the meaning, the instrument, and the main objective.
Another relevant aspect, which does not depend on the initiative itself, is the existence of a legal landscape framework that could act as an umbrella for the development of the different activities of the initiative. For example, the lack of this legal landscape framework at a Latin American level has not stopped the work of the LALI—in Europe, the European Landscape Convention already exists—but this legal framework could help strength and provide more tools and possibilities for its implementation.
Cities are, like landscape initiatives, living organisms. This is why cities need these new approaches to develop and evolve, to become urban hubs of ideas, commerce, culture, education, and, of course, to empower people to be more aware of what they have, the cities they want to live in, the quality of cities’ landscapes and the kind of society and values with which they are identified.
Main square in Filandia (Quindío), Colombia. Photo: Claudia Misteli
Osvaldo Moreno Flores is a PhD candidate and has his MSc. in Landscape, Environment and City. He has worked as a professor and consultant in landscape architecture and in urban environmental planning.
Traditionally, the focus on green areas and public spaces in cities has been characterized by a fragmented way of addressing the problems of planning, design and management, without a systemic approach that can integrate their interrelationships and potential synergies. This has resulted in enabling spaces and equipment in contexts of urban centrality, with high construction and maintenance costs and low impacts on beneficiaries’ coverage. It should be noted here that most Chilean cities are under the standards of green areas per inhabitant defined by the World Health Organization, which recommends 9m2. of green area per inhabitant. In general, cities in Chile have rates around 4m2. of green area per inhabitant (Urban Observatory, MINVU). Under these terms, achieving the standards that relate to improved urban environmental quality is a difficult task, especially if the focus is on building new green areas.
Green spaces’ comprehensive, dynamic, and participatory management represents one of the most important challenges of urban and environmental agendas in Chilean cities.
Moreover, a large number of public and private green areas are located in areas of middle and upper socioeconomic strata, as opposed to the deficit situation observed in low socioeconomic sectors. Such sociospatial segregation affects the provision and accessibility of ecosystem services that green areas provide to city’s inhabitants. Green spaces and their components—at the level of vegetation, soil, water, programs, infrastructure and equipment—are systems that contain important ecological, sociocultural, and economic functions. Therefore, green spaces’ comprehensive, dynamic, and participatory management represents one of the most important challenges of urban and environmental agendas in Chilean cities.
From this scenario emerges the need to incorporate the notion of green infrastructure into public policies that aim to form a systemic and integrated look that can go beyond traditional management models of urban green areas. These policies should promote an innovative approach for rethinking, understanding, and managing those systems and components that contribute to the balance of life in its many forms—human, animal, plant—which generally are degraded, neglected, or hidden in urban contexts. Rivers, streams, creeks, wetlands, hills, farmland, forests, grasslands, parks, and peri-urban spaces—these systems and components, almost in the manner of a puzzle, are available to regroup and to strengthen, to establish synergies and complementarities that benefit not only natural ecosystems, but that also provide strategic functions and services for the population living in the city and its surroundings.
Through a green Infrastructure planning approach, our cities can be more sustainable and resilient living systems, improving the quality of people’s lives and helping to conserve ecosystems and landscapes, which are understood as key pieces for the balance of our social, economic, and environmental dynamics.
Architect, Urban Designer, Landscaper, Filmmaker, Multimedia Communicator, Editor. Cisiting professor in Spain, Brazil, Mexico, USA, Italy, Colombia and Argentina.
Tell me, when you were a child, were you allowed to play in the street?
I am constantly confronted by PRIVATIZED public space which is marked by Big Brother and the fear of what is different.
Autobiographical details mark us out in our thinking and our actions. I am convinced that the work I do is shaping society…and that often makes me aware that I must constantly feed my curiosity with images and experiences from all over the world. Seeing how different cultures spend their time in society is my definition of URBANITY. And by building living spaces as an integral designer, it is from those gaps that I must permanently tame the INNER CHILD we all have inside of us, in order to be open to other ways of experiencing the multiple realities that exist. My key has always been to link space with TIME, which is what leads us to understand that everything changes, and that what is important is to be sensitive, and to recognize the POTENTIAL that we must awaken in people so that they can relate to it and evolve.
Campus WU. Photo: Laura Spinadel
Going back to the question. I was not allowed to play alone in the street because I lived much of my childhood under military dictatorships in Argentina. Nowadays, I live in a city where everyone takes “pride” in not playing in the street because that is what foreign immigrants do. In my work as a holistic architect, I am constantly confronted by PRIVATIZED public space that, obviously, nobody wants to pay for, and which, in our globalized culture, is marked by Big Brother and the fear of what is different.
It was very interesting when, a few years ago, I made a film about Campus WU in Vienna, interviewing all of the protagonists who interacted in the conception and realization of the largest University of Economics and Business in the European Union. I asked all of them the same question to kick off the dialogue. Economists, architects, politicians, etc.—all people from different cultures who, together, helped us create this MIRACLE, each of them complementing the others with their NOSTALGIA, using our vision to give birth to a place for FREEDOM. The miracle was that everyone was ready to synchronize with the vision of creating a huge university park which would be open 24/7 for everyone—overcoming all preconceptions—where overstretched economics students would cross paths with visitors to the popular Prater amusement park; and with hoards of football fans who lay waste to everything before the game, drinking beer on our campus; and with international tourists trying to get a selfie in front of a piece of architecture from the “Star System”.
Campus WU. Photo: Laura Spinadel
But…careful…don’t think that we have overcome the 1960s and that everyone respects pedestrians, or that investors have suddenly discovered that they want to be patrons who BRING MORE LAUGHTER into society. When we won the competition for the Masterplan Campus WU, we had no budget for the 70,000m2 university park, nobody in the city had thought about the impact of having 30,000 intruders in a neighbourhood of 100,000 people, and, of course, there was no facility manager to set limits by pointing out that having a university open to society would result in maintenance and security costs that were higher than those for a mega building with an indoor academic life.
Campus WU. Photo: Laura Spinadel
I think it’s extremely important that someone moderate the process and set up a Hannah Arendt “table” in order to interrelate interests and allow the process to gestate COMMUNITY. In this case, it was an anthroposophic Latin American woman dreaming of a better world who managed to wake up the perceived enemies—ECONOMISTS—to the belief that public space was the added value, in order to change perspectives so that we could RETHINK ECONOMY.
In the last few years, I have travelled extensively around the world presenting this project, which has not just stayed on paper, but through the efforts of thousands of people has been transformed into a contemporary space that is driving the economy and culture in Vienna. It is not a space which is merely a baroque jewel; it is a PROCESS that this city was encouraged to start. I must say, in answer to your question, that I’m frightened by the housing speculation bubble that is destroying all of the values that I am talking about in terms of building the RES PUBLICA of the XXI century. I am given hope by initiatives such as the Landscape Law in Chile, Flower Power Neighbourhood Movements in Australia, and the new American generations in Washington who do not want the American dream.
We are learning to see and to believe again. It’s worth encouraging creation from within!
My comments focus on the relationship between the landscape idea and cities and the proposition that cities (urban areas) are in fact cultural landscapes (Taylor 2015). The cultural landscape paradigm can be seen to offer a trajectory of thinking relevant to the historic urban environment, not least because we are dealing primarily with vernacular culture, where landscape study is a form of social history. Such discourse in turn supports the notion that views landscape as a cultural construct reflecting human values.
Landscape is not static; it reflects changing human ideologies over time.
The significance of the cultural landscape concept in the urban sphere is that it allows us to see and understand the approach to urban conservation that concentrates on individual buildings as “devoid of the socio-spatial context” that “contributes to a deterioration of the [wider] urban physical fabric” (Punekar, 2006, p.110). Notable to this line of thinking is the emergence of the Historic Urban Landscape paradigm and its evolving pivotal role in the discourse on historic urban conservation. Inherent in this mode of thinking is the role of landscape change that takes place over time with changing values in culturally diverse communities. Landscape is not static; it reflects changing human ideologies over time. In the urban landscape it is critical that we are able to manage change so that historic cities, as they change in response to changing values, reflect their human history, but do not become merely designated historic zones with a tight boundary around them, devoid of a sense of lived-in places. This thinking is summarised by van Oers (2010, p.14):
“Historic Urban Landscape is a mindset, an understanding of the city, or parts of the city, as an outcome of natural, cultural and socio-economic processes that construct it spatially, temporally, and experientially. It is as much about buildings and spaces, as about rituals and values that people bring into the city. This concept encompasses layers of symbolic significance, intangible heritage, perception of values, and interconnections between the composite elements of the historic urban landscape, as well as local knowledge including building practices and management of natural resources. Its usefulness resides in the notion that it incorporates a capacity for change.”
References
Taylor K, (2015), ‘Cities as Cultural Landscapes’ in Bandarin F & Van Oers R, eds (2015), Reconnecting the City.The Historic Urban Landscape Approach and the Future of Urban Heritage, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
Punekar A (2006), ‘Value-led Heritage and Sustainable Development: The Case of Bijapur, India’ in Roger Zetter and Georgina Watson (eds) Designing Sustainable Cities in the Developing World, Aldershot UK & Burlington VT: Ashgate.
van Oers R, (2010), ‘Managing cities and the historic urban landscape initiative – an Introduction’ 7-17 in Van Oers, R. & Haraguchi, S., eds. UNESCO World Heritage Papers27 Managing Historic Cities; Paris: UNESCO World Heritage Centre.
Menno Welling is the owner and lead consultant of African Heritage Ltd in Zomba and African Heritage Consulting in the Netherlands. His interests are in African archaeology, cultural landscapes, heritage tourism and intangible cultural heritage.
Currently, Zomba is the fourth city in Malawi. But while the other three are ever expanding, Zomba seems to maintain a status quo. There is no big industry, and government departments are slowly moving out. In colonial days, Zomba was the capital of the Nyasaland Protectorate. It was founded by the Blantyre Mission of the Church of Scotland in the 1880s, and British Consul A.J. Hawes decided the little settlement—at the foot of a lush green plateau with several mountain streams—would be the ideal place for setting up central government administration.
In Zomba, Malawi, historic preservation and greenery seem to be considered antithetical to development and the modern city.
In the course of the next decades, Zomba slowly developed. Office buildings were constructed in vernacular architecture and residential areas laid out, the latter following racial and social segregation, as was common in that time. The high ranking white officers lived up the slopes of Zomba Mountain. A large golf course separated them from the African and Asian communities down below. In those days, Zomba was known as the Garden Capital of the British Empire. Indeed, the comparatively moderate climate lent itself to urban greenery. Trees were planted along the roads—and not only in the upper class area. Privately, the British officers, if not their wives and Malawian gardeners, tended their gardens in typical fashion. The common lot size in the white area was 1 hectare, allowing for sizable lawns surrounded by tropical flowers and trees. These, in turn, attracted the most colourful birds, such as Livingstone’s turaco and various hornbills.
A typical colonial residence in Zomba, Malawi, with a brick wall surrounding the neighbours’ plot. Photo: Menno Welling
After independence, President Kamuzu Banda decided to move the capital of what had become Malawi to Lilongwe, which was much more centrally located. The city of Lilongwe was developed with the aid of South African urban planners in the 1970s. Following South African principles of ‘divide & rule’ the Lilongwe neighbourhoods, or “Areas”, as they are called, were spaced wide apart, separated by bush or agricultural land. Ever since, Zomba has gradually seen its government departments and the parliament move to Lilongwe. Whereas other British colonial capitals in Africa have become metropolitan cities with high-rises and skyscrapers, Zomba has, for the most part, retained its charming colonial character. Indeed, its historical core would be worth a World Heritage nomination. Just as nearby Mozambique Island is an outstanding example of Portuguese colonial heritage. And like Mozambique Island–or Zanzibar, or the Island of Gorée, for that matter—Zomba could exploit that heritage for tourism purposes in order to boost the local economy.
Brick wall construction. Photo: Menno Welling
As it is, such developments seem far away. In April 2014, Zomba City Council started cutting the century old Mahogany trees that flanked the main road through Zomba and which are its hallmark. Historical buildings such as the District Assembly and the regional police headquarters were marked for destruction. As any modern city, Zomba was to have a dual carriageway, and greenery and buildings had to give way. From an urban planning point of view, the proposed development was poor; it had all the signs of a political campaign tool of a sitting president seeking re-election who had not yet left a tangible legacy in her home district. City administrators seized the opportunity, as a more sensible city bypass might never come.
On technical grounds, a group of concerned citizens managed to get a court order against further destruction and the National Roads Authority settled for merely redoing the existing road. A lot of damage to the trees was, however, already done. Given vested interests, even some trees outside the construction zone had been cut. Two year later, little seems to have come from the mandatory replanting of 500 trees as part of the court settlement. And another mahogany tree was just cut down by a local resident citing laxity in pruning by city officials.
A road with its flanking trees cut down. Photo: Menno Welling
Yet another development is threatening the garden city of modern Malawi. Under the pretence of security concerns, homeowners have started erecting brick walls around their plots. If this tendency is not kept in check, the pleasant mountain roads along lush gardens and charming white houses will turn into brick funnels. How would this historical neighbourhood then be different from a newly built, middle class area in, let’s say, Lilongwe?
At the heart of these issues lays the concept of development. I dare say security concerns in Zomba do not warrant a brick wall fence. The wall has become part of the middle and upper class homeowner mentality. The same goes for city officials; historic preservation and greenery seem to be considered antithetical to development and the modern city. At the same time, officials may opt for immediate benefits, rather than the elusive prospect of increased tourism potential—despite such being included in the Urban Development Plan.
I believe that urban landscape matters! The landscape in which one grows up, matures, and lives life may be the essential factor in determining the behavior towards and empathy with nature and with other people and their cultures. The landscape can even be the way we connect to ourselves.
The shape of our cities is a result of the historical changes in land cover, built structures, and the continuous man-made interferences that are made in the landscape and its relationship with natural factors such as geomorphology, climate, biodiversity, ecosystem remnants, green areas, and urban forests. Social aspects are not less important. Cities that segregate social life in closed communities (being gated high-end or middle class enclosures, or favelas), malls and cars, may induce prejudice and injustice. Live streets and urban amenities are the public realm where the different meet, learn with each other, and may have daily contact with nature and natural processes.
Landscapes and the spiritual bond with Nature
When I walked along the Philosopher’s Path in Kyoto, I felt the spiritual power of Nature in the urban landscape. The path meanders along a channelized river, with clean waters in the city border. The landscape is peaceful, with the city in one side and the forest in the other, the water flows in between.
Shinto shrine. Photo: Cecilia Herrzog
There are several Temples and Shrines along the path. The Shinto Shrines profoundly touched me. I was ignorant of their sacred meanings, but I have never felt this deep connection with Nature in a spiritual way before. Being a non-religious Jew myself, I perceived the temples and churches I have entered in my life as built structures; I have never had the feelings I had in the shrines! Actually, much earlier in my life I remember when I was in Assisi (Italy), I felt something very special. I was touched by St. Francis of Assisi’s history of loving of nature and its creatures. At the top of the hill was the place where he had lived, and I could feel the energy of nature flowing around. Maybe this was the source of his inspiration and connection with holy love to nature and living organisms.
After these experiences, I started reflecting about our divine bond with nature, and how the landscape influences our lives and values.
Until I read the E.O. Wilson’s book The Creation, I had never really had any thoughts about how religion could play an important role in ecological education and awareness raising. In his book, scientist Wilson dialogues with religion, and looks for the common ground to protect and restore Nature.
And what a grateful surprise was the Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis! The LAUDATO SI’ calls on all of humanity “to care for our common home”. Firmly grounded in science, the Pope talks about consumption, greed and accumulation; the oil addicted society that eradicates ecosystems and depletes natural resources. He also says that we cannot trust only in technical solutions to solve our environmental and social problems. He declares the urgent need to restore, conserve, and protect our environment. He urges all of us to mitigate the colossal damage that our civilization has made, and to avoid climate change and the huge uncertainties that are threatening the future of humanity. The response to his message has been massive, and I believe that 2015 is crucial to prioritize life and also to shift the way we see, plan, and design our landscapes at all scales.
Cities in challenging times
How can globalized, modernist urban landscapes reconnect urban dwellers with Mother Earth?
We are living in challenging times in which cities play a crucial role, as so many authors of The Nature of Cities have pointed out from different perspectives. In this international blog, contributors have presented and discussed examples that are popping up around the world—of social-ecological oriented research, planning, and design, wherein biodiversity is treated as fundamental. Many of those case studies come from local residents who want more livable places to raise kids in healthy and diverse environments.
However, many cities have remained in the old modernist sprawl paradigm—based on high consumption economies, gated communities with homogenized gardens, and automotive transportation that requires costly infrastructure—known as business-as-usual. The surrounding ecosystems’ remnants and productive lands are eradicated in this process. Also, old urban areas have been transformed, destroying their history and culture. Gentrification in renovated regions is another negative factor, displacing residents and small businesses while ceding room for a globalized culture and international brand stores. This globalized trend widens the social gap even farther, especially in poorer countries, where it is already abyssal.
Our planet is urban not only because the Biosphere is giving way to built surfaces, but also because the political and economic decisions are largely taken by city dwellers.
I consider ecological illiteracy to be one of the main drivers of the disconnection and disregard of our Home: our planet, our region, our city, our neighborhood, our street or our own home. Or even with our own selves!
How can people connect with nature and its processes if they spend their life in air-conditioned (or heated) built boxes, apart from biodiversity and social diversity? How can they develop and act on their Biophilia in artificially built and “controlled” landscapes? [Biophilia is the “innate and genetically determined affinity of human beings with the natural world” (E.O. Wilson)] Much has been written, published, and discussed in conferences about those issues (see for instance Tim Beatley in this blog).
Urban landscapes and reconnection with Nature
For me, the Pope’s call to “care for our home” is more than a metaphor for the Planet’s degradation and the related risks to Humanity. It is time to care for our home at all scales, including the ecological restoration of our urban landscapes.
In Brazil, the number of urban dwellers that are engaging in growing organic food, fighting for ecosystem restoration and water conservation, and getting together to learn and exchange experiences has been growing exponentially. As everywhere, in this country, social media is helping people to communicate among themselves about their findings and experiences with Nature and natural processes in multiple ways. We have very positive results on the fields that actually enhance urban landscapes ecologically and socially: publications and courses on related themes are starting to pop up around the country; leaders are assuming important roles, participating in actions and policy elaboration; volunteers are expanding their work in a society without a tradition of social work.
There are lots of good examples that are more powerful every day, as I have already mentioned in my previous posts in this blog. Hortelões Urbanos (Urban Food Gardeners), an urban agriculture group in São Paulo, has been a source of knowledge and inspiration to similar projects in cities around the country, and now depends on more than 17,000 followers (in less than 4 years). Their interventions in parks and squares in São Paulo, the largest Metropolitan Region, are awesome: from green or gray deserts, they create biodiverse, productive landscapes with waters springing again.
A Hortelões Urbanos (Urban Food Gardeners garden in São Paulo. Photo: Cecilia Hezog
Rios e Ruas (Rivers and Streets) is another group that has been working in the last decades to ecologically educate residents. They have been tracing rivers and creeks that were wiped out from the landscape. The severe drought that is hitting Southeastern Brazil, with water shortages threatening the removal of large number of residents from urbanized areas, has helped to give visibility to their work
A few years ago Juliana Gatti and Sandro Von Matter started the Instituto Árvores Vivas (Living Trees Institute). They have a remarkable engaging and educational role in São Paulo. They are actually changing the way Paulistas (São Paulo residents) see, feel, and act regarding trees and their urban lives.
The green economy is slowly starting to emerge in Brazilian cities, with new companies that develop green technologies to implement green roofs and walls, solar energy, water bioremediation and conservation, and bio-sanitation, at different scales. Hopefully, with the dramatic water shortage and the challenges of the changing paradigm towards a clean economy, they will rise and help Brazil get out of its severe economic crisis.
Another excellent and inspirational example is the Skygarden, a relatively new company specialized in green roofs and walls, that mimics São Paulo’s native ecosystems: Mata Atlântica (Atlantic Rainforest) and Cerrado (Brazilian Savanah). The founder/owner Ricardo Cardim, studied odontology, but soon fell in love with botany and native ecosystems and then went on to a Master’s in biology. In 2008, he started an NGO named Árvores de São Paulo (São Paulo Trees), and from then on has been helping to change hearts and minds regarding autochthonous urban trees, not only in streets and parks, but also in roofs and facades
The TransCarioca Trail, in Rio de Janeiro.
In Rio de Janeiro, the remarkable TransCarioca Trail project is underway with the support of hundreds of volunteers under the leadership of Pedro Menezes and Celso Junius. It is a more than 180 km-long walking track over the splendid massifs of the city, connecting several protected areas. It spans the world-renowned Sugar Loaf to the distant beaches of Guaratiba.
Another initiative that is also gaining more support is Green Corridors, part of the Carioca Mosaic project, in the lower areas on the water basin where most of the Olympic Games facilities are concentrated.
The locations of the low lying areas, or water basin, in Rio.
Shift for a better future
I have written before in this blog about the challenges and opportunities that the city of Rio de Janeiro has had in the last few years, especially with the high investments focused on international events—the 2014 Soccer World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games being the most internationally recognized. Unfortunately, decisions about the future of our cities (not only Rio de Janeiro) are mainly focusing on companies that build gray infrastructure, engage in non-productive land speculation, and support the oil-based transportation industry. This means building cities-as-usual: sprawling and transforming the landscape and changing natural processes and flows with social segregation.
Model of gated community in Rio. Photo: Cecilia HerzogGolf Olimpic in Rio.
We might expect that what is happening was planned based on the knowledge that was generated by state-of-the-art academic research, supported by the city since 2007. Not at all…Wetlands and protected areas have been eradicated with the excuse of the Olympic Games. The rich biodiversity and wet landscapes that offer irreplaceable ecosystem services have been transformed into more and more gated communities, commercial areas adorned with homogenized cosmetic gardens, and the expressways on which oil-dependent transportation oil-dependent relies. In this process, the city is losing not only its ecological heritage, but its cultural identity.
One of the most significant examples is the Olympic Golf course that was built over one of the last protected remnants of Restinga (sandy soil, sea border ecosystem). Besides the elimination of biodiversity and ecosystem services, the landscape conversion to lawn requires daily irrigation in times of uncertain climate. The real estate market is the beneficiary of this mega-gated development, as many others in the same water catchment.
A sewage canal in Rio. Photo: Cecilia Herzog
The social segregation and lack of sanitation are still huge issues and the City has not complied with the commitments it assumed when the right to host the Olympic Games was won. The rivers, lagoons and even Guanabara Bay are heavily polluted with sewage, diffuse stormwater run-off, and garbage.
Civil society is fighting against what is happening in the city. Its voices are heard mainly on social media when the traditional media doesn’t open space for protests and meetings.
Landscape for today and the future
Landscape is becoming an important issue as people start to understand how they depend on biodiversity and the ecosystem services they need to live healthy and fulfilling lives. Unfortunately, in Brazil, the profession of landscape architect is neither recognized nor institutionalized. We are in the process of passing a law that will make possible to start new undergrad courses in the area of landscape architecture in Brazilian Universities. We need to implement interdisciplinary courses, establish research groups, and fund pilot projects that demonstrate how our landscapes work, their social-ecological functions, and their processes.
Pierre-André Martin and I are coordinating a new Master’s in Ecological Landscape Planning and Design at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in the Department of Architecture and Urbanism, to start next August. The course is interdisciplinary, with professors from landscape planning and design, urbanism, biology, geography, social sciences, law, anthropology, and engineering.
We urgently need cities that praise nature, that protect and restore native biodiversity in all possible ways. We must escape from the trap of fragmented knowledge and look for integrative research and teamwork on adaptive landscape-based urban planning and design. We must monitor results and learn what works or not in our landscapes. We must plant trees to have water and food. The cities have to be part of the Biosphere with green infrastructure that regenerates degraded gray and polluted areas. People have to be educated and reconnected to life to participate in the landscape planning and design process.
I hope that the momentum we are living is transformational. Powerful forces are moving to make effective change in the economic, social, and environmental paradigms: from a competitive society to a more cooperative world, where natural capital has more value than the virtual financial market. I believe that the call of Pope Francis can help, especially in Brazil. We are the most populous Catholic country in the world, with more than 120 millions followers of the religion.
I hope all people hear his call and give science and practitioners with ecological vision the opportunity to contribute to a shift to a better future.
Make the stories of your landscapes louder. Narrate them. Spread their seeds. Write about what you see around you, about the beauty and pain that emerges in these varied contexts. Pay attention to the places and spaces that are of value to your loved ones, and notice all that is there. Remember, remember, remember.
It’s July. With the windows down, drive to the corner of Hudson Street and Netherwood Avenue. Pull into the driveway lined with Marigolds and with Morning Glories climbing the mailbox. You might miss the street sign, which is regularly hidden behind Sunflowers 10 feet high, but you can’t miss the strawberry patch nipping at their feet. Park the car and step outside. A warm breeze will caress your skin and tenderly play the percussion of wooden wind chimes. You will feel something special about this place, and the birds will confirm it; you’ll find dozens of them singing at the bird baths, waiting patiently for the bird feeder, made from plastic soda bottles, to be refilled with seeds. Say hello to them.
Photo: Ashley Jankowski
Gramps will come through the screen door in cracked bare feet and a sunhat. You can take your shoes off, too, if you’d like to feel the sweet grass on your ankles and the thick mud between your toes. He’ll hand you a Tupperware bowl with your name Sharpie-scribbled on the lid before wandering around the side of the house. Follow him.
He’ll lead you just around the corner to a blueberry bush. As you step closer, you’ll smell sugar and earth, a scent that conceals the stench of the trash cans and recycling bins overflowing against the house’s exterior. Gramps will gesture to your Tupperware and tell you that the birds will get to the blueberries first if you don’t hurry. Careful now; look out for critters as you gently pull a berry from a branch. Look closely. Each blueberry is a rounded, blue-purple shade of perfect and just about the size of a marble. Squeeze one between your thumb and your pointer finger and notice how little force is required for it to fall apart. Pop it into your mouth; feel the fruit drenching your tongue in tart juice instead of the expected sweet. A few steps further and you’ll find a pocket of sky-high beanstalks, heavy with foot-long beans that are more often purple than green. Munch on one and tug at another to add to your loot. Start thinking about creative ways to prepare them. Once Gramps knows you like them, he’ll bring you jumbo Ziploc bags of them all summer long. In your peripheral vision, you’ll catch the sight of a dilapidated statue of the Holy Mary standing lopsided next to a prayer bench covered half with soft moss, half with peeling paint. Be sure to thank the hands that prepared this food; this is how Nana used to conclude grace before every family dinner.
Continue into the backyard. To your left, find the tiny, concrete patio adorned with wooden picnic furniture painted terracotta red. You won’t be able to see the years of barbeque nights, rounds of Hearts, Scattergories, and Easter egg dyeing held around the sticky table-clothed table. The table is now covered with old prescription bottles that once held Gramps’s Alzheimer’s medication and Nana’s Parkinson’s pills. They are now filled with seeds and layered with new labels of wrinkled duct tape.
Photo: Ashley Jankowski
To your right, find Gramps’s three piles of compost – separated by jagged metal sheets and chunks of broken doors and fences – which he meticulously spins thrice annually. Here lies the secret behind his fertile soil. Watch as he scatters a handful of pumpkin seed-laden compost onto his yard; he will accidentally grow a sweeping pumpkin patch by fall.
Gramps is resourceful and imaginative. He finds new life for everything. Adjacent to the compost is Gramp’s shed, overflowing with odds and ends, crates, wires, tubs, twigs, tires, and tubes, all of which Gramps has saved to tend to his yard. Bags of human hair, collected from the local barber shop, rest against the shed, waiting to be poured out around the garden to deter the deer. Hanging on the outer wall of the shed are three wooden hooks labeled Kyle, Ashley, and Chelsea: places for his three grandchildren, now grown, to hang their little coats, grab a shovel, and learn alongside him.
Watch your head! Two taut clotheslines spread from Gramp’s shed to a tired post. He is hang drying his jeans, his underwear, and his single-use medical masks. During the 30 years of his marriage, Gramps was not allowed to touch the laundry, as Nana feared that he might tragically mix colors or disrupt her meticulous schedule. Sometimes, you pass by, see the lines, and forget she’s gone. But she’s dead, and he’s learned to tend to his own clothes in necessitated mimicry. Gramp’s wrinkled fingers pinch wooden clothespins one by one.
Continue on. Against the house, beauty and pain intersect; Gramp’s thorny pink roses and deep green ivies wrap higher and higher about his trellis each year. The once-was are made tangible in their old growth. As you greet the thick rows of carrots and jungle of tomatoes running the length of the backyard, notice an intermittent array of lime green tennis balls bobbing upon the poles delineating the contours of the garden. These are round relics of the fateful summer evening when my brother, playing hide and seek in the garden, pounded his knee into a rusty metal stake. After watching his grandson get eight stitches and a tetanus shot, Gramps decided to kid-proof his yard.
The back corner of the lot is where the old wooden swing lies. Look, don’t touch. The slats of the seat are battered and unsittable; the arms and its chains have pulled away from the wooden frame, leaving the entire structure laying sideways. It is broken. To a passerby like yourself, it might just look like a pile of junk. But Nana loved it.
Just beyond this swing and along the sidewalk, a cardboard sign balances on the curb. Read aloud the handwritten message: FREE! PLEASE TAKE! In this spot, Gramps gives away hundreds of seedlings – sunflowers, peppers, tomatoes, rose of Sharon – each summer to lucky friends, neighbors, and strangers. He once gave away one of Nana’s cherished diamond rings at this spot, which my family, to our heartbreak, only found out about later. Whatever it is that he gives away, it is here that Gramps shares the abundant melody of his garden and of his life, and invites everyone to sing along.
Welcome to Gramps’ garden.
The truth is, I love this messy, memoried landscape more than any place in the world.
. . .
I remember the time when Gramps’s garden received a citation from the city. He brought the letter over to our house, confused.
“I think it has something to do with my yard,” Gramps said, exasperated.
Over the past several years, the city has come to his doorstep several times with demands about his garden. Once, they asked that he trim back his prized sunflowers to improve traffic visibility; in another instance, they alerted him that they would be asserting eminent domain and carving into his property by 5 feet to install a sidewalk. To Gramps, this letter was just another nuisance in a long history of what he considers to be municipal clashes.
My mother spent hours on the phone with the city, trying to understand what, exactly, about her 80-year-old father’s yard seemed to be the problem this time. Their answer was simple: “Poor yard maintenance; exterior debris”. Gramps was to rectify the perceived failings within his responsibilities as a homeowner or head to court.
Poor yard maintenance? The great majority of Gramps’s time is spent tending to his yard. In fact, when the snowstorms and frigid temperatures typical of New Jersey winters keep Gramps out of his garden, he is overcome with restlessness and depression. During these cold months, my family and I relentlessly strategize to keep Gramps’s mind busy and to fixate his outlook on the April and May mornings to come. His Christmas list is usually quite simple: new sandals, new seeds, for spring. We know the pride he takes in his garden. Why does it have to look ‘good’ for everyone to know the ‘good’?
Without much of a choice, we spent the next month trying to align Gramps’s yard with what the city believed was more aesthetically pleasing. We organized the tools, bins, and crates surrounding his shed, and against Gramps’s protests, tossed out any of the particularly flimsy ones; we tried to work with Gramps to create a new system for storing seeds and seedlings; with heavy hearts, we helped him dispose of the deteriorated wooden swing. Through all of this, Gramps looked physically uneasy, as if we were rooting through his private belongings and erasing the memories upon which he relied.
That’s because we were.
Despite his progressing Alzheimer’s, Gramps spends hours out in his garden daily; his yard grounds him in a loving routine of care and growth, almost as if it were a radical denial of all that he has lost. Like sticky notes with appointment reminders stuck onto the refrigerator, Gramps’s garden is riddled with his own familiar cues to care. Feeling the temperature on his skin and dipping his fingers into the damp springtime soil, Gramps knows when it is time to plant his seedlings. A quick look and waft above the compost, and Gramps knows when it is time to add more brown or more green. Based on how the flowers hang their blossomed heads, Gramps knows when it is time to give them a drink. The birds singing; the makeshift labeling systems; even the laundry hanging out to dry: it all reminds Gramps of his responsibility to his yard and to himself. And all of these broken-down statues, swings, and metal sheets? They remind Gramps that he has lived and loved.
“If the inspector would just talk to me, he would come to the conclusion that there is not one single thing in my garden that I do not use,” Gramps said. “Not one!”
“I know, Dad,” my mother said. “They’re just noting what they see from the street, they don’t really understand.”
. . .
I often wonder why the city could not grasp this landscape of memory. Importantly, landscapes, even as small as a private yard, are tools of communication, and “above all other information, people seek information about each other when they experience a landscape” (Nassauer 1995). Gramps’s garden was obviously a poor communicator, but what was it saying to others, if anything at all?
Numerous scholars have pointed out that the ecological benefits of landscapes are often obscured from sight or eliminated entirely due to the neat and orderly aesthetic expectations of human viewers (Nassauer 1995; Eaton 1997; Hill 2007; Gobster et. al 2007). At the neighborhood scale, the community perceptions of what care and aesthetic quality shouldlook like dominate hyperlocal landscape features and change. The white picket fence, the freshly trimmed green grassed yard: these outdated ideals of the American Dream promote the idea that we can show that “we are good citizens by the way we care for the landscape to make it look neat or picturesque, safe or inviting” or by using the landscape “to express power or wealth” (Nassauer 1995). With values of neatness and orderliness on a pedestal, a yard’s inherent disorderliness is often associated with poor stewardship and lack of neighborly-ness, regardless of its true ecological health (167). Even if some people may be open to improving the ecological quality of their yard for moral reasons, most people would not do so “at the expense of the proper appearance of their landscapes” (162). Gramps may be an outlier in this by prioritizing the ecological function of his yard over anything else. But as Nassauer (1995) writes, even “if personal preferences for an unconventional landscape structure exist, they tend to be subsumed by the power of convention”, or in other words, the power of a municipal citation (232). Ecologically, socially, and physically beneficial landscapes that lack aesthetically pleasing features are often, as a result, undervalued, ignored, or worse: totally destroyed.
And it is not just the disorderliness of the landscape that is the problem, but our false perception or assumption of it. If it is unclear how a less-than-pristine landscape is being intentionally used or enjoyed, it can easily be mistaken or misinterpreted for “neglected land” (Nassauer 1995). As Nassauer points out, “perception of human intention may be the difference between a nature preserve and a dumping ground, or the difference between a wetland and a slough” (162). While aesthetic experiences — positive and negative — are happening immediately at the surface, “so many imperceivable things are happening in the background” (Eaton 1997). For this reason, Saito (2002) suggests that “we need to develop public capacity to see value in what, at the surface, appears to be aesthetically negative” (259). To Saito’s mind, this involves communicating ecological importance through “comprehensible and pleasing design vocabulary to appeal to our current aesthetic experience and sensibility”. Nassauer (1995) agrees and asserts that one way this may be done is by placing familiar “cues to human care” that indicate human intention and biological worth in otherwise novel or messy landscapes (163-5).
But how do we provide cues to the rather intimate, often illegible, unreliable, and completely invisible: someone else’s memory and memories?
Picturesque American ideals and Western knowledge systems — and therefore, western governance systems that operate within places like Gramps’s city— rely on evidence, either visual or scientific, and therefore fail to recognize the intangible and interpretative benefits of ecosystems (Fish et. al, 2016). Gobster et. al (2007) offer that “it is difficult for people to understand, care about, and act purposefully upon phenomena that occur at scales beyond our own direct experience,” (960). The “perceptible realm” — fundamentally, what people can see and interact with in landscapes — “is the scale at which humans intentionally change landscapes, and these changes affect environmental processes” (960). When I ask myself why I love Gramps’s garden, I am flooded with memories of learning to tend to the land with a loving guide, dirt under my nails, and worms way beneath my feet. The municipal inspector, I remind myself, never pulled thick carrots from the ground in Gramps’s garden; never mourned the loss of Gramps’s pepper plant seedlings after an unusual April cold front; and was never handed a surprise bouquet of freshly cut sunflowers from Gramps on a Saturday morning.
Gramps’s garden is a living extension of his memories and ours — the good ones and the bad ones; like memory, the value of his garden is not about making things pristine. It is about embracing, not fighting, change and loss. It is about passing on learned experience. It is about relationships with each other and with the land. It is about the wholeness of life. I don’t think this is about uncritical nostalgia; this is about refusing to accept that landscapes are silent and memoryless slates. This singular example of a municipal citation falls into a greater social and political phenomenon of uprooting memory from place and force-feeding memoryless aesthetic expectations and solutions onto landscapes. It poses significant threats to many of the physical, mental, and sociocultural benefits that they have the potential to provide. In particular, the sociocultural benefits provided by landscapes are crucial to our understanding of people’s identities, histories, values, and how people shape and change landscapes as a result (Nassauer 1995, Fish et. al 2016).
So, what do we do about it?
“Changing the way people design and manage” [and perhaps, condemn] “landscapes will require change in the way people read social characteristics into landscapes,” Nassauer (1995) writes, and I agree. I would assert that maybe this change will also require accessing people’s capacity to keep, share, and read memory. This isn’t a new idea. Theorists of the aesthetics of nature often ponder how “our appreciative experiences [are] in fact affected by our upbringing, our profession. our culture, our beliefs,” (Carlson and Bearleant, 2014). Environmental philosopher Thomas Heyd also offers what is considered to be a postmodernist approach to nature appreciation:
“That is, if aesthetic appreciation depends on our capacity to take note of a thing, to make a thing the object of our sensory attention and of our imaginative play, then stories … may be of great value because, in contrast to scientific classification, which, due to its abstractness, draws us away from the present thing, such stories, because of their concreteness, draw us into the object, site, or event,” (Heyd 2001).
This is something he holds true for “cases of both artistic and non-artistic stories, as well as ones that are communicated by verbal and non-verbal means,” (Heyd 2001; Carlson and Bearleant 2014). Examples of these include the Indigenous tradition of translating knowledge about relationships with non-humans through storytelling, and the intention communicated by cultural resources like a particular arrangement of rocks or flowers, or as Dr. Robin Kimmerer points out, the weaving of Sweetgrass. It includes reading the detailed signage, tombstones, and murals that capture the rich history of a place, or it could be as simple as noting a carefully placed glass lawn ornament. It includes sharing a good laugh with good company over good food and wine. It includes wondering about the lives of the birds in your yard. “If stories enrich our capacities to aesthetically appreciate the natural environment (pure or modified),” Heyd writes, “then they are relevant” (Heyd 2001).
I wonder if we might continue this intellectual investigation by making conscious efforts to let the landscape talk.
I think back to Gramps’s exasperated comment towards the city: “If the inspector would just talk to me, he would come to the conclusion that there is not one single thing in my garden that I do not use. Not one!”
Maybe he’s right.
Just think of how we transmit memories to our friends, colleagues, and loved ones: storytelling. The only way to make intangible memory perceptible in landscapes, therefore, is to make a practice of listening to landscapes. There are rich, beautiful, painful histories embedded in the scenery –whatever the scenery may be–and we need to begin asking to hear about them while we still can. Perhaps before making a decision about a landscape’s worth and a landscape’s future, talk to the people who steward land. Ask what these spaces remind them of. Get their stories. Hear their ‘whys’. In our race against the clock to fight climate change, protect biodiversity, and ensure ecological prosperity, our impatience will be our demise. What I’d like to say to the city is simple: Slow down, and hear what Gramps’s landscape has to say.
And if the city won’t listen? Well, let the city be damned.
Make the stories of your landscapes louder. Narrate them. Spread their seeds. Write about what you see around you, about the beauty and pain that emerges in these varied contexts. Pay attention to the places and spaces that are of value to your loved ones, and notice all that is there. Find the qualities and personalities of your loved ones in a landscape: perhaps in the hurriedness of a red Cardinal in the tree outside your window, in the ever-patient hope of a four-leaf clover in the grass; in the resilience of a dandelion poking through the sidewalk cracks. Collect fallen leaves and rocks found on your path on a really good day, or maybe just take a picture. Revisit the landscapes that changed your life, and bring a friend. In your garden, plant the flowers your mother loved, or buy a bouquet of them at the bodega, or sketch them in your journal. Thank the hands that prepared your food. Remember, remember, remember.
Gramps’s brain is deteriorating. His own memory won’t last forever. My family won’t have his green thumb. We won’t know the totality of his complex systems of knowledge and care, and this garden landscape, left unstewarded, will inevitably change. Maybe because I know Gramps’s memory is slipping away, I feel the responsibility of preserving and perceiving his story in landscapes I steward to ensure access to this melody for myself, my children, and my grandchildren.
This is already quite true of my childhood yard. My mother, Gramps’s eldest daughter, spends her springtime Saturday mornings like Gramps does: listening to the wind chimes in her garden beds, tending to the thirst and weeding needs of our Hyacinths, Tiger Lilies, and Black-eyed Susans. Using the tips gathered from Gramps across the years, she meticulously curates a collection of symbiotic flowering plants in large pots and places them around the yard to acquire the perfect balance of sunshine and shade. Our blueberry bush, hand-planted by Gramps a decade ago, offers a small harvest each July; during late summer nights under the stars, I’ve snuck old friends and new love interests back to steal a few. Gramps’s transplanted sunflower seedlings are now growing strong in our front garden for the second year in a row after I learned to take the hair from my hairbrush and put them at the base of the stems to prevent any snacking rabbits and deer. We’ve got a small composter, and we do our best to remember to save our egg shells and vegetable scraps to add to the bin; last Summer, Gramps used old plywood to create three separate piles – just like his – although we’re still learning to master the turning schedule. And perhaps most importantly, we have a back patio with a table large enough for our family, where we gather regularly for summer meals, Gramps included.
Gramps’s wisdom grows wild in our yard, and it will keep growing back stronger and louder with every season.
Carlson and Berleant, A. (2004). Introduction: The aesthetics of nature. In The aesthetics of natural environments. Peterborough, Ont., Broadview Press. 11-42.
Gobster, P., J. Nassauer, T. Daniel and G. Fry (2007). “The shared landscape: what does aesthetics have to do with ecology?” Landscape Ecology 22(7): 959 – 972.
Eaton, M. M. (1997). The beauty that requires health. Placing Nature: Culture in Landscape Ecology. J. I. Nassauer. Washington, D. C., Island Press: 85-107
Fish, R., A. Church and M. Winter (2016). “Conceptualising cultural ecosystem services: A novel framework for research and critical engagement.” Ecosystem Services 21: 208-217
Hill, K. (2007). Urban ecological design and urban ecology: As assessment of the state of current knowledge and a suggested research agenda. Cities of the Future. V. Novotny and P. Brown. London: 251-260
Nassauer, J. I. (1995). “Culture and changing landscape structure.” Landscape Ecology 10(4): 229-237.
Joan Iverson Nassauer, FCELA, FASLA, is a Professor in the School for Environment & Sustainability at the University of Michigan. She investigates ecological design and planning to support everyday aesthetic experiences, well-being, and the cultural sustainability of ecosystem services.
Nature provides immense emotional, spiritual and health benefits to residents of cities. There is little wonder then as to why many of us in the urban planning and design fields see nature as central and essential to all that we do and to imagining the future of cities.
The concept of biophilia is at the core and argues that we have co-evolved with nature, and that we have a deep need to affiliate with the natural world. The human species has “grown up with nature,” as Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has said. To Wilson, biophilia is understood as “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms. Innate means hereditary and hence part of ultimate human nature.” It is thus not surprising that we are happier, more productive, more creative, and even more generous in the presence of nature. Nature in cities offers the promise of lives that are wondrous and connected, lives attentive to the natural magic around us.
Much of our work here at the University of Virginia has focused on connecting the urban and the natural and envisioning cities that contain bountiful and abundant nature and are committed to restoring and celebrating that nature, and to cultivating an urban ethos and populace that is profoundly connected to and cares about the nature around them—essentially what we have been calling Biophilic Cities (see Beatley, 2011).
From October 17-20, 2013, we convened an impressive group of urban leaders from around the country and the world here in Charlottesville at what we called our Biophilic Cities Launch. The conference was a significant step forward for our work developing the concepts of biophilic cities and biophilic urbanism, and extending and applying these concepts around the world. It was a culminating event, celebrating two years of collaborative research and work, but also a Launch event looking into the future of taking on the task of imagining and designing a larger network of cities and interested individuals and groups around the world willing to embrace and move forward the idea of biophilic cities.
The Biophilic Cities Project, underway for several years at the University of Virginia, stems from the essential premise that nature is absolutely essential to urban life. Biophilic cities must provide opportunities for daily contact with nature and deep connections to the natural world for citizens to be happy, healthy, and productive and to lead meaningful lives. Funding for the initial two-year research and for the conference and launch events was provided by the Washington DC-based Summit Foundation, in addition to the George Mitchell Foundation.
It was a most stimulating four days, attended by at least three fellow TNOC blog writers (Mike Houck, Lena Chan, and Cecilia Herzog). Panelists shared a mix of presentations about the innovative work of cities, the immense challenges (political and otherwise) they face in giving nature priority in their planning and design and a host of practical and innovative ideas. There were workshops, earth walks, a biophilic cities exhibition, and many, many productive and stimulating conversations over meals, walks and breaks between sessions.
Much of the work of the Biophilic Cities Project has focused on certain cities around the US and the world. In these “partner cities,” and through collaboration and information sharing, we have been able to assemble similar GIS and data layers across the cities, and to understand the detailed programs, policies and projects advancing biophilic urbanism in these cities. We have conducted site visits to partner cities, and have also been working to document the innovative urban nature projects in these cities, and the variety of tools, techniques and planning strategies utilized in protecting and incorporating nature in these cities, and in fostering connections with the natural world. One key goal of the Launch was to allow and encourage these cities to share their stories and insights and begin to help each other to better integrate nature into their planning and management.
Our partner cities, and cities we have been actively studying, have included a wonderful mix of cities actively fostering connections to the natural world, including: San Francisco, California; Portland, Oregon; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Phoenix, Arizona in the US, and Singapore, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain; Oslo, Norway; Birmingham, United Kingdom; and Wellington, New Zealand. Representatives from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Perth, Western Australia; and Montréal, Canada also joined the launch event and were included in the Launch exhibition, with the hope that we will begin to include them in our work as well. Attendees came from cities all over the US and beyond, including St. Louis, Missouri; Boston, Massachusetts; Houston, Texas; Stockholm, Sweden; Washington, DC; Seattle, Washington; and elsewhere. The event was extremely well organized and managed by an incredible team of faculty, staff and students at UVA, with Julia Triman, graduate student in Urban and Environmental Planning and Carla Jones, Project Manager and Instructor leading the team.
The first two days of the Launch provided partner cities the chance to present their good work, and a rather amazing and exciting set of urban nature stories emerged. An initial panel addressed ways that universities might help in advancing biophilic cities. Jana Soderlund from Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, discussed the innovative Green Skins initiative, spearheading the installation of green walls around the port city of Fremantle, and her preliminary research assessing their reception and impact on local residents. Jana’s work is providing significant insights about what urban residents like about green walls. Her preliminary survey results show, among other things, that respondents tend to emphasize the beauty of these walls. Craig Thomas, from Arizona State University, discussed the ASU-UVA educational collaborative that has allowed several classes of honors students to analyze Phoenix neighborhoods against the metrics and concepts of biophilic cities. Kelly Hare, from Victoria University in Wellington, NZ, one of our partner cities, described the successful “halo” initiative, helping residents of that city living in close proximity to the innovative urban park and restoration project called Zealandia (a piece of wilderness in the city, where through a mammal-proof fence, native bird species such as Kaka parrot are rebounding dramatically).
We had two rousing and stimulating keynote addresses that helped push our collective thinking in important ways. An evening lecture by Jennifer Wolch laid out a Biophilic Cities “Manifesto.” Provocative and thoughtful, Wolch challenged us to think carefully about the many different and often marginalized interests (people and animals) that must be taken into account, and the potential “collisions” she sees in the movement. We must be careful, for instance, that urban greening projects like New York City’s Highline do not result in displacement and exacerbate unequal access to nature, and we must find creative ways to take full account of all species impacted, what she referred to as an “Intersectional Transspecies Urbanism.” Proponents of biophilic cities must think more about governance issues, and about the ethics of urban consumption as is impacts global nature. [You can watch the Jennifier Wolch lecture here.]
Kellert’s talk continued some of these themes, presenting the evidence and evolutionary logic for biophilia and arguing that that biophilic values “need to be nurtured and developed through learning and experience.” A strong advocate for the power of biophilia, Kellert challenged us to work to shift our values, culture and consciousness away from domination, disconnect, and transcendence of nature, to a paradigm of design and planning that understands contact with nature as essential and” deeply rooted in human biology”. He spoke of the special importance of aesthetics and beauty as biophilic values, and connections to nature. Kellert put forth at the end a set of Biophilic Urban Propositions at the end (using his own city of New Haven as an example), that explained location, livability and future thriving based on natural features and conditions. He later signed copies of his newest book, Birthright: People and Nature in the Modern World. [You can watch the Stephen Kellert lecture here.]
Friday panels provided an array of compelling examples of urban commitments to nature and biodiversity. The first morning panel addressed urban compactness and nature. Matt Burlin of Portland, Oregon described the many impressive urban greening efforts there, including the some 1,300 green streets, examples of that city’s innovative approach to stormwater management, and he ended with video of the thousands of residents watching and reacting to the spectacle of tens of thousands of migratory Vaux’s Swifts descending down the chimney of a city school.
Rebeca Dios Lema described the history of efforts in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital of the Basque Country of Spain, and a recent Green Capital City of Europe, to restore nature and to establish its green ring, and more recent efforts to extend that ring into the interior of this very compact and walkable city. Finally, Lena Chan, Director of the National Biodiversity Center (and a TNOC blogger!) descried the many impressive efforts of Singapore to implement its vision of itself as a “City in a Garden.” These efforts include promoting Skyrise Greening, an innovative Park Connectors network, and support for the creation of community gardens and green schools, among many others. She also reported on Singapore’s Comprehensive Marine Biodiversity Inventory (which is about halfway completed), and Lena tells me that already they have discovered some 64 new marine species (i.e. species not known to science).
A second late morning panel “Urban Nature on the Edge” provided equally impressive stories of the efforts to conserve and enhance nature in San Francisco, California, Wellington, New Zealand, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Peter Brastow, the City of San Francisco’s Senior Biodiversity Coordinator and Scott Edmondson, from the city’s planning department, together described this city’s major ongoing and emerging efforts, including a vision for connecting parks and natural areas within the city, and restoring native habitats. Several areas of innovation were discussed, including the city’s urban forest management plan, Green Connections initiative (planning and improving some 24 routes by which residents can reach nature in the city), and the city’s new Biodiversity Program. Particularly impressive are the many examples of community-based stewardship in the city. Together these efforts will allow the city to shift its vision from “Park City” to “Wild City.”
Amber Bill, who heads Wellington’s Our Living City Programme, described that city’s impressive efforts, including its town belt and green belt, and new emerging idea of a blue belt, that would encompass the harbor, marine reserve, and other marine and water environments. Finally Cecilia Herzog (another TNOC blog author!) discussed the impressive nature of Rio de Janeiro, the efforts of her NGO Inverde (for instance in the design and planning of the Olympic Green Corridor), but also the sobering difficulties faced in advancing an urban nature or urban ecology agenda in that city (with relevance certainly to other cities).
The afternoon panel saw efforts in three more cities described: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Montréal, Canada and Birmingham, United Kingdom. Here the focus was more on how nature might be enhanced and reinvigorated in older cities. Matt Howard, Environmental Sustainability Director for the City of Milwaukee, described many initiatives there, including continuing efforts to restore the city’s rivers with new efforts focused on the Menomonee River (and an impressive new Urban Ecology Center and park opened there). Montréal has recently completed its first biodiversity action plan, which Sabine Courcier described, along with other urban greening innovations there, including the city Green Alleys program. Finally, Nick Grayson described Birmingham’s innovative planning efforts connecting a number of public health concerns (air pollution, urban heat, poverty) with a vision of how the city’s natural assets (e.g. its network of small streams) might be harnessed to address them and to reduce overall chronic stress.
A key goal of the conference and launch was to provide opportunities for partner cities to share insights about work and experience, and to begin to develop personal and institutional relationships that will lead to future sharing and collaboration. That seems to be very much what happened, with attendees sharing stories and ideas over the course of the event, and forming friendships and developing plans for future interactions and collaborations.
In addition to the main city presentations on Thursday and Friday, there were a number of side events, earth walks, and workshops for participants and the general public. These includes walking tours of the Dell Stream Day-lighting project on the UVA Grounds and the Meadow Creek Stream Restoration Project (in the City of Charlottesville, a collaboration of the city and The Nature Conservancy).
On the first day of the conference a workshop on green walls was jointly organized and run by Jana Soderlund, from Western Australia, and two graduate student members of the UVA Biophilic Cities team: Mariah Gleason and Amanda Beck. The graduate students, as part of the Launch and exhibition, built a clever, rollable green wall, from wood palettes (see below). They explained this design and have prepared how-to instructions for others interested in building a similar structure, which can be found here. Jana discussed in more detailed her efforts in Fremantle, and at the end, Launch participants joined together to plant several additional (commercial) mountable green walls, which once planted became part of the biophilic cities exhibition.
One of my favorite events had to do with ants. We were joined for most of the launch by an entomology post-doc from North Carolina State University, Amy Savage. On Friday, during the bulk of our presentations from partner cities, Amy was busy setting out ant bait (including such things as Snickers bars, tuna, and pecan Sandies), attempting to see just how many species of ants she might find in and around the UVA School of Architecture. She was quite successful and discovered 13 different species in short order, in close proximity to where we were meeting. Education about this ant diversity, the habitat we were sharing that day, became something we attempted to weave into the more formal meeting and power point presentations. With Amy’s help at several points during the day we interrupted the Launch presentations with a report on what species had been found. We also produced a series of five ant collecting cards, with images of ant genus on one side and information about biophilic cities on the other side.
The incorporation of ants provided a visceral demonstration on the ways in which nature, much of it small and difficult to see, is all around us in cities. There is immense wonder and fascination value in ants, of course, yet urbanites are not well educated in looking for, identifying or even visualizing their existence all around us. Amy works with a wonderful initiative called the School of Ants that seeks to engage citizens in the collection and identification of ants throughout the country. They have produced a highly valuable urban ant identification guide, copies of which were distributed during the Launch.
On Saturday afternoon, Amy took the ant station, including her microscope, to the Charlottesville Downtown Mall, engaging children and families walking by about the ants around them—something we called the Urban Ant Safari! In her interactions with people on the downtown mall Amy asked people to write down memories and recollections they had about ants in their past. She later compiled and shared these with us, and some were quite moving. An older woman wrote a note about her days as a child in England during WWII. She wrote, ‘When I was an evacuated little girl of 5 in WWII Britain, I used to watch ants. I dreamed of having a see through container, so that I [could] watch them work.’
On Saturday evening, John Hadidian, Senior Wildlife Scientist with the Humane Society of the United States, presented ideas for human-wildlife coexistence in cities, passionately arguing for tolerance and understanding, and offering a number of examples of approaches and strategies for co-existence and non-lethal resolution of conflicts.
On the final day of the Launch, participants traveled to Washington, DC, to paddle up the Anacostia River on canoes. Hosted by the Anacostia Watershed Society, participants saw an unusual side to that capital and the hidden nature, from abundant cormorants to sunning river water turtles.We learned about green rooftop subsidies, and other efforts to green the City of Washington and areas around the Anacostia River.
One major premise of the Project has been the power of telling stories about nature in cities through still images and film. In pursuit of the latter goal, several short documentary films have been prepared about our study cities, with several premiered at the Launch event. Indeed, Friday evening became our biophilic cities film night (which we kiddingly referred to as the first annual Biophilic Cities Film Festival). The feature film was Stephen Kellert and Jim Finegan’s beautiful hour-long documentary Biophilic Design (featuring several Launch attendees, including Bill Browning of Terrapin Green). The film presents a dizzying array of projects and sites, with a heavy emphasis on buildings of various kinds and the biophilic powers they deliver.
Four biophilic film shorts were premiered, as well, three telling the story of partner cities. These included films about Singapore, Wellington (NZ), and McDowell Desert Preserve (in the urban environs near Phoenix). A fourth short film told the story of the restoration of Meadow Creek in Charlottesville, Virginia. These are now on YouTube, and available to view:
Taking place alongside the conference and launch we also organized a major Biophilic Cities Exhibition in the UVA School of Architecture’s largest exhibition space, the Elmalah Gallery. With mounted images and text about each partner city, largely provided by participant cities, and consistently formatted maps presenting the comprehensive nature in each city, the result was a spectacular picture of the many different ways in which nature can be planned and designed into urban areas. Along with still images, film and video were available on stands with mounted iPads. Two of our graduate students, Sarah Schramm and Harriett Jameson had a major hand in designing and installing the exhibition.
One of the most interesting features in the exhibition was a beautiful glass terrarium, which we commissioned from the design firm Crooked Nest, based in San Francisco. Our UVA team designed and built an equally beautiful biophilic table made from recycled wood and steel. The wood table top was routed to convey the pattern of a water ripple, with the terrarium placed in the center of the ripple, as if it had just fallen from above.
The terrarium quickly became known locally as the “’biophilic bubble!” It is quite arresting and soothing in the small nature it provides. A fitting piece of the exhibition, the bubble graced postcards and publications announcing the exhibition and conference and became a kind of symbol for the importance and potential of small natural elements to deliver some of the power of nature. Stephen Kellert reminded us at several points of the importance of considering the kinds of nature that might be brought into indoor and interior spaces, recognizing that more than 90 percent of our typical day is spent inside (despite efforts to get us out of doors). Planning and design of biophilic cities ought not to forget the impact and value of bringing nature inside as well, where we can.
On Saturday morning a smaller group, mostly partner city representatives, came together to participate in a workshop to discuss and invent the new global Biophilic Cities Network. For several hours we discussed and debated key questions about what the Network could or should look like, what functions it will serve, what value it will have, and how and in what ways it might meet needs not served by other networks that exist.
There was considerable enthusiasm for the network and at the end of the meeting as a symbolic gesture and show of support participants went outside and signed a blown-up version of the Biophilic Cities Pledge Card. Meant very much as a draft and work in progress, we have already revised and amended this card, but here is the card as we discussed it that day.
One of the most useful parts of our discussion had to do with what value of such a global network and how it would serve to strengthen the position of those in and outside city government working in support of nature. Some participants emphasized the importance of different local departments breaking out of their silos and that the network might help to do this. Others noted that the pledge card seemed to envision participants and signatories as primarily local council or local governments, but that left out universities, NGOs and many others with a stake in the network but working outside the city government.
One of the most interesting ideas is that the network might serve as a focal or organizing point for nature across a city and across the sectors of that city. This is something that had not occurred to me that in addition to the global network linking cities in different places and regions it might also serve to link disparate interests and actors within a city (and then perhaps linking these local constellations across the globe!).
There is still much to be done, as we near completion of our two-year Summit grant and look to the rolling-out of the global network. Key deliverables for the project will include a case book of best urban practices, including analyses of the accomplishments and urban-nature innovations in each city. We are also developing an urban-nature index as an aggregate measure of connections to nature, and as a way of comparing exposure to nature across cities. Other pieces of this work we hope to complete include a Delphi study through which we hope to be able to offers insights about the minimum daily amount of nature needed in cities. And of course we will continue to maintain and expand our Biophilic Cities webpage, blog, and e-newsletters.
Please stay tuned as we determine the exact language and mechanisms through which cities can declare their intentions to be a biophilic city (some version of the pledge language above) and participate in the Network.
We hope to grow this network into a global force on behalf of nature in cities and we will need your help! If you or your city would like to join the Biophilic Cities Network, please send us an email: [email protected].
While Zagreb’s circumstances and regimes changed, planners often remained, pulling the values of the previous period and linking them with values of the next period. Most of the time positive aspects remained while the undesirable ones were replaced.
When we consider planning for green infrastructure, we typically think forward to what kind of city we might imagine for the future. Far less frequently do we consider the history of the city and how past generations have shaped the green spaces and the activities and meanings related to them. In Croatia, a country known for its majestic landscapes and beautiful coastlines, the city of Zagreb is a unique example of how past generations have shaped the city’s green legacy.
Zagreb indeed has a rich and complex history. It entered the 19th century as a small town in the Austrian Empire only to become the largest city and the capital of Croatia in the mid-19th century. The change in the balance of power between Austrians and Hungarians resulted in subjugating Croatia to the Hungarian Kingdom which governed it as a colony, suppressing its social and economic development. The First World War marked the end of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and Croatia united with other south Slavic nations in the Yugoslav kingdom where Zagreb was the second largest city and economic centre. The short fascist phase during the Second World War was followed by almost half a century-long socialist period in which Zagreb was again the economic centre of Tito’s Yugoslavia. The independent era finally began in the 1990s with Zagreb becoming a modern European metropolis. So, over the last 200 years, Zagreb lived through changes in government forms, ideologies, planning ideas and practices, and, all of this impacted how greenspace was perceived, planned, and maintained.
Zagreb: Circa 19th century
Before the 19th century, Zagreb was a small town with two separate cores: religious (Kaptol) and secular (Gradec). Both were built densely within the fortification walls for protection from Ottoman conquests. In such a compact area, there was not much space for parks, so the city’s rural surrounding provided most opportunities to enjoy nature. Where green spaces did exist in the city, they were primarily designed around religious buildings, as is the case in Kaptol, where the churches’ green spaces were almost exclusively reserved for the clergy. It wasn’t until the end of the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century when urban parks around the two settlements really started to take root (Barešić and Sirovec, 2011). Yet, it remained the case that the creators of these parks were most often the bishops of Zagreb, as they owned most of the land around the town. In the same way, today’s largest park in Zagreb—Maksimir—was created. Its initial development was influenced by the baroque landscape design ideas penetrating from central Europe. Although imagined as a regular-structured French garden, construction took many years. It was finished in the mid-19th century in the style of an English landscape garden with many romantic elements.
Maksimir Park in the mid-20thcentury. Source: The Zagreb City Museum
The golden age of urban greenspace
A new era of urban greening began when the two cores, Kaptol and Gradec, began to merge together in the city of Zagreb. At this time, Zagreb was industrialising. Railway construction accelerated population growth and economic development, and as the population moved into the city Zagreb expanded rapidly, creating new quarters and “absorbing” surrounding villages (Slukan Altić, 2012). The separation between church and state led to the civil government overpowering the clergy, and landscape design became a civil activity. Zagreb got an official architect and urban planner whose task was planning the construction of new parts of the city, which also included the greenspace. City planners in Zagreb were usually schooled in other large cities of the Austrian Empire, and design and style in these cities greatly impacted planning ideas in Croatia.
Notably, the utilitarian aesthetic of German planners, Ernst Bruch and Reinhard Baumeister—for whom beauty was almost synonymous with practical—guided aesthetic in the city of Zagreb. This can be seen in the construction of a green belt around the new city centre. Modelled on Vienna’s Ringstrasse, a chain of seven parks was designed as a visual barrier around the new city centre as well as a kind of buffer zone protecting it from air and noise pollution originating along the railway (Slukan Altić, 2012). Due to its U-shape, the park chain came to be known as the Green Horseshoe. Another change characteristic for this period was the redevelopment of many medieval graveyards around churches into parks as the civil authorities started considering them as non-aesthetic and non-hygienic (Barešić and Sirovec, 2011). As industrialisation increased the city’s income, greater investments were made to further city expansion.
The aerial view of the Green Horseshoe in the centre of Zagreb. Source: geoportal.dgu.hr
Socialism and urban planning in Zagreb
As the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918 with the end of the First World War, Croatia became a part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In united Yugoslavia, Zagreb became an economic centre. Under these conditions, the development of new working class quarters did not follow the urban plans set in place earlier but progressed uncontrollably and informally. This caused overpopulation and led to a lack of focus on preserving greenspace (Bašić, 1989). The authorities, therefore, planned a green zone with recreational facilities along the river, which the city reached in that period, but due to a lack of money, only the green lawns were realised (Matković and Obad Šćitaroci, 2012).
Sava Riverside Park in the plan from 1936. Source: Matković and Obad-Šćitaroci (2012)
During the Second World War, the socialist party took over the government, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia became the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). The change in political values and government structures was blended with the urbanistic tradition. Socialist urbanists seemed to be aware of the benefits for workers population provided by urban greenery, including the effect on physical and mental health (Kiš, 1976). The care for urban greenery was demonstrated already in the early post-war years. Since the country did not have the financial means, the new regime implemented a decree in which the citizenry was organised to repair the damage in the city caused by the war and re-build the city. In this wave of public works all the existing parks were renewed and, according to the socialist ideology, the fences around them were removed so that access to parks were open to all. The socialist regime also nationalised all the land in urban areas, with the exception of the privately owned buildings on these properties (Simmie, 1989) to ensure planning went unimpeded, and smoothly according to socialist ideological principles.
Socialism also widened participation in urban greenspace planning processes. The general public could engage in greenspace planning by proposing ideas and implementing projects together with official service workers in charge of greenspace. One of such initiatives was the creation of the Newlyweds Park, based on the idea that newlyweds select and pay for a tree which would then be planted in the Newlyweds Park (Blažević, 1976). However, this widening of participation int he planning process also had its setbacks and ultimately led to a lack of planning control that great impacted urban green space. For example, in the 1970swhen the number of cars in the city started increasing, there was not enough parking space. Through legal means, but more often than not illegal recourse, parking lots and garages were constructed on the edges of urban parks, which impacted their size and quality. Authorities were generally aware of the problem, but not having a solution, they usually turned a blind eye on such developments. Today, the impact of this is still visible in Zagreb.
The examples of garages and parking lots intrusion in Vjekoslav Majer Park (above) and Newlyweds Park (below). Photos taken on 11/04/2018. Photo: Neven Tandarić
Contemporary Zagreb
The disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early1990s lead to yet another war that greatly impacted the development of the city of Zagreb. A political, economic and social transition introduced democracy in government and liberal market economy and various nationalised services and departments were transferred to the private sector. The lack of money in city treasury meant that some public projects could not be done exclusively by the city and needed the involvement of private investors. That often included granting some rights to private investors over the public space at the expense of public rights. Moreover, the new system allowed the private-sector-led transformation of public space, like urban parks, into commercial or residential functions. This sparked discontent among the citizenry and lead to people self-organising against these public-private initiatives to redevelop greenspace. For example, one recent initiative rallied around the preserving the only park in the Savica quarter from joint city authority, and private sector plans to build a church in it (Kramarić and Lisac, 2017).
A church was supposed to be built in the only park in the Savica quarter. Source: Inicijativa Čuvajmo naš park, 2018
Today, there are hundreds of various green spaces in Zagreb. While the most famous and central ones are well-maintained, the other ones, especially those further from the centre, are not cared for as well. Moreover, in distant districts green spaces are frequently of poor quality, they often lack landscaping, biodiversity and are mostly just plain grass lawns, and are used mostly by dog owners. Contemporary greening ideas appear to focus mainly on accommodating tourists while incorporating incorporate the longstanding mayor’s passion for fountains. There are many examples of newly introduced fountains in Zagreb squares and parks. Perhaps the largest and most expensive such project was the redevelopment of the University Meadow close to the city centre. While beautifying the image of the city, little attention is paid to the inhabitants’ opinion and the functional design of quarters. The light at the end of the tunnel is the strengthening of the civil sector in Croatia which fights its way to influence the planning of public space at the local level and publicly re-examines decisions made by city fathers.
The new design of the University Meadow. Photo taken on 29/08/2018. Photo: Neven Tandarić
Look at the history to envision the future
Over the last 200 years, greening ideas in Zagreb changed substantially. Urbanisation, influential planning practices such as utilitarian aesthetics (in the 19th century), regime ideology (socialist period), privatisation and personal agendas (post-socialist period) were all factors that greatly influenced the design and development of greenspace in the city. Parks in Zagreb are the result of original ideas and contemporary drivers of each period. While historical circumstances and regimes changed, planners often remained, pulling the values of the previous period and linking it with values of the next period. Most of the time positive aspects remained while the undesirable ones were replaced. By knowing some socio-political history, we can read Zagreb’s parks as a history of ideas of living, recreation, design and values. Moreover, the parks can help us to evaluate new ideas and re-evaluate the old ones in order to come up with functional public spaces. Even past mistakes can help us to learn and improve the planning practices.
Barešić, D. and Sirovec, J. (2011) ‘Rokov perivoj u Zagrebu’, Prostor, 19(1), pp. 184–199. Available at: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=63030750.
Bašić, K. (1989) ‘Unutargradski prerazmještaj stanovništva kao pokazatelj funkcionalno-prostorne transformacije Zagreba’, Acta Geographica Croatica, 24, pp. 69–84.
Blažević, M. (1976) ‘Uvod’, in Uloga i značaj zelenila za stanovništvo Zagreba i njegove regije. 1st edn. Zagreb: Stablo mladosti, pp. 8–10.
Kiš, D. (1976) ‘Drvo u gradu – faktor zaštite čovjekove okoline’, in Uloga i značaj zelenila za stanovništvo Zagreba i njegove regije. 1st edn. Zagreb: Stablo mladosti, pp. 35–44.
Kramarić, I. and Lisac, R. (2017) Slučaj Savica – i struka protiv betonizacije parka. Zagreb: Savica ZA park. Available at: http://www.kulturpunkt.hr/sites/default/files/DAZ_SLUCAJ_SAVICA-podrska_struke.pdf.
Matković, I. and Obad Šćitaroci, M. (2012) ‘Rijeka Sava s priobaljem u Zagrebu; Prijedlozi za uređivanje obala Save 1899.-2010.’, Prostor, 20(1), pp. 46–59.
Simmie, J. M. (1989) ‘Self-management and town planning in Yugoslavia’, The Town Planning Review, 60(3), pp. 271–286.
Slukan Altić, M. (2012) ‘Town planning of Zagreb 1862-1923 as a part of European cultural circle’, Ekonomska i ekohistorija, 8(8), pp. 100–107.
Chris Ives takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying sustainability and environmental management challenges. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham.
By all rights a one-eyed bald eagle is a doomed bird. Imagine trying to catch a salmon or a brush rabbit with no depth perception. Oh eagles will scavenge and occasionally steal food from one another, but roadkill and kleptoparasitism will only get you so far in life…or so the conventional wisdom goes. The one-eyed eagle that finds its way into captivity should be put out of its misery or relegated to life in a zoo. To release such a bird is to condemn it to a slow death by starvation.
West Hayden Island Bald Eagle. Photo: Bob Sallinger
Late on a Saturday afternoon in early November, shortly before Sunset, Portland Audubon’s wildlife hospital received a call about an injured bald eagle on West Hayden Island. The location was notable. West Hayden Island sits at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. Lewis and Clark camped here almost exactly 208 years to the day earlier on their journey to the Pacific. They called it “Image Canoe Island” after observing a Native American canoe carved with the images of men and animals emerging from behind the island. It was a place teaming with wildlife. Captain William Clark noted in his journal the following:
Rained all the after part of last night, rain continues this morning. I [s]lept but verry little last night for the noise. Kept [up] during the whole of the night by the Swans, Geese, white & Grey Brant, Ducks, etc on a Small Sand Island close under Lard. Side; they were emensely numerous, and their noise horid [sic].
Two centuries later, West Hayden Island represents one of the last intact remnants of this once fertile delta area. Its 800 acres of bottomland forest, wetlands and meadows, sit between the cities of Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. The surrounding river has been deepened, straightened and its banks hardened to make way for industrial development. Marine terminals line the banks to the north and south. East Hayden Island has been fully developed — nearly 750 acres of shopping malls, auto lots, high end condos and Oregon’s largest manufactured home community.
What little natural area that remains is an oasis for federally listed migrating salmon that require shallow water habitat to rest, forage and temporarily escape larger predators on their journey to the ocean. Its uplands provide habitat for a plethora of wildlife. Almost the entirety of West Hayden Island lies within the 100-year floodplain and during major flood events much of the island can be almost entirely submerged.
West Hayden Island with the Port of Portland Marine Terminals to the right. Photo: Jim Labbe
It is also a battleground. For nearly two decades the Port of Portland and other industrial interests have fought to turn West Hayden Island into marine industrial terminal. Even as other downriver port facilities sit vacant awaiting tenants and teetering on the brink of failure, development interests in Portland argue that this is the last big parcel available for marine terminal facility development in Portland.
There are no tenants lining-up for West Hayden Island either; the Port can’t say what it will build or when it will be needed. A decade ago they thought it would be containers. Today the best bet is auto imports. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is to be ready future whenever it comes and that means annexing the island, rezoning it for development, filling its floodplains and waiting for the “next big thing” in the realm of imports or exports.
West Hayden Island Beaches with Port of Vancouver looming in the background. Photo: Bob Sallinger
On the other side of the issue, a loose coalition of environmental groups, neighborhoods and tribes have a different conception of what it means to be “prepared for the future.” Representatives of the Yakama Nation travel more than 100 miles downriver to testify against this development at hearings. In a letter dated November 6, 2012 they wrote:
What was true in 1905 — and for thousands of years before that — is still the case today and will be for the Yakama children yet unborn; salmon and the health of the Columbia River are of paramount importance to our people.
Yakama Nation and other Tribes testifying against development in 2012. Photo: Bob Sallinger
They are joined in their opposition by a manufactured home community — a trailer park in more common lingo — that has persisted more than 40 years adjacent to the natural area…high end real estate that somehow has managed to remain low income housing for more than 2000 people. In 2012, the City of Portland adopted a long range vision known as the Portland Plan which established equity as the city’s “core principle.” Hearing this, the locals rose up and flooded hearings demanding equity, although one self-described “grandma” admitted to me afterwards that she didn’t actually know what the term meant.
That’s okay, the city and port don’t really know either. It is a work in progress. From the Port’s perspective, equity equals jobs and a larger tax base. Our development community likes to talk about a three legged stool of economics, environment and equity. Funny thing about that stool though. Too often the economic leg is growing while the equity and environment legs are getting shorter. One should think twice before sitting on that stool.
In this case a small army of sign-waving “grandmas and grandpas” demanded something more substantive than metaphors, a Health Impact Assessment, defined by the Centers for Disease Control as “a process that helps evaluate the potential health impacts of a plan, project or policy before it is built or implemented.” The City agreed to do a truncated version called a “Health Analysis” — sort of a Health Impact Assessment “Lite”. The findings were not pretty. The final report revealed that, even with mitigation strategies in place, the proposed development would potentially triple air toxic levels to 55 times the state benchmarks in the local community. It also described the potential for development induced poverty and displacement in the local community.
Manufactured Home Community protesting development. Photo: Bob Sallinger
In fact the project has generated a small mountain of reports. The project website lists more than eighty such documents: Economic Foundation Studies, Cost/ Benefit Analyses, Mitigation Plans, Market Studies, Growth Concepts, a report on the viability of the black cottonwood forest, another on the value of floodplains…this list goes on. The goal is to find “balance.”
If we study it long enough and hard enough perhaps a win-win solution will materialize. It hasn’t. Some places are special. They shouldn’t be turned into parking lots.
Which brings me back to the one-eyed eagle. As the sun was sinking low in the sky, my eleven year old son and I drove through the tangle of sprawling development that now covers East Hayden Island, past the shopping mall and the convenience stores and the impossible to ignore and even harder to explain “Hooters” sign, past the auto auction lot and single story industrial office parks, and finally past the tidy manufactured home community. We met the hiker who had reported the injured eagle and together we headed out into the wilds of West Hayden Island.
We found her perched in a meadow a little over a mile from the gate, a big female, white head stark against the falling darkness. When I approached she leapt into the sky, but only one wing extended and she twisted awkwardly and dropped back to the ground. We quickly bundled her up in an old Mexican blanket I had brought with me and began the mile long trek back to the car. I wondered as we walked whether this eagle could be the eagle that a few years back had established a nest and began raising young in the middle of the proposed development area. We often featured that eagle in our efforts to protect West Hayden Island. Her picture adorns the banner atop our “Save West Hayden Island” Facebook page.
West Hayden Island Eagle on nest in 2013. Photo: Bob SallingerWest Hayden Island Eagle in Flight 2012. Photo: Bob Sallinger
Our veterinarian met us at Audubon later that night and we gave her a full work up. In addition to the injury to her wing, she had fresh wounds on both of her legs. Most likely she was injured in a territorial dispute with another eagle — the most common cause of injury for eagles treated at our center. X-rays revealed that at some point in her life she had also been shot. A bb was still lodged deep in her breast muscle but by all appearances, it had been there for quite some time.
However the worst thing was the right eye. I couldn’t see it when we were carrying her through the darkness on West Hayden Island, but we all saw it right away as we unwrapped her from the blanket under the surgical lights of our treatment room. The right eye was badly damaged — beyond repair. As we worked to treat her injured wing and legs we knew in the back of our minds that she was most likely never going to return to the wild. It was sad. She was a beautiful bird, nearly 12 pounds, other than her injuries in perfect body and feather condition. We consulted other experts from around the country. They all said the same thing. She wouldn’t survive in the wild with one eye.
Eagle being examined on arrival at Audubon. Photo: Peter Sallinger
However sometimes conventional wisdom is wrong. A veterinary ophthalmologist surprised us a few days later when she confirmed that indeed the damage to the eye was severe, but also that it was old, many months old, perhaps years. This bird had most likely been surviving in the wild for quite some time and doing quite well despite the injured eye.
Verification of her strange and unlikely journey came from an even more unlikely source. David Redthunder lives in the manufactured home community on Hayden Island. He spends much of his time communing with the wildlife that inhabits West Hayden Island. He has an uncanny ability to get close to the critters and he has a particular affinity for the nesting eagles. Sometimes when I visit the island, I find small shrines he has built to protect the birds.
Over the years he has sent me hundreds of amazing photographs he has taken of the island’s wild inhabitants including dozens of the eagles. (To see a gallery of David’s West Hayden Island Photos go here.) What were the odds that David would have captured an image of the injured eye? It seemed like a fool’s errand, but I opened the file of David’s photos on my computer and began scanning. About 30 photos along, I found it….a blurry photo dated August 12, 2012, the injury to the right eye clearly visible. The injury was more than a year old. She had not only survived her eye injury, but also apparently has successfully nested and raised two young.
Photo of West Hayden Island Bald Eagle with Injured eye on November 28, 2012. Photo: David RedthunderManufactured Home Community Protesting Development in 2012. David Redthunder in foreground holding picture of eagle. Photo: Bob Sallinger
More of David Redthunder’s West Hayden Island wildlife photos follow. To see more, go here.
Somehow it seems fitting that a one-eyed eagle calls this place home. By all rights, the island should have been paved over long ago. Despite the odds, it somehow survived, decade after decade as the landscape around it developed. The odds are against it now too. The big money and conventional wisdom say development is inevitable — we need to prepare for the future. But sometimes the conventional wisdom is wrong; sometimes we need to think beyond the experts or perhaps seek out different sources of wisdom. Sometimes the path forward is written not in technical reports, but on the side of a canoe and in the stories of our fellow travelers, the stories that usually don’t make it into technical reports.
A one-eyed eagle is still a long shot. Not every bird survives. Not every story has a happy ending … but if she can fly, let her go. Let her have her freedom.
A review of The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. 2013. ISBN: 978-0316178525. Little, Brown and Company. 338 pages. Buy the book.
Bestiaries—elaborate and fantastical combinations of medieval scientific knowledge and folklore—were meant to describe the animal life of the Earth. These large volumes depict all kinds of different animals using intricate illustrations, and almost never distinguish between fact and fiction.
The Urban Bestiary is a beautiful marriage of writing meant for the soul and for the mind, with information about interacting closely with wildlife.
The most famous of these kinds of catalogs, the Aberdeen Bestiary, was created in the 12th century, and now resides in the Aberdeen University Library. Its entry for the beaver states that, when pursued, a beaver “bites off its own testicles and throws them in the hunter’s face and, taking flight, escapes.” Beaver testicles were, in those days, highly valued for their medicinal purposes. The Aberdeen Bestiary is full of fantastical descriptions like this. It has been digitized by the University of Aberdeen, and can be accessed online here.
Lyanda Lynn Haupt has created a modern version of a bestiary, set in the urban wild of Seattle, Washington, USA. Devoting a chapter to each creature, Haupt describes the habits of her urban cohabitants. She sticks to the tradition of mixing facts and lore; The Urban Bestiary is a combination of Haupt’s personal experiences with these creatures and scientific tidbits. She gives advice on topics from tracking animals to urban deer control to human-wildlife conflict. Not only does this book tell stories, it also provides information about real ways to interact more closely with your own local wildlife.
Haupt dedicates each section of The Urban Bestiary to a different type of urban fauna or flora. One part for the mammals (“The Furred”), one for the birds (“The Feathered”), and one for the rest (“The Branching and the Rooted”), which includes one chapter each for trees and humans, the engineers of the urban ecosystem. Disappointingly missing are the reptiles, amphibians, and insects, some of the most maligned of urban critters. In her introduction, Haupt states: “My intent was not to be all-inclusive, but rather to treat species that are common in most urban places and those that have a particular lesson for co-existing with wildlife”. Surely, Haupt missed a chance here to defend an unappreciated toad, a slandered snake, or a seemingly insignificant grasshopper.
That said, The Urban Bestiary does provide some worthwhile lessons. From opossums, we learn not to judge another being strictly by its (in the opossum’s case, shocking) appearance. From mountain lions and bears, we learn humility in the face of nature’s power. From the oft-overlooked city birds (pigeons, starlings, house sparrows), we learn to appreciate the wildlife we do have in cities, instead of lamenting an absence of “nature”. From crows, we learn about non-human intelligence. From opossums, we learn not to judge by appearances. And from trees, we learn a sense of time deeper than that usually available to humans. The book is full of lessons such as these that we can learn from the everyday nature we experience even in the most urban of cities.
The Urban Bestiary is a beautiful marriage of writing meant for the soul and for the mind. By observing closely the habits of our non-human neighbors, we can learn about animals, plants, our neighborhood, our planet, and ourselves. Haupt of describes in detail the habits of, and lessons to be learned from, each organism she presents. For any urban dweller looking to connect with nature, The Urban Bestiary is a superb first step. Even skilled naturalists may find some useful tips on urban tracking or animal behavior. Haupt’s goal “is that this is just the start of a huge, earthen bestiary, an invitation to wild intimacy, written daily by all of us, through attention to the creatures in our midst.”
A review of Nature in Towns and Cities, by David Goode. 2014. William Collins, New Naturalist Library. ISBN: 9780007242405. ISBN 10: 0007242409. 417 pages.
The newest title in The New Naturalist Library, Nature in Towns and Cities by Dr. David Goode, is trueto the series’ dual goals of “recapturing the enquiring spirit of the old naturalists” and “maintaining a high standard of accuracy in presenting the results of modern research.” Goode’s scientific background, deep personal interest in urban nature, and long-term involvement in, and advocacy for, Britain’s urban nature movement has created an entertaining and intellectually stimulating read for professional urban ecologists, planners and practitioners, amateur naturalists, and grass-root activists. While the book is specific to Britain, its descriptions of the ecological principles and the manner in which the urban conservation movement has grown over the past three decades, in Britain and beyond, are universally relevant.
Goode, with more than forty years’ experience as ecological advisor to local and regional governments, director of the London Ecology Unit, and Head of Environment at the Greater London Authority, is eminently qualified to document the urban conservation movement, including his own role as exponent, in Britain and abroad. But, beyond the institutional, political, and social factors that have contributed to changing attitudes toward urban nature, what makes Nature in Towns and Cities a practical and enjoyable read is Goode’s keen knowledge of natural history dating from the time he became a curious naturalist at the age of fourteen. Nature in Towns and Cities isn’t Goode’s first book on urban nature. His Wild in London inspired a generation of urban nature enthusiasts in the mid-1980s.
The Nature of Towns and Cities
Goode opens with “Nature In A Small City”, a description of British habitats through a tour of his home town of Bath, where plants and animals inhabit “deep basements and small courtyards”, sunbaked walls where leaking drainpipes and holes in masonry provide microclimates for lichens, ferns, and spiders; Peregrine falcons utilize a church steeple; and ancient graveyards, “with their rich humus and ample nutrients, support a rich array of native flora.” He offers the reader colorful and intimate illustrations whereby even in a built-up small town, a vast array of habitats host species that belong to native sites that have been engulfed by urban development and other species that are utterly unique to the urban scene where wildlife and plants live “cheek by jowl” with people. Bath, as a template city, represents a microcosm that is representative of similar towns and cities across Britain where densely built up cities, surrounded by suburbia, offer a patchwork of green spaces, wetlands, streams, rivers, and green corridors. All of these special habitats yield an amazing amount of biodiversity from city centers to the surrounding rural landscape.
Organization of the text
Two themes run throughout the book: scientifically sound descriptions of urban natural history through an ecological lens and a detailed recapitulation of the growth of the urban nature conservation movement. In “Urban Habitats” Goode methodically describes the ecology of “encapsulated countryside” woodlands, meadows, marshes, heathland and hillsides that have been subsumed and form a remnant of the surrounding rural landscape within the urban matrix. He describes the biota, both native and non-native, that has colonized canals, cemeteries, abandoned and active railways, post-industrial landscapes, “new” created wetlands, and concludes with more prosaic urban parks, squares and cemeteries. Goode provides examples of the influence of socio-economic and political factors in shaping urban habitats. For instance, he describes the manner in which “encapsulated woodlands” were transformed following the industrial revolution and in response to changes in transportation, particularly the national railroad network, and abandonment of traditional coppicing following adoption of coal for residential heating.
Regent’s Canal, London. Photo: Mike Houck
“Colonisers And Specialists” focuses on: birds new to the urban scene—“a motley crew” of opportunists; badgers and foxes; and pigeons, sparrows and swifts. A passion for urban nature, citizen science, keen natural history observation, and detective work are all illustrated in descriptions of a changing lifestyle of urban badgers since they attained protected status in 1973. What started as a colony of badgers concentrated in a small graveyard in Bath is now a badger population occupying more than 400 cities and towns across Britain, taking advantage of myriad habitats from wooded banks and gardens to golf courses. Anyone engaged in urban canid-human interactions will recognize challenges of managing the explosive colonization of urban foxes throughout Britain. The use of “swift towers”, “swift-bricks”, and nesting “boxes” in new building construction or retrofit projects will also resonate with those who have worked to introduce or reintroduce swifts into the urban environment.
The cover of a book about Britain’s urban foxes.
I found “Post-Industrial Ecology” to be especially interesting and relevant given the modern rush to repurpose brownfield sites for new industrial development. Goode makes a strong case for investigating the ecological value of post-industrial sites, no matter how contaminated, before proceeding to industrial reuse. Goode describes how Buglife, one of the myriad NGOs at work protecting brownfield sites for their unique ecological values, created a best practices guide for planners and developers that describes the importance of invertebrate species and the benefits of ecological landscaping to protect them. He also provides several examples where endangered or threatened species, with their narrow ecological requirements, have colonized highly alkaline or acidic sites in a “Tour of Britain’s Wastelands.” Goode describes the importance of gravel pits, disused wharves, canals, and railways for providing a patchwork of plant communities that offer a range of successional patterns within the urban matrix. He argues that urban “wastelands” are the “essence of urban ecology.”
Urban nature conservation
“Urban Nature Conservation” traces the changing philosophy regarding the role of conservation in the urban context, a shift he persuasively declares as “one of the most important ecological movements in the past half-century.” He follows the urban conservation movement from establishment of the Nature Conservancy in 1949—to protect the “gems of British wildlife” when little or no attention was accorded urban nature—to the eventual recognitions of the value of nature to humans and their longing for connection to nature where they live, work and play. Eventually, these shifts led to an explosion of interest in urban nature conservation. Goode recounts the origins of local natural history societies that sprang up during the Victorian era in cities such as Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol.
In the post war era many of these volunteer, amateur societies turned their attention to protecting urban natural areas. In the 1970s professional urban planners and landscape designers turned their collective attention to urban areas. Goode gives a great deal of credit for the surge of interest in urban nature to Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature, Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside, and contributions from the U. S. in the form of John Kieran’s Natural History of New York City (1959). But it was The Endless Village, a publication of the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC), that Goode argues “changed the rules overnight” by dispelling the myth that cities represented “ecological deserts.”
The cover of The Unofficial Countryside.
The 1980s: time for action
Anyone who has worked on urban nature conservation will relate to the assertion that, in the 1980s, urban conservation went viral across Britain with local conservation agendas leading the way. Goode uses a fight over a scrap of disused railroad property, the Gunnersby Triangle, to illustrate the rise of “Friends” organizations dedicated to the protection of small, locally important nature sites. A site of little ecological value in the traditional sense, the Triangle nonetheless became a cause célèbre due to its importance to the local population. Today it’s one of the London Wildlife Trust’s most important urban preserves. The 1980s saw an explosive growth of urban conservation groups and the integration of urban nature into formal urban planning schemes across Britain, a pattern repeated in the United States.
Urban planning
In “Urban Planning” Goode describes his own work as London’s first ecologist for the Greater London Council which was created in 1982. Goode and his ecological team were tasked with three primary functions: developing policies for ecological and nature conservation for London and the surrounding boroughs; establishing an ecological database for London; and providing ecological input and advice on issues related to land use planning and management of publicly-owned land. The team published a number of influential “nature conservation guides” for London and its surrounding boroughs which serve as excellent planning templates to this day.
The cover of A Nature Conservation Strategy for London.
Creating new habitats and planning for nature
Going above and beyond their mandate, Goode and his colleagues also participated in the development of ecology parks and nature centers. A premier example was the creation of Camley Street Natural Park which demonstrated the feasibility of creating a new wetland park out of what had been a derelict coal tip adjacent to the Regent’s Canal, literally a stones throw away from King’s Cross tube station. Not only did the creation of Camley Street demonstrate that new habitats, in this case a wetland, could be created amidst the most urbanized of urban environments but it also showed how a bit of green could be provided for children occupying nearby low-income housing. Camley’s success sparked urban revitalization projects across Britain and was the inspiration for similar efforts in Portland, Oregon and elsewhere in the United States.
The entrance to Camley Street Natural Park. Photo: Mike Houck
Nature in Towns and Cities includes an overview of the many international conferences, publications, and key innovators who succeeded in bringing the urban conservation movement into the mainstream. Goode also describes the evolution of London’s Nature Conservation Strategy, which, for the first time, introduced nature conservation as part of land use planning for London. The process the team of ecologists employed to inventory almost 2,000 sites not only painted a comprehensive picture of the city’s ecology but provided a template of a rigorous science-based approach to documenting the ecologically significant landscapes that is as relevant today as when they undertook the process in 1982.
One of the London Ecology Unit’s most important contributions to urban nature conservation was the development of a three-tiered hierarchy of ecological sites: London-wide; Borough-wide; and Local. Their work identified over 140 “Sites of Metropolitan Importance for Nature Conservation” (London-wide). Surveys were also performed for 31 of the 33 London boroughs that resulted in the establishment of 1,300 “Sites of Borough or Local Importance” that together with sites of Metropolitan-wide significance represented almost 20 percent of the London area’s land base. All of this information has been described in thirty-one Ecology Handbooks published between 1985 and 2000, which constitute partial basis London’s biodiversity strategy today.
Access to nature, Biodiversity Action Plans, green infrastructure, ecosystem services, and new ecological landscapes
A conundrum for cities across the world is how much urban nature and greenspace is enough? What, in Tim Beatley’s Biophhilic Cities parlance is the “minimum daily requirement of nature?” Do we assess access to nature in hectares per capita, in quality of habitat, or rarity of habitat? One approach Goode describes is a national accessibility to nature standard developed by Natural England, which recommends at least two hectares in size within a five minute walk from home and at least one hectare of a site with the quality of a Local Nature Reserve per 1,000 population. He then describes London’s “Areas of Deficiency in Access to Nature”, which planners are using to identify where ecologically important sites can be improved, where points of accessibility can be expanded, or where new sites need to be created.
The London Wetland Centre. Photo: Mike Houck
The final chapters cover a host of emerging concepts in urban ecology including valuing nature’s ecosystem services and the creation of large new urban wetlands such London’s Wetland Centre which attracted 135 species of birds in its first year after construction. Nature in Towns and Cities ends with a description of the newest effort to introduce greenspaces into city centers through the creation of green roofs.
Whether you share The Guardian’s assertion that Nature in Towns and Cities is “probably the finest work on urban ecology ever written” (December 6, 2014), there is absolutely no doubt you will agree that it’s an essential addition to any serious urban naturalist’s library and an essential and inspirational guide to planning for urban nature in your own city, town or region.
A green wall in London. Photo: Mike Houck
***
Rating Nature in Towns and Cities: I highly recommend the book to the lay audience, urban planners, park planners, urban conservation advocates, and natural resource managers. I give Nature in Towns and Cities a five (flawless and fantastic) in The Nature of Cities parlance, even though some might find the Britain-centric nature of the book to be a slight disadvantage.
The book is full of high quality color photographs that illustrate the text. There are also excellent graphs, charts, and diagrams that accompany the quantitative oriented text. It’s hard to imagine what Goode might have left out, given its comprehensive nature. Even though these are evolving concepts he covers the ecological importance of green roofs, green infrastructure and the concept of ecosystem services. His references to important people and publications in the urban conservation movement provide seasoned veterans with inspiring reading and new-combers with motivating material to urge them into action in their own cities or towns.
In terms of physical implementation, we have an endless stream of good knowledge, theory, and practice for building sustainable, nature-inclusive cities; a collection reaching back for well over a century.
What’s missing, I would argue, are not methods and knowledge, but a consciousness of our relationship to the environment, one which supports a consistently growing integration of nature into our urban agenda.
With this consciousness would come the ultimately necessary understanding of how culture and nature fit together to form the basis of an ecologically connected society. This is not an understanding ecologists alone should hold; it is one which on some level or another, all citizens need to carry with themselves in order for any serious attempt at inserting ‘nature’ into a city can truly be considered successful. This consciousness would essentially flip our common mantra of “how does nature fit into the city” into a “how does city fit into and with nature” way of thinking.
I am not an urban planner, academic, or landscape architect; but rather an artist who likes to work with these types of folks. My work straddles rural and urban in attempts to find ways of temporarily unplugging people from their world of economic and political logic, and expanding their consciousness of the reality of the local, regional, and global natural systems which support them.
With this in mind, I would like to use a recent experience of leading a social / ecological art project on Megijima, a small Japanese island with just 130 inhabitants, to ask: what can we learn about urban nature from the loss of traditional culture?
The following writing includes a rather informal dissemination of the ecological and social transformations on this small island, and related suggestions as to how the understanding of such transformations could help us look differently at how nature might fit within the consciousness of contemporary culture. Rather than offering answers, it offers a loose framework for thinking about urban nature issues in a new context, and I hope readers may contribute their own answers and additions to the concept.
A small corn plot, adjacent to one of the many abandoned homes in Megijima. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon
Our work took place during the hot and sticky summer months, and consisted of interviewing all of the willing residents about the island’s history, family, agriculture, and most importantly, about the importance of their connection with the environment. These interviews were turned into a site-specific digital artwork which allowed users to navigate relationships between people, culture, and nature.
To give a brief portrait, the island of Megijima is a physically small piece of land, small enough to be jogged around in just a few hours. The island is situated between Mainland Japan’s Okayama Prefecture on the East, and Shikoku Island on the West, in what is referred to as the Seto Inland Sea.
Natural forest and farmland covers the majority of the island, making it a spectacular example of Japanese nature in this region, yet it’s also only a 20-minute ferry ride from the city of Takmatsu, a city of half a million, and one which includes Megijima in its administrative jurisdiction.
The glow of Takamatsu, a short twenty-minute ferry ride from Megijima. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon
Shigeko Yokohama, who runs the island’s tourism office, offered us the view that “Seeing Takamatsu City from Megijima creates a strong contrast between a modern Japanese city, and the serenity of a traditional country… where the beauty and power of both environments are enhanced.”
You could argue that, both physically and culturally, Megijima occupies a liminal space between the modern and the historical, and also between the urban and the natural. Indeed it sees its share of all of this in waves throughout the year.
In the past few decades, however, the ‘traditional’ waves of the past have been smaller, and the peoples’ culture and connection with their environment has found itself to be quite incompatible with the ideologies of modern Japan.
The center of the ‘beachfront’ district on Megijima. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon
As we interviewed individuals, we saw a recurring theme: several centuries of a flourishing local culture, paired with a deeply rooted cooperation between human and environment on this small island was literally slipping away before the eyes of its inhabitants.
To make a point of the disappearing culture, the island’s semi-annual Matsuri (festival) has just this year seen its last celebration.
This festival, which we were privileged to see and take part in as foreign guests, sees the island’s extended families gather to carry out their own brand of religious and cultural festivities – in a general sense, to celebrate the harvest, banish evil from the island, invigorate the youth, bring prosperity, and other cultural rites which were once commonplace in most towns and villages in Japan.
Dragon dancing on the eve of Megijima’s Matsuri festival. Photo: Suhee Kang
The island’s youth are the center of much of this festival, which in and of itself presents one of the biggest problems for the festival – and the island. On any given day, you’ll be able to count the young people living on the island of Megijima on one hand, if you’re lucky.
This creates some obvious issues with maintaining such cultural events here, and also in maintaining any sort of vibrant community.
For the weeks leading up to the festival, the island temporarily brought enough Megijima relatives back to easily triple the island’s population, most of whom had long since moved off to the big cities and in some cases had started families of their own.
A wooden float which is carried around the village over the span of two days during Matsuri. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon
Even still, there was a large shortage of young men, whose physical work in parading a giant wooden float around the island for two days is a necessity of the festival. Due to this shortage in manpower, the island was forced to import volunteers from nearby cities. The festival went on, and it was two days of only-in-Megijima moments; magical temples lit through painted lanterns, boisterous sake-filled celebrations, nightime dragon dances, where quarters of the town faced off in dynamic fashion, and a series of deeply rooted traditional rites for youth and elders.
According to local leadership on Megijima, this was the last time the festival would be held.
The loss of such cultural tradition is not isolated; it’s widespread across Japan and most of the industrialized world, and when we look at it deeply, we begin to see rather clearly that both the disappearance of tradition, and ecological degradation, are two victims of a single cultural deficiency.
One of the town elders watching over the temple before the Matsuri festival. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon
During the two months we spent on Megijima, we interviewed around 30 families and found that many of their stories mirrored what is happening throughout Japan: young people grow up, they want to experience the fast-paced city life; they leave the small towns and become deeply embedded in what is one of the world’s most hard-working business-centric lifestyles. A lifestyle which is not only devoid of connection to the roots of their personal culture, but also to their roots in nature.
That is to say, nature isn’t culturally valued outside of their towns and traditional cultures.
In particular, as Japan’s rural population is dwindling, its cultural heritage is disappearing, as are the small agricultural and fishing towns once iconic of this country. And silently, along with it all, a historically resilient and well-rooted environmental agenda is disappearing as well.
While the disappearance of cultural heritage is rarely connected to issues like resource depletion, pollution, or land degradation, I would argue – in a most urgent way – that it certainly should be.
Two men leave the main city of Takamatsu, bound for Megijima on the last ferry. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon
Amid all of these changes, the sensitivity of Megijima’s aging denizens to the island’s environment has remained especially well tuned.
I am reminded of our first visit with the island leadership as we began preparation for our project. The meeting was held in a small home, flanked by other small homes on two sides, and a dense forest ascending nearly vertically up into the hillside behind it. Here, we were told by the island’s community leaders that in recent history, Megijima has seen the vitality of the forest and land dwindle, and along with it, the life of the surrounding sea.
From their point of view, the health of this small piece of land, which once flourished with forest, farm, and social life, also gives life to the surrounding ocean, and the ocean back again to it. It’s a continuous cycle, they told us, where cultural life, ecological life, land, and sea are all inextricably interconnected.
It is also a cycle that has been disrupted, by a cultural missing link, a disconnection and mass exodus of youth, and a subsequent lack of care for the immediate and surrounding environment.
It is important to note here, that in Megijima in particular – as in Japan in general – there is a culture of sacred and deep-rooted spiritual connection to the environment, which was very much evident in talking with the population of this island. It is a connection which, as Japan Social and Ecological scholar Allan Grapard once wrote, forces a “continuous examination of nature from the point of view of culture, and of culture from the point of view of nature.”
Today, this connection is held almost exclusively within the retired population.
The only three children from the island wave to an incoming fishing boat. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon
The main industry on Megijima was once its agriculture, which over the years centered variously around dairy, tobacco, rice, and peanuts. Today there is a single rice farm left here, several dozen small-scale gardens and farms, an orange orchard, and a fishing industry consisting of several individual fishermen in small boats.
The rice farmer, Masakatsu Nakamura, runs what is the last agricultural operation of any significant scale, and even then, much of his harvest goes to feed his extended family, who are spread throughout the country.
“It is not about money,” Nakamura told us in reference to his single-person rice farming operation. “It is about affection, and this affection can be expressed through the food that we grow and share. For my family, our rice field is a very significant place, both to find peace and to connect.”
The only rice field left on Megijima. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon
In a short 50 years, Nakamura the rice farmer has gone from being one of many, to quite literally, the only one.
Today, the residents of Megijima still enjoy the simple beauty of the island’s natural setting, talking of cherry blossoms, sitting beneath the expanse of stars, and the subtle sound and light of nearby Takmatsu as it’s carried across the water to mingle with Megijima’s thick forested hills and resident inoshishi (wild boars).
They talk of the love they have for the land, for their small farms with expansive views, for the neighbors who are still around on this island where the youngest farmer is a spry 70-years young.
All of it is talked about with great passion, and more often a smile than a sigh.
Our team interviews a 90-year-old farmer on Megijima: Photo: Suhee Kang
But along with its ever-increasing average age, the days of a vibrant local community have long since passed, and when speaking of the future, the locals see little to no hope that current efforts by the city or cultural organizations such as the Setouchi Triennale (Art Festival) will make much of a difference.
To this, we argued that the arts festival brought us here, so at least we can share their stories and help islanders and visitors make new connections. For that, the local people seemed to at least smile and nod; most were unbelievably supportive of our work.
As we left the island, so did the steady stream of art tourists, and life continued for the people of Megijima. For a 90-year-old woman who still works in her field each day and still enjoys a local beer each night, for the lone family who finds creative ways to bring their children up close to the island, and for the one remaining rice farmer dedicated to keeping his family together through the grain he grows.
A ‘state of agriculture’ walking tour of Megijima which our team arranged with natural farmers from around Japan. Photo: Suhee Kang
I suppose that the hope for this island — the same for anywhere on this earth, island, town, or city — is not that we’ll go back to old rituals, isolated agrarian villages, and storied culture to live it again. We are far beyond that and by most accounts there seems little point to it.
The hope is that we might plant the seeds for a new culture with roots deep enough that we can grow to understand, learn from, and live with our past culture as an informant to future versions of what that culture could be.
There are a substantial yet dwindling number of places like Megijima around the world, and I would put forward to you that these are important and largely undervalued places to learn lessons for ecologically-sound settlements, if only because the lessons are all right there, concentrated, highly visible, at the intersection of modern and historical words.
I would put forward that there are lessons for mega cities within small, historically-rooted communities at the liminal space between two very polarized ways of life; that there is value in viscerally assessing the importance of human-nature connections at individual and community scale, or in engaging a geographically identifiable culture of which a single generation has lived through nearly the entire process of modern development.
Comparatively, much of our current urban culture has almost no awareness of nature; we don’t know nature deeply, we don’t know the extent to which it exists, or what it does for us. It is rare today, that we ever come into contact with nature in an honest and thoughtful way.
Two men stand at a subway exit in Seoul, South Korea. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon
Yet this thoughtful connection is arguably a big part of why semi-isolated places like Megijima have been ecologically successful for centuries; a depth of understanding of nature and constant connection to it. These places have built a very good basis for putting into practice the “how does city fit into and with nature” mantra.
Establishing such a relationship with nature takes time and constant work to build, and conversely, relatively little time to completely destroy. It is not really something you can make an informational poster about, or a one-time event, or even a beautiful city master plan, because these outputs do not themselves necessitate such a depth of connection, they only varyingly make attempts to encourage it.
In this realm, perhaps success isn’t dependent so much on the design, or its physical manifestation, but on the culture which inhabits this physical manifestation.
Gardens fill nearly every piece of unused public and private land in the Daedong neighborhood in South Korea. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon
By example I can think of large cities Korea where something we urbanists call ‘guerrilla gardening’ is simply a normal act ingrained in the culture; a part of life which never really went away in the move from rural to urban. In the most tightly packed urban centers — and I mean places where no one might ever think to plant anything — little old Korean women fit dozens of small garden plots.
Their city wasn’t built for nature, but their individual and collective culture was.
For those communities who have been long disconnected from nature, making the cultural case for nature within cities is slightly more involved; the case for urban nature must be, for lack of softer terminology, both invasive and omnipresent in the lives of citizens, business owners, and elected officials. In these communities, one could say that we face the task of building a completely new culture of respect for and connection to nature.
This could mean political forums held in nature, it could mean more structured open space requirements which include gardens and farms as a percentage of development, or it could involve the sponsoring of artists, ecologists, and activists to regularly engage locals on issues of their ‘neighborhood’ ecology, building some relevant local recognition for — and connection to — local natural features such as watersheds, meadows, gardens, and forests.
Or, it could be vastly more simple.
In the end, perhaps habitually, putting ourselves (and our children and our elected leaders) in constant and meaningful contact with nature — with no tactical agenda to speak of — offers us a way forward.
We all know that nature in the urban environment can make our lives as city dwellers infinitely better, but can it create quality of life even for the displaced among us? Winter is here in the city of Detroit, Michigan. It’s cold, and people all over this northern city are scurrying to find a warm place to spend the season. It seems that no matter what our circumstances, the nesting instinct survives in all of us.
With all of Detroit’s vacant space, why couldn’t a nomadic, tent-based lifestyle also be an option?
Of course, for some city dwellers, the question of where we will spend the cold winter months is more pressing, and more poignant, than it is for others. Each year at this time, those without homes in our city struggle to find a place to stay that is safe and warm and that affords them the shelter they need without sacrificing the freedom they desire. Last year, a community of homeless citizens established itself in the shelter of the forest on the western edge of The Greening of Detroit Park in honor of Elizabeth Gordon Sachs (“EGS Park”), a park that The Greening of Detroit has developed and maintained for nearly 20 years.
The Greening of Detroit Park in honor of Elizabeth Gordon Sachs.
Displaced, or “homeless,” people regularly spend time in EGS Park, a verdant three-acre parcel on the edge of Detroit’s downtown, but most often they remain transient, enjoying the greenspace for a few long summer days before moving along. Last December, a real encampment built up over a few weeks, with a communal fire pit and an accumulation of tents, milk crates and shopping carts that created an air of permanence. Tent cities are a common component of the urban environment, and they are nothing new, even in a cold northern city like Detroit. But this one was particularly visible, located as it was in a well kept park nestled between two major thoroughfares right on the edge of downtown. It grew quickly and attracted lots of attention from supporters and detractors alike.
The Greening of Detroit is a non-profit devoted to sustainable growth of a healthy urban community through trees, green spaces, food, education, training and job opportunities. For 25 years the organization has worked to make Detroit a safe, healthy, clean and, most importantly, green place where all of its citizens can flourish. As the organization charged with maintaining EGS Park, The Greening quickly found itself in the midst of a controversy. The appearance of a tent city in a park where The Greening is responsible for long term development and maintenance, and where it has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past 20 years, caused the organization to reconsider its work through the eyes of the park’s new residents. Did The Greening’s maintenance responsibility extend into the tent city? How should that responsibility be construed? Most interesting was the question of whether it was the organization’s long term investment in this greenspace that made the camp so inviting.
All human beings have a desire to find community in the shelter of the natural environment. The tent city that grew up in the forest of a Detroit park, which became known as “Tinseltown,” was a testament to the strength of this desire. Whether their choice of location was conscious or not, it is no coincidence that this community gathered and then bonded together in an area where The Greening of Detroit has planted over 200 trees and seeded a wildflower meadow. Trees and green space make us feel better. Research shows that we are healthier where trees are present, that those same trees provide a calming effect, and neighborhoods where trees provide a canopy are safer for the people who live there (see Green Cities: Good Health, Kathy Wolf). No doubt, the forest that The Greening of Detroit planted in EGS Park provided these benefits for the residents of Tinseltown in the same way that the 95,811 trees that it has planted across the city benefit all Detroiters.
Novel forms of shelter. Photo: Import Export Architecture
Still, trees cannot provide for all of the basic needs of a community. There are no sanitary facilities in the park and the only source of heat for this community was open flame, a genuine safety concern in a community where shelter is provided by tents. There are good reasons for Detroit’s ordinances prohibiting tents and open flames in city parks. The park is a public place, meant for use and enjoyment by the public at large—an objective that is impaired by permanent residents as well as by the odds and ends that accumulate as a part of the existence of a community without formal support or storage. Before long, Detroit’s Mayor decided that Tinseltown’s time should come to an end. Its residents would be offered long-term housing, their accumulated belongings stored, and the space that the tent city occupied would be returned to parkland. In its role as caretaker of the park, The Greening aided the City in repairing the landscape where the tent city once stood. More importantly, in its role as caretaker of a healthy urban community, The Greening also supported Tinseltown’s residents with workforce training and gardening supplies.
Detroit has many dedicated agencies providing support and care for our homeless citizens. But those services only help the people who elect to take advantage of them. The residents of Tinseltown said that they preferred the shelter that their tents provided; they were looking for something other than the services that they can find at our shelters, soup kitchens and warming centers. Their needs were more closely met by the green embrace of a young forest than they were by the confines of those other options.
Vacant land in Detroit.
There are assets in Detroit that could be used to create alternatives for displaced citizens. In a city with abundant vacant space (an estimated 100,000 vacant lots comprising 20-30 square miles of empty space) and plans to plant more young forests, perhaps there is room for innovation in serving the needs of Detroit’s displaced people. Detroit has plenty of vacant spaces that are not currently designated as public parks and which, as a result, are not encumbered by the ordinances that govern parks. If there are more citizens like the residents of Tinseltown who are determined to keep their community intact and in tents, it seems that we should be able to find a sliver of unloved land that they could adopt. In fact, redevelopment of neighborhoods with abundant vacant land is a high priority in Detroit and creative use of green space is a central component of the plans for redevelopment. Detroit has recently announced plans to undertake a massive expansion of its planting efforts in neighborhoods where vacant space dominates the landscape, with the express purpose of improving the quality of life for residents.
Consider this: Detroit could be a city where residents are able to choose a classic, walkable urban lifestyle, a spacious suburban lifestyle, or a bucolic rural lifestyle, all with an appropriate complement of natural assets and all within the 138 square mile confines of the city limits. With all of this vacant space, why couldn’t a nomadic, tent-based lifestyle also be an option?
All over the world, people are opting to create high quality lifestyles by incorporating more of the outdoors into their living arrangements. In progressive cities across the United States, villages of tiny homes are popping up with houses so small that residents naturally take advantage of outside space to add to their living area. Sometimes tiny homes are simply an interesting housing option for those living off the grid. However, these tiny villages have also turned out to be a practical solution to the problem of homelessness. Inexpensive to construct, maintain and operate, tiny houses are manageable for people on a severely restricted income (note, not all who are homeless are also jobless) and with some subsidy can prove to be a good option for “housing-first” agencies, as well. Given that Detroit has so much former residential vacant space with the infrastructure to support habitation, this could be a viable alternative for housing displaced citizens in this city.
The eco-district concept is another idea that’s taking off. An eco-district is a defined geographic area (often a single neighborhood) wherein stakeholders have agreed to advance sustainability district-wide through green building principles by installing blue and green infrastructure and by modifying individual behavior. While these districts require substantial planning and resources, they also attract residents who want to live lightly upon the ground. This lifestyle allows residents of eco-districts to take advantage of the same benefits that attracted the residents of Tinseltown to their spot beneath the trees of EGS Park. Urban camping is apparently a (still relatively minor) trend as well, and represents another innovative way that city citizens are incorporating the great outdoors into their urban lifestyles.
Rooftop camping sleepover at One New Change in August. Photo: 365 dot travel
Of course, Detroit has another, more traditional, asset that should not be overlooked when considering solutions for homelessness. In a city that housed over two million residents at its population peak and currently houses less than seven hundred thousand, Detroit has lots of houses with no people in them and, at the same time, plenty of people with no houses to live in. In fact, there are thousands of vacant residential structures in Detroit right now. Accordingly, the opportunity to reduce homelessness using empty houses should not be dismissed out of hand, particularly as the City of Detroit is spending millions of dollars to knock down thousands of houses each year. Many of the houses on the demolition list are lone survivors in neighborhoods now dominated by newly created wildlands. It seems likely that a more permanent housing solution in one of these neighborhoods would be a welcome option to the folks who formed Tinseltown.
From Tinseltown’s makeshift community to the eco-village residents who have worked so hard to plan and implement their neighborhood goals, there is a thread of commonality. All of these people have recognized that their lives in the city are better when they include nature in their midst. We have much to learn from the denizens of tent cities, tiny villages, eco-districts and urban campsites throughout the world. May each of these folks find a community that provides the support they need along with the clean, green environment that the members of the Tinseltown community found in The Greening of Detroit Park in honor of Elizabeth Gordon Sachs. We at The Greening of Detroit will keep working to create that kind of clean, green environment, so that all of us might experience the feelings of peace and safety that come with an urban landscape that is filled with trees.
This is a tale of an experience I had in Alachua County, Florida. The challenge? How can we encourage the construction of more natural stormwater ponds, which offer more wildlife habitat and more efficient ways to remove pollutants?
Stormwater retention/detention ponds can be designed to provide multiple ecosystem services. The question is whether we we can find the right combination of regulatory policy, economic incentives, enforcement capacity, and public education to allow them to do so.
We have all seen conventional stormwater ponds—deeply dug ponds, with mowed turfgrass and some exotic plants all around the perimeter. Often a chain-link fence surrounds the ponds. These types of ponds may be good at storing water, but they offer little in terms of wildlife habitat and do not efficiently remove pollutants from stormwater. Mowed and fertilized turfgrass around the pond only exacerbates nutrient loading to the pond, not to mention the amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted through mowing and fertilizing. Alternatively, increased native vegetation around the perimeter and within the basin (and decreased turfgrass) help to improve uptake of pollutants from the water and simultaneously provide wildlife habitat. Unfortunately, in Florida, the norm for stormwater ponds is mowed turfgrass throughout.
A conventional stormwater pond with mowed turfgrass around the perimeter. Photo: http://www.hcmud249.com/pictures/index.htmlAn enhanced, more natural stormwater pond. Photo: Mark Clark, University of Florida/Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS)
How can we change this norm? We explored this issue in Alachua County, Florida. The stakeholders involved were scientists from the University of Florida, environmental consultants, city/county staff, and developers. We met over a number of years to develop policies that would encourage enhanced ponds. These enhanced ponds would contain areas that were not mowed and increased native vegetation. The goal was for these ponds to offer more wildlife habitat and be better at removing pollutants from stormwater. These enhanced stomwater ponds were nicknamed no-mow ponds. These included primarily detention ponds (that hold water for short periods of time) along with a few retention ponds (that maintain a pool of water throughout the year). Below, I describe a four-part account to create policies that promoted these no-mow ponds and lessons learned.
Creating the no-mow pond policy
About 11 years ago, discussions with county staff, local developers, scientists, and some environmental groups were started to explore policies that would encourage the construction of no-mow ponds. Many meetings were conducted to explore how county policies could be amended to promote these alternative ponds. Design and management practices were hashed out to determine what these no-mow ponds would look like and how they would be managed. The following is essentially what was agreed upon:
the majority of the basin and the perimeter of the pond would not be mowed;
mowed areas only occurred around inlet and outlet for maintenance;
there would be forebays (i.e., shallow areas designed to capture sediments before water runs into deeper areas) and littoral shelf zones so wading birds could forage in shallow areas along the edge;
native trees would be planted in the perimeter and basin;
the public must be able to access and walk around the pond and there should be no fencing; and
educational signage is required explaining the purpose of the no mow ponds because they were designated as open space and not mowing them was unconventional.
A Great Blue Heron foraging along the edge of a stormwater area. Photo: Tyler Jones, UF/IFAS photos
To encourage the creation and maintenance of these no-mow ponds, the county adopted a new incentive policy and made it available for developers to try (voluntarily). It was a voluntary incentive because developers were not required to create these no-mow ponds, but if they did, they were allowed to count these ponds as open space credit. In Alachua County, a current zoning regulation exists were approximately 20-50 percent of proposed developments have to be designated open space. Normally, stormwater ponds were not counted as part of the percentage requirement for open space; however, if the developer created no-mow ponds, the footprint of these ponds could be counted towards the open space requirement for the property. The developers that adopted the construction of no-mow ponds could ultimately build more homes on the site because the remaining open space requirement is reduced. Thus, a big financial incentive!
Policy implementation and failure
Fast forward a few years. Several developers applied and received the open space credit, and created no-mow stormwater ponds. However, upon inspecting these installed ponds, a majority were mowed and had very little native vegetation. The developer had already received the credit but now the designated no-mow ponds look like conventional ponds. What happened?
Essentially, there was no robust mechanism to monitor and make adjustments once landscaping companies took over maintenance or when people moved into the neighborhood. A combination of factors were at work. Foremost, most of the landscaping companies were used to mowing the basins and perimeters of retention/detention ponds so they just continued to do so. No information about the unique management of these no-mow ponds was passed down. When these ponds were located in neighborhoods, residents saw these “scraggly” ponds and they convinced the landscaping company to mow them. Additionally, the educational signs that were installed (to inform the residents and maintenance crew about these no-mow ponds) were the size of a postage-stamp, and did not explain the rationale of these enhanced stormwater ponds. Finally, there was no claw back provision on the permit, so that if these ponds were not functioning as intended, the developer would lose the open space credit or the developer/homeowner association would be fined. With no oversight, the no-mow ponds turned into conventional ponds.
Take two: back to the drawing board
Because of these initial failures, we (developers, city/county staff, and scientists) reconvened in 2014 and brainstormed about how to improve the policy to achieve long-term, functionally enhanced stormwater ponds. I (and others) mentioned the problem of no oversight and lack of communication with landscape maintenance companies.
I suggested four strategies:
Extension services (University of Florida) could be used to train and certify landscaping companies in the region about maintenance of these no-mow ponds. Extension is the outreach arm at the University of Florida, and each county has hired personnel to interface with the public. To get open space credit, the developer and homeowner association (HOA) could only hire these companies to manage these ponds.
Because the developer is benefiting (monetarily, from the open space credit), he/she would set aside some money that would be used to hire a third party monitoring person that would visit the ponds twice a year. After the developer completes the community construction, the HOA is structured in such a way that a portion of monthly dues is set aside to hire a third-party monitoring entity. The fund includes enough money to make amends when things are not functioning.
A significant fine should be levied to the developer if during construction of the community, these ponds fail to be maintained appropriately. After developer leaves, there is a mechanism where the HOA has to keep up with the maintenance, and if not, a significant fine is levied on the HOA.
Of the four suggestions, only the significant signage requirement was considered as a draft revision to the code. The third-party monitoring, levying fines, and limitations on types of landscaping companies received significant resistance from the developers in the group and even county staff thought it would be too difficult to monitor and levy fines. From the developer perspective, reading between the lines, they wanted the extra open space credit but did not want to give up control of who maintained it and did not want to open themselves up to fines. Moreover, developers said the third-party monitoring would cost extra money even though building a few extra homes (the credit) was a significant financial benefit. From county staff perspective, I think the staff recognized that these first three solutions would be more robust, but they hesitated because it would be difficult to create and write up the mechanism for monitoring and levying fines. For example, which county staff would oversee the third-party monitoring and maintenance by an appropriate landscaping company? Who would check and levy a fine? The county staff were already stretched thin, and while University of Florida Extension could step in, train landscaping companies and even monitor the ponds, the regulatory part (levying fines) would still fall on county staff. Who would do this? In addition, there was confusion about who actually had regulatory authority among different county departments, and these representatives were not always at the table in these discussions.
An installed sign that represents the type and size of sign that is required to be installed near no-mow stormwater ponds. Photo: Mark Hostetler, UF/IFAS
Thus, the larger signage requirement was placed into the proposed policy revisions along with some proposed modifications to the pond design. Although I was not entirely happy with the outcome, at least we implemented the improved signage into the review of open space credit applications. Although not formally adopted into code (as of yet), the improved signage and improved modifications to the pond design were communicated to developers (by Alachua County staff) as essential to obtain open space credit.
More failure, but some mini-successes
To see how the new and improved requirements would play out, I became involved with a development in Gainesville that installed the no-mow ponds. Working with county staff and a developer that had received open space credit, we ran into some issues regarding the maintenance of these no-mow ponds and in installation of the signs. First, it was very apparent that the developer and site manager (my main contact) had no idea about what these no-mow ponds actually meant. This is likely because there had been no communication between the engineering consultants that applied for the open space credit and the site manager. It took a lot of back and forth (with county staff involved) to get the developer to recognize that these ponds were special and required proper signage and a unique maintenance regime.
Were the ponds mowed? They were, at first. Initially, the site manager communicated to county staff and myself, in emails, that the ponds were not being mowed and that the hired landscaper understood what was to be done. However, several spot checks revealed that the pond basins and sides were still being mowed. Instructions about the no-mow areas were not communicated to the hired landscaping company and their workers. It took quite a bit of effort on my part and that of the county staff to educate the people overseeing the landscaping company that these areas should not be mowed.
Overall, the developer and site manager did not put much emphasis on how important it was to maintain these ponds in the spirit of the original design and management plan. If it were not for myself and dedicated county staff to go back multiple times, take pictures, and communicate repeatedly, I strongly believe that these ponds would have turned into conventional ponds as before. To date, though, it seems the basins are not being mowed. But who knows what will happen two to five years down the road, especially when the developer leaves and the homeowner association obtains control of managing these ponds?
A no-mow stormwater pond that was being mowed anyway in a new Alachua County development. Photo: Mark Hostetler, UF/IFASA no-mow stormwater pond where the landscaping company has stopped mowing in the basin of the same Alachua County development depicted in the photo above. Note that the vegetation is beginning to become more structurally diverse, but it is still in the early stages of succession. Photo: Mark Hostetler, UF/IFAS
Lessons learned
First, I think success will be determined by how well a developer and engineering consultants, working on submitting a plan for the unconventional stormwater pond credit, understand and are motivated to create and maintain an enhanced stormwater pond. Unfortunately, in most cases, I believe motivation to maintain a functional pond is limited. Thus, a policy that offers incentives to create no-mow ponds needs to have mechanisms where the ponds are monitored, evaluated, and adjusted when issues come up. The following four key requirements in such a policy are:
A required funding mechanism where a third party bi-annually evaluates no-mow stormwater ponds to assure that they are functioning as intended.
Developers and HOAs are required to hire only approved landscaping management companies that know how to maintain these no-mow ponds.
Fines are levied on developers and HOAs that do not maintain the ponds appropriately.
Education signs are required to be installed with no-mow ponds that explain to residents why they are not being mowed and their purpose, describing how they benefit people and nature alike.
Monitoring and evaluating the functionality of any landscape design is typically difficult for government entities to do. Although requiring a third-party entity to monitor the ponds helps to maintain the enhanced stormwater ponds, the regulatory side still needs to be handled by government. Thus, some city/county resources must be allocated to hire additional city/county staff. One funding possibility is that a portion of stormwater taxes to be set aside to hire personnel to oversee the long-term monitoring of enhanced stormwater ponds. Additionally, some governments have the capacity to assign responsibility to current staff, but early communication and agreement should be established before adopting the new policy. A local government will adopt a new policy, which contains government oversight, only when a clear path towards government capacity is established.
“Stronger than the storm.” I can’t get this phrase out of my head, nearly one week into my sabbatical move to Venice, Italy. It so happens that we arrived on a week when the moon and the winds lined up to create acqua alta (high water) for six days in a row.
On day 1, I thought I could wait it out inside. On day 2, I got a little antsy, and bought 7 euro galoshes to pull over my brand new Doc Martins. On day 3, after springing a devastating leak in my right galosh while in shin deep water, I gave up and set out to buy stivali (boots). I was shocked to find a perfect pair for only 12 euros (about 15 dollars) at the hardware store on my corner, and that’s when it hit me: this is resilience, already in action, and right in your face. Thanks to their history, and their coastal position next to a rising sea, Venetians are used to storms, and know how work around them.
But are we all destined to need to make these kinds of changes?
Photo: Franco Montalto
Contemporary Venetian culture is heavily impacted by climate change. Two hours prior to every high water event, sirens followed by a sequence of eerie whistles sound throughout the city. The siren gets your attention, and the subsequent number of whistles tells you what the predicted high tide level will be. Each whistle indicates another 10 cm over 100 cm, the tidal elevation corresponding to 5 percent of the city under water. When you hear three whistles, as we did several times this week, 75 percent of the city is under water. When that happens, the city government deploys kilometers of passarelle (elevated wooden walkways) in the portions of the city with the deepest inundation. Shop owners place small barriers in front of every door, while continuing to hawk their wares. Sump pumps (that you never see) begin discharging water (of different colors) into the alleys through small plastic tubes, which you suddenly realize are all around you. And everyone, including the most dapper among them, sports boots. The young college girls wear black boots; the rugged delivery men where hip waders; the bridges and tunnels crowd, coming into Venice for work, wear garbage bags over their shoes. The Southeast Asian immigrants, who at other times of the year sell pocket lasers and fake Gucci bags, start selling boots and fluorescent galashes to the tourists in Piazza San Marco. But a basic pair of shin-high boots, like mine, gets you just about everywhere.
Photo: Franco Montalto
Walking through the flooded streets is another interesting experience. Everyone slows down—tremendously. It wasn’t initially clear to me why this was happening. Without cars, there’s always a lot of ground to cover in this city, and the average Venetian typically moves at a healthy gait. Feeling confident in my new stivali, I continued to move at this pace only to find out within a few minutes that I was suffering death by a thousand drops. It seems that each fast step kicks a few drops into the top of your boot. You don’t feel those individual drops, but keep it up and in a few minutes, your socks are soaked. I slowed down, realizing that alas, pazienza, everyone around me was used to this. When there’s acqua alta, it’s OK to be late, or to change the plan, or to cancel appointments. (Though, ironically, not for first graders. My daughter’s new teacher was careful to tell me that acqua alta is not an excuse to be late for school.) Venetians have adapted to contemporary acqua alta the way they adapted to life in a foggy lagoon over a thousand years ago. Life goes on despite it.
This said, the flooding is, of course, unpleasant. Though life continues, acqua alta is the subject of continuous conversation. At the supermarket, the woman in front of me on line at the cashier complains that the water level this morning was higher than was predicted by the sirens. The locals get extremely frustrated with tourists who block their way by stopping to take photos on the narrow passarelle. An elderly couple I encountered couldn’t get to the hospital to talk to their doctor because the vaporetto (boat bus) couldn’t fit under the Ponte dei Tre Archi due to the high water. In short, though Venetians have adapted, the situation is not welcome, and creates some very formidable challenges. Here is a city that is “stronger than the storm,” but definitely not voluntarily, and certainly not happily.
Photo: Franco Montalto
As I plod through the beautiful yet flooded streets, staring at the water ponded several inches on the marble tiles of cafés with delicious pastries in glass windows mere inches above the floor, I ask myself why our global culture can’t look at this example and make the changes necessary to avoid other coastal cities having to face the same fate. Sure, the vulnerable can try to adapt, and those with access to significant resources may, like the Venetians, achieve some level of resilience. But at what cost, and what fate faces those countries, cities, and peoples who can’t afford to build massive storm surge barriers, deploy kilometers of walkways, enforce new construction standards, or elevate critical infrastructure nodes? Why has the push for mitigation and the global cultural change necessary to significantly reduce emissions fallen so far behind the call for adaptation to an “unavoidable” future?
Yes, there is momentum in our emissions, and even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gasses today, a certain amount of change would still occur. And yes, it is politically naïve to think that there is any chance that significant cutbacks in global emissions will occur in a short time frame. For these reasons, we need to find ways to adapt to changes that are, in most cases, involuntarily imposed on us by an anthropogenically modified climate system (and especially in cities housing particularly vulnerable and economically challenged populations). But when will we pool our global resources and knowledge to develop true comprehensive global solutions to these problems?
Photo: Franco Montalto
There are some reasons to be cautiously optimistic. For example, I came across a recent New York Timesarticle titled “Leaders in Davos Urge Quick Action to Alter the Effects of Climate Change,” and found it intriguing that participants of the World Economic Forum, for years the targets of anti-globalization protests for their perceived advocacy of trade liberalization and corporate profit over environmental conservation, worker rights, social justice, and other contemporary sustainability goals, have now “redoubled their calls to combat climate change.” And here in Italy, the Pope is known to be preparing an encyclical on ecology that he will deliver in the months leading up to the December 2015 United Nations conference on climate change in Paris. The expectation is that he will make the case that disagreements regarding the specific causes of climate change do not preclude the need for action. The pontiff is also expected to say that care for all creation, and healthy global ecology are the basis for global development and world peace, as recently reported in the National Catholic Reporter.
Photo: Franco Montalto
But while these and other statements from global economic and religious leaders may be encouraging, progress in the US, a country that a recent study by Concordia University suggests is responsible for 20 percent of the global warming observed through 2005, is dismally slow. Democrats seek action but are blocked by a powerful Republican lobby that doesn’t believe in anthropogenic climate change, or isn’t willing to consider legislation designed to reduce emissions significantly. In a hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, expressed concern that the recent focus of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on earth science (including climate science) is taking resources away from space exploration, what he considers to be its core mission. In January, the current leading Republican contender, Gov. Scott Walker, threatened to bring a lawsuit against the federal government if it passes legislation limiting carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. And Florida, home to Jeb Bush, another Republican presidential contender, restricted its Department of Environmental Protection employees from using the terms “climate change” or “global warming” in official correspondence.
As the drops seep deeper into my boots, I get frustrated at the pace of our collective inaction on climate change. We can talk about how to live in unpleasant situations, or we can attempt to reduce the likelihood of making our lives unpleasant. Is there not a great deal of hubris in thinking that we mortals can become stronger than nature? As I reach home to my children’s happy voices, I wonder if we will learn that lesson early enough to keep their feet dry.
Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Juan Azcárate, BogotáPodemos entender la interdependencia que tenemos con la biodiversidad—de la cual hacemos parte—y cómo en la medida en la que reconozcamos a los procesos ecológicos en la planeación de las ciudades es que esto podría desafiar el modelo urbanístico aséptico y controlado.
Keith Bowers, CharlestonRealizing the vision of re-wilding means breaking down traditional paradigms of how we think about cities, public spaces, and aesthetics.
LouiseLezy-Bruno, ParisThe path for re-wilding the city must pass through a re-wilding urban people.
Katrine Claassens, MontrealI imagine an over-grown garden, hazel eyes through the rose-bushes, soft and slient paws.
Don Dearborn, LewistonWe are drawn to wild places. The affluent can buy access to nature the way they buy everything else. Not so the less affluent. Give the wild to everyone.
Ian Douglas, ManchesterSome people seem to wish for a designed, controlled urban “rewilding”, with preferences for the presence of certain species. For me, true “whatever-happens” rewilding is better, making urban ecosystems interesting for all.
Ana Faggi, Buenos AiresAs cities sprawled and the natural landscape disappeared, people lost contact with the natural, pristine vegetation of the city. The garden allows people to know the local flora.
Lincoln Garland, BathWe should be endeavouring to create an ecologically rich urban realm, but I am unconvinced that re-wilding is the appropriate terminology or the approach to wildlife restoration in UK cities.
Amy Hahs, MelbourneWild places are the free radicals keeping the residents of our cities healthy and well, and businesses innovative and prosperous.
Keitaro Ito, Fukutsu CityWe usually see and feel the environment around us is stable but we need some disturbance for habitat and our future.
Mark Hostetler, GainesvilleTo the mayor, I would describe the wild areas as controlled chaos, bordered with maintained features such as trimmed vegetation, perimeter trails, and sculpture.
Jala Makhzoumi, BeirutI was inspired to learn that Saida’s rivers were still alive in the collective memory even though they had long disappeared from sight. Restoring them as green corridors became integral to a future vision for Saida.
Juliana Montoya, BogotáWild spaces could contain high levels of biodiversity as well as social components, providing for more real multifunctionality and becoming economically and sociably feasible.
Daniel Phillips, BangaloreThere’s no such thing as a “Vacant Lot”, as they’re often alive both ecologically and socially. “Feral”, better reflects their state of being untamed by the conventions of domesticated urban life.
Mohan Rao, BangaloreThe way to go about re-wilding our city is not merely by withdrawing all maintenance services but through a careful process of strategic de-engineering.
Kevin Sloan, DallasRe-build the park, but as a nature project. Such a re-wilded landscape would shift, adapt, and evolve with the Dallas floods.
Kati Vierikko, HelsinkiWild nature without human control offers an escape room for young people where they can release from daily duties, don’t have to be perfect, and only be themselves and experience 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.
Letting go of some of the domestication of our cities might be a hard sell to a mayor. It sounds a little like chaos—like we’re going to stop mowing the grass in the park. But the idea of urban re-wilding started out as a movement to restore some “real” nature to cities, in the form of (relatively) undesigned and unmanaged spaces: space in which nature can be nature. There are potentially biodiversity conservation reasons to pursue re-wilding, but there are also some compelling reasons to do so in the realm of human health and wellness.
So, you get your meeting with the mayor, and she or he is skeptical. What do you say to convince them, both about the cost and the benefits, and how you would go about accomplishing the re-wilding? The mayor is busy and up for re-election: you have 800 words-worth of their time.
Does re-wilding make better cities, or just wilder ones? Explain it to your mayor: why should she or he care about re-wilding? Here are 16 contributions. Perhaps they will provide some inspiration for the next time you find yourself in an elevator with the mayor, or over coffee at a reception.
For nearly 30 years, Keith Bowers has been at the forefront of applied ecology, land conservation and ecological restoration. As the founder and president of Biohabitats, Keith has built a multidisciplinary organization focused on regenerative design.
Realizing the vision of re-wilding means breaking down traditional paradigms of how we think about cities, public spaces, and aesthetics.
Yes, of course re-wilding makes for better cities. In fact, mayors should not only embrace re-wilding as part of a culturally rich, socially just and economically robust future for their city, they should also be the primary supporters for re-wilding the countryside.
No, we are not talking about re-wilding Pleistocene era wooly mammoths, but in my mind, we are talking about restoring natural landscape level ecological processes; providing habitat corridors and patches for native flora and fauna; and reintroducing apex predators and keystone species which play a critical role in maintaining the structure of an ecological community.
Protecting and restoring natural ecological processes provides a host of benefits that we often take for granted, including access to clean air, fresh water and healthy soils; carbon sequestration and storage, moderation of extreme events, erosion prevention and flood attenuation, along with habitat for native plants, birds, fish, mammals and insects. All are critical for maintaining the biological health of our ecosystems.
Many cities struggle to implement costly and often ineffective strategies to mitigate the loss of these naturally occurring ecological services. Sustainability plans begin to chip away at these issues, but they are often divorced from the underlying causes that gave rise to many of these problems—a disassociation with the natural world. We have found that embracing and weaving the concept of re-wilding into the fabric of cities can result in a more livable, just, healthy and resilient place.
That said, realizing the vision of re-wilding means breaking down traditional paradigms of how we think about cities, public spaces, and aesthetics. How do we go about re-wilding from a practical standpoint? Our recent work in cities like Baltimore, New York City, Cleveland, San Francisco, Kansas City, and now Atlanta, has underscored the importance of thinking about re-wilding based on three interlaced themes:
First, we believe that re-wilding needs to be grounded in sound science, yet fully embracing the intangible qualities that make each city unique, that give it its sense of place, that celebrates its genus loci!
Next, we have found that effective re-wilding needs to encompass a tapestry of richly layered and intricately connected systems of green spaces, greenways, and natural features, at nested scales, interwoven throughout the fabric of the city.
Finally, re-wilding within cities should address environmental justice issues, ensure that every neighborhood in the city has free and unencumbered access to quality green space, and guarantee that decisions regarding city governance are accomplished through an inclusive, transparent, just and participatory process.
Re-wilding cities can surely address a host of environmental, social and economic issues that mayors would be envious of. But is it enough? No.
First, all cities are highly dependent on the extraction, production, flow, and disposal of goods and services from surrounding regions. This ecological footprint typically encompasses areas of land much larger than the city itself. If a city is truly striving to be sustainable and resilient, then it must consider its full array of long term needs and impacts. Re-wilding can therefore be a wonderful and effective way for mayors to offset their ecological footprint, meet sustainability goals and create a more resilient city.
Second, unlike attempting to re-wild within cities, re-wilding regional landscapes affords the opportunity to reconnect large expanses of fragmented habitat, restore key ecological processes and provide exciting possibilities for reintroducing predators, keystone species and a full array of biological diversity not attainable in cities. Interwoven within a matrix of small towns, farms, transportation corridors and industry, re-wilded landscapes can assure that cities have access to the ecological services and biological diversity that are vital to their long-term health and well-being.
Now, imagine if a string of cities along North America’s east coast began initiating re-wilding efforts within their respective cities. Then, imagine if the same string of cities forged an alliance to help fund a continental re-wilding effort, from maritime Canada to the subtropical Everglades of Florida. The power of these combined efforts would exponentially ensure each cities access to clean air, fresh water and productive soils. It would provide cities with more tools to mitigate climate change and withstand disturbance regimes, and it would boast long-term biological capacity to provide pollination, assimilate wastes, and recycle vital nutrients.
Wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers aside, cities now have a real opportunity to embrace re-wilding as a means for a more culturally rich, socially just and economically robust future.
A conceptual re-wilding vision for the City of Atlanta’s Urban Ecology Framework. Credit: Biohabitats
Louise is Deputy Director of the Environment in the Paris Region. An Architect-Urban Planner with a PhD in Geography, she works on the cities-nature relationship. She is a member of the IUCN-WCPA.
The path for re-wilding the city must pass through a re-wilding urban people.
The key to success in re-wilding cities is not politics but people
In 2016, France, and the Paris region in particular, were hit by severe floods. These events made an impression on everyone. They caused contradictory reactions on the results of re-wilding cities:
Conservation policies of natural areas, especially marshes and wetlands along the rivers, have borne fruit. These protected natural areas played their buffer role for flooding storage.
Following these flood events, with the receding floodwaters, human-wildlife conflicts increased. The animals spread out, some displaced by the rising waters, others harmful, carriers of disease: mosquitoes, rats, foxes, wild boars.
Regarding the first point, the reactions were very positive on the mitigation role of the natural areas for relieving the flood effects. This confirms the political choices made according to the virtues of nature-based solutions for urban planning. However, the second point reminds that nature can also be perceived as a nuisance.
Urban people recognize the benefits of nature and their desire for wilderness. Yet, they want a sanitized nature without any inconvenience. They dream of an “urban nature”, in the primary sense of the word “urban”: civilized and polished.
Nature conservation specialists thought it was possible to strengthen biodiversity conservation by “naturalizing” cities[i]. But will we succeed in combining nature in the city with the old medieval fear of the wolf? If we can provide answers to this question, we can convince the mayor and other elected officials to progress on re-wilding the city.
According to the mayor, the usual talk about the benefits of nature in the city is something for professionals. It would even be well integrated by them—architects, urban planners, developers, elected officials. All know the arguments that nature provides a lot of benefits for the city: air quality improvement and reduction of pollution; allergy prevention, asthma reduction and increased immunity; regulation of air temperature and reduction of the urban heat island effect; improved soil quality, regulation of the water cycle, risk reduction, reduced energy use, carbon sequestration.
However, for the citizens, urban biodiversity is the spider that invades their home, the knots of mosquitoes at the lake edge and other mosquito breeding sites, and the wild boars that plow their gardens.
The mayor asks for another speech about nature in the city, new and innovative, of course. For him, the discourse about a functional nature is for professionals. He wants to stand out from his predecessors and to win the support of the voices that count, that of the citizens.
Through the discourse on climate change and loss of biodiversity, the increased pollution, the development of respiratory diseases, the increase of the flood and drought extreme phenomena, citizens have begun to realize the importance of preserving nature in a holistic way.
But what interests the mayor is making his fellow citizens understand the importance of starting with their own garden, their street, their city. It is a matter of demonstrating in practice that when a street tree or a park helps to cool the weather during periods of significant heat waves, people understand that nature in the city does not have only aesthetic virtues.
Whether only a global policy comprising a coherent and balanced package of multiple measures is likely to bear fruit, the path for re-wilding the city must pass through a re-wilding urban people.
For touching the human being, we must explore the symbolic and sensorial values of nature. This is about the guy, in Rio, who goes to the beach at the end of the day just to enjoy the sunset or swim in the sea. The same call of the wild moves the Capetonians to start their day with a mountain bike tour of Table Mountain. A simple walk in a park or public garden in any city in the world is surely less exceptional, but equally relaxing.
What are these urban people looking for? According to Dr. Nooshin Razani, “Within five minutes in the trees, our heart rate goes down and within 10 minutes our brain re-sets our attention span”[ii]. In our hyper connected world, the perception of nature as a haven of peace and calm is extremely important for peoples’ physical and mental health and well-being.
For citizens to be wild again, we must recreate their natural roots, to make them actors of re-wilding cities. Gardening in the city is a way of reconnecting urban people to nature and recreating social links. People can participate on re-wilding public spaces (green a sidewalk, cultivate a community garden) and also their private space to make backyards biodiversity friendly (without agrochemicals, with native species, with using rainwater, etc.).
From the movement to conserve, restore, and reconnect natural areas, the idea of re-wilding cities must be expanded to how to relink humans with nature. The objective now is to spread the word that beyond biodiversity conservation and aesthetic benefits, re-wilding cities provides free recreational areas and improves physical and mental well-being. Nature in the city also offers spiritual values, without forgetting its economic benefits of lower energy costs and increased property values. This is a speech that urban people understand.
According to David Goode, speaking about London, the main lesson we can learn from urban ecology actions is that “gaining local commitment and support was crucial to success”[iii].
This means that the key to success in re-wilding cities is not politics but people.
Notes:
[i] Michael L. Rosenzweig, Win-Win Ecology : How the Earth’s Species Can Survive in the Midst of Human Enterprise, Oxford University Press, 2003.
Katrine Claassens' paintings reflect her interest in climate change, urban ecology, and internet memes. She also works as a science, policy and climate change communicator for universities, think tanks, and governments in South Africa and Canada.
The affluent can always buy wilderness access. What about everyone else?
We are drawn to wild places. The affluent can buy access to nature the way they buy everything else. Not so the less affluent. Give the wild to everyone.
Let’s flip the question for a moment. Instead of “Why wilderness?” let’s ask “Why cities?” Economists would say that cities are efficient places to live and work, if you’re not a hunter-gatherer or a subsistence farmer. Cities offer shared infrastructure, economies of scale, facilitation of trade, facilitation of consumption. In that sort of modern economy, people’s jobs are removed from nature. Our entire lives are removed from nature. We have more money than time, so we buy food instead of farming or hunting, buy water instead of living near water, buy petroleum-based heat to stay warm at the flip of a switch, buy electricity to make our lives more convenient, buy special soap for our time-saving dishwashers. But despite these urban conveniences, we still feel the allure of wild places, and thus the more affluent among us buy access to nature the way we buy everything else. We buy it with the purchase price and the taxes on homes in affluent neighborhoods adjoining nature reserves, and we buy it with weekend getaways to the wilderness outside of town.
If cities are so great, why do we spend this money for access to wild places? Because wild places speak to us in profound and intimate ways that stretch back into our personal and evolutionary pasts, when we were inextricably connected with the land. As an affluent person who works in a city, I drafted part of this letter while visiting a quiet, empty lake in the Maine mountains (USA), two or three weeks after the peak of autumn foliage. I felt like I had stepped into another world, far from my normal routines and the stress of work and life in a small city. My sense of realignment was partly because of the physical distance from the things that drain my attention and energy on a daily basis. But a more powerful contributor to my realignment was the simple wildness of the place. In nature—but not so much in groomed parks—there is silence, and there are surprises. There are mysteries. Crayfish waiting patiently beneath stream-bottom rocks. Salamanders under wet, rotten logs. Plants in perpetual slow-motion battles for access to sunlight. Animal noises that defy easy identification. These things demand us to be present in the landscape, in the moment, in a way that is restorative.
Research demonstrates the impact of wild places on human health. I’ll ignore here all the clear financial benefits that urban nature can provide via ecosystem services—pollination, stormwater control, reduced heating and cooling costs, and more. Such benefits are compelling and surprising in their scale, but here I want to focus on the most direct impacts on humans. To wit, a healthcare study showed faster recovery from surgery for patients whose hospital windows overlooked trees rather than a brick wall. Others have shown that access to nature—even urban nature—reduces mental fatigue and helps people see their problems as more manageable. Forests improve air quality, which leads to better respiratory health. (A recent study suggests that one in six deaths, globally, are connected to pollution. One in six!)
Developmentally, wild places provide kids with crucial opportunities beyond what they get on an iPad or a football field. Kids need unstructured play, especially in wild places that connect them with nature—places that demand agency and creativity, that teach them to judge and manage risk; places without a cushioned landing on shredded tires. Agency, creativity, and risk assessment typify successful leaders in business and in society. And even if not leaders, we need these future-grownups to become good stewards of our planet, which will hinge on the extent to which they connect to the natural world as kids.
People in power are disproportionately affluent, and if politicians decide that cities don’t need or deserve wild places, those same power brokers will still have their weekend getaways to the mountains, the coast, the lake. Urban re-wilding can help provide equal access, because it can be accomplished inexpensively and locally to all neighborhoods. Untamed wild spaces are cheaper to create than manicured parks with fancy facilities and groomed lawns and seasonal flower beds, and they have no maintenance costs. If you don’t need these spaces to be part of the maintenance circuit of your landscaping crew, they don’t need to be centrally located. This flexibility, combined with the low establishment cost, makes it cost-effective to create wild spaces all over the city, to provide local access to everyone. And it doesn’t take pristine starting material—you can allow wild growth on abandoned lots and brownfield sites, and let nature take its course. Cities are economically inevitable, but the idea that urban wild places and the economy are incompatible is an argument put forward by people who will have access to wild places regardless of how accessible those places are.
The less affluent will have no such luxury. Bring nature to the people.
Ian is Emeritus Professor at the University of Manchester. His works take an integrated of urban ecology and environment. He is lead editor of the "Routledge Handbook of Urban Ecology" and has produced a textbook, "Urban Ecology: an Introduction", with Philip James.
Some people seem to wish for a designed, controlled urban “re-wilding”, with preferences for the presence of certain species. For me, true “whatever-happens” re-wilding is better, making urban ecosystems interesting for all.
Re-wilding urban areas: removing the dominant carnivore
In absolute contrast to the practice of re-wilding as adopted in remote wilderness areas far from major human settlements, re-wilding in urban areas means removing the influence of the dominant organisms in the urban ecosystem: people. Urban areas are clearly the localities where human beings have most modified the work of natural processes and have most altered climate, hydrology, terrain, vegetation and animal populations. Urban re-wilding is the process of removing human intervention from patches of ground and allowing nature to proceed to colonise and occupy such areas without further human interference. Sometimes such processes happen deliberately, as when a former mine waste tip of abandoned factory site is left unused and gains some protection as a part of a peri-urban country park or “wilderness”. (In Manchester, there is a derelict sewage treatment plant that has become totally re-vegetated and remains undisturbed because it is securely fenced). At other times the processes follow drastic human action. I am old enough to remember the recolonization of bombed areas of the City of London, England, after the Second World War. Similar re-wilding is probably happening now in the destroyed cities of Syria and Iraq.
I used to tell students in my lectures on the urban environment that “nature fights back”. In Manchester in the 1990s, I took urban ecologists to Pomona Dock at the inland terminus of the Manchester Ship Canal. Abandoned 20 years previously, the dock wharves had been colonised by multiple invasive plants, from the usual suspects, such as Buddleia, to many rarer species. A few years later all the wild vegetation was cleared. However, redevelopment did not occur. Nature has fought back again and twenty more years on, tree saplings are reappearing among the invasive plants.
However, human beings are introducing species to the urban wild all the time. Feral cats and dogs abound. Exotic pets escape (or are illegally released) within towns and cities. The whole history of plants that escape from gardens and harmful invasive species, such as Japanese knotweed, is well known, but is also an inadvertent contribution to urban “re-wilding”.
However, people seem to wish for a designed, controlled urban re-wilding, with preferences for the presence of certain species: native plants without the invasive species; a diversity of birds, without the escaped parakeets or feral cats. Probably such controlled urban re-wilding is merely a version of the creation of public parks the way the Olmsteds created spaces in New York, Chicago, and Seattle. In Britain, with inadequate expenditure on public services—such as urban parks and environmental protection—re-wilding may be occurring by default, through reduced mowing of grassy areas and general neglect of tree-covered spaces.
For me, whatever happens adds to the interest and fascination of urban ecosystems and makes them interesting for us all, particularly our children and grandchildren, to explore and enjoy. Letting nature take its course is good medicine to help us cope with our urban ills.
Ana Faggi, Buenos Aires
As cities sprawled and the natural landscape disappeared, people lost contact with the natural, pristine vegetation of the city. The garden allows people to know the local flora.
Buenos Aires flourishes in October and November, being the perfect time to visit the city and its green spaces. The brightness of the urban green and the multiple colors of the flowering trees are its main attractions.
A very significant green space is a historic garden: the Rose Garden located in the Tres de Febrero Park. The garden created in 1914, is three hectares (ha) and is a cultural and historical heritage place. This a beautiful place, with about 18,000 rose plants of diverse varieties, is also a tourist attraction (Fig. 1)
Figure 1. Rose Garden. Photo : A. Faggi
In the world, roses are the most preferred flowers. It is that, regardless of their fragrance and beautiful forms, roses are a love symbol. The symbolism comes from ancient times: Greeks and Romans identified their respective goddesses of Love, Aphrodite and Venus with roses.
When the Rose Garden blooms it is filled with people who marvel at the variety: roses of different colors, sizes, shapes, structures, perfumes and names that celebrate princes and princesses, or outstanding personalities. The Rose Garden is one of the most important green areas of Buenos Aires not only for the roses but also for its design that includes, in addition to the beautiful bridge at the entrance, a large pergola also in Greek style, a jetty next to a small lake and a temple. It is an ideal place to walk, to contemplate or take pictures.
Figure 2. Re-wilded garden at the National Museum of Science in Buenos Aires. Photo: A. Faggi
But what are the ecosystem services that such a green area provides? Undoubtedly it has a great historical and cultural value. However, the area that requires a lot of landscaping, gardening and maintenance work does not provide habitat for wildlife. There are no insects, and only few birds like doves or sparrows.
A contrasting situation that shows the importance of including re-wilded areas in the middle of the city is the garden at the National Museum of Natural Sciences where I work (Fig. 2). There, about ten years ago, a project of re-wilding a sector of a conventional park was carried out and was consistent with the idea of local conservation. Therefore, in just 0.8 ha, a wild garden was created to show visitors and school children the typical vegetation of the Buenos Aires region. It includes riparian and dry forests, grasslands and a constructed lagoon.
The multiplicity of habitat types favors the diversity of wildlife. More than 150 species of plants that include trees, shrubs, grasses, and epiphytes are the habitat for 36 species of birds and large amount of insects (Fig.3). This small patch of green provides many ecosystem services from support, and regulation to provision in addition to cultural benefits.
Figure 3. Butterfly and wasp visiting flowers. Photo: A. Fussaro
It is a garden that shows that once the local vegetation is installed, the associated fauna—that one believes absent—returns to the city. It is also a good example of an urban green area that does not need maintenance or special care. No need to water, no insects are fought or chemical additives are used. It is a resilient place where all is in balance, everything is recycled; and it is the best justification to the mayor of the city as to why he should care about launching projects like this to increase native natural assets in the city.
The re-wilded garden might be mysterious to many visitors. As the city sprawl and the natural landscape disappeared, people lost contact with the natural, pristine vegetation of the city where they live. The garden allows people to know the local flora.
Figure 4. Halloween in the garden. Photo: C. Bandurek
The leafy forest, the crunching of branches and the sounds of nocturnal insects are also a perfect setting every October to celebrate Halloween. The little garden becomes a “mysterious forest” as witches to the cry of Samhain receive many children in costume (Fig.4).
Lincoln is Associate Director at Biodiversity by Design, an environmental consultancy in the UK. Lincoln has been working as an ecologist and eco-urbanist in consultancy, academia and for wildlife NGOs for more than 25 years. He has a particular interest in developing sustainable ecologically informed landscape-scale approaches to development and land management, with a particular emphasis on the urban realm and ecotourism. Contact Lincoln by email: [email protected]
We should be endeavouring to create an ecologically rich urban realm, but I am unconvinced that re-wilding is the appropriate terminology or the approach to wildlife restoration in UK cities.
Urban re-wilding: real re-wilding or just rebranding existing restoration practices?
I have been asked to set out here my standpoint on the opportunities for implementing urban re-wilding in my city of Bristol and also other UK cities. Urban re-wilding is an offshoot of the wider re-wilding movement, a relatively new approach to nature conservation that has been rapidly gaining momentum over the last decade.
Figure 1: Relatively formal courtyard planting, consisting of ornamental but nectar-rich herbaceous cultivars, within the Crest Nicholson Centenary Quay development in Southampton, UK; design by Allen Scott Landscape Architects and Biodiversity by Design. Photo:
The UK includes no meaningful areas that approach bona fide wilderness; our landscape is the product of 1000s of years of cultural influences rather than untamed nature. Re-wilding, however, aims to restore to the UK (and elsewhere) large-scale core wilderness areas and dynamic natural ecosystem processes. While some wilderness engineering may initially be required to re-establish apex predators and keystone species, ultimately the aim is to allow the process of natural ecological succession to take its course with no or very limited human-based intervention, as the successful reintroduction of such species is intended to deliver self-regulating ecosystems.
There are certainly opportunities for introducing re-wilding in rural parts of the UK, in particular in upland regions where, without subsidy, agriculture is economically unviable for the most part. With respect to the UK’s cities, nature should also be allowed to take its own path in certain select locations to create some semblance of wildness. I am unconvinced however that re-wilding is the appropriate terminology or the approach to wildlife restoration that we should be pursuing in UK cities at any meaningful scale.
Figure 2: Award-winning linear wildflower meadow (biannually managed), created in Crest Nicholson’s Harbourside development in the heart of Bristol, UK; design by Grant Associates and Biodiversity by Design. Photo: courtesy of Grant Associates
The large expanses of greenspace that would be required to recreate fully functioning wildwood, including relatively large numbers of herbivores and viable populations of naturally scarce predators at the top of food chain, are simply not available in our cities, where space is increasingly at a premium. Sustainable urban design should be seeking to avoid low-density sprawl and instead promote compact, transit-oriented, pedestrian-and-bicycle friendly urban development that provides easy access to services. This development model is crucial for tackling congestion and for reducing CO2 and other harmful emissions. Given this compact city imperative, the proposition of devoting large areas of urban space for re-wilding in anything approaching its true sense is untenable.
The suggestion that brownfield sites could provide the large areas required to implement urban re-wilding is particularly worrisome. While post-industrial landscapes can support a wealth of wildlife and should be preserved for this purpose in a few select locations, they must primarily be set aside for redevelopment as part of sustainable urban densification strategies.
Proponents of urban re-wilding might counter that it is a caricature to imply that they wish to revert to something akin to the Pleistocence epoch, where woolly mammoth and cave lion, brought back from extinction through genetic engineering, freely roam across our cities within vast tracts of newly created forest and grassland. Rather they contend that their vision for urban re-wilding is much more modest in its objectives. Perhaps the UK’s many large urban parks provide alternative, more moderately sized opportunities for re-wilding. Many of these do include large expanses of tightly mown amenity grassland that would seem to provide space for unruly nature to reassert itself, and indeed there are examples of this being encouraged in Bristol’s parks and elsewhere. But even in these greenspaces there are multiple competing interests that significantly limit the scale of possible change.
Some authors/practitioners respond that there should be no minimum area thresholds for wilderness and re-wilding from an ecological perspective, frequently quoting Aldo Leopold who declared that “no tract of land is too small for the wilderness idea”. While it is true that ecosystems can be considered at the microcosm, there really is not the space available to recreate complex self-sustaining food webs, with meaningful ranges of predators and prey, in accordance with the true principles of re-wilding.
Even ignoring the seeming disregard for matters relating to population viability analysis and the principles of island biogeography, other concerns remain. In those small areas where nature can be left to its own devices, many people may have a profound dislike for the outcome that sometimes emerges. Negative comments may be expressed relating to perceptions of safety, the appearance of neglect, reduced accessibility and visual/aesthetic preference. With respect to the last of these concerns, while education programmes can attune people’s valuation patterns, within an urban context a great many people will continue to favour more ordered, manicured environments. Undeniably, a previously accessible urban greenspace that has been left to nature, which then rapidly succeeds into a monoculture of impenetrable bramble or butterfly-bush, is unlikely to be well-received by most local residents.
Figure 3: Regularly managed biodiverse sustainable drainage lagoons in Grainger’s Berewood development in Waterlooville, UK; design by Mayer Brown, Fabrik and Biodiversity by Design. Photo: courtesy of Grainger Plc.
A woodland brimming with wildlife and resounding with the chorus of birdsong can take far more time for nature to deliver by itself than many people are prepared to wait. Furthermore, the idyllic deciduous woodland scene that most people in the UK probably assume to be wild and natural, is in fact attributable in no small part to human activities dating back 100s and sometimes 1000s of years, including coppicing, clearances and hunter-gathering. Prior to and overlapping with man’s influence, grazing by aurochs (the wild ancestors of cattle), deer and wild boar would have produced large sunlit glade areas and open-structured woodland, which would also be impossible to replicate in an urban context without significant human intervention.
The disturbed nature of urban soils is likely to be another major limiting factor, impoverished as they frequently are in terms of seedbank, organic material and soil organisms. Without active management newly emerging urban woodland would also be subject to degradation by trampling, visual and noise disturbance, fire, invasive species, effects of predatory pets etc. To reiterate, unencumbered natural succession may well produce landscapes in urban areas dramatically less visually and ecologically appealing than anticipated.
Putting these objections to one side, if we are asking a separate question, should we be endeavouring to create an ecologically rich urban realm, including more street trees, urban meadows and copses, perennial borders for pollinators, sustainable drainage systems, restored rivers, living architecture etc., then count me in. As an ecologist and eco-urbanist this is my raison d’être (see Figures 1, 2 and 3). However, suggesting that these practices are somehow novel and then grouping them all under a new urban re-wilding banner, which many appear to be doing, dilutes the concept’s true spirit, potentially rendering it meaningless.
Perhaps in response to the difficulties I have outlined, some authors have suggested that the definition of urban re-wilding be broadened even further, encompassing cultural urban ecosystems, and allowing for repeated interventions to retain early successional stage habitat to benefit particular species. Such interventions may indeed be desirable in many circumstances but should not be conflated with re-wilding. Surely the concept of re-wilding mustn’t be contorted to such an extent that it is all things to all men.
In summary, to casually refer to re-wilding as incorporating the majority of urban habitat restoration practices, undertaken at almost any spatial scale and even including the maintenance of cultural landscapes through ongoing human stewardship, debases the concept. The excessive flexibility being allowed for in defining urban re-wilding would seem to reflect the fact that the opportunities for implementing it in its true form are not generally available in UK cities or indeed within many cities in other parts of the world. The prospects for re-wilding are diminished further by the fact that many cities are progressively prioritising the multiple sustainability benefits associated with compact city living. The absence of true re-wilding in our increasingly densified urban realm should though not concern us per se. With vision and creativity there still remains multiple opportunities for re-wilding in rural areas, and also for integrating and experiencing a rich array of wildlife within the urban environment, all be it in a more managed, and unashamedly ‘designed’ context.
Dr Amy Hahs is an urban ecologist who is interested in understanding how urban landscapes impact local ecology, and how we can use this information to create better cities and towns for biodiversity and people. She is Director of Urban Ecology in Action, a newly established business working towards the development of green, healthy cities and towns, and the conservation of resilient ecological systems in areas where people live and work.
Wild places are the free radicals keeping the residents of our cities healthy and well, and businesses innovative and prosperous.
Dear mayor,
I’d like to invite you to consider this proposition for how you can leave a lasting visible and highly valued legacy in this city and be remembered as a visionary leader by this generation of residents and all those who follow after. This legacy is not embedded in bricks and mortar, sports stadiums, or public buildings, but rather in the infinitely more enduring legacy of landscapes, human wellbeing and sustainable prosperity, delivered through the vehicle of “re-wilding” our city.
The concept is a simple one. Throughout human history, our existence and living conditions have been intertwined with the landscapes in which we live. The natural world can inspire a sense of wonder, awe and delight; but rarely do we expect these feelings as part of our everyday experience as city-dwellers. Yet there are many “wild” things that we can include in our cities.
Here are three reasons why your commitment to re-wilding our city will ensure that you are remembered for the positive legacy you made in preparing our city for the future.
Adaptive capacity and resilience to future environments
We need wild places in our city to provide us with a barometer for environmental change and how we might respond most effectively. In the face of changing climate and increasing human populations, the most innovative cities are now looking to incorporate natural infrastructure such as plants, water and soils as part of the essential service delivery for their city. Their reasoning? The natural world has repeatedly proven its ability to deliver clean air, water and food; be incredibly difficult and expensive to replicate with technical solutions, and demonstrated enormous capacity to respond to, adapt and outlast every disturbance it has encountered. No other materials or systems can boast of such an impressive track record! Wild places are not only the canaries in our coal mines, they are also the emergency systems that can lead us back to safety.
Inspiration and prosperity
When you enter a wild space, the sound changes. You can see things that are not present in a more cultivated landscape. In Australia, we have wild things that are found no-where else in the world—spotting a platypus, koala, or echidna in the wild feels like you have been given a gift.
What new things would become possible if our cities residents and workers were able to encounter these experiences during their lunchtime walk?
Humility and leadership
In our fast-paced, highly connected world it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the things we are trying to do. Wild places can help to remind us to remember the bigger picture. By visiting wild place we can recalibrate our understanding of where we fit in the world, and bring our problems back into the scale of the human world. They also provide our kids with spaces where they can exercise their imagination, creativity, problem solving, strength, balance, and extend their understanding concepts like risk, change, care, and responsibility.
Today represents a critical point in our city’s future, with a predicted doubling of the human population over the next twenty years. The decisions made today shape the fabric of our city in the future. Yes, wild spaces need to be well planned to protect both the environment and the people who spend time there. The process of re-wilding may even challenge us to rethink and reframe the things we thought we knew. But we have many tools and signposts that can help ensure we can identify and overcome these challenges.
We need wild spaces in our city for all sorts of reasons. For some people it will be the sounds, smells and immersive experience akin to the concept of forest bathing in Japan. For others it is a place for curiosity—where they can exercise their imagination, creativity, problem solving, strength, balance, and extend their understanding of concepts like risk, change, care, and responsibility. Or perhaps it is an opportunity to feel a sense of awe or beauty, or to seek inspiration from looking at life at its most complex, and also its most simple.
Wild places are the free radicals keeping the residents of our cities healthy and well, and businesses innovative and prosperous. Who wouldn’t want to be responsible for leaving a wonderful legacy like that!
Keitaro is a professor at Kyushu Institute of Technology and teaches landscape ecology and design. He has studied and worked in Japan, the U.K., Germany and Norway and has been designing urban parks, river banks, school gardens, and forest parks.
We usually see and feel the environment around us is stable but we need some disturbance for habitat and our future.
Re-wilding, a little disturbance is needed in a tidal flat
The tidal flat in our town is very important wild habitat for species like the horseshoe crab (Tachypleus tridentatus), the black-faced spoonbill (Platalea minor, only 3,500 population on the world) and many kinds of fish and shellfish. It is called “Tsuyazaki tidal flat”, located in south part of Japan. This place has been nominated as one of the 500 most important wetlands in Japan. However, these days, the horseshoe crab population is decreasing, as are some shellfish and some seaweed species. I guess one reason for these declines is the lack of sand from around the area to resupply the coastal beaches.
The tidal flat.
In the 1970’s, there was no road around this tidal flat. Water and sand flowed freely into it from the surrounding hills. In the 1980’s the road around the tidal flat was constructed. I think this road stopped the flow of sands that supplied the tidal flat. These sands formed the sandbank that served as the habitat for the many living creatures. So I think we need to re-wild this area. My idea is to construct “small under paths in the road”. The costs associated with this re-wilding effort would be minimal, and we could use the road as usual. With the replenishment of the sand bank, the horseshoe crabs would be able to lay their eggs and the population would increase.
Laying eggs, Tachypleus tridentatus in Tsuyazaki tidal flat, August 2017. Photo: Keitaro Ito
Now we are moving to the practical studies in some sites in this city. Work on three important projects has begun: (1) preserving the sea coast pine forest; (2) restoration of the bamboo forest; and (3) nature restoration in the tidal flat.
The emphasis of the third project, nature restoration in the tidal flat, is my proposal to build a small under path for supplying small amounts of sand and water from the hill to replenish the tidal flat. This small under path proposal should be implemented to change not only the tidal area but also to improve the sea coast sand formation. Last year two sea turtles came back to this area to lay their eggs. These nests had to be relocated to incubation boxes for hatching because there is insufficient sand along the sea coast for successfully hatching sea turtles. This unnatural process is due to loss of habitat.
Black-faced spoonbill (Platalea minor) in Fukutsu in 2016. Photo: Keitaro Ito
By creating the small paths for supplying the sands and water to the coast we are re-wilding the place and changing the future. The sands would be reconnecting the ecological network. We usually see and feel the environment around us is stable but I think we need some disturbance for habitat and our future. For example, the forest is regenerated by natural disturbance like strong wind, water and so on. When large trees fall a gap appears in the forest making way for a new generation of trees to grow.
In urban areas, the roads and city structure are sometimes too fixed by impervious concrete that tends to prevent small disturbances. Of course, disturbances that are too big are life-threatening. But I think small disturbances are needed for keeping a healthy environment even in urban areas.
To the mayor, I would describe the wild areas as controlled chaos, bordered with maintained features such as trimmed vegetation, perimeter trails, and even sculpture.
Re-wilding areas within cities, as a city policy advocated by the mayor, would take several “elevator moments” with the mayor highlighting the economic, social/health, and environmental benefits for letting things go. Below, I highlight some strategies and points that I would share in short discussions with a mayor who is considering a re-wilding initiative. I focused re-wilding areas on city-owned parks and vacant lands. Privately owned lands are also important but I decided not to address these for the roundtable.
1. Economic: One of the first things I would mention to the mayor is that targeted areas could be re-wild without any cost to the city. These areas in particular, would represent a cost savings over the long term. How? Maintained parks are an annual cost to a city. Re-wilding portions of these parks would eliminate some maintenance costs. One would simply calculate how much money is being used to mow turfgrass and maintain structures to make the area accessible to humans, such as park benches, lights and light poles, etc. Once maintenance costs for proposed re-wild areas are calculated, the savings could be used to restore these designated wild areas. In fact, the costs to start the restoration process would decrease over time, resulting in a savings to the city. For example, if planned re-wilding areas costs $50,000 a year to maintain, then this money could be used to initially create these wild areas. Over time, these costs would decrease as mother nature takes over and only minimal maintenance is needed. There is a working example of this in Pinellas County, Florida. The county has created an initiative to have a portion of county parks to return to nature. Called “no mow” zones, the essential idea of this effort is to restore low traffic areas in county parks to native fauna and flora (see http://www.pinellascounty.org/park/no_mow.htm). The public is still invited to explore these wild areas, signage informs residents about the project and explains the transitional period and that going back to nature takes time. Money saved from not mowing these areas goes towards the signage and restoration activities (e.g., removing invasive exotics).
2. Selection, Restoration, and Maintenance: Once the go ahead is given to re-wild areas, the next step is to determine low traffic park areas that have some vegetative structure that would readily revert to nature if given a chance. For example, marked re-wild areas can be near natural areas where seeds would be dispersed by wind or by wildlife. I envision a dynamic marketing campaign to engage the local community in this selection process, creating excitement about the natural area to come. Other particularly attractive areas for re-wilding include manicured parks that border semi-natural areas. Park areas near these semi-natural parks would be given priority to go wild as the nearby natural areas serve as a seed source for the restoration process. Think of the seed rain coming from the nearby natural areas, helping to establish native plants. Eventually, restored areas next to existing natural areas would make a bigger, natural patch and thus more habitat for wildlife.
Most likely, some built structures (e.g., paved areas) would be removed and perhaps some native plants would be planted to jumpstart the restoration process. Funds for these activities would come from the money saved from not mowing/maintaining an area. Residents in the area could come to “plant a tree day” becoming actively involved in the restoration process. Some areas may need invasive species removal; another opportunity to include the local community. Educational signs placed around then re-wilded areas explain the process of restoration (as it could take many years and may go through several scraggly stages). Construction of a walking trail around portions of the perimeter with one or two access points would lead people into the interior of these areas to experience the sights and sounds of nature. However, education near these access points should indicate how visitors are stewards and the importance of limiting human impacts (e.g., staying on trails, not dumping yard trash into the interior, and no pets).
These wild areas should not be thought of as pristine, no exotics at all types of areas. Although management would be needed to control some particularly nasty invasive plants (not to mention exotic animals such as feral cats/dogs), we should think about restoring urban habitats in terms of “reconciliation ecology.” Here the goal is not to return to pristine, indigenous habitats but to implement strategies that simply increase the diversity of native species in cities. Conserving species diversity where people live, work, and play means providing areas where nature takes over a bit. We can have parks that are geared more towards humans—think mowed areas with some large trees, playgrounds, etc. But for city inhabitants to understand and experience their true natural heritage, we do need more wild areas where the primary landscaper is mother nature. Many iconic species, such as migrating birds, require these wild areas as habitat, and would not occur in cities without them. Overall, there is an understanding that wild areas are still influenced by and are accessible to humans that live nearby. The trick is to minimize the negative impacts and to maximize positive impact to native species and humans alike.
To the mayor, I would describe these wild areas as controlled chaos. Here, the wild areas are bordered with maintained features such as trimmed vegetation, perimeter trails, and even sculpture. It would not cost the city any additional money. The mixture of manicured parks and re-wild areas is critical to house a variety of species in cities where people can enjoy and become aware of their natural heritage.
Dr Jala Makhzoumi is an Iraqi architect and academic who specializes in landscape design, with expertise in postwar recovery, energy efficient site planning, and sustainable urban greening.
I was inspired to learn that Saida’s rivers were still alive in the collective memory even though they had long disappeared from sight. Restoring them as green corridors became integral to a future vision for Saida.
“A River Runs Through It”
Rivers and streams are the surest way to re-wild Mediterranean cities in the twenty first century. Regardless as to how big or small, people and nature have for millennia competed to benefit from the climatic sheltering and rich environmental resources of riverine landscapes. Rivers swell up with the melting of snow and during the rainy season but many remain dry for the rest of the year. With the exception of large rivers, however, streams and dry watercourses are undervalued, slowly vanishing in coastal cities, swallowed by building encroachment. Many are used to dump solid waste and sewage. As a result, they are channelized and diverted into culverts, their memories erased from the collective memory of the urban inhabitants.
Abuse and misuse has come to undermine the potential of rivers and dry watercourses to enhance the quality of living for the urban inhabitants if restored to their natural state as healthy ecosystems and living landscapes. Re-wilding urban streams is undeniably visionary and a huge challenge. The benefits however are equally immense. Healthy watercourses, no matter how small, have the potential to form green corridors that punctuate the urban fabric and provide distinctiveness and a sense of place. Similarly, seasonal fluctuations, rather than being a problem, remind urban inhabitants of the cycles of nature in an otherwise timeless existence. A restored, healthy ecosystem will demonstrate nature’s regenerative power, its ability to restore and sustain. The river landscape becomes once more a wildlife habitat and a place where people experience nature. Just as significant is the revival of the river memory, often inseparable from that of the city and its inhabitants. The river becomes an amenity landscape, a place to promenade and cycle, to rest and reflect away from the stressful environment of the city. Above all, rivers are ecological corridors that ensure landscape connectivity. As such, they re-anchor the city in the larger landscape and link terrestrial ecosystems with coastal ones.
The opportunity to put my words into action presented itself to me in a project in the city of Saida, Lebanon[1]. Like all coastal cities in the country, Saida streams and two small rivers punctuate the landscape, many covered and forgotten. Speaking to older residents I was amazed and inspired to learn that rivers were still alive in the collective memory even though they had long disappeared from sight. Restoring Saida’s rivers, promoting their use as green corridors and amenity landscapes became integral to the future vision and strategic development framework proposed by the project team.
At first, my proposal for reviving the streams was ridiculed and opposed by the municipality, the client. Their argument was that there were no rivers, only sewers. I persevered arguing that the process was long but doable. The first step is to embrace the concept of re-wilding[2] and convince municipal authorities that rivers are not a “problem” that requires a solution but a potential that should be seized and capitalized. Once convinced, restoring the riverine ecosystem begins with redirecting sewage discharge away from the river channel and separating stormwater from sewage discharge. Demolishing the concrete encasement and restoring the soft river verges can follow. The choice of planting is also critical. Here, the vegetation of healthy rivers will provide inspiration and guidance.
The vision proposed by the project became the inspiration for local activist groups[3] that continue to fight to realize the project vision, working on the ground, to secure funding to clean the river, hold community meetings to raise awareness.
In choosing to talk about rivers, my aim is to demonstrate that re-wilding can and should be a place and culture-specific approach. Re-wilding Mediterranean coastal cities would differ fundamentally from bringing nature into cities in temperate climates or those in arid regions. Can we use the discussion platform provided by TNOC to explore different ways of re-wilding? Another facet of re-wilding worth exploring is the role of the various stakeholders, local NGOs, municipal authorities, and the public at large, in the long-term process of inviting nature back into our cities.
Juliana Montoya is a researcher at the Humboldt Institute, Colombia, where she works with biodiversity in urban-regional environments. She is an architect with a Master of Science degree in Conservation and Use of Biodiversity. Her main interest is to promote urban biodiversity as a crucial element of city planning, with a special emphasis on the role of citizens in territorial management.
Asilvestrando ciudades: Una perspectiva desde la biodiversidad latinoamericana
Podemos entender la interdependencia que tenemos con la biodiversidad—de la cual hacemos parte—y cómo en la medida en la que reconozcamos a los procesos ecológicos en la planeación de las ciudades es que esto podría desafiar el modelo urbanístico aséptico y controlado.
Analizando la idea de asilvestramiento de las ciudades (re-wilding cities) como espacios que permiten la vida de especies de forma natural y espontánea en lugares diferentes a su área original, nos lleva a pensar en la ficción de cómo sería el mundo sin nosotros. Alan Weisman en su libro The World Without Us, nos muestra el impacto de la desaparición de los seres humanos y la forma en que las ciudades se habrían de deteriorar dando paso a la naturaleza. Esto nos lleva a imaginarnos un paisaje de ruinas asilvestradas y preguntarnos si esta conformación de lo silvestre y la infraestructura humana, ¿nos ofrece un escenario de mejores ciudades?.
En la planeación tradicional de las ciudades, ya existía una concepción higienista y aséptica de la naturaleza. Una idea del orden impuesto y el control sobre lo que no conocemos o sobre las otras formas de vida y con una postura estética de lo bello de la naturaleza bajo el hacha del orden del color y las alturas como mecanismo paisajístico. Esta domesticación de la naturaleza en las ciudades lo leemos incluso en cartas de Francisco José de Caldas (científico, ingeniero militar, geógrafo, botánico, astrónomo, naturalista y periodista de la antigua Colombia) que a inicios del siglo XIX percibía lo salvaje y desconocido como caótico y sinónimo de peste y enfermedad. A esto, Caldas dice que “…al encontrarse impresionado por la exuberancia de la vegetación andina (…) las plantas se han esparcido sobre la superficie de los Andes sin designio, y que la confusión y el desorden reinan por todas partes” por lo que entonces determina que “la única forma de controlar la selva es haciendo con ella precisamente lo contrario a domesticarla: exterminarla” (Pinzón, 2011).
Sin embargo, hoy en día podemos entender la interdependencia que tenemos con la biodiversidad de la cual hacemos parte y cómo en la medida en la que reconozcamos los procesos ecológicos en la planeación de las ciudades es que esto podría desafiar el modelo urbanístico tradicional (Montoya y Garay, 2017) en busca del bienestar para todos los seres vivos.
Pensando ahora en cómo evolucionar en la construcción colectiva de mejores ciudades a través del asilvestramiento urbano donde la naturaleza puede ser natural y beneficien la salud y el bienestar humano, es cuando se nos ocurren ideas para convencer a un alcalde a desafiar el modelo urbanístico tradicional:
En las áreas urbanas, los espacios públicos resultan ser un espacio nostálgico en nuestras ciudades ya que nos ofrecen recreación, esparcimiento, deporte, identidad, ocio y demás, relevantes para la dinámica de los habitantes urbanos. Normalmente las ciudades colombianas poseen bajos índices de m2 de espacio público accesible por habitante. Es por esto que dentro de los elementos que componen lo verde de las ciudades, podrían existir una nueva categoría de infraestructura verde como espacios de asilvestramiento urbano espontáneo, que pueda albergar más equitativamente la multifuncionalidad de un área verde (más allá de la típica oferta de espacios para perros y para juegos infantiles) con altos niveles de biodiversidad y una oportunidad para una apropiación social del lugar.
Esto le aportaría también a aumentar los espacio público de la ciudad por habitante, por lo que mejoraría sus indicadores y se podrían generar proyectos de acciones locales para la biodiversidad (Montoya, 2016). Por ejemplo, sería interesante medir y comparar los costos-beneficios de los desiertos verdes (gramas, césped) con lotes baldíos o residuos viales que favorezcan el desarrollo espontaneo de lo silvestre y que esté sujeto a la construcción colectiva. Esto también podría resultar en proyectos educativos ambientales que nos orienten a cómo percibir la belleza que hay en la maleza por su función ecológica, por la sucesión hacia el asilvestramiento de las ciudades y por la convivencia con la fauna “temida” como chuchas, abejas, murciélagos (Mejía, 2016) que cumplen papeles determinantes en los ecosistemas de la ciudad.
Es interesante ver la propuesta de la Nueva Agenda Urbana de ONU-Hábitat bajo la insignia de “ciudad para todos” incluyendo la idea del asilvestramiento urbano en donde se puede permitir que lo silvestre encuentre un equilibrio en la ciudad y que busque la real accesibilidad para todos, incluso de lo silvestre.
References
Weisman, A. (2008). The world without us. Macmillan.
Pinzón, F. M. (2011). Una geografía para la guerra: Narrativas del cerco en francisco José de caldas. (spanish). Revista De Estudios Sociales, (38), 108-119.
Montoya, J., y Garay, H. (2017). Desafiando el modelo urbanístico. Naturaleza urbana: Plataforma de experiencias. En Moreno, L. A., Andrade, G. I., y Ruiz-Contreras, L. F. (Eds.). 2016. Biodiversidad 2016. Estado y tendencias de la biodiversidad continental de Colombia. Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt. Bogotá, D. C., Colombia.
Montoya, J. (2016). Reconocimiento de la biodiversidad urbana para la planeación en contextos de crecimiento informal. Cuadernos de Vivienda y Urbanismo, 9(18), 232-275.
Mejía, M. A. (ed.). Naturaleza Urbana: Plataforma de Experiencias. Bog Continue reading →
Can we re-envision our cities with a stream of linear open spaces, defining a new geography of cities? Can we break away from large, monolithic spaces and geometric structures into fluid open spaces, meandering, modulating and negotiating varying city terrains, as rivers and watercourses do? This way, the new structure of open spaces would relate to and integrate with many more areas and provide access to more people across neighborhoods and the city. Why? Because a linear park passes near more people than a square part of the same size—that is, more people are within a short walk of a linear park than a square one of the same size in the same neighborhood. And linear parks are parks of opportunity. Where would one create a big square park in Mumbai? But streams and other naturally linear features provide opportunities to create park access in an otherwise crowded urban zone.
Over the years, across cities, we have been planning and building parks and gardens and other public spaces as geometric blocks that, in most instances, stand out in sharp contrast to the character of the neighborhoods in which they are placed. Such decisions that impose such blocky parcels of land seem guided by intentions of promoting exclusive spaces, spaces that could be contained and controlled, with access to them regulated. In many urban situations, such blocks have led to class and community polarization due to the very nature of their design and governance structure. A public space has significant socio- political colour that cannot be ignored or masked under the guises of city beautification programs and limited environmental objectives.
Today, we are confronted by many critical questions that need to be answered. Can public spaces in various forms be conceived to harness social and community relationships? Can they bring together the disparate fragments of spaces within cities, otherwise characterized by forced ghettoisation and gated communities? Can sensitive ecological assets that have been classified, colonized, and/or treated as backyards of development programs be put into the public domain and turned into social and cultural fore-courts? How can we alter the established blocks of barricaded spaces and structures into open and clear spaces for all, forever? Can more people freely access and exercise control over common property in order to democratise the ecology of cities? Alternately, can we work towards developing linear structures of open spaces as an answer to many of the above issues, while significantly altering the established, dogmatic order of public spaces in the planning and development of cities?
These are key questions for the future of city building. It may be a tall order, but worth pursuing, as it is rooted in the idea of a new urban rights agenda—governance models that strive to achieve integration, equality, and socio-environmental justice. In most instances, public spaces have been shrinking with city expansion. Open land, including that reserved for gardens and playgrounds, has either been converted by governments for building construction purposes or is being grabbed and developed for real estate projects, as has been experienced in the case of Mumbai. In such an event, collective or community ownership of common spaces becomes crucial for maintaining a desirable balance between open spaces and built-up areas. It is in this regard that linear streams of open spaces achieve significance. This is not to say that larger parcels of land for open spaces are not necessary at all. Rather, that the interesting possibility of linear systems is that small residual or marginal spaces that are often ignored or neglected can be stitched together with other open spaces and natural areas into a larger structure of open spaces. Such an approach would greatly aid our struggle for expanding open spaces in dense cities where open lands are in short supply, helping us to achieve minimum open spaces standards.
Pimpri Chinchwad Networking Plan: Central Park. A network of green corridors and a central park in a plan by this author for Pimpri Chinchwad town in the state of Maharashtra, India. Credit: PK Das & Associates
In terms of physical planning, at P.K. Das & Associates we aim to develop contiguous open spaces by interconnecting various facets of areas open to the public. This would produce a network of green corridors throughout the city and its various localities, nourishing community life, neighbourhood engagements, and participation. With public space being the main planning criteria, we hope to bring about a social change: promoting collective culture and rooting out alienation and a false sense of individual gratification promoted by the market. By achieving intensive levels of citizens’ participation, we wish to influence governments to devise comprehensive urban plans and to integrate disparate developments. The ‘open and clear forever’ public space policy will truly symbolize our democratic aspirations. This is a significant way to rebuild humane and environmentally sustainable cities.
In Mumbai, the ‘Mumbai Waterfronts Centre’ and architects PKDas & Associates have made an attempt to re-envision the city by proposing such a linear public spaces structure, bringing together the vast extent of the natural assets and the available open spaces within the city. An illustration of such an idea shows how a system of linear parks and other public spaces can radically alter the socio-environmental character of the city. More importantly, by this plan, it is possible to mobilise neighborhood people’s participation in the development and expansion of open spaces as much as their participation in the development and expansion of the city, as seen in the plans for Juhu, a neighborhood in the western suburbs of Mumbai.
In order to Re-Vision Mumbai and democratize its public space, we have launched the ‘Vision Juhu’ plan as a pilot project.
A public campaign poster, published by area residents and this author to popularize the idea of linear open spaces structure in the Juhu neighbourhood of Mumbai, currently under implementation. Credit: PK Das & Associates
A rendering of the green corridor onto a Google image of Juhu area. Credit: PK Das
As Mumbai expands, its open spaces are shrinking. The democratic ‘space’ that ensures accountability and enables dissent is also shrinking, very subtly but surely. The city’s shrinking physical open spaces are of course the most visible manifestation of this, as they directly and adversely affect our very quality of life. A new order of linear open spaces must clearly be the foundation of city planning.
Open Mumbai Exhibition and inauguration photos
Through this plan we hope to generate dialogue between people, governments, and professionals and dialogue within movements working for social, cultural, and environmental change. It is a plan that redefines land use and development, placing people and community life at the centre of planning—not real estate and construction potential. A plan that redefines the ‘notion’ of open space to go beyond gardens and recreational grounds to include the vast, diverse natural assets of the city, including rivers, creeks, lakes, ponds, mangroves, wetlands, beaches, and the incredible seafronts. A plan that aims to create non-barricaded, non-exclusive, non-elitist spaces that provide access to all our citizens for leisure, relaxation, art, and cultural life. A plan that ensures open spaces are not only available, but are geographically and culturally integral to neighbourhoods and participatory community life.
Such plans for cities will be the beginning of a new dialogue to create a truly representative ‘Peoples’ Plan’. Let streams of linear open spaces flow across urban landscapes, defining a new ecology—socio-environmental order—of cities the world over
I started my research as a landscape architect and urban ecologist in St. Petersburg, Russia. My home town is one of the biggest European cities and it is famous for numerous historical landscapes. In that time (1990’s) investigation of urban biotopes was a novelty. Passion for the history of landscape architecture resulted in my concentration on biodiversity of historical parks and gardens.
With a dramatic turn in my life I had a chance to research UK, US and then New Zealand urban flora and vegetation. One of the first striking surprises in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, where I moved in 1997, was the similarity of urban floras. I could easily identify almost 90% of plant material! Urban landscapes, traditions and way of life in New Zealand were so similar to “motherland” England and to general Anglo-American culture. In this particular moment I felt myself a “global” person and started my research on unification of urban global landscapes and searching for alternative sustainable landscape design solutions. I saw as my goal to use knowledge of landscape ecology processes and match them with landscape design practice. Why the rest of the world so easily accepted British picturesque and gardenesque thinking even when this is not sustainable at all. How we landscape architects and environmentalists can convince ordinary citizens, as well as politicians and even our own professionals, to accept a new way of thinking — biodiversinesque — which gives a way and space to nature in our cities and not only “tidy” gardens with colourful flowers and lawns?
There are different definitions of globalization and its main manifestations. This phenomenon is always described as multifaceted and connected with market economics (economic globalization), political, cultural (worldwide homogenization of culture, export of western culture), ideological and even ecological and social globalization. The last aspect is referred to as consumerist culture – today’s homogenized mode of life based on an individualistic approach.
I started to search for the roots of landscape globalization and found them in 19th century England. The most influential park styles and the major contributors to later global aesthetics, which started to reshape the physiognomy of cities and towns in 19th and 20th centuries, were Landscape or “natural style” (later known as the English landscape park style or sometimes called Picturesque) and Gardenesque style. The principal attributes of this “natural style” were irregularity, serpentine and meandering paths, “green openings like meadows”, groves, forests and shrubberies of free configurations. Being born in Britain, this park movement reflected the features existing in natural ecosystems in Britain. Open grasslands (most of them were secondary, as a result of deforestation), broadleaved forests, groves and tree groups began to be the dominant feature of English parks. Flowering plants were only allowed if they grew naturally in the fields and woods.
The Gardenesque style was directly connected to the Industrial Revolution, geographical discoveries and the conquest of new lands by the British Empire. The main principle of this style was eclecticism: a mixture of formal elements (for example French parterres, topiaries and flowerbeds), picturesque imagery (winding path, groves and lawns) and even Chinese motifs. In planting design, Gardenesque introduced exoticism and the wide use of new plant species that were introduced from different parts of the world. Victorian gardens had always been based on Christian belief and philosophy. Man was nearer to God in the garden (a reference to Eden and the Gethsemane gardens in the Bible). For wealthy people gardening was “a source of agreeable domestic recreation” and for the poor it was “beneficial to physical, mental and spiritual well-being”. The Victorian era was a triumph of art and horticultural skills over nature.
Lawn as a powerful global symbol. Hyde Park in London, Central Park in New York, Public Park in Shanghai, Safa Park in Dubai. Photos by Maria Ignatieva.
All evidence suggests that the British Empire presented not only a new “model” of a public park for the rest of Europe and colonial countries. Britain introduced a whole range of garden related attributes and plant material which later, in the 20th century, became symbols of the entire western civilization and an important feature of “global” landscapes. Among them are botanical gardens and public park layouts and principles, garden (flower) shows, popular gardening books and magazines and a “global pool” of exotic plants for temperate as well as tropical landscapes and commercial nurseries. Researching for years in different urban landscapes around the globe I argue that the main influential elements of picturesque-gardenesque landscapes, which were “accepted” for global landscapes, are lawn, flowerbed and rockery.
The history of forming the “global pool” of plant material started from the second part of the 19th century and went through several stages of introducing chosen plants from Asia, the Americas, Australia and tropical countries. With movement towards an “international market economy” the rich choice of original Victorian plant material was dramatically simplified and declined especially with the development of mass commercial nurseries. Many landscapes follow the typical slogan of a globalization era: to be “tidy”, “pretty” and “colorful”. For example, today the most common annual “global” flower bedding plants are: Begonia, Tagetes, Petunia, Salvia, Pelargonium, Viola, Coleus (Solenostemon) and Lobelia. I am sure that everyone can see these plants today in different cities from northern part of Russia to desert Dubai.
Typical “global” flowerbed with Petunia, Shanghai, China. Photo by Maria Ignatieva.
Interestingly enough, in tropical and subtropical countries the available plant material is also the result of English Victorian garden activity. The Industrial revolution, with its opportunities to build glasshouses together with the enthusiasm of colonial botanists, explorers and commercial plant hunters, resulted in the creation of the core of favorite tropical and subtropical plants, which were first collected and displayed in Kew Botanic Gardens (the Palm House). British glasshouses were responsible for creating the Western image of a modern “tropical paradise”. The process of choosing the most “appropriate” beautiful and unusual tropical and subtropical plants in greenhouses started in Victorian England and ended in the crystallisation of the Western image of “tropical Eden” based on exotic plants from all over the world. Modern global tropical resorts, urban private gardens and public parks are all based on the same unified group of tropical and subtropical plants (mostly exotic to the local areas). I say to my landscape architecture students: “If you would like to work as a landscape architect in tropical countries it would be enough to know about 200 plants and you will be able to create private “tropical paradises”. The most popular plants are: palms, bougainvillea, Chinese hibiscus, croton (Codiaeum variegatum), cordalyne (Coprdalyne spp.) south-east Asian orchids, African bird of paradise (Strelitzia), South American Plumeria and Australian Casuarina. Botanical Institutions all over the Victorian British Empire helped to epitomize the image of the “lost Eden”.
Classical tropical paradise in Rarotonga (Cook Islands). All plants are exotic execpt coconut palm. Photo by Maria Ignatieva.
One of my favorite “justifications” of plant material unification is the comparative analysis of the plants offered for sale by nurseries in Seattle (USA), Christchurch (New Zealand), and St. Petersburg (Russia), which I did in 2007. It showed tremendous similarity of plant material, especially for conifers.
And now I think many of my landscape architecture colleagues would disagree with my next argument. Today big international architectural and landscape firms are playing an extremely important role in creating patterns of global landscape architecture and unification of urban landscapes. These firms create examples of “routine modernism” of skyscrapers – one of the most powerful symbols of success and prosperity of market economy in urban landscapes. The group of Anglo-American “signature” architects and landscape architects offer similar, “familiar”, and comfortable landscapes with its buildings, picturesque-gardenesque public parks and “global” plants which can attract international investments to the new market economies in Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates. Paradoxically, the practice of modern landscape architecture is contributing to the ecological globalization and is linked to environmental problems such as climate change, water and air pollution, and the spread of invasive species. For example, our research on urban biotopes in different cities in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, particularly urban lawns, shows striking similarities in species composition and the structure of lawns. Today, the lawn is the main element of open space design in all types of green areas (up to 70%!). The “sacred” Western lawn is declared by many researches as the most ecologically extravagant element of our cities (because of high resource use, contribution to urban pollution and loss of biodiversity) and one of serious contributors to global climate change. For example, according to recent studies in the US, greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizer production, mowing, leaf blowing and other lawn management practices are four times greater than the amount of carbon stored by ornamental grass in parks.One of theemissions includes nitrous oxide (which is released from soil after fertilization), a greenhouse gas that is 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, the Earth’s most problematic climate warmer.
Compared to countries with temperate climates, tropical and arid cities in Africa, India, South East Asia, Indonesia and the Middle East are behind in research and providing different design solutions on urban biodiversity at different landscape scales. Fast growing megapolises are catching up in acceptance of Anglo-American global landscape signatures and developing international modern “civilized” examples of public and private parks and gardens. Big international American and British landscape architecture firms have found a great new market in these countries and broadly advocate “global consumer culture”. In this particular case, Western landscape architecture created “brands” such as lawns (symbol of “clean and green”), golf courses (symbol of western gentlemen “style” and prosperity), palms (very powerful symbol of Victorian exotism), and brightly colored plants (also powerful Victorian landscape symbol) as very modern and ideal combinations of nature and civilization and, ironically, advocated this vision as “sustainable”. For example in the recently established professional landscape journal “Landscape”, new “sustainable golf course development” is widely advertised. How can a golf course be sustainable in the desert? But funny enough, the lawn is seen as a very “sustainable” element in dry environment of Dubai because of its “green” image and exotic plants. It is declared to be very ecological because of its “cooling effect”.
Urban landscape in Dubai. Photo by Maria Ignatieva.
Among my dear Russian landscape architects colleagues, lawn, rockery and flowerbeds are the most important elements of design for private gardens. Newly rich Russians are catching up to have “Western paradise”. Fortunately among progressive landscape designers there is a growing concern for unprecedented acceptance of western landscape consumerism and dramatic loss of local cultural traditions and suppressing native plant communities. The real essence of landscape and urban ecology as a science that works and respects natural processes is lost in the process of globalization and consumerization of landscape architecture.
This is why it is not a surprise that such cultural and ecological globalization has led to an identity crisis in modern cities and pushed designers to search for inspiration in indigenous landscapes and particularly in native flora. Today urban biodiversity is seen as an important tool for creating resilient and sustainable urban landscapes. The native component of biodiversity (native flora and fauna) began to be appreciated more and more as one of the most important tools for urban ecological and cultural identity. It is visible not only in the Southern Hemisphere, where there is a real problem with exotic species and their naturalization (in New Zealand for example there are 2,500 indigenous species of higher vascular plants, 2,500 completely naturalized non-native and 25,000 exotic species which are planted in various habitats) but in the Northern Hemisphere cities as well.
Demonstration Gardens “Design with Indigenous Plants” in Christchurch Botanic Gardens, NZ (design of the team from Lincoln University and Landcare Demonstration Gardens “Design with Indigenous Plants” in Christchurch Botanic Gardens, NZ (design of the team from Lincoln University and Landcare Research) See also http://researcharchive.lincoln.ac.nz/dspace/bitstream/10182/553/1/landcare_ignatieva.pdf Photo by Maria Ignatieva
Today I see several approaches to design of urban biodiversity that are addressed by planners and designers in different scales across the landscape. I name just a few of them: “Go Wild”, “Go Spontaneous”, “Prairie Style”, “Going Native”, xeric landscapes, plant signature, “natural schemes” and pictorial meadow. They are using the models from nature (different ecosystems or their fragments) as an inspiration for planting design. These innovative concepts of “design with nature” are powerful visual tools for reinforcing urban biodiversity and make it more visible and recognizable for the general public as well. The most recent trends in landscape design are going even broader and include not only plants but insect and animal populations, for example bird, butterfly and lizard gardens in Switzerland.
In my opinion western countries can be champions for introducing the “right” ecological scenarios for developing countries in place of the current “global” pool of traditional western design and planting suggestions. Now it is time to create a new landscape architecture style which should be dominant over the 21st century –biodiversinesque style!
Lizard Garden in Zurich, Switzerland. Photo by Maria Ignatieva.
The Convention brings together the governments of 192 countries to discuss policies, actions and investments in the conservation and sustainable use of all life forms on Earth, as well as access to biological resources and equitable sharing in the benefits of their use. Working in collaboration with global networks of cities and subnational governments for the last six years, and supported by relevant international and UN agencies, these governments adopted a decision (XI/8) in which they commit to continue investing in a specific Plan of Action to work with municipal and other local authorities, states, regions and provinces, and to promote the development, enhancement and/or adaptation of local and subnational biodiversity strategies and action plans in line with each country’s respective national-level plans and strategies.
Maybe even more concretely, more than 21 Parties have shown leadership in showcasing successful strategies, and (as reported by Kathryn Campbell in this blog recently) more than 400 cities and subnational governments worked in parallel and announced their own strategies, policy instruments and campaigns in support of the CBD. The increased mobilization of local and subnational authorities along the CBD targets, themes and issues over the last six years is arguably one of the most notable changes in terms of its potential positive impacts.
…but it’s not enough
This mobilization does not come a moment too soon, and it is still too small by orders of magnitude. Extinction rates for life of Earth are 1000 higher than the usual “background” rates over its geological history – we’re losing species at a rate comparable to one of the last five extinction events of Earth’s history, and this time the culprit is us. What is at direct risk is nothing less than the food we eat, cheap drinkable water, the air we breathe and between 40 and 57% of our economy (100% really, at the end…).
We can – and must – to do something urgently at the local level: most of the catastrophic loss of biodiversity foreseen for the 21st century, with its lasting and critical effects on development, food security, health, resilience to climate change and peacekeeping, is still ahead of us. And most of it, for better or worse, is and will be linked to the way we live in our cities, and more specifically with the way urbanization will happen in emerging economies.
Biodiversity is critical for urban quality of life, but most decision makers in urban planning and management are still not aware to which extent. Urban planners, legislators, investors, city managers, developers and organizations of residents have yet to realize how much their success and well-being are dependent on ecosystem services. We need to bring biodiversity and its services into the factors considered in urban governance and reduce the ecological footprint of urban life.
Not that the process of urbanization is an option: evidence shows that urban development and the evolution of human settlements is largely inevitable and organic (meaning that its growth evolves naturally and is affected more by global trends than by national governance or NGO or UN-level actions), but can be positively influenced through participative planning, incentives and guidelines that decouple urban expansion rates from unsustainable resource consumption rates.
We in fact have such schemes for such participative planning: governments in the CBD have committed to a well-designed Strategic Plan for the next 8 years, with a set of 20 specific targets (collectively called Aichi targets for the city in which they were adopted) ranging from environmental education to nature-friendly business incentives, parks and the contribution of indigenous and traditional knowledge, linking biodiversity to poverty eradication and saving money and generating jobs by using nature’s bounties. What is needed, as recalled by the Convention’s Executive Secretary, Dr. Braulio Dias, is implementation: bringing those good ideas into reality at national level and, increasingly, at local level. It will be the ecological footprint of the newly urbanized citizens that will ultimately make or break the chances that the Convention’s ambitious Strategic Plan on Biodiversity 2011-2020 and its associated Aichi targets are reached in 8 years.
A new form of urbanization, as outlined by former Curitiba mayor and well-known urban planner Jaime Lerner, or an urban bio-revolution as proposed by planner and activist Jeb Brugmann, are not only part of the solution for a more sustainable future: they are our only hope. The green economy is essentially an urban phenomenon, and needs local governance to work.
What we accomplished in Hyderabad
Let us begin by celebrating recent progress on this topic – aside from being a prominent issue in the Rio+20 conference last June, decision XI/8 is proof that green urbanization is a relevant issue in the Convention’s work. At the City and Subnational Governments Summit, an official event of the Conference, 12 national governments, 60 mayors and governors and 200 local and subnational government officers showcased coordination efforts between different levels of governments, and launched the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook, a reference publication on local action on biodiversity. Eight city leaders showcased their advances and commitment through a 37 panel “Biodiversity in Cities” exhibition. Announcements were made on Medivercities (a Mediterranean network of cities for biodiversity supported by the city of Montpellier, France) and a network of port cities and their associated scientific and technological institutions (called maritime innovative territories, MarITIN) proposed by Brest Metropole Oceane. New projects like URBIS, a proposal to set criteria and recognize local governments making a difference on the wider concept of biosphere reserve, and an approach to reduce impacts on nearby conservation hotspots called the BiodiverCity Hotspots concept were proposed by ICLEI, Conservation International and IUCN, and are gathering partners and momentum.
Culminating with the Cities for Life Summit in Hyderabad this October, the last six years have seen rapidly increasing cooperation with local governments in response to the global biodiversity crisis:
In 2006, a global network of around 1,200 local governments, “ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability”, officially included biodiversity as a focus area and began a worldwide programme known as Local Action for Biodiversity (LAB) in which local governments are guided through a step-wise process towards improved biodiversity management.
Curitiba, Brazil, 2007: at the first anniversary of the eighth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 8), Curitiba’s Mayor supported by Brazil, hosted a meeting of cities and biodiversity, following and making use of the momentum created by the COP and launching the official process of cooperation between different levels of government in the Convention.
Bonn, 2007: Following Curitiba and driven by ICLEI and the City of Bonn in partnership with the Secretariat of the Convention, around 50 local governments gathered at a Mayors’ Conference in parallel to the ninth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 9). The “Bonn Call to Action” was subsequently presented by four Mayors to the high-level segment of COP 9.
The CBD Global Partnership on Local and Subnational Action for Biodiversity, a cooperative forum of governments, networks of cities and States, as well as UN and international agencies, which became the main exchange platform for subnational implementation of the Convention, was launched at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in October 2008 in Barcelona. Today the Partnership brings together more than 1,200 cities, 50 subnational governments, 25 Parties, scientific networks like URBIO, UN agencies like UN-Habitat, UNESCO, FAO, UNEP and UNDP, as well as IUCN and the World Resources Forum. It has an advisory committee of cities and an advisory committee of subnational governments that communicate its advice to the CBD’s Ministerial Segment at every COP, and its members have been responsible for a number of catalytic initiatives over recent years.
Nagoya, 2011: The same partners worked together to organize the largest side event of the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 10), where more than 600 participants from more than 200 local and subnational governments met at the “City Biodiversity Summit”, to indicate support for the implementation of the Convention and to illustrate their potential to contribute to that implementation.
Activities of the Global Partnership have shown that when they get mobilized, far from becoming a financial burden to CBD Parties, cities and subnational governments can be trustworthy partners in joint ventures on the sustainable use of urban biodiversity and in the reduction of footprints, co-financing and co-management arrangements involving a wide range of stakeholders.
Just imagine: one million mayors and 40-70,000 subnational heads of state can be involved, consulted, sourced and supported to identify, adjust and replicate greener policy and development solutions that achieve quality of life and protect nature and its services. On this avenue of work, we are still subject to Pareto’s Principle: the next 20% effort may result in quite significant (if not 80%) change. We should act now to take advantage of this momentum.
Let’s not reinvent the wheel – or should we?
As usual in the history of societal change, most technologies, solutions, programmes and initiatives needed to make these solutions happen are already available and beginning to get known through networks of practitioners and scientists. Curitiba’s green bus transportation system, Catalonia’s footprint analysis and its concrete recommendations for action, Singapore’s Cities and Biodiversity Index as a measuring stick to monitor progress, Bonn’s and Montreal’s experience in green area management, Hyderabad’s beautification efforts for COP 11, Sao Paulo’s green procurement policies – these examples are known and described in various publications. Solutions towards a more sustainable, and biodiversity-friendly city are available, and will come, to a large extent, from relatively large urban conglomerates in developing countries. Today’s laboratories for the most cost-effective and resource-efficient innovations in green urban technologies are more likely to be found in rapidly expanding cities in developing economies, and in better-organized slums of large cities.
Back cover of the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook.
Although many cities have attained high levels of excellence in greening their operations, funding and technology limitations today still restrict the “replicability” of those solutions. Also, solutions will require partnerships: many of the approaches described in the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook and recent related publications arise not from direct public governance, but through the spontaneous participation of citizens and associations of small-scale businesses. They may not come from “open” Western-style lay democracies, as many communities in more centralized countries and religious societies are showing very relevant leadership. They may not even come through new ideas: much of what works at the local level is really “reinventing the wheel”, a novel association of already tested mechanisms. With so many different solutions and technologies being applied around the globe, effective dissemination depends on networks of practitioners at local and subnational level, supported by national guidelines and programmes and articulated through regional and global exchange platforms, so that each subnational or local government can identify its specific menu of activities working in the context of their national policies. As shown in a side event at COP 11 by the World Resources Forum, Internet and mobile phone technology can help interested citizens monitor their biodiversity in cooperation with city park agencies. Gardening and green roofs can reduce temperature variation and cooling/heating needs, and using endemic species increases the resilience and decreases the cost of maintaining these patches of nature. Well-managed wetlands and surrounding hillsides can also harbor Satoyama-like sustainable and traditional food production units, contributing to urban food security and health. Hundreds of case studies are available in the literature available to the participants of the Global Partnership, and in the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook.
These solutions will be identified and disseminated by working closely with subnational and local authorities. They need to be involved and consulted from the inception of any biodiversity strategy or action plan, and this may often require capacity building for effective engagement.
But in my personal experience over the last years, and considering how effective this line of work is, it is still amazing how little this is actually done, at a larger scale and in more coordinated ways.
Clearly, implementation is site- and country-specific, responding to the legal and governance systems of each country. It will need to be adjusted and scaled up or down through equitable scientific and technical cooperation (whether North-South, South-South or triangular) with different levels of decentralization. The process needs to be informed through and coordinated with national and global processes, and if it should support implementation of the CBD, it needs to reflect the Convention’s guidance and tools, specifically the Strategic Plan and the associated Aichi targets.
What we need next
What we need is international and national support for local action.
We need different levels of government, and the players that support them, to coordinate action to protect nature as the ultimate source of all economic and social development (as someone said, you cannot eat money) and well-being in our cities. Our choices in urban living need to reflect our growing awareness of their impact on nature, nearby and thousands of miles away. Life in cities should offer natural experiences to its citizens as well. Cities, rural and natural areas are interconnected to the core.
The CBD Plan of Action on Subnational Governments, Cities and Other Local Authorities has been a key force as it has opened the way for support, from various quarters, for local and subnational governments’ implementation of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020. Local and subnational governments and their partners now intend to play a more significant and appropriate role in cooperation with their relevant national governments, in implementing the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011‑2020 and achieving the Aichi Biodiversity Targets.
In a further effort to complement and respond to Parties’ fulfillment of the Plan of Action, the Global Partnership on Local and Subnational Action for Biodiversity proposes a response divided into four complementary strategies: a local government response; a subnational government response; a response from academia; and a response from the UN and international agencies.
Illustration of the grouping of stakeholders producing response strategies to complement the CBD’s implementation of the Plan of Action. Credit: UN CBD.
The current global (and UN-led) policy development and governance structure is already aware of the need to build capacity of local and subnational authorities to engage with multilateral environmental agreement like the CBD, but it needs adjustments in order to respond more adequately to the size of the challenges. Some initial ideas would include:
Greater participation of representative bodies of local and subnational governments in all multilateral environmental agreements such as the CBD, by being represented and involved, including in the elaboration of national strategies and action plans and reporting exercises.
Enhanced and more flexible/adjustable funding (and technical support including match-making) for decentralized cooperation on biodiversity supported by the competent UN agencies.
Support to the development or enhancement of local and subnational strategies and action plans in line with national policies and international agreements.
Consistent capacity building programmes for local and subnational authorities on the implementation of the CBD. For instance, effective technical helpdesks for local authorities to learn about best practices and benchmarks (such as ICLEI’s Cities’ Biodiversity Center in Cape Town) can disseminate solutions and coordinate training and cooperation initiatives.
We need to show local governments the wheel, and they remake and adapt it as fits their needs, culture and society.
Based on the encouraging results of COP 11 for subnational implementation, I look forward to the next steps and to another City Summit at Korea, the accepted venue of COP 12 in 2014 and a very active Party when it comes to subnational and local action for the CBD.
Our culture must evolve as in a cycle, and return to ancestral wisdom: a true, conscious, responsible, comprehensive and generous biophilia.
Activities related to urban development usually reflect the prevailing global cultural characteristics of a society. At the same time, other aspects of the local culture remain silently persistent, tied to more intimate and traditional values than those the present trend of globalization motivates or allows. For example, the stiffening of the meandering flow of water courses and the indiscriminate use of foreign vegetal species are advanced supported by the argument of their use in other latitudes in developed countries, ignoring the traditional dialogue relationship water-human being and ignore the local biodiversity wealth.
Derived from the overlap of local and global cultural nuances, from each social community emerges a way of understanding nature and establishing a relationship with it. This fact, and also the fact that the planet is currently immersed in an increasingly urban development trend of no return, the question is: What is the best way to integrate nature and city?
Here some alternative routes to an answer, none of which are mutually exclusive.
(1) To “inject” nature in cities?
A long-standing and generalized practice has been to complement urban constructions with a few “nice” trees or plants. A practice that often ignores actual ecological values, such as: natural morphology, rivers or streams, and biodiversity. Yolanda van Heezik notes: The aesthetic values of many people still reflect preferences for an Arcadian/Romantic landscape form, seen in parks with widely spaced trees that in New Zealand are usually exotic species, scattered across a mown lawn with no understory—not the best habitat to support wildlife. Although the text refers to New Zealand, it applies to many other places in the world, such as most Colombian cities, the motivation for this text.
(2) To rediscover and reestablish the nature that existed there before?
The admirable ecological intention of reestablishing the previous ecosystem, from the scarce traces left, and besides the urban expansion, is the purpose of the Ecological Restoration Projects, promoted by Colombian environmental policies. Unfortunately, the current immediatist perspective makes that this good intention be considered idealistic by builders and real state developers and hindered by infrastructure development and building priorities. Most of the time, when this type of intervention is undertaken, it ends up being a cosmetic solution, or distraction in the face of environmental requirements. A more responsible attitude towards an actual solution is lacking and environmental authorities are getting more and more lax.
(3) To maintain and enhance the nature that is left?
Certain wise urban development planning approaches take into account the provision of open public areas, coinciding with outstanding features of the natural territory. Nevertheless, the unbridled building activity diminishes and fragments those areas to the consequent detriment of their character and value, if not obliterating them completely. Unfortunately, lay people are not aware of the scam that comes with the offer of a seductive place to live, in dense buildings with views that will soon disappear and that themselves represent an unsolved environmental impact. It is the case, fo,r example of dense buildings of tight apartments that entail the need for parking lots to the detriment of green free areas.
Figure 1. Forced insertion of dense buildings in green spaces that used to let a breath to the urban environment. Sector of the city of Medellín, Colombia, seen from the Metro-cable. Photo: Gloria Aponte
(4) To rehabilitate the remaining or weakened nature?
It is an even more difficult task. There are many urban functionality factors that hinder and come before this sound purpose. In places already affected by deforestation, the hardening or invasion of stream borders and flattening of topography it is almost impossible to go backwards in order to reestablish natural components and dynamics. Hard infrastructure and urbanization usually prevail.
Figure 2. Infrastructure imposed without bioengineering considerations. Sector of the city of Medellín, Colombia, seen from the Metro-cable. Photo: Gloria Aponte
(5) All of the above?
No singular action pushed by decision makers, can on its own guarantee a sound nature-city relationship. It is to say, we need to promote an approach that gathers an interweaves responses to the multiple determinants involved in a living habitat, as it is our planet earth where cities appear as concentrations of artificial products. These manmade habitats have to follow the laws of life in their host if they expect a successful development.
In this sense, Carlos Eduardo Maldonado, in a recent article, invites us: To think as nature does, alluding to the way in which wise nature responds simultaneously to various problems and functions.
A best approach would pursue an integral holistic proposal, but definitely it will not be enough if culture is not involved before and during the implementation process. More precisely if the knowledge baggage of ancestral cultures, who have been closer to nature, is not involved.
Although our culture is not intentionally against nature, we are a long way away from returning nature to its proper position in terms of urban realm and values. If we rely on the dominating contemporary culture, immersed in consumerism, immediateness, anthropocentrism, and egocentrism, the nature in cities is condemned to failure. It is important to understand and culturally valuate multiple aspects related to social relationship with nature.
As Lincoln Garland expresses: The power of the natural world to energize creativity has of course long been understood by artists, philosophers, composers and poets. Science is catching up.
It is true that natural sciences have been quite rational and that tradition could be enriched looking at them with the right hemisphere of the brain. It will help for the purpose of integration between city—product of creativity, and nature—object of scientific understanding. However, the select groups mentioned by Garland have to be complemented bringing the idea of nature closer to people, spreading the awareness of nature, at diverse levels, as more than a mere supplier of goods.
Those levels of awareness are related to the biophilia concept. The first: “bio” is not just about useful resources, as it is frequently understood. As an example, in Colombia, many people when hearing the word “ecosystem” think of trees, and their direct benefit: shade, independence of uses, or aesthetic and sometimes capricious complacency.
I propose the term bio-value-philia in an attempt to stress a dimension that overrides selfish utilitarian interests, and involves the appreciation of values related to life in general.
The utilitarian approach is evident even in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. A direct mention to nature (clean water and basic sanitation), appears only in sixth place, but with an emphasis on consumption, not towards the care of water as part of nature cycles or dynamic. The first five objectives (1.end of poverty, 2. zero hunger, 3.health and well-being, 4.education, 5.gender equality) do not directly mention nature, although the first three clearly depend on it.
The second level of awareness is this: “bio” is not static. It is not just “the tree” as static as a lamp post or a piece of furniture in a public space, but a process; continuous, permanent, without harmful and unnecessary interruptions which hinder the carbon cycle, indispensable for all type of life. It is not just the water measured in liters but its cycle, all the creative roles at play during its complex trail. Here the term would be bio-cycles-philia, to focus on life dynamics. It sounds obvious but it is not reflected in daily practice. Our society, characterized by immediacy, has no patience to follow the time of nature, so it prefers to ignore it. This is a call to recover the good practice of previous cultures that understood varied temporal dimensions and their effects.
About this, the words of Ken Yeang, in a TNOC essay, are pertinent: Instead of focusing on building biophilia of cities, we should be focusing on making cities into constructed ecosystems that are proxies and extensions of naturally-occurring ecosystems.
Figure 3. If a dialogue exists, it would be wiser to apply natural principles on buildings, that force nature to appear as a manmade object. Bucaramanga, Colombia. Photo: Octavio .
There is an imminent need to return to ancestral knowledge, to those cultures that understood the importance of natural processes, of the elementary cycles that seem to be forgotten in an unbridled eagerness to build, win money and enrich oneself.
If we could understand and internalize natural cycles at all levels of society and people ages, we would be more willing to valuate nature and of course nearer to a true biophilia. In Colombia, for example, it will help society in general, common people, professionals and authorities, to value the páramos, scientifically recognized as the best water factories of the planet, 50 percent of which are located in Colombian territory. The páramos is one of our main wealth.
It is imperative to empower those legitimate traces of national cultural assets; of which Colombia has plenty, although they are still to be discovered. As an example, Figure 4 shows the Nasa ethnic group calendar, built according to their knowledge of natural phenomena and traditions. The Nasa calendar has undergone transformations based on two factors; acculturation, on the one hand, which brought the use of pesticides and technical irrigation, and climatic change that Nasa are clearly aware of.
Figure 4. Nasa calendar. Source: Catherine Ramos et al. Retrieved from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259688716
The knowledge of local communities about “epochal change markers” or “biotemporal markers” are more imperceptible in the eyes of scientists, but because of this, they are no less interesting for research on climate and its changes, argues Catherine Ramos, et. al. The authors illustrate the statement with proved experiences, such as the indigenous groups which, following their beliefs, moved to higher lands just before the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia and were saved from its onslaught.
That sort of relationship with natural phenomena starts with a conscious reading of the territory identity. An example of this can be seen in the Bogotá National Museum in the exhibition called Endulzar la palabra (“Sweetening the word”), that gathers examples on the territorial recognition by numerous ancestral Colombian ethnic groups (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Wiwa culture interpretation of the territory, in diverse interconnected components. Mounting by researchers and art curator of the exhibition “Endulzar la palabra”. National Museum, Bogotá, Colombia. December 2017 – February 2018. Source: Catherine Ramos et al. Photo: Gloria Aponte
In summary, I propose we apply Ethnoecology, a meeting point between nature and culture within cities, where most of the population lives. In order to achieve this we must dig into the remaining knowledge of indigenous ethnic groups (the actual ecological native) and also into inhabitants of urban peripheries who still keep vanishing links to the connivance with natural cycles because of their peasant, indigenous or afro origins.
Apliquemos un enfoque Etno-ecológico a las ciudades y su naturaleza
Nuestra cultura debe evolucionar como en un ciclo y volver a la sabiduría ancestral: una biofilia verdadera, consciente, responsable, amplia y generosa.
Generalmente las actividades relacionadas con el desarrollo urbano, reflejan las características prevalentes en la cultura global. Simultáneamente, otros aspectos de la cultura local permanecen en silenciosa persistencia, atadas a valores más tradicionales e íntimos que aquellos que la actual tendencia de globalización motiva o permite. Por ejemplo, el endurecimiento de los flujos meándricos de los cursos de agua y el uso indiscriminado de vegetación foránea correspondiente a otras latitudes, se adelantan con base en el argumento de que se usan en países desarrollados, mientras desconocen la tradicional relación dialógica agua-ser humano o ignoran la riqueza en biodiversidad local.
Derivado del traslapo de rasgos culturales locales y globales, de cada comunidad social emerge una manera de entender la naturaleza y de establecer relaciones con ella. Este hecho, como también el hecho de que el planeta está actualmente inmerso en una tendencia creciente de desarrollo urbano de no retorno, la pregunta es: Cuál es la mejor manera de integrar naturaleza y ciudad?
Se presentan aquí algunas rutas para responder a la pregunta, sin que sean ellas mutuamente excluyentes.
“Inyectar” naturaleza en las ciudades?
Una practica generalizada y de larga data ha sido la complementación de construcciones urbanas con unos pocos “bonitos” árboles o plantas. Una práctica que con frecuencia desatiende los valores ecológicos reales, tales como la morfología natural, ríos y quebradas y biodiversidad en general. Yolanda van Heezik anota al respecto: Los valores estéticos de muchas personas reflejan preferencias por una forma de paisaje Arcadiana/romántica, presente en parques con amplio distanciamiento entre árboles, que en Nueva Zelanda son generalmente de especies exóticas, esparcidos sobre prados cuidadosamente podados sin sotobosque, que por supuesto no son el mejor hábitat para especies silvestres. No obstante referida a Nueva Zelanda, la afirmación aplica perfectamente a muchos otros lugares en el mundo, tales como las ciudades colombianas, las cuales son la motivación de este texto.
Redescubrir y restablecer la naturaleza que existió allí antes?
La admirable intención ecológica de reestablecer el ecosistema previo con base en las escasas huellas dejadas, a la par con la expansión urbana, es el propósito de los Proyectos de Restauración Ecológica promovidos por las políticas ambientales colombianas. Desafortunadamente la perspectiva inmediatista actual hace que esa buena intención sea considerada idealista por constructores y promotores inmobiliarios, y también obstaculizada por el desarrollo de infraestructura y por las prioridades edificatorias. La mayoría de las veces cuando se adelanta este tipo de intervenciones, terminan siendo soluciones cosméticas o distracciones para afrontar los requerimientos ambientales. Hace falta una actitud más responsable hacia una verdadera solución, mientras que las autoridades ambientales son mas laxas cada vez.
Mantener y mejorar la naturaleza restante?
Algunos sensatos enfoques de la planificación para el desarrollo urbano, tienen en cuenta la provisión de espacios públicos abiertos, coincidentes con rasgos sobresalientes del territorio natural. Sin embargo, la desenfrenada actividad edificatoria disminuye y fragmenta tales áreas con el consecuente detrimento de su carácter y valor, cuando no las borra totalmente. Tristemente, la gente del común no es consciente del engaño que viene con la oferta seductora de un lugar donde vivir, así sea en edificios con vistas que pronto desaparecerán y que representan en sí mismos problemas ambientales no resueltos. Es el caso de densos conjuntos de apretados apartamentos, que conllevan la necesidad de superficies de parqueadero, en detrimento de zonas libres verdes.
Figura 1. Inserción forzada de edificios densos en espacios verdes que permitían un respiro al entorno urbano. Sector de la ciudad de Medellín, visto desde el Metro-cable. Foto: Gloria Aponte
Rehabilitar la disminuida naturaleza restante?
Esta es una tarea aún más difícil, pues existen muchos factores de la funcionalidad urbana que se priorizan obstaculizando este sano propósito. En lugares ya afectados por deforestación, endurecimiento e invasión de las rondas de quebradas o el aplanamiento del relieve original, es casi imposible retroceder para restablecer los componentes y las dinámicas naturales. Generalmente la infraestructura dura y la urbanización prevalecen.
Figura 2. Infraestructura impuesta sin consideraciones de Bioingeniería. Sector de la ciudad de Medellín, visto desde el Metro-cable. Photo: Gloria Aponte
Todas las anteriores?
Ninguna acción impulsada por los tomadores de decisiones puede por sí sola garantizar una relación sólida entre la naturaleza y la ciudad. Es decir, necesitamos promover un enfoque que reúna y entrelace respuestas a los múltiples determinantes involucrados en un hábitat vivo, como lo es nuestro planeta tierra donde las ciudades aparecen como concentraciones de productos artificiales. Estos hábitats artificiales deben seguir las leyes de vida de su anfitrión, si esperan un desarrollo exitoso.
En este sentido, Carlos Eduardo Maldonado, en su artículo de reciente publicación que se puede consultar, nos invita a: Pensar como la naturaleza, aludiendo a la manera como la sabia natura responde simultáneamente a variados problemas y funciones,
Un mejor enfoque perseguiría una propuesta holística integral, pero definitivamente no será suficiente si la cultura no está involucrada antes y durante el proceso de implementación. Más precisamente, si el bagaje de conocimiento de las culturas ancestrales, que han estado más cerca de la naturaleza, no está involucrado.
Aunque nuestra cultura no está intencionalmente contra la naturaleza, estamos muy lejos de devolverla a la posición que le corresponde, en términos del ámbito urbano y sus valores. Si confiamos en la cultura contemporánea dominante, inmersa en el consumismo, la inmediatez, el antropocentrismo y el egocentrismo, la naturaleza en las ciudades está condenada al fracaso. Es importante entender y valorar culturalmente múltiples aspectos relacionados con la relación social con la naturaleza.
Como expresa Lincoln Garland: El poder del mundo natural para dinamizar la creatividad, por supuesto, ha sido entendido por artistas, filósofos, compositores y poetas durante mucho tiempo. La ciencia se está poniendo al día.
Es cierto que las ciencias naturales han sido bastante racionales y que la tradición podría enriquecerse mirándolas con el hemisferio derecho del cerebro. Ayudará con el propósito de la integración entre: la ciudad como producto de la creatividad, y la naturaleza como objeto de la comprensión científica. Sin embargo, los selectos grupos mencionados por Garland deben ser complementados acercando la idea de la naturaleza a las personas, difundiendo la conciencia de la naturaleza, en diversos niveles, como algo más que un simple proveedor de bienes.
Esos niveles de conciencia están relacionados con el concepto de biofilia. El primero: “bio” no se trata solo de recursos útiles, como se entiende frecuentemente. En Colombia, por ejemplo, muchas personas cuando escuchan la palabra “ecosistema” piensan en los árboles y su beneficio directo: sombra, independencia de usos o complacencia estética a veces caprichosa.
Propongo el término bio-valor-filia en un intento por enfatizar una dimensión que contrarresta los intereses utilitarios egoístas, e implica la apreciación de los valores relacionados con la vida en general.
El enfoque utilitario es evidente incluso en los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible de las Naciones Unidas. Una mención directa a la naturaleza, aparece apenas en sexto lugar, pero con énfasis en consumo (agua limpia y saneamiento básico). Los primeros cinco objetivos (1.fin de la pobreza, 2.hambre cero, 3.salud y bienestar, 4.educación, 5.igualdad de género) no mencionan directamente la naturaleza, no obstante que los tres primeros claramente dependen de ella.
El segundo nivel de conciencia es este: “bio” no es estático. No es solo “el árbol” como una farola estática o uno de los elementos públicos del mobiliario como a veces se ve, sino el proceso; continuo, permanente, sin interrupciones nocivas e innecesarias que obstaculicen el ciclo del carbono, indispensable para todo tipo de vida. No es solo el agua medida en litros sino su ciclo, todas las funciones creativas, en juego durante su complejo recorrido. Aquí el concepto propuesto es bio-ciclo-filia, para enfocarse en la dinámica de la vida. Parece obvio, pero no se refleja en la práctica diaria. Nuestra sociedad, caracterizada por la inmediatez, no tiene paciencia para seguir los tiempos de la naturaleza, por lo que prefiere ignorarla. Esta es una llamada para recuperar la buena práctica de culturas ancestrales acostumbradas a entender variadas dimensiones temporales y sus efectos.
Al respecto, son pertinentes las palabras de Ken Yeang, en un ensayo de TNOC: en lugar de centrarnos en construir la biofilia de las ciudades, deberíamos centrarnos en convertir las ciudades en ecosistemas construidos que sean aproximaciones y extensiones de ecosistemas naturales.
Figura 3. Si existe un diálogo, sería más inteligente aplicar los principios naturales en los edificios, que obligan a la naturaleza a aparecer como un objeto hecho por el hombre. Bucaramanga, Colombia. Foto: Octavio Jiménez.
Se evidencia una necesidad inminente de regresar al conocimiento ancestral, a aquellas culturas que entendieron la importancia de los procesos naturales, de los ciclos elementales que parecen ser olvidados en un afán desenfrenado por construir, ganar dinero y enriquecerse.
Si pudiéramos comprender e internalizar los ciclos naturales en todos los niveles de la sociedad y en personas de todas las edades, estaríamos más dispuestos a valorar la naturaleza y, por supuesto, más cerca de una verdadera biofilia. En Colombia, por ejemplo, ayudaría a la sociedad en general, gente del común, profesionales y autoridades, a valorar los páramos, científicamente reconocidos como las mejores fábricas de agua del planeta, el 50 por ciento de los cuales se encuentran en territorio colombiano. Los páramos son una de nuestras principales riquezas.
Es imperativo potenciar esos rastros legítimos de los bienes culturales nacionales, de los cuales Colombia tiene abundancia, aunque todavía están por descubrirse. Como ejemplo, la Figura 4 muestra el calendario del grupo étnico Nasa, construido de acuerdo con su conocimiento de los fenómenos naturales y las tradiciones. El calendario Nasa ha sufrido transformaciones basadas en dos factores; la aculturación, por un lado, que trajo el uso de pesticidas y el riego técnico, y el cambio climático del cual los Nasa son claramente conscientes.
Figura 4. Calendario Nasa. Fuente: Catherine Ramos et al. Obtenido de: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259688716
El conocimiento de las comunidades locales sobre los “marcadores de cambio de época” o “marcadores biotemporales” son imperceptibles a los ojos de los científicos, pero no por eso es menos interesantes para la investigación sobre el clima y sus cambios, argumenta Catherine Ramos, et. al., e ilustra la declaración con experiencias comprobadas, tal como la de los grupos indígenas que, siguiendo sus creencias, se movieron a tierras más altas inmediatamente antes del tsunami de 2004 en Indonesia y se salvaron así de su embestida.
Ese tipo de relación con los fenómenos naturales comienza con una lectura consciente de la identidad de un territorio. Un a muestra de esta idea se puede ver en el Museo Nacional de Bogotá en la exposición llamada Endulzar la palabra, la cual reúne ejemplos sobre el reconocimiento territorial por parte de numerosos grupos étnicos ancestrales colombianos (Figura 5).
Figura 5. Interpretación del territorio, según la cultura Wiwa, en diversos componentes interconectados. Montaje realizado por investigadores y curadores de arte en la exposición del Museo Nacional “Endulzar la palabra” Bogotá, Colombia. Diciembre de 2017 – febrero de 2018. Fuente: Catherine Ramos et al. Foto: Gloria Aponte
En síntesis, propongo que apliquemos la etnoecología, un punto de encuentro entre naturaleza y cultura dentro de las ciudades, donde vive la mayoría de la población. Para lograrlo es indispensable profundizar en el conocimiento remanente en los grupos étnicos indígenas (el verdadero nativo ecológico y también en los habitantes de las periferias urbanas que aún guardan débiles enlaces a la connivencia con los ciclos naturales debido a sus orígenes campesinos, indígenas o afro.
Cities around the world are using the arts to enhance urban aesthetic experiences and motivate innovative environmental activism. Manifesting as flash mobs, immersive street theatre, bike parades, pop-up installations, zero-carbon concerts, and participatory storytelling, artists are using their creativity and ingenuity to draw attention to and propose solutions for the environmental challenges of the 21st century city.
Environmental arts catalyze environmental learning and action in cities worldwide.
Often referred to as creative or artistic activism, environmental arts are becoming part of the curriculum in schools, universities, colleges, museums, and community centers, and are being woven into the fabric of the city in unexpected spaces like parks, city streets, alleyways, and rooftops. This chapter provides an overview of some of the ways that the arts—visual arts, drama, dance and music—are transforming environmental education in urban centers, and helping bring about cultural shifts towards sustainability.
Imagining a more sustainable world through the arts
As part of the development of the environmental arts movement over the past several decades, artists, musicians, playwrights, dancers and filmmakers have revealed critical insights about urban places and spaces. McKibben (2009) describes their cultural sway: “Artists, in a sense, are the antibodies of the cultural bloodstream. They sense trouble early, and rally to isolate and expose and defeat it, to bring to bear the human power for love and beauty and meaning against the worst results of carelessness and greed and stupidity” (n.p.).
As one of the founders of the 350.org campaign, McKibben draws on the power of the arts to catalyze action on climate change in cities around the world. Using media as diverse as comics, music videos, documentary photography, spoken word poetry, reverse graffiti, performance, puppetry, and aerial art, 350.org is harnessing the energy of artists in unique ways. In Istanbul, activists created a giant inflatable sculpture of lungs, inspired by the art of Artur von Balen, to highlight the effects of CO2 emissions on human health. Working with artists in Lima, Peru, activists designed “Casa Activa,” an arts and activism center that exemplifies what a sustainable future could look like. These and other projects are demonstrating that cities can be used for artistic activism in multiple ways, as inspiration, as material, and as exhibition site.
By cultivating imagination, engagement, connection, and reflection, artists help us to think critically and creatively about ecological degradation, resource extraction, climate change, and other environmental issues. They explore, analyze, and critique the complex materiality and social contexts of urban centers, often leading to innovative sustainability solutions. They demonstrate that the arts make for powerful and personal learning experiences that transcend age and life-stage, inviting citizens to engage with their cities through emotional and creative lenses, and helping to shift attitudinal change into action about and for sustainability.
Greene (1995) referred to this power as “social imagination,” that is, the capacity “to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficit society, on the streets where we live, [and] in our schools” (p. 5). Eisner (2002) recognized the similarity between the arts and sciences: “this is what the scientists and artists do; they perceive what is, but imagine what might be, and then use their knowledge, their technical skills, and their sensibilities to pursue what they have imagined” (p. 199). For many then, the arts are a form of research in their own right; they “provide a special way of coming to understand something and how it represents what we know about the world” (Sullivan, 2004, p. 61).
For urban dwellers, opportunities abound for becoming involved in arts-based creation, research, and activism. For example, student teachers at the University of Toronto regularly engage with its public eco-art collection; inspired by what they experience, many join the eco-art club looking to contribute to the next installation. For some, this is the start of engagement with the creative process or their own form of artistic activism; for others, it provides insights about how to do an environmental art project with their own students.
Engaging with environmental education through art-making
Visual artists have been creatively addressing environmental issues in cities for decades, inspiring teaching and learning across multiple educational settings. Alan Sonfist recreated the history of nature in urban spaces (“Time Landscape,” 1978); Agnes Denes planted a brownfield with wheat to raise questions about food security (“Wheatfield: A Confrontation,” 1982); and Joseph Beuys invited citizens to collaboratively combat urban deforestation (“7000 Oaks Project,” 1982).
Environmental arts cultivate imagination and provoke reflection, helping citizens to think critically and creatively about environmental issues.
These early efforts led to aesthetic experiments that design and implement sustainability solutions. Mel Chin used hyper-accumulator plants to leach heavy metals from soil in an art installation intended to reclaim toxic land (“Revival Field,” 1990). Noel Harding’s “Elevated Wetlands” (1997) sculpture project showed indigenous plant species could be grown to cleanse water from a polluted urban river. And JR’s large-scale photographs (“Women are Heroes/Kenya,” 2009) raised issues of eco-justice in a Kenyan shanty town.
These environmental art pioneers led the way for a new generation of artists, photographers, filmmakers, and architects to combine traditional and digital media to maximize the reach and power of their work. The “Beehive Design Collective” uses techniques drawn from popular education, storytelling, and advertising to collaboratively design large-scale, narrative drawings that illustrate and mobilize support for citizens’ social and eco-justice struggles. “No. 9,” a community-based nonprofit that installs eco-art in urban parks and rivers to encourage citizens to explore their city and environmental issues simultaneously; artist Ian Baxter’s ECOARTVAN was one such project that took learning to city streets. Additionally, artists and scientists of the “Cape Farewell” project bring their explorations of the Arctic, manifested in photography, sculptural installations, and light projections, to urban settings to draw attention to the effects of climate change. Finally, Maya Lin’s “What is Missing” uses permanent sound and media sculptures, travelling exhibits, a Times Square video billboard, and an interactive website that displays videos and stories contributed by people around the globe, to create awareness of the current sixth mass extinction and what we can do to reduce carbon emissions and protect habitats. These forms of artistic activism have opened up critical dialogue between curators, critics and the public focused on instigating environmental learning through art (Spaid, 2002; Weintraub, 2012).
Introducing children to the works of environmental artists can inspire them to learn about the issues the artists raise, as well as about the artistic processes itself. It can also spur children to experiment on their own, finding ways to address local environmental issues in their communities. Children at Runnymede Public School in Toronto created a series of imaginative art installations in their schoolyard to address local environmental problems including habitat destruction, air pollution from idling cars, and invasive species in their schoolyard. Their projects ranged from painted fence murals, to large-scale stencils on the asphalted playground, to a knitted sweater for a favorite oak tree. The art projects created opportunities for cross-curricular learning, raised awareness about environmental issues, and inspired other schools to create their own eco-artworks, all age-appropriate forms of eco-activism (photos).
Left: Fence paintings by grade six students aimed to bring about positive environmental change in Toronto. Credit: Hilary Inwood. Right: A bird parade during the “Celebrate Urban Birds” event in Central Park, New York City, educates residents about local avifauna. Credit: Alex Russ.
Dramaas a tool for environmental learning
Theater has long been used as political commentary, social instruction, cultural normalization, and calls to action. In environmental education, theatre is used to communicate educational messages, challenge political positions on environmental issues, and engage people in policy-setting at the community level. Theatre’s role in urban environmental learning grew out of the Environmental Theatre movement, which broke down physical and psychological walls between performers and audience, engaged in full use of indoor and outdoor performance spaces, and forced audiences to consider themselves within the intention and meaning of the play (Schechner, 1971). Creating theatre is a pedagogical approach (Reed and Loughran, 1984) that leads learners to challenge their assumptions about environmental issues and explore their local environments. In the town of Samadang, Turkey, theatre performances were used with middle school students living near beaches where threatened sea turtles nest; a comparative study showed the theatre performance had a significantly higher cognitive recall than did traditional classroom teaching (Okur-Berberoglu et al., 2014).
Theatre provides fertile ground for engaging audiences in local environmental issues. The “Theatre of the Oppressed” was used to achieve transformative learning (including environmental) by allowing audiences to see the structure of oppression, and to inspire action by engaging them in finding solutions. Inspired by this work, the nongovernmental organization Ecologistas en Acción (Ecologists in Action) in Madrid uses social theatre to address issues of water privatization and engages the audience in discussions with the characters following performances. Similarly in Forum Theatre, the Protagonist is oppressed, does not know how to fight, and fails. The audience is invited to replace the Protagonist and act out on stage all possible solutions, ideas, and strategies. These uses of theatre for social change led to its use as a tool for multiple environmental purposes: entertainment conveying messages to low literate communities around environmental justice issues; performances engaging residents in environmental design and policy-making; and theatre companies researching local issues, incorporating community members’ words into presentations, and conducting talk-backs after the performance. Theatre is also used for consciousness-raising and as a tool for confrontation by environmental protesters and activists.
The use of theatre as entertainment that conveys a message remains its most common use in schools and communities. In informal educational settings, environmental, heritage, and museum theatre often uses educational entertainment around environmental issues, such as a sustainability theatre performance in a science center or the conservation messages contained in a bird show at a zoo. In these settings, hundreds of thousands of individuals each year are exposed to environmental messages.
Embodying urban process and experience through dance
Dance has long been an expression of people’s connections to their natural and built environments. It is an outward expression of humans’ embodied knowledge, allowing us to both learn about and act on our relationship with the environment. In urban settings, Harvie noted that dance not only “demonstrate[s] urban processes” but is also a “part of urban processes, producing urban experiences and thereby producing the city itself” (as cited in Rogers, 2012, p. 68).
As with visual arts and theatre, environmental dance refers to choreography that is informed by environmental issues. Stewart (2010) described environmental dance as an eco-phenomenological method that is “concerned with the human body’s relationship to landscape and the environment, including the other-than-human world of animals and plants” (p. 32). Artists usually work in non-traditional dance spaces, and use the natural and built environment to inform movement. As part of iMAP, choreographer Jennifer Monson used an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on history, geography, and hydrology, to study water resources and the urban environment, resulting in a site-based performance that highlighted the relationship between human intervention and natural processes in a neglected urban park in Brooklyn, New York City. In another effort, the Ananya Dance Theatre, a group of women artists of color in Minneapolis created works that address environmental justice issues in marginalized communities around the world, highlighting grassroots advocacy work being done by women to address these issues. In Austin, Texas, choreographer Allison Orr engaged municipal garbage collectors in choreography that juxtaposed their own collection movements with those of their massive garbage trucks. A crowed gathered to watch the final production on an abandoned airport runway. The entire process, from the creation to the public performance, was captured in the documentary “Trash Dance.” This project moved the largely unseen collectors to an aesthetic center allowing the audience to appreciate their vital roles in the environmental health and sanitation of the city.
The environmental dance movement is slowly filtering into urban schools. The Council of Ontario Drama and Dance Educators developed a unit plan where teachers and students “explore the environment through dance composition” (CODE, 2009) and address larger questions about using dance to address social issues and advocate for environmental change. In another example, the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance created BIRD BRAIN to engage urban elementary students in learning about bird migration through cityscapes. Dance connected to the environment is a dialogue between humans and nature that emphasizes the shared agency of humans, nonhumans, and their physical setting (Kramer, 2012). By integrating dance into environmental education, learners are encouraged to share and create their own kinesthetic and embodied understandings of their environment.
Place, identity, and sustainability through music
Humans have used music as a means for environmental expression for thousands of years—to convey the beauty of the natural and built world, celebrate the features of local communities, or protest against the exploitation of people and places. From Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” where the beauty of seasonal environmental changes come to life, to Paul Kelly’s “Sydney from a 747,” where the sparkle of Sydney’s city lights seen from an airplane are the focus, we have always sung about our places in a manner that imbues them with human connection and cultural significance. Indeed, it is this affective impact of music that makes it so powerful.
Environmental arts help to bring about cultural shifts towards sustainability.
The protest song is not new, but highlights the ways in which human beings use music to engage with issues of exploitation and inequality. Songs such as “Simple Song of Freedom” by Bobby Darin and “The Day After Tomorrow” by Tom Waits protest against the futility of war, while eco-activist songs aim to raise awareness as well as call for change. In Australia, the band Midnight Oil sings about injustice for Indigenous people in “Beds are Burning” and about corporate environmental vandalism in “Blue Sky Mine;” Gurrumul sings about the disappearing land in “Galupa;” and Christine Anu about “My Island Home” and the sense of belonging we have to our place of origin.
Similar trends are appearing in music education in schools. In an exploration of place, four participating pre-schools in “The Living Curriculum” project (Ward, 2010) researched the flora and fauna of local suburban environments, and reflected their habitats, interspecies relationships, and coexistence with humans through story, verse and song. These songs became the students’ “Sydney Songs,” representing the intersection of the human and non-human in the places where the children lived. This musical mapping of place is akin to what Somerville (2013) called “a post modern emergence” (p. 56) where a place becomes known through story, drawing, singing and mapping. Knowing and caring about places that are meaningful to us are precursors to developing stewardship dispositions.
In 2012, teacher education mentors from Antofagasta, Chile visited Western Sydney University and engaged in master classes on representing their local natural and built environment using visual arts and music. The songs written for this occasion focused on the kamanchaca, a weather phenomenon in Antofagasta, and the vischaca, a chinchilla type animal common in the Antofagasta community and surrounding mountains. This project highlighted the multiple uses of environmental or place-based music for understanding community and environmental relationships, for investigating human and other-than-human worlds, and for building interwoven musical bridges between them.
Conclusion
As demonstrated by the examples above, the arts play a crucial role in environmental learning in urban centers. They do this by raising awareness about environmental degradation, by introducing a new means to voice dissension, and by proposing imaginative sustainability solutions. The arts involve the public in creative forms of activism, helping them to bring about positive environmental change in unique and personal ways through music, dance, drama, and other art. By engaging those in urban centers in memorable arts experiences that connect them to the places and spaces in which they live, artists in all media are demonstrating an inclusive and innovative approach to environmental education. The arts reach learners who may not be reached in other ways, and ensure that a broad audience can be involved in making the cultural shifts needed to move urban communities toward sustainability.
Hilary Inwood, Joe Heimlich, Kumara Ward, Jennifer Adams
Toronto, Columbus, Sydney, and New York City
This essay will appear as a chapter in Urban Environmental Education Review, edited by Alex Russ and Marianne Krasny, to be published by Cornell University Press in 2017. To see more pre-release chapters from the book, click here.
Okur-Berberoglu, E., Yalcin-Ozdilek, S., Sonmez, B. and Olgun, O.S. (2014). Theatre and sea turtles: An intervention in biodiversity education. International Journal of Biology Education, 3(1).
Reed, H. B., and Loughran, E. L. (1984). Beyond schools: Education for economic, social and personal development. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts.
Rogers, A. (2012). Geographies of the performing arts: Landscapes, places and cities. Geography Compass, 6(2), 60-75.
Schechner, R. (1971). On environmental design. Educational Theatre Journal, 23(4), 379-397.
Spaid, S. (2002). Ecovention: Current art to transform ecologies. Cincinnati, Ohio: Contemporary Arts Center.
Stewart, N. (2010). Dancing the face of place: Environmental dance and ecophenomenology. Performance Research, 15(4), 32-39.
Sullivan, G. (2004). Art practice as research: Inquiry in the visual arts. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.
Ward, K. (2010.) The living curriculum: A natural wonder: Enhancing the ways in which early childhood educators scaffold young children’s learning about the environment by using self-generated creative arts experiences as a core component of the early childhood program. PhD thesis. University of Western Sydney, Milperra, Australia.
Weintraub, L. (2012). To Life! Ecoart in pursuit of a sustainable planet. Berkley, California: University of California Press.
A renowned expert in research and analysis, Joe has worked with informal environmental learning for more than 30 years. Over the past two decades, he has focused on how people learn in and about the environment, as well as the efficacy of programs at achieving outcomes.
Jennifer D. Adams is an associate professor of science education at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research focuses on STEM teaching and learning in informal science contexts including museums, National Parks and everyday settings.
A review of Towards Low Carbon Cities in China: Urban form and greenhouse gas emissions, edited by Sun Sheng Han, Ray Green and Mark Y. Wang. 2015. ISBN: 9780415743310. Routledge, New York. 216 pages.Buy the book.
Urban morphology has a great impact on greenhouse gas emissions, a viewpoint supported by research findings. Generally speaking, an urban form featuring disordered sprawl produces more CO2. Scattered urban land use increases travel distance, vehicle-miles driven, and per capita living space, which leads to more energy consumption. Low density urban development needs more infrastructure and public services for support, which increases carbon emissions, and the conversion of large amounts of relatively lower carbon emitting agricultural land into urban areas enhances carbon emission intensity.
Over the past three decades, China’s rapid urbanization has boosted economic development and brought about fundamental social achievements. However, this process has also been characterized by disorderly urban land use which has negatively affected the natural environment and drastically increased the carbon footprint of the country.
Over the past three decades, China’s rapid urbanization has boosted economic development, but has also been characterized by an extensive, disorderly urban land use which has drastically increased the carbon footprint of the country
“Towards Low Carbon Cities in China: Urban Form and Greenhouse Gas Emissions” comes at a time when climate change is starting to be recognized as an important global issue, and the Chinese government is committed to exploring and implementing a low carbon urbanization pathway. The book explores the relationship between urban form and greenhouse gas emissions in China, and examines how factors such as urban households’ access to services and jobs, land use mixes and provision of public transport impact greenhouse gas emissions. The book draws on the results from a four-year multidisciplinary Australia-China collaborative research project, and is drafted by faculty members and students of renowned universities from both countries.
It is structured in three parts and ten chapters. The first part gives an overview of the book (chapter one) and introduces the policies and practices of low carbon cities in China (chapters two and three). The second part is the major component of the book. It examines the relationship between urban form and greenhouse gas emissions at a macro level (chapter four), presents results of analyses and empirical evidence related to the relationship between urban form and CO2 emissions in the four case study cities (chapters five, six, seven and eight), and reports results from household surveys from two of the case study cities with regard to the residents’ personal opinions on how to build low carbon cities (chapter nine). The third part summarizes the findings and discusses the implications of the outcomes of the research (chapter ten).
The book adds value to the existing literature in the field by filling in the research gap between greenhouse gas emissions and urban form. In China, research on low carbon cities is focused on the three major areas of carbon emissions: industry, transport and building. Though it is equally, if not more, important, the influence of urban form on greenhouse gas emissions usually receives less attention because it is much more difficult to quantify and evaluate greenhouse gas emissions associated with urban form. This research adds to the methodology in the field and offers a different angle to address the problem. It uses household survey results and transforms the information into quantifiable data, so that the relationship between urban form and household carbon emissions can be roughly evaluated. Empirical study and household survey make the research more realistic.
There are few empirical studies on the relationship between urban form and greenhouse gas emissions in China. By surveying 4,677 sample households from four major Chinese cities—Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and Xi’an—the authors are able to analyze real life data and to draw practical conclusions. In addition, by conducting door-to-door household surveys in Xi’an and Wuhan, the authors are able to understand what the citizens really need and to have the local people’s suggestions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This bottom-up approach is supplementary to the top-down mechanism dominating the decision-making process of low carbon cities programs in China. This research also shed light on the relationship between household characteristics and household daily travel carbon emissions. Factors such as household income, the level of education, type of employment and the family members’ travel behaviors are found to influence the household’s decisions about private car ownership and daily travel mode which, in turn, impact household carbon emissions. This research finding suggests that, in making urban policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as proper physical planning and design, policy makers and urban planners should also take these socio-economic factors into consideration.
As it is introduced in the preface, the target audience of this book is scholars, urban policy makers and planners. In my opinion, the book is obviously focused on research, and it might be more suitable for scholars and urban planners working in this field. It is strong in analyzing data and presenting research findings, but relatively weak in giving specific recommendations. For example, what kind of policy tools can Chinese local governments use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with urban form? What is the specific roadmap to achieve this goal? How should the Chinese local executors act to make it happen? Further, the content and style of this book is research oriented. If we aim to influence policy makers, it is important to make it easier for them to read. City officials usually have little time to read a book that is theoretically rich; rather, they would be interested in a work that advises them on how to act. They love straightforward recommendations, hands-on experience and practical cases with vivid presentation styles (illustrations and tables).
I recommend this book mainly to urban scholars and planners. It is a timely product by contributors from multidisciplinary backgrounds (urban planning and design, urban geography, regional economics, public policy, etc.), and it succeeds in conveying its key message to its intended audience: urban form does influence greenhouse gas emissions, and cities with different spatial layouts vary in their average daily travel carbon emissions. But to bring this critical observation to the actual planning of Chinese cities, we will need an additional volume that elaborates on explicit recommendations and action roadmaps for local governments and implementers.
For me, the poppies are in themselves a landscape, one that entangles past and present, people and place, urban and rural. They are material things imbued with affective power and bound to the physicality of place (our garden). They have a capacity to recall the past (e.g., stories of Doris, sharing seeds with neighbours and friends) and to shape the present (providing a welcoming presence when returning home). Through growing peony poppies and creating a garden, connections are created to people and places—a personal landscape of attachment.
A few years ago Juliana Gatti and Sandro Von Matter started the 
In addition to the main city presentations on Thursday and Friday, there were a number of side events, earth walks, and workshops for participants and the general public. These includes walking tours of the Dell Stream Day-lighting project on the UVA Grounds and the Meadow Creek Stream Restoration Project (in the City of Charlottesville, 
One of my favorite events had to do with ants. We were joined for most of the launch by an entomology post-doc from North Carolina State University, Amy Savage. On Friday, during the bulk of our presentations from partner cities, Amy was busy setting out ant bait (including such things as Snickers bars, tuna, and pecan Sandies), attempting to see just how many species of ants she might find in and around the UVA School of Architecture. She was quite successful and discovered 13 different species in short order, in close proximity to where we were meeting. Education about this ant diversity, the habitat we were sharing that day, became something we attempted to weave into the more formal meeting and power point presentations. With Amy’s help at several points during the day we interrupted the Launch presentations with a report on what species had been found. We also produced a series of five ant collecting cards, with images of ant genus on one side and information about biophilic cities on the other side.
The incorporation of ants provided a visceral demonstration on the ways in which nature, much of it small and difficult to see, is all around us in cities. There is immense wonder and fascination value in ants, of course, yet urbanites are not well educated in looking for, identifying or even visualizing their existence all around us. Amy works with a wonderful initiative called the School of Ants that seeks to engage citizens in the collection and identification of ants throughout the country. They have produced a highly valuable urban 
On Saturday afternoon, Amy took the ant station, including her microscope, to the Charlottesville Downtown Mall, engaging children and families walking by about the ants around them—something we called the Urban Ant Safari! In her interactions with people on the downtown mall Amy asked people to write down memories and recollections they had about ants in their past. She later compiled and shared these with us, and some were quite moving. An older woman wrote a note about her days as a child in England during WWII. She wrote, ‘When I was an evacuated little girl of 5 in WWII Britain, I used to watch ants. I dreamed of having a see through container, so that I [could] watch them work.’
On Saturday morning a smaller group, mostly partner city representatives, came together to participate in a workshop to discuss and invent the new global Biophilic Cities Network. For several hours we discussed and debated key questions about what the Network could or should look like, what functions it will serve, what value it will have, and how and in what ways it might meet needs not served by other networks that exist.
One of the most useful parts of our discussion had to do with what value of such a global network and how it would serve to strengthen the position of those in and outside city government working in support of nature. Some participants emphasized the importance of different local departments breaking out of their silos and that the network might help to do this. Others noted that the pledge card seemed to envision participants and signatories as primarily local council or local governments, but that left out universities, NGOs and many others with a stake in the network but working outside the city government.
Somehow it seems fitting that a one-eyed eagle calls this place home. By all rights, the island should have been paved over long ago. Despite the odds, it somehow survived, decade after decade as the landscape around it developed. The odds are against it now too. The big money and conventional wisdom say development is inevitable — we need to prepare for the future. But sometimes the conventional wisdom is wrong; sometimes we need to think beyond the experts or perhaps seek out different sources of wisdom. Sometimes the path forward is written not in technical reports, but on the side of a canoe and in the stories of our fellow travelers, the stories that usually don’t make it into technical reports.
That said, The Urban Bestiary does provide some worthwhile lessons. From opossums, we learn not to judge another being strictly by its (in the opossum’s case, shocking) appearance. From mountain lions and bears, we learn humility in the face of nature’s power. From the oft-overlooked city birds (pigeons, starlings, house sparrows), we learn to appreciate the wildlife we do have in cities, instead of lamenting an absence of “nature”. From crows, we learn about non-human intelligence. From opossums, we learn not to judge by appearances. And from trees, we learn a sense of time deeper than that usually available to humans. The book is full of lessons such as these that we can learn from the everyday nature we experience even in the most urban of cities.
The multiplicity of habitat types favors the diversity of wildlife. More than 150 species of plants that include trees, shrubs, grasses, and epiphytes are the habitat for 36 species of birds and large amount of insects (Fig.3). This small patch of green provides many ecosystem services from support, and regulation to provision in addition to cultural benefits.
Through this plan we hope to generate dialogue between people, governments, and professionals and dialogue within movements working for social, cultural, and environmental change. It is a plan that redefines land use and development, placing people and community life at the centre of planning—not real estate and construction potential. A plan that redefines the ‘notion’ of open space to go beyond gardens and recreational grounds to include the vast, diverse natural assets of the city, including rivers, creeks, lakes, ponds, mangroves, wetlands, beaches, and the incredible seafronts. A plan that aims to create non-barricaded, non-exclusive, non-elitist spaces that provide access to all our citizens for leisure, relaxation, art, and cultural life. A plan that ensures open spaces are not only available, but are geographically and culturally integral to neighbourhoods and participatory community life.
Urban morphology has a great impact on greenhouse gas emissions, a viewpoint supported by research findings. Generally speaking, an urban form featuring disordered sprawl produces more CO2. Scattered urban land use increases travel distance, vehicle-miles driven, and per capita living space, which leads to more energy consumption. Low density urban development needs more infrastructure and public services for support, which increases carbon emissions, and the conversion of large amounts of relatively lower carbon emitting agricultural land into urban areas enhances carbon emission intensity.
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