Our planet is at a crossroads. The ecosystems that underpin our economy, well-being, and survival are collapsing, species are becoming extinct at an unprecedented rate, and climate change continues unabated.
To mobilize change, it is important to identify the financial returns of investing in nature.
In these times of change, nature-based solutions can offer a way of addressing growing challenges such as climate change (TNC, 2016), natural disasters, and food security. Nature-based solutions focus on protecting key ecosystems, and restoring ecosystems on a massive scale. Forests and other vegetation help stabilise slopes and therefore reduce the risk of landslides. Wetlands can help regulate floods. Nature-based solutions for sequestering carbon, such as avoiding forest loss, reforestation, investing in soil health and coastal ecosystem restoration, can bring us more than a third of the way to emission reductions needed by 2030 (The Nature Conservancy, 2016). Coastal vegetation and natural features, such as sand dunes, can provide protection from storm surges, strong winds, and cyclones. Healthy coral reefs have proven to reduce wave energy during coastal storms (IUCN, 2015). Following Hurricane Katrina, the US Congress approved US$ 500 million to restore and reconnect ecosystems around the Gulf Islands and in the Jean Lafitte National Park on the New Orleans coast. These types of interventions can help reduce the economic damage and loss of lives following disasters (IUCN 2015).
For the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, this is the moment for turning the sustainable development and climate goals, to which nations agreed last year, into action, and to use nature-based solutions to tackle common global challenges. It is the starting point of IUCN’s World Conservation Congress taking place in September 2016, which will bring top scientists together with world leaders and decision-makers from governments, civil society, Indigenous peoples, and the business sector to discuss the way forward.
Slowing the flow
Two-thirds of the planet’s terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems are now significantly degraded due to human activity (Global Environment Outlook, 2014). Wetlands, for example, are crucial for the provision of clean, useable water; they provide biodiversity and serve as natural buffers that reduce the occurrences of floods and droughts, as well as critical breeding and nursery grounds for aquatic and terrestrial species. Yet over the last century, an estimated 64 percent of wetlands have been lost.
Fishing, logging, mining, and agriculture are all pushing more and more species to the brink. Failing to account for natural capital is the quickest route to depleting the planet’s resources. And because so many businesses depend on nature, short-term stripping of the planet’s assets is accumulating a substantial backlog of risk for investors.
Europe and many other parts of the world face continued threat from extreme weather caused by climate change. Recent floods in France, Germany, and the Netherlands killed several people and cost millions. In Bavaria, the damage is already over €1bn and governments, insurers, and victims are struggling to find a solution to cover the expenses. The insurance industry indicates that the growing frequency of climate-related claims would result in higher claims and, ultimately, less affordable premiums (Crisp, 2016).
Compelling opportunities are available for restoring the natural strength of the planet for the benefit of people and cities and to counter the widespread degradation of our natural ecosystems worldwide. Speaking at the World Conference of the Society for Ecological Restoration last year, Professor Jungou Liu of the Beijing Forestry University explained that when he was assessing the status of the 50,000 rivers in China based on existing maps, he discovered that 28,000 had disappeared. Some had silted up, while others had dried out completely as a result of a growing population, increasing demand for water, urban development, and climate change.
Restoring the natural capacity of rivers to cope with floods via wetlands, floodplains, and riparian woodlands, can significantly lower the risk of flooding downstream and dramatically reduce the need to build costly concrete defences. Experiences from the River Devon Project in Scotland, set up by WWF Scotland with funding support from HSBC (Slowing the flow – natural solutions to flood problems, WWF Scotland), demonstrate that sustainable flood management can increase the storage capacity and resilience of rivers in wetlands and floodplains in an affordable way. Sustainable flood management approaches include:
Restoring natural dams – Planting native trees and managing woodland in upland gullies encourages woody debris to build up and restores natural dams and ponds, thereby reducing runoff effects.
Investing in the protection and restoration of wetlands – Wetlands are natural sponges that hold immense amounts of water and play a vital role in flood management.
Restoring natural river banks – Grazing along riverbanks increases erosion and coarse sediment build-up in the river, reducing the channel’s ability to cope with heavy flows during floods. Specific tree species, such as willows, create barriers, but also new habitats for wildlife.
Reconnecting rivers with their floodplains – Floodplains can hold colossal volumes of water and release them slowly as the river falls back to its normal height. When water slows down on floodplains, it deposits sediment on the land. This naturally fertilises the soils and prevents a build up of sediment in the river channel, increasing its capacity to hold water.
Restoring riverbank woodland – Riverbank woodland provides one of nature’s most valuable flood defences. In the fertile soil of the floodplain, native woodlands create a rich habitat full of wildlife. During storms, trees trap water, then release it slowly downstream.
Global targets for restoration
Target 15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity makes a clear commitment to restoring 15 percent of degraded land across the globe by 2020:
“By 2020, ecosystem resilience and the contribution of biodiversity to carbon stocks have been enhanced, through conservation and restoration, including restoration of at least 15 per cent of degraded ecosystems, thereby contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation and to combating desertification” —Convention on Biological Diversity
According to the CBD, restored landscapes and seascapes can improve resilience, including adaptive capacity of ecosystems and societies, and can contribute to climate change adaptation and generate additional benefits for people, particularly indigenous and local communities and the rural poor. While restoration activities are already underway in many parts of the world, the consolidation of policy processes and the wider application of these efforts could contribute significantly to the achievement of the objectives of the Convention. Furthermore, appropriate incentive schemes could reduce, or even reverse, degradation and deliver substantial co-benefits for biodiversity and local livelihoods.
In line with CBD Target 15, The Bonn Challenge is a global initiative for forest landscape restoration, which aims to restore 150 million hectares of deforested and degraded land by 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030. According to estimates (FLR), achieving the 350 million-hectare goal could generate US$ 170 billion per year in net benefits from watershed protection, improved crop yields, and forest products, and could sequester up to 1.7 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually, all while reducing the current emissions gap by 11-17 percent.
As part of international action towards global climate targets, there is a growing recognition of the role of healthy ecosystems in increasing resilience and helping people adapt to climate change through the ongoing delivery of a range of ecosystem services. The discussions at the Climate Summit in Paris in December last year underscored that national governments and the private sector, as well as other key stakeholders from science and civil society, need to work together to act immediately. The UNFCCC has established a database on ecosystem-based approaches to adaption to capture some of the ways in which various types of ecosystem-based measures have contributed to several sectors, including livelihood sustenance and food security, sustainable water management, disaster risk reduction, and biodiversity conservation. One of the examples in the database is from the City of New Orleans, which faces a high risk of flooding, and has integrated the need for protection and restoration of wetlands around New Orleans as a feature of the City Masterplan. The intention is to restore wetlands using a combination of restoration of natural delta through building, marsh creation, and construction of water control structures to increase resilience.
Restoration’s return on investment
There is a clear need for a new financial system which recognizes nature’s enormous contribution to global economic growth and incorporates the full cost of generating wealth. This means bringing the world of nature conservation together with the financing and urban development sectors.
According to The Nature Conservancy, combining the climate mitigation benefits of natural climate solutions with their co-benefits can break through financing barriers by unlocking a more diverse group of investors and stakeholders who are interested in business and sustainability solutions beyond climate mitigation alone. To mobilize change, it is important to identify the financial returns of investing in nature. Several countries and cities around the world are demonstrating how this can work.
A study released by the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility in 2014 indicates that damage from wind, storm surges, and inland flooding amounts to between 4 and 6 percent of the national Gross Domestic Product per year in Barbados and other Caribbean countries (IUCN, 2014). Early investment in climate resilience is more cost-effective than post-disaster recovery. According to the report, Barbados could avoid more than a third of expected losses by implementing risk mitigation initiatives such as beach nourishment and reef and mangrove revivals to reduce damage from strong winds and storm surge. Every dollar invested in the Folkestone Marine Park on the west coast of Barbados, for instance, could reduce 20 dollars of hurricane loss. This is why climate adaptation is a priority for national and local decision-makers, and explains why the United Insurance Company of Barbados is giving financial incentives for homeowners to put preventive measures in place (IUCN, 2014).
Other countries, such as Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Thailand, have become increasingly aware of the economic benefit of restoring lost coastal wetlands, discovering that it is much less expensive to protect existing wetlands than to replace them after they have been lost. Considering the costs associated with storm damage, the value of wetlands becomes clear; in Malaysia, for example, each kilometer of intact mangrove swamp is valued at US $300,000 for its role in flood and storm protection (De Vries, 2016). In Japan, following a major earthquake and tsunami in 2011, the government declared a plan for the expansion of its coastal forest national park in the form of Sanriku Fukko Reconstruction Park, with an estimated saving of more than JPY 2.5 billion (IUCN, 2015).
A coastal forest national park in Japan. Photo: Naoya Furuta
Another example is Calcutta, India, where 8,000 hectares of wetlands help to treat the sewage from its 10 million citizens, reducing the need for constructing expensive treatment plants, while producing substantial amounts of fish and vegetables and multiple other benefits (De Vries, 2016).
One of the world’s most innovative urban wetlands can be found in Bucharest, Romania. Văcărești is a natural area of approximately 190 hectares with miniature lakes and wetland vegetation hosting over 90 species of birds and wild animals live. It emerged as a result of unfinished works for a hydrotechnical project begun by the Communist regime in 1986, and was established thanks to the support of a strong civil society movement.
Văcărești, an urban wetland in Bucharest, Romania. Photo: Arhiva Adevarul
In 2013, Washington D.C., which faces major difficulties related to storm water runoff, developed a new idea to increase green spaces in the city through so-called retention credits. These credits are available to homeowners, churches, businesses, and anyone else with land that could be upgraded to retain more rainwater. The credits can then be sold to developers who may need them in order to meet the retention requirements for large new building projects.
These examples show that investing in restoration can bring multiple benefits that many cities around the world have not yet tapped into.
How to make restoration work?
Since 1995, John D. Liu, an American filmmaker and ambassador to Commonland, has documented the rehabilitation of the Chinese Loess Plateau, a vast plain of approximately 640,000 square kilometres and the cradle of Chinese civilization. This area is approximately the size of France and stretches over seven severely degraded Chinese provinces. A range of measures of planning, policy, participation, and engineering measures, including afforestation; banning free range grazing and cutting trees; terracing; dune stabilisation; agroecology; and agroforestry have led to the transformation of degraded agricultural lands and deforested mountain slopes to lush farmland. According to Liu, ecological restoration presents the great work of our time. Through restoration efforts, we can create and continuously renew the atmosphere, hydrological cycle, and soil fertility, and naturally regulate the weather and the climate. At the same time, restoration returns habitats to their natural balance and allows natural genetic variety to reassert itself.
Rehabilitation of the Chinese Loess Plateau. Photo: John D. Liu
One of the best ways to convince decision makers, politicians, business representatives, policymakers, and others that nature-based solutions such as these can work on a large scale is to demonstrate how it can be done and what it means for the community and local economy.
Better information sharing amongst the urban development sector, the environmental community and climate change policy makers, and the fostering of mutually beneficial partnerships and collaborations are also key to promoting nature as a solution for a wide range of societal challenges.
Furthermore, the scientific basis of nature-based solutions also needs to be strengthened to enhance the understanding of how natural infrastructure can complement engineered infrastructure and how it can be integrated into urban planning.
Locally relevant information on nature-based solutions, as well as technical support on integrating nature-based solutions into land-use planning, is also essential.
In order to make large-scale restoration credible and viable, we need new partnerships between governments, NGOs, conservationists, scientists, consumers, producers, urban planners, entrepreneurs and financing partners. Each partner holds a vital piece of the puzzle—the knowledge, the tools, the resources—and they need to be united.
Murti, R. and Buyck, C. (ed.) (2014). Safe Havens: Protected Areas for Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN. https://portals.iucn.org/library/node/44887
On 21 June 2016, I committed to reading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Report executive summary as part of a national (Canadian) collective challenge. What is the TRC report and what does it have to do with urban natures and sustainable cities? The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in 2008 with the aim of uncovering the hidden experiences and histories of Canada’s residential school system. It was (and is) also about recovering diverse Aboriginal histories in Canada to better understand complex settler–Aboriginal relations.
Beyond media stereotypes, the importance of nature to Canada’s Aboriginal peoples living in urban settings remains largely unknown.
I use Aboriginal rather than Indigenous to be consistent with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. In Canada, Aboriginal refers to First Nation, Inuit, and Métis peoples. Canada’s historic and contemporary settler–Aboriginal relations are—as in many other colonial places—tense and reprehensible; indeed, the TRC refers to Canada’s past Aboriginal policies as cultural genocide. The TRC spent six years (2009 to 2014) collecting stories from Aboriginal, as well as non-aboriginal, people about their experiences in residential schools, on reserves, and in urban centres. In 2015, the TRC produced a six-volume report detailing these experiences and making recommendations on how Canada can reconcile and heal past settler-indigenous relations and create new relations without forgetting the past. As Willems-Braun (1997: 4) has emphasized, we need to pay attention to the “ways that colonial pasts continue to organize experience in the present.” A key part of the report is to advise Canadian society on how to collectively reconcile and heal through institutional and political reform.
As I read the TRC report summary, I am questioning how the experiences and recommendations apply to my own research and work on urban nature and children. The last volume of the report contains 94 calls to action which underscore the importance of recognizing and incorporating Aboriginal culture into mainstream policies of education—and part of this culture comprises diverse knowledges and experiences of natures.
While I am just starting to think about this, I have two preliminary ideas on how I can incorporate the TRC into my own research and what my own experiences and expertise can add to the calls to action
My first idea involves exploring, in more depth, non-settler understandings of nature. More specifically, I want to question the taken-for-granted assumptions about human-nature relations that are often underpinned by European ideas. Aboriginal understandings, experiences, and relations with natures are complicated, diverse, and dynamic. First Nations, Inuit, and Métis are diverse populations. There are over 600 First Nations groups across Canada. As such, there can not be a singular Aboriginal understanding of nature. While many of the articles in TNOC emphasize the complexity of our relations to nature, within the general public (at least in Canada), there is still an underlying simplistic understanding of Aboriginal peoples and their relationship with nature. In the imaginaries of many non-Aboriginal people, there are dominant stereotypes about Aboriginal peoples, which include their relations to nature. For centuries, Aboriginals in Canada (as well as in the United States and other places) have been depicted warriors, savages, lazy, free-loaders, and drunken. Then there is the other side of the stereotyping coin—the romanticizing of First Nations as the Indian princess, the noble savage, and the native warrior etc. and their understandings of and relationship with nature(s). Such stereotypes are often shaped by films and literature, and tend to simplify complex culture-nature relations. Much of this has to do with the marginalisation of Aboriginal culture in mainstream media (see the recent national survey on what non-Aboriginal Canadians know and think about Aboriginal Peoples).
I previously wrote about how the portrayal of nature in children’s media influences how they interact with and understand nature, both urban and non-urban. Children learn much from the movies they watch and the books they read. Nature in the children’s mainstream media landscape does not tend to include complex portrayals of Aboriginal American nature. The idea of the noble savage endures in film and literature for children. Perhaps it is not as pervasive today as in previous decades, but movies from Peter Pan (1953) to Pocahontas (1995) and Avatar (2009) visibly and audibly reinforce the idea of the noble savage (listen to the song ‘Savages’ from Pocahontas, for example). There is also the assumption that Aboriginal peoples must have a particular spiritual connection to the earth. Another tendency is to ‘freeze’ Aboriginal people in the past—to trap them in a particular historic moment.
But more visible than the negative and stereotypical portrayals of Aboriginal peoples in mainstream media is their absence in film, literature, etc. Of particular interest for me is that absence within children’s media and in school curriculums (the latter of which is emphasized as a key call to action in the TRC). Less than 1 percent of children’s cartoon characters and 0.09 percent of video game characters are Aboriginal (Leavitt et al. 2015). In Canada there are few children’s books written by Aboriginal individuals that make it onto school reading lists or library and bookstore displays, especially in large bookstores such as Chapter-Indigos. Yet there are many wonderful Aboriginal authors. For example, my daughter has a great book called Just a Walk, by Cree author Jordan Wheeler, about a boy named Chuck. Wheeler has a second book about Chuck in the city. (Both books are published by Theytus Books, an Aboriginal publishing company located in the Syilx territory in British Columbia).
Why is this important to mention on a blog about urban nature? Because such books tell stories about urban and non-urban worlds that contribute to shaping children’s knowledge about the world, which includes diverse representations of nature. And while many children’s books do not have explicit stories about nature, how nature is represented in the landscapes and in relation to characters can impact children (as I discussed in my previous post on children’s TV shows). More importantly, we need books by Aboriginal authors that complicate settler (non-Aboriginal) ideas about Aboriginal peoples, culture/natures, and what it means to live and built the future urban-rural Canada hinted at in the TRC report.
This brings me to my second point on how I can draw on the TRC in my work on urban nature and children to help the process of reconciling Canadian’s past settler-Aboriginal relations. Canada is a predominantly urban country. According to 2011 census data, 81 percent of the total population and 56 percent of Aboriginal people live in urban areas. The city is the home to a growing number of Aboriginal people in Canada, and off-reserve Aboriginal people constitute the fastest growing segment of Canadian society (see also the Urban Aboriginal Peoples Study, 2010). As a result, many Aboriginal children will be born and raised in cities. This profoundly disrupts non-Aboriginal/settler stereotypes of Aboriginal peoples, but until recently, most Canadians still linked Aboriginals with rural, “wild” nature—thanks to the media images and lack of historical accuracy in Canadian curriculum discussed above. A recent article in the journal The Canadian Geographer points out that despite the growing urban Aboriginal population, little is known about how “traditional” relations and understandings of nature have changed:
The importance of nature to Aboriginal peoples living in urban settings is a topic that has been neglected by scholars. In contrast to the large volume of social science research on the importance of nature to indigenous peoples, it is striking that major studies on urban Aboriginal issues make no mention of the natural environment [….]. This represents a significant gap given that at present more than half of Aboriginal people in Canada live in urban areas. Many questions remain unexamined. For example, are “traditional” connections to nature diminished, maintained, or reshaped in urban settings? Can nature be experienced in urban settings, or do people leave the city to fulfill their relationship with nature? (Smith et al. 2016: 4)
Such questions are critical to ask at this moment in Canadian history—and perhaps globally—if we are to recognise the past and current oppression and assimilation of Aboriginal populations. And more importantly to reconcile the oppression and processes of assimilation that marginalise Canadian Aboriginal populations. Indeed, if cities are supposed to be spaces of diversity, community, individuality, anonymity, culture, and natures, then we need to ask: How do the ways in which we construct urban nature maintain and reproduce colonial natures in the city? One 2015 article on TNOC—the Bright Side of Indigenous Urbanization for Biodiversity—sought to identify some ways that Indigenous peoples “urbanize with nature, incorporating biodiversity and more sustainable forms of socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes into the urban fabric, and linking peri-urban and urban ecosystems into innovative city design and planning”. The authors point out that the process of urbanization can result in loss of traditional knowledge and social alienation. Urbanization can also bring diverse Aboriginal peoples together and engender communities that not only recover cultural traditions, but create new ones. We have to remember that the idea of what counts as traditional and Aboriginal in communities can be contested—see the case of half-Indigenous individuals. The city can be a place to reclaim indigeneity. The city has also given rise to strong Aboriginal social movements, most recently Idle No More, that seek to resist neo-colonialism and create better futures.
How does this change my research on children and nature in cities? What can I do differently? I need to start asking how certain natures have assisted in the national project of assimilation of Aboriginal children. Moreover, how do we begin to diversify our constructions of urban nature to take into account the complex and dynamic contemporary Aboriginal culture-nature relations? Of course, asking these questions opens me up to many criticisms and challenges. As one of the many Canadians with mixed settler-Aboriginal heritage, I can never identify completely with the histories, cultures, and context of Aboriginal peoples. Growing up in a predominantly settler environment, I can only ask my questions from this position. But I need to recognise that Mi’kmaq is part of my family heritage and that this was buried because of the stereotypes that surround Aboriginals in Canada. But recognition, as the TRC emphasises, is critical, and we need to start asking deeper questions about settler-Aboriginal relations if we want to change perceptions and future relations—and such questions will alter how we produce future culture-nature relations.
A review of Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal. By Joseph Alexiou. 2015. ISBN: 9781479892945. NYU Press. 2015. 398 pp. Buy the book.
Even a brief summer shower can cause fresh human waste to spill into the Gowanus Canal, as anyone who lives along one of America’s most polluted waterways can tell you from experience. Brooklyn’s old sewers, which combine pipes carrying waste from buildings and homes with pipes that collect rainwater from streets, are designed to overflow into local waterways when the weather gets too wet and a nearby sewage treatment plant can’t handle all that extra water. Two new rainwater retention tanks, courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency and the City of New York’s Department of Environmental Protection, will soon be installed to keep raw sewage out of the Gowanus Canal. But sewage may be the least toxic of all the pollutants plaguing the eponymous waterway of the Gowanus, a nearly two-mile zigzag of water that was once at the heart of Brooklyn’s industrial revolution.
Alexiou’s book is written with an attention to narrative detail that enlivens scenes from the Gowanus past.
Joseph Alexiou’s Gowanus presents a comprehensive history of the canal’s transformation from a sleepy stream in the middle of an uninhabitable wetland to an all-but-abandoned stretch of shipping infrastructure in a rapidly gentrifying patch of New York City. It is a story rooted in topography, economics, and urbanization, overlaid by Brooklyn social history that begins with 17th–century agricultural colonies and winds its way through four centuries of industrialization, postindustrial decay, and urban renewal, ending with the canal’s 2008 designation as a federal Superfund site—a bureaucratic honorific that allows EPA lawyers to sue historical polluters for the cost of a massive environmental clean-up. Alexiou argues that the story of the Gowanus is more than one of the canal: the waterway and its environs in fact serve as a microcosm of New York City and Brooklyn’s growth in relation to their physical geography.
For early settlers of the Gowanus, the area’s attracting force was rooted in its geography; the waterway facilitated agriculture, trade, and industry. But as the canal’s transportation of goods has dropped off in recent years, the Gowanus has retained its allure. Despite being a cesspool of disease and industrial contamination, the murky canal is drawing investment to its banks, with massive real estate and commercial projects proceeding steadily. This murkiness did not always define the canal, as Alexiou shows, and it is likely that its waters will be restored to a condition more amenable to biological life. Projects of urban environmental restoration from industrial damage are completed and underway throughout New York City (recent examples include Alley Creek Park and Freshkills Park), and the Gowanus Canal Conservancy has a similar vision of reclaiming the Gowanus from industrial pollution and creating environmentally-sound greenspace, as well as improved neighborhood resilience to the effects of climate change also wrought by those industrial processes.
The first published book that takes the Gowanus Canal as its main subject, Gowanus is a work of extensive historical research that showcases the fruits of dedicated archival digging. Full of Easter eggs for history buffs—like a cheeky description of Revolutionary War-era soldiers bathing in the millponds of the erstwhile Gowanus Creek—the book is written with an attention to narrative detail that enlivens scenes from the Gowanus past. The origin and inspiration of the book is the richness of life around the canal, as well as a personal “obsession” to which Alexiou readily admits. But this richness is also an obstacle to the book, with an overstuffed host of characters and plots that don’t clearly contribute to a central analytic stake in the material. Without a guiding thread beyond the microcosmic relationship of Gowanus’ history to that of the larger city, the fascinating stories Alexiou has culled from the archives remain just that—a collection of anecdotes that illuminate the history of the Gowanus but do not reveal precisely why people have been drawn to the area throughout recorded history, beyond the unspecified “magnetism” of the canal.
Gazing at canal waters is an urban pastime, a pleasurable, contemplative end in itself, and the stench and filth of the Gowanus Canal offers a peculiar perversion of such magnetism. Alexiou writes that his obsession with the canal is in fact shared by many of his contemporaries, an obsession fed by the feeling of discovery. This romantic notion has spurred the neighborhood’s ongoing gentrification. The valorization of a scrappy, creative culture rising out of industrial ruin infuses cultural value into the polluted landscape, a dangerous combination that developers are in turn converting into lucrative private investments with unknown public health risks. Today the “uniqueness” and cultural innovation of the Gowanus “define its potential”—as they do for postindustrial sites in other cities and neighborhoods of New York. Gowanus provides historical legitimization for the exceptional narrative of the area and in this way is not free of complicity in Brooklyn’s continuing crises of affordability.
The gaze at the Gowanus offered by the book has a built-in audience—the renters and, more importantly, the buyers of property in postindustrial Brooklyn seeking a connection to authentic urban life, however abstracted. When the Gowanus waters flow more clearly, will the feeling of discovery be flushed away for future visitors and reframe the obsessive affection of today?
The term “sustainable city” evokes images of green roofs, energy-efficient buildings, bioswales, bike lanes, urban forests, and other types of green infrastructure. These urban features clearly have value for ecosystem and human health, but they also have great educational potential. Green infrastructure can help urban residents improve their understanding of complex sustainability issues, provide opportunities for residents to interact with urban nature, and potentially encourage citizens to take actions to enhance the environment in cities.
Green infrastructure enhances ecosystem health and climate change resilience, contributes to biodiversity, and benefits human populations.
Green infrastructure can be defined as a network of human-managed and natural ecosystems that together enhance ecosystem health and resilience, contribute to biodiversity, and benefit human populations through the maintenance and enhancement of ecosystem services (Gómez-Baggethun et al., 2013; McPhearson et al., 2016; Novotny, Ahern and Brown, 2010). Green infrastructure projects provide a broad array of human and ecosystem services in areas such as food, energy, security, climate regulation, water management, education, and aesthetics. The field of urban ecology has advanced a conceptual framework that considers the ecology in, of, and for cities (McPhearson et al., 2016). This framing reflects ecological research taking place in cities; a systems approach to study the ecology of cities that considers the complexity and dynamic interactions of social, ecological, economic, and built components; and how the field can be positioned for advancing urban sustainability and resilience (Childers et al., 2015; Grimm et al., 2008; Pickett et al., 2008).
In this chapter, we adopt a similar lexicon to consider how environmental education in cities and urban regions can be advanced in, of, and for urban green infrastructure (Figure 1). Put another way, we address three questions related to green infrastructure education: Where and how do we learn? What do we learn? and Why do we learn?
Education in green infrastructure refers to the rich opportunities for place-based education in cities. Here we discuss opportunities for using green infrastructure in classroom and after-school activities and deepening student contact with and attachment to their local environment. Education of green infrastructure refers to the vast learning opportunities provided by infrastructure projects in cities, where ecosystem services are entangled with human development and can teach fundamental lessons about systems thinking, sustainability, and resilience.
Environmental education in, of, and for green infrastructure provides significant opportunities for improving human-nature connections in the city.
Finally, education for green infrastructure focuses on the need for increased public education regarding the benefits of green infrastructure, which could increase public support, management, and stewardship of present and future green infrastructure projects. (Education for green infrastructure could also include restoration-based education, see the Ecological Restoration chapter in this volume.) These ideas and the discussion of education in, of, and for green infrastructure below parallel the work of Lucas (1972) who proposed an education in, about, and for the environment. Throughout this exploration of education in, of, and for green infrastructure, we bring these themes to life by sharing case examples used by educators in urbanized areas around the world.
Figure 1. Urban environmental education in, of, and for green infrastructure.
Environmental education in green infrastructure
Environmental education in green infrastructure is concerned with rooting education in place. If green infrastructure in cities can be used for environmental education, then the lessons learned are necessarily about the local environment where learning occurs. In the words of Geertz (1996), “[N]o one lives in the world in general” (p. 259). Place-based education in green infrastructure can make abstract ecological principles concrete.
Demonstration projects can illuminate the potential for environmental education in green infrastructure. For example, the Center for Sustainable Building Research at the University of Minnesota in the U.S. initiated a demonstration project entitled “Art, Story, and Infrastructure: A Model for Experiential Interconnection in Environmental Education.” This project takes kindergarten students on a tour of the urban water cycle using water infrastructure from the Minnesota landscape, from treatment facilities to the school building sink, all the while incorporating place-based environmental education and participatory art. Another example is the Urban Ecology Center at Riverside Park in Milwaukee Wisconsin (Figure 2). This center showcases a green building, solar power station, public art, urban wasteland being transformed into a park, riparian habitats, classrooms, and a climbing wall, all of which are intended to improve visitors’ environmental experiences and knowledge. Educational efforts such as these are rich in their ability to string together disciplines like civil engineering, landscape architecture, and building design to trace both ecological and human processes—all grounded in the learners’ lived environment.
Figure 2. The Riverside Park branch of the Urban Ecology Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S. Photo: Urban Ecology Center.
Despite the potential to use place-conscious education and systems thinking to advance sustainability education, current public educational models are challenged to use these approaches. Such strategies may require additional financial resources and time from school districts and teachers. Moreover, some green infrastructure projects lack access and educational interpretation, making them difficult destinations for classroom field trips. Further, the place-based nature of education in green infrastructure may not align with more abstract, place-neutral methods of educational assessment that emphasize measurement and accountability. Examples around the world illustrate the potential of environmental education in green infrastructure, though neighborhoods and cities may need to invest additional resources to unleash this potential.
Environmental education of green infrastructure
Environmental education in green infrastructure entails formal and informal place-based learning in built and natural green infrastructure settings.
Urban environmental education provides opportunities to teach the benefits of green infrastructure and therefore improve urban residents’ understanding of the impact that green infrastructure has on their own health and well-being. This approach includes lessons about planning and designing multifunctional and inclusive urban green infrastructure. Teaching about green infrastructure can borrow ideas from urban ecology to increase public understanding of high-performing social, ecological, and biophilic landscapes (Beatley, 2011; Novotny, Ahern and Brown, 2010). In particular, the concept of ecosystem services, a widely used term in urban ecology (Elmqvist et al., 2013), can be used to frame the benefits of green infrastructure and ecosystems for human health and well-being. For example, in San Francisco, the California Academy of Sciences provides tours of its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified (LEED) green building to teach visitors about using green infrastructure to reduce waste, save energy, reuse materials, provide healthy indoor environments, create rooftop habitats for birds and insects, and other ecosystem services (Figure 3).
Figure 3. At the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, California, U.S., a docent educates visitors about ecosystem services provided by the green roof, including insulation, stormwater control, and fresh air, which help the Academy and surrounding parkland thrive. Photo: Alex Russ.
In general, ecosystem services refer to those ecosystem functions of green infrastructure that are used, enjoyed, or consumed by humans. Ecosystem services can be categorized into four types: provisioning services (e.g., drinking water, raw materials, and medicinal plants); regulating services (e.g., pollination, water purification, carbon sequestration, flood control, climate regulation); habitat and supporting services (e.g., nutrient cycling, soil formation, photosynthesis, habitat for species); and cultural services (e.g., recreational, educational, and spiritual experiences) (Gómez-Baggethun et al., 2013; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005; TEEB, 2011). Urban residents, whether they know it or not, rely on ecosystem services produced by green infrastructure both within and outside the city. Urban green infrastructure is especially important in providing services with direct impact on human health and security such as air purification, noise reduction, urban cooling, and stormwater runoff mitigation, but also provides places for social cohesion and connection, recreation, and development of sense of place. Further, green infrastructure is being increasingly used as a nature-based solution for climate change adaptation and mitigation in cities (McPhearson et al., 2016). For example, cities are investing in green infrastructure as a specific management tool for combining engineered and ecological systems (e.g., bioswales) in place of engineered non-ecological systems (e.g., concrete sewer drains) to provide ecosystem services such as cooling, stormwater management, urban heat island reduction, carbon storage, flood protection, and recreation (Novotny, Ahern and Brown, 2010).
Environmental education of green infrastructure is about the ways in which cities provide opportunities for complex and interdisciplinary sustainability lessons. Green infrastructure offers lessons in science, mathematics, art, design, history, social studies, and beyond. From stormwater pathways to pocket parks with bird habitat to plazas with permeable surfaces, green infrastructure in cities provides endless venues for lessons about how human settlements interact with ecosystems. In urban environmental education, green infrastructure gives visibility to processes such as water flowing through cities, sunlight converted to heat and electricity, food being grown, species migration using greenway trails, and urban forests that support biodiversity and recreation.
Environmental education of green infrastructure offers a framework for teaching about the benefits of urban green infrastructure, such as ecosystem services.
Cities are complex and best studied as an entanglement of systems that are social, cultural, technical, and ecological in nature (e.g., Grimm et al., 2008; McPhearson et al., 2016; Pickett et al., 2008). By focusing on the multiple functions of green infrastructure, urban environmental education teaches about systems thinking. For example, urban community gardens provide food, absorb excess stormwater, mitigate microclimate fluctuations, support urban biodiversity, and provide aesthetic benefits. These gardens become places for recreation, reflection, social bonding, and cohesion. Similarly, green roofs and vegetated areas, including trees, can increase rainwater infiltration and reduce peak flood discharge and associated water pollution while also delivering mental and physical health benefits such as providing spaces for recreation, relaxation, and reducing stress. These kinds of green infrastructure projects are critical for building community resilience, and simultaneously offer rich contexts for urban environmental education.
Environmental education for green infrastructure
Environmental education can amplify public support for green infrastructure. Urban environmental educators can play a critical role in fostering support for current and future green infrastructure projects, helping cities push toward a community-based form of urban land management that has been described as urban ecological or civic ecology stewardship (Krasny and Tidball, 2015; Svendsen and Campbell, 2008). Environmental education can help to promote, create, and maintain green infrastructure in multiple ways.
First, educators can involve adults and children in the planning and maintenance of green infrastructure. Such projects may require deep and sustained partnerships between local governments, grassroots, nonprofits, businesses and schools. For example, in the Bronx, New York City, community-based organizations such as the Bronx River Alliance, Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, and The POINT Community Development Corporation involved high school students and other urban residents in designing a concept plan for greenways along urban rivers and streets. As another example, the 1.2 hectare Grands-Moulins – Abbé-Pierre garden in Paris offers an inspiring instance of how residents actively manage green spaces and rediscover nature in the city. These examples show that diverse members of urban communities can play a role in decision-making about green infrastructure development.
Environmental education for green infrastructure provides opportunities for promoting urban environmental stewardship by meaningfully engaging residents.
Second, urban environmental education can involve people in using green infrastructure. With bike lanes, gardens ready for growing vegetables, and green buildings open for tours, cities are providing green infrastructure projects that become dynamic examples of sustainability woven into the daily life of citizens. In this way, green infrastructure acts as a stage for informal environmental education as people spontaneously engage “hands-on” with green infrastructure projects. For example, many community-based education/restoration organizations in the U.S. offer free canoeing in restored urban waterways for residents to rediscover local recreational opportunities, potentially raising public support for urban open space.
Third, education related to green infrastructure may inspire interest and future action to expand green infrastructure in cities. Berlin offers an example of how citizens knowledgeable about the benefits of open and multi-functional spaces engaged in supporting the revitalization of an urban green space. In the 1980s, local residents formed a nonprofit organization to protect an 18-hectare railyard. The former railyard had been abandoned for five decades during Berlin’s separation of East and West, a circumstance that allowed the landscape to regenerate while untouched by development. Despite the area’s proximity to a densely populated neighborhood, civic activists and professional planners influenced policy makers to protect it. Their efforts, along with ecological research, helped transform the area into the Natur-Park Südgelände, opened in 2000 (Kowarik and Langer, 2005) (Figure 4). The park offers a model for green infrastructure that fosters a strong sense of place for residents by nurturing cultural values related to art, education and sport. In this way, it also provides opportunities for education in and of green infrastructure.
Figure 4. Natur-Park Südgelände in Berlin resulted from the efforts of civically engaged residents. Credit: Cecilia Herzog.
Conclusion
Urban environmental educators working in, of, and for green infrastructure offer a unique voice as cities design, build, and promote ecologically- and socially-conscious infrastructure. In particular, we suggest that environmental education in green infrastructure can offer nature-based opportunities for place-based environmental education, help to build sense of place, and use spaces that otherwise may not be perceived as educational (e.g., waste management facilities, mechanical rooms of green buildings, and bioswales). Advancing environmental education of green infrastructure can help to showcase the social and ecological benefits of urban green infrastructure to residents’ everyday lives, thus increasing awareness of the value of urban nature. Finally, we suggest that environmental education can be employed for encouraging hands-on stewardship or restoration of green infrastructure, as well as programs that encourage cities to build new and better manage existing green infrastructure.
Laura Cole, Timon McPhearson, Cecilia P. Herzog, and Alex Russ
Columbia, MO; New York City; Rio de Janeiro; and Ithaca
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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.
References
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Childers, D.L., Cadenasso, M.L., Grove, J.M., Marshall, V., McGrath, B. and Pickett, S.T. (2015). An ecology for cities: A transformational nexus of design and ecology to advance climate change resilience and urban sustainability. Sustainability, 7(4), 3774-3791.
Elmqvist, T., Fragkias, M., Goodness, J., Güneralp, B., et al. (Eds.). (2013). Urbanization, biodiversity and ecosystem services: Challenges and opportunities: A global assessment. Dordrecht: Springer.
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Gómez-Baggethun, E., Gren, Å., Barton, D.N., Langemeyer, J., et al. (2013). Urban ecosystem services. In Elmqvist, T., Fragkias, M., Goodness, J., Güneralp, B., et al. (Eds.). (2013). Urbanization, biodiversity and ecosystem services: Challenges and opportunities: A global assessment (pp. 175-251). Dordrecht: Springer.
Grimm, N.B., Faeth, S.H., Golubiewski, N.E., Redman, C.L., et al. (2008). Global change and the ecology of cities. Science, 319(5864), 756-760.
Kowarik, I. and Langer, A. (2005). Natur-Park Südgelände: Linking conservation and recreation in an Abandoned Railyard in Berlin. In: Kowarik I, Körner S (eds) Wild Urban Woodlands. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005, pp 287–299
Krasny, M.E. and Tidball, K.G. (2015). Civic ecology: Adaptation and transformation from the ground up. MIT Press.
Lucas, A.M. (1972). Environment and environmental education: Conceptual issues and curriculum implications. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University.
McPhearson, T., Pickett, S.T.A., Grimm, N., Niemelä, J., et al. (2016). Advancing urban ecology toward a science of cities.BioScience, 66(3), 198-212.
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. (2005). Ecosystems and human well-being: Synthesis. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Novotny, V., Ahern, J. and Brown, P. (2010). Water centric sustainable communities: Planning, retrofitting and building the next urban environment: Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
Pickett, S.T., Cadenasso, M., Grove, J., Nilon, C., et al. (2008). Urban ecological systems: Linking terrestrial ecological, physical, and socioeconomic components of metropolitan areas. In: Editors Marzluff, J., Shulenberger, E., Endlicher, W., Alberti, et al. (Eds.). Urban ecology: An international perspective on the on the interaction between humans and nature (pp. 99-122): New York: Springer.
Svendsen, E. and Campbell, L. K. (2008). Urban ecological stewardship: understanding the structure, function and network of community-based urban land management. Cities and the Environment (CATE), 1(1), 4.
TEEB – The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity. (2011). TEEB Manual for Cities: Ecosystem Services in Urban Management.
Dr. Timon McPhearson works with designers, planners, and local government to foster sustainable, resilient and just cities. He is Associate Professor of Urban Ecology and Director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School and Research Fellow at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Cecilia Polacow Herzog is an urban landscape planner, retired professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She is an activist, being one of the pioneers to advocate to apply science into real urban planning, projects, and interventions to increase biodiversity and ecosystem services in Brazilian cities.
Alex Kudryavtsev (pen name: Alex Russ) is an online course instructor for EECapacity, an EPA-funded environment educator training project led by Cornell University and NAAEE.
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Jane Battersby, Cape TownUrban agriculture is a weapon of mass distraction, drawing attention away from increasingly unsustainable food systems, absolving state responsibility as it goes.
Katrin Bohn, BrightonThe concept of Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes proposes integrating networks of connected open urban spaces that are designed to coherently include food producing urban agriculture.
Christopher Bryant, MontrealFor many cities in relatively temperate climates, Urban Agriculture contributes much to the sustainability of food needs.
Easther Chigumira, HarareThrough intensification of production on small pieces of land, urban agriculture can augment national food reserves.
Evan Fraser, GuelphIf there were more incentive for individuals to devote the time and resources to becoming good gardeners, then urban agriculture could play a major role in provisioning North American cities.
Kelly Hodgins, GuelphIf there were more incentive for individuals to devote the time and resources to becoming good gardeners, then urban agriculture could play a major role in provisioning North American cities.
Patrick Hurley, CollegevilleForaging provides another mechanism for thinking about the multifunctionality of urban greenspaces.
François Mancebo, ParisWhile some types of urban agriculture can help make cities more sustainable, others may produce deleterious effects on the city and its inhabitants.
Idah Mbengo, HarareThrough intensification of production on small pieces of land, urban agriculture can augment national food reserves.
Innisfree McKinnon, MenomonieTo make urban agriculture successful, land access must be made available in the nearby urban-rural interface.
Leslie McLees, EugeneHow can we imagine an urban sustainability? Focus on the connections, safety, and pride, and people of urban agriculture, even in poor places.
Geneviève Metson, VancouverUrban Agriculture could help harness city purchasing power to affect whole food system sustainability rather than only local sustainability.
Navin Ramankutty, VancouverThe most important way in which urban dwellers can address urban sustainability challenges related to food is by fostering a transformation of the food system.
Kristin Reynolds, New YorkUrban agriculture’s contribution to sustainability depends on a focus on social, economic, and political equity.
Esther Sanyé-Mengual, BolognaHow can urban rooftop agriculture in European cities contribute to urban sustainability in environmental, economic, and social terms?
Shaleen Singhal, New DelhiUrban agriculture directly contributes to the nexus of water, food, and energy.
Kathrin Specht, MünchebergHow can urban rooftop agriculture in European cities contribute to urban sustainability in environmental, economic, and social terms?
Naomi Tsur, JerusalemBefore reckoning the area available for peri-urban food-growing, we have to convince the consumer of the advantages of locally produced food.
Andre Viljoen, BrightonThe concept of Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes proposes integrating networks of connected open urban spaces that are designed to coherently include food producing urban agriculture.
Claudia Visoni, São PauloCultivating land in the city opens up the gates to the transition to a decentralized mindset that can fix diverse problems.
David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director. David's dad told him once that he needed a back up plan, something to "fall back on". So he bought a tuba.
Introduction
Sustainability is key to our future, and, as urbanization steadily grows, keys to increased global sustainability must be found in cities and how they use and are provided with resources. In this area there has been much excitement about urban agriculture, which for our purposes here we will define as the production of food in and near cities at scales larger than home or community gardens.
There are many potential benefits to such efforts, including the support of social movements; economic development; creation of local businesses and jobs; environmental education; community building; and local food security. But does urban agriculture have the potential to contribute significantly to urban sustainability by reducing cities’ dependence on food grown at great distance from the city? Can it produce enough to address food insecurity?
These questions are complicated, depending on exactly what we mean by “sustainable”, “great distance”, and some other key words. And maybe the emphasis on food, literally, misses the point when there are benefits in social sustainability. In this roundtable we asked respondents to address the potential for urban agricultural production to make cities more sustainable, and how such potential could be realized.
In short, what should we expect (or not expect) from urban and peri-urban agriculture?
Jane Battersby is the research coordinator of the ESRC/DFID-funded Consuming Urban Poverty Project, based at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town.
Jane Battersby
Urban agriculture, as supported by municipal governments in Africa, is a weapon of mass distraction.
It has been heralded as a panacea to a number of urban ills: poverty, food insecurity, waste management, flood mitigation, inter alia. Increasingly, particularly as the Sustainable Development Goals come online, there has been a focus on the potential contribution of urban agriculture to environmental sustainability. Proponents of urban agriculture have been critiqued in the past about over-claiming benefits by using limited data to extrapolate expansive claims. That, however, is not my concern in this piece.
Claims of the sustainability contribution of urban agriculture are being used to detract from the responsibilities of the state and private sector to address the environmental impact of the food system.
My concern is not about the relative environmental sustainability merits of urban agriculture per se, but the way in which urban agriculture has been used to destract attention from the wider sustainability challenges of the urban food system. This is not the first time urban agriculture has been used to destract from broader urban challenges. When urban governments in Africa became more open and less repressive towards urban agriculture in the 1990s, it was in the wake of structural adjustment-related food price shocks. The changing attitude towards urban agriculture was not due to a collected epiphany about its intrinsic value, but an effort to shift the costs of structural adjustments from the state to the poor themselves and prevent declining urban living standards from becoming a political problem. In a similar way, claims of the sustainability contribution of urban agriculture are being used to detract from the responsibilities of the state and private sector to address the environmental impact of the food system and the planning decisions that are shaping the system.
The food system at a global and local level is profoundly unsustainable. Although notoriously hard to calculate, it is estimated that the food system is responsible for at least 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. At the local scale, the food system accounts for over 40 percent of Cape Town’s ecological footprint. The food system in developing countries is undergoing rapid transformation, characterized by increased presence of imported, highly-processed foods, lengthening supply chains and the increased presence of large-scale formal retailers. The overall trajectory is towards a less, not more, sustainable food system, characterized by greater chemical inputs, greater carbon emissions across the value chain, more waste, and other externalities. At the urban scale the privileging of this system increases food and food packaging waste, increases energy demand, increases the overall carbon footprint through increased transport, and undermines local food economies.
It is in this context that the latest enthusiasm for urban agriculture and its potential sustainability contribution is situated, supported by local governments, global development agencies, and corporate social responsibility programmes. There are many potential opportunities for local government, working with their existing mandates to address the unsustainability of the existing urban food system, through creating an enabling environment for informal sector retailers, through developing waste management programmes that consider deferring food waste from landfill, through not rolling out the red carpet to large developers who want to rezone agricultural land or build malls that force local businesses out of business. Most of these initiatives, however, are antithetical to the private-sector led, modernizing development agenda shaping African cities. Through focusing on urban agriculture, these urban actors are able to claim efforts to address food security and enhance sustainability, whilst drawing attention away from the sustainability impacts of the business-as-usual food system transformation.
Does urban agriculture in itself have sustainability benefits? Quite possibly, but the evidence needs to be interrogated. The more important question is, does urban agriculture increase sustainability across the whole urban food system, or does it simply distract from a system transitioning into ever less sustainable forms?
Christopher Bryant is a professor in the department of geography at the University of Montreal. His thirty years of research have dealt primarily with development, including urban and peri-urban agriculture, climate change, and conservation of agricultural land, among other subjects.
Christopher Bryant
Urban Agriculture, as defined here, is broad and covers a wide range of farming systems which contribute to many markets. For many city regions in relatively temperate climates, Urban Agriculture contributes much to the sustainability of the food needs of their cities and thus to urban sustainability. They could contribute more under two conditions: 1) that agricultural land and farming activities are really protected from unnecessary urban development such as industrial parks and residential subdivisions that still get parachuted in many developed countries onto prime, quality farmland, even with the support of governments; and 2) that more attention is given to the many new emerging forms of agriculture, particularly forms of agriculture that involve intensive small scale farms that have few negative environmental consequences.
For many cities in relatively temperate climates, Urban Agriculture contributes much to the sustainability of food needs.
In some jurisdictions, public policies that have encouraged large scale capitalist farming systems can actually restrict these small farms (small in terms of their area, not in terms of their volume of production per unit area) from developing because of restrictions on the creation of small property parcels. These Urban Agricultures already contribute to the food needs of large cities in their regions. Increasingly, the small-scale intensive farms have attracted much attention from particular segments of the urban market.
On the one hand, we note that in developed countries many informal small networks of consumers have been established which involve consumers from each network appointing someone to collect food produce from different farms and deliver the produce to other members of their small networks. The key is that these consumers seek out high quality food produce and develop confidence in the farmer producers they interact with, which means they do not have to question the veracity of labels on food products sold in supermarkets!
In addition, where these Urban Agricultures exist in temperate climates with good quality farmland resources, these Urban Agricultures can relatively easily adapt to changing climate conditions. At the same time, this means that they also have the potential to contribute to the food needs of certain developing countries where climate change and variability has already made it nigh on impossible for these countries to satisfy their own food needs, such as in several African countries. So even at distance, these Urban Agricultures (particularly those in periurban areas) can contribute substantially to the food needs of other countries and, in this respect, distance is not necessarily a major issue to food sustainability.
Such Urban Agricultures also need to have effective forms of marketing and communicating with consumers. This is not too difficult for market segments in nearby cities in many developed countries, as seen in the increasingly important development of informal consumer food networks and even the distribution of food baskets to consumers who are reasonably well-off financially, as well as those who are in dire need but who can benefit from certain social organizations. We also observe the development of food markets in many suburban areas that can respond to the need of many consumers to have some form of direct contact with farm/food producers. But in many developing countries which do not have the capacity to meet their own food needs, it would require other more innovative forms of moving produce to distant markets in these developing countries.
Easther is a political ecologist with an interest in land and agrarian studies. Her current research is centred on understanding urban poverty through the lens of food.
Easther Chigimura and Idah Mbengo
Green Economy, Climate Change, and Agrarian Intensification in the Urban Landscape
Attention to urban agriculture (or UA) has increased during the last couple of decades. UA is increasingly accepted and used as a tool for sustainable development and local food production. This commentary positions UA within the green economy development framework. In this framework, greening urban spaces, especially through UA, creates functioning ecological spaces, alternative sites for food production, and provides solution to the effects of climate change. This development paradigm has gained traction amongst government and policymakers in Southern Africa, particularly in light of the adverse effects of climate change on rural production and livelihoods.
Intensification allows urban agriculture to support both local and national food security.
We have therefore limited the scope of this paper to focus on how UA can contribute to sustainable local food production, nutrition, and security in the face of climate change, and become a significant component of the national agricultural sector and “an essential ingredient of city space”. We argue that through intensification of production on small pieces of land UA has the potential to augment national food reserves in the face of declining productivity in rural areas. Within a broader green economy framework, UA will make a significant contribution to sustainability and to the well-being of city dwellers—from enhancing local ecosystem services and biodiversity, to reducing urban footprints (Moreno-Penaranda, 2011).
The impact of rising temperature, increasingly erratic rainfall, and extreme weather events (flooding/droughts) has affected the agricultural sector in many rural localities in Southern Africa. Most households in rural areas rely on rain-fed agriculture and are susceptible to the effects of climate change, which lowers agricultural productivity and increases vulnerability to poverty. Within this context, former colonial cities/towns, like Harare, which are located in areas of high agro-ecological potential, are sites where UA can augment national food production and reduce food insecurity caused by low agricultural production in rural localities. The geographical location and design of these colonial cities with green spaces and residential gardens allow for the intensification of agricultural production. Agrarian intensification based on increasing crop yields per given area ensures that farming can be done productively on small/limited spaces. Intensification allows for UA to support both local and national food security and minimizes the dependence on rural areas for food production.
Based on a survey of low, medium, and high-income suburbs in three urban towns and two rural communities in Zimbabwe, our assessment of the 2015-2016 agricultural season—the driest and hottest in living memory—shows that urban farmers (albeit farming on small pieces of land) had higher crop yields than their rural counterparts, who, in most cases, experienced crop failure. A combination of factors such as soil fertility, higher rainfall, and access to inputs, agricultural extension, and weather-related information enabled urban farmers to fare better than those in rural areas. Further, we noted that there was a higher density of boreholes in these urban areas which were utilised by some farmers to irrigate crops and mitigate the effects of (a) delayed onset of rains and (b) El Niño induced drought. These factors show that urban farmers are more resilient to the effects of weather extremes and urban areas can be key sites for agrarian production and contributors to food security.
Livestock production based on rearing chickens and quelea birds (which are considered pests in rural areas) in backyards has grown across African cities as an urban-based farming activity. Chicken and quelea provide affordable meat to low income families. The rearing of these birds for domestic consumption as an alternative/and or complement to crop production is an adaptive strategy by urban farmers to mitigate climate and economic-related stresses. This mode of production demonstrate ways in which urban farmers utilize limited space and creative ways to contribute to food production, nutrition, and security.
Idah is an environmental geographer with a particular interest in environmental strategy formulation and behavioural patterns of smallholder farmers in the face of climate change.
Evan started thinking about agriculture and food systems while spending summers working on his grandfather’s fruit farm in Niagara. His work is on challenges to food security over the next two generations, during which time population growth and climate change threaten to make food harder to produce and more expensive to buy.
Evan Fraser and Kelly Hodgins
The Role of Urban Agriculture
Theoretically, urban agriculture seems to offer huge opportunities to address food insecurity in both the global North and the global South.
In the global North, the promise held out by vertical farming or other intensive urban food production systems and suggests that we can virtuously shorten supply chains, reduce energy intensity, and reconnect consumers and producers, all while boosting the resilience of food systems. These issues are probably even more pressing in terms of the global South, where urban agriculture offers the opportunity for poor urban residents to enhance their livelihoods by providing an alternative means of achieving food security.
If there were more incentive for individuals to devote the time and resources to becoming good gardeners, then urban agriculture could play a major role in provisioning North American cities.
While in many contexts that have been carefully studied, the promise of urban agriculture is sometimes realized, in many instances the evidence suggests that urban agriculture rarely lives up to its promise.
For instance, in research conducted at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, on the potential for urban gardening in North America to be a realistic and viable contributor to food supply systems, we collected data on labour and productivity for urban gardeners. While a small number of gardeners were shown to be extremely productive and produced vast amounts of food on very little land, the majority of gardeners spent a huge amount of money maintaining extremely inefficient gardens. The conclusion we reached was that there is a massive skills gap and that if individuals devoted the time and resources to becoming good gardeners, then urban agriculture could play a major role in provisioning North American cities with a significant amount of fruit and vegetables during the summer months.
However, our society has moved so far away from this ideal that it is difficult to imagine policies or processes that would build these skills that have, to a large extent, been lost by current generations. Historic data confirms this, and we can look back to European gardening traditions that emerged during the Second World War and the Great Depression in response to economic deprivation as an illustration of how economic necessity can create a context where urban agriculture is a viable. That said, in the present day, there is very little incentive to develop the skills of an effective urban gardener while there are many other competing demands on our time.
Another aspect our research group looked at was the role of urban agriculture in the developing world and, in one study based on data collected in Malawi, we concluded that for extremely marginal households, producing vegetables to be sold on roadside stands provided meaningful income. Urban agriculture was far less important for even slightly better off households who could make more money working menial jobs. In addition, for the people who benefited from urban agriculture, we had to note that this was an extremely precarious livelihood strategy, as the most marginal families never had secure access to land; hence, they regularly lost access to their gardens and all of the investments those gardens entail.
The studies that our research team has been involved have mostly have explored urban agriculture at its smallest and least formal scales (the garden). We have not investigated whether larger scale, commercial, and peri-urban agriculture would be any different. However, our reading of the existing literature suggests that commercially viable urban farming may be possible in situations where land prices are low.
For instance, if well-skilled gardeners are able to obtain access to sufficient amounts of land such that they can achieve an economy of scale that makes them commercially viable, then urban or peri-urban food production may be a useful food production strategy. Case studies on this include urban farms that have emerged in inner-city America, where significant amounts of formal industrial land has been converted to farming. Similarly, examples from Asia suggest that extremely capital-intensive vertical farms can provide high-end products for affluent urban consumers. However, in most cases, the products that seem viable on such operations focused either on small amounts of high value-added protein or horticulture (especially fresh fruits or salad ingredients). It seems far less likely that urban or peri-urban farming will be suitable for carbohydrate, fats, or the large amounts of low cost protein demanded by sprawling urban populations.
Born and raised on a farm, Kelly's understanding of community food security incorporates a deep understanding of farmer livelihood (in)security, but also environmental and political issues, social justice, and inequality. She is project coordinator for Feeding 9 Billion and a research assistant on the Guelph Food Waste Research Project.
Patrick T. Hurley is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at Ursinus College. His research focuses on human-environment interactions and conservation politics in urban and exurban landscapes.
Patrick Hurley
Beyond Agriculture: Finding Food in the City by Looking Out and Up
With more people living in cities, policymakers, researchers, and residents are pursuing new approaches to urban sustainability. How to design, manage, and use urban greenspaces, such as parks and street trees, in ways that support biodiversity, reduce pollution, and provide other benefits for residents have become key questions. Pursuing nature-based solutions that incorporate this “multifunctional” approach are seen as critical to providing for the well-being of nature and people in cities. This includes determining the relationship of food production within greenspaces. In the US and elsewhere, three overlapping approaches to edible urban greenspaces are emerging: 1) a (re)new(ed) commitment to food-producing gardens and farms in the city, 2) an increase in orchards and edible forests, and 3) a recognition by foragers that existing greenspaces already contain edible species.
Foraging for plants in parks and other greenspaces may keep important cultural traditions alive.
Much attention has focused on urban gardens and farms in addressing food insecurity. Cities such as Detroit, Oakland, and Philadelphia have been recognized for increases in food production, particularly through vacant lot transformation. While these efforts frequently build on and help reconstruct community food-producing traditions, other more intensive efforts seek to create urban farms in spaces that previously had none, including vertical farms. Whether or not production from these gardens and farms can fully meet the food needs of their residents, with secure land tenure, they can provide access to nutritionally and culturally appropriate vegetables and fruits for many urbanites, including lower income residents and minorities.
Foraging in Boston. Photo: Patrick Hurley
The rise of urban orchards and food forests represents an expansion of thinking about food from an agricultural perspective. Here, scholars argue that adding fruit trees and perennial berry-producing plants to the garden mix, within vacant lots, and as street trees will enhance food security. Orchard initiatives in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Seattle appear to be expanding the availability of fruits, with some neighborhoods experiencing concerted efforts to plant fruit trees. The efforts of organized groups, such as in Los Angeles and other cities, to harvest the existing and unused fruit from these trees—so-called gleaners—further contribute to efforts to find food for city residents, including the homeless. Outside the US, such as in Germany or Turkey, the presence of abundant fruit trees may also support gleaning efforts that accomplish similar goals.
Foraging provides yet another way for city residents to find food, including fruits, from wild and managed plants across diverse greenspaces (i.e. institutional campuses, cemeteries). Frequently, these harvests include species not fully appreciated for their edibility or nutritive values. Foraging also creates opportunities to learn about local ecologies and develop closer relationships to nature. Research by Melissa Poe (Washington Sea Grant), Rebecca McLain (Portland State University), Marla Emery (US Forest Service) and myself in Seattle demonstrates how residents incorporate myriad harvested materials from trees, shrubs, and groundcover into their daily lives (e.g., raw consumption, ingredients in meals, processed for later consumption). In Philadelphia, students and I have documented how the “Wild Foodies of Philadelphia” use social media to foster learning about diverse edible and medicinal plants in the city’s parks, cemeteries, and other greenspaces. As with foraging meet-ups in other cities, organized tours mean that individuals can learn about local plants, find interesting foods, and spend time with like-minded individuals.
Foraging is not just about recreational engagements with city plants. In New York City, Marla Emery and I have begun identifying differences in species sought out by distinct cultural groups and motivations for foraging. This research reveals how foraging may provide culturally appropriate—and sometimes unavailable—foods for immigrant communities. Foraging for plants in parks and other greenspaces may keep important cultural traditions alive. Such was the case in Seattle, where some residents foraged to maintain access to important foods associated with indigenous traditions. In New York, foraging may also contribute to the diets of individuals and households who are living below the poverty line. Or, as was the case in Syracuse, New York, foraging may be a critical component of meeting short-term food needs for an immigrant group whose urban garden was vandalized and crops destroyed.
Legacy olive trees. Photo: Patrick Hurley
Whether foraging can meet the full caloric and nutritional needs of urban residents is, as of yet, unclear. In some cases, foraging fosters recreational eating and belonging, while in others—as with gardens and orchards—harvests help maintain important cultural practices or meet critical short-term needs. Thus, our research suggests that foraging itself serves multiple functions for those who practice it. But more importantly, it provides another mechanism for thinking about the multifunctionality of urban greenspaces. This is true both for thinking about management interventions and how urban residents currently interact with existing urban greenspaces on their own terms. Our ongoing research suggests that in discussions about urban sustainability and whether cities can address residents’ food security, there is a need to think about intersecting goals and their application to a wider range of greenspaces.
François Mancebo, PhD, Director of the IRCS and IATEUR, is professor of urban planning and sustainability at Reims University. He lives in Paris.
François Mancebo
P’têt Ben Qu’oui, P’têt Ben Qu’non (Maybe So, Maybe Not)
Can urban agriculture contribute to urban sustainability? A seemingly simple question, but a pretty complex answer. How to make a bold statement to ignite a debate? My provocative answer will be “P’têt ben qu’oui, p’têt ben qu’non“, which can be translated to “Maybe so, maybe not”. An expression—a stereotype—supposed to characterize the cunningness of Normandy’s farmers in French popular culture, this phrase means that you’re choosing not to choose (when you’re asked to choose), which is already a big choice. It means refusing to enter a simplistic framework for thinking.
The first thing to determine when dealing with the contribution of urban to urban sustainability is: Will this agriculture be at the service of the inhabitants?
Yes, while some types of urban agriculture can help make cities more sustainable, others may produce deleterious effects on the city and its inhabitants. Urban agriculture is not sustainable in nature. Basically, it is all about cultivating, processing, and distributing food in town. This being said, there are very different types of urban agriculture that don’t have much in common except that they are about growing edible plants in the city: intensive vertical farming, pockets of conventional farming—mainly orchards, cornfields and vineyards—incorporated in the city alongside urban sprawl, micro-farming, kitchen and community gardens, etc. These don’t have the same consequences on urban sustainability.
As I pointed out in a recent post, many economic and political players, as well as big farmers doing conventional farming, talk about urban agriculture as being inherently sustainable to sugarcoat this unsavory pill: without their veneer of sustainability, these activities would logically be rejected. Perpetuating the impression of urban agriculture as sustainable is a way of obscuring the issue of pesticides and fertilizer dissemination, as well as the wastes and by-products of industrial urban agriculture, especially in vine-growing or grain-growing regions. Grain and wine are agricultural products with high added value, and regions where they are grown frequently incorporate them in their cities. People are exposed to critical levels of pesticides on a daily basis without even knowing. Yes, cities, farmers, and their non-farming neighbors share more than fence lines, and it can be quite challenging to live near pockets of industrial agriculture.
To design a more sustainable urban future, we’d better focus on community gardens, kitchen gardens, crofting and micro-farming, land sharing, low-rise rooftop gardens, or schoolyard greenhouses—which are diverse modes of urban agriculture, but are nevertheless related in the sense that they all develop the potential for people to exercise significant influence over the place where they live.
Indeed, apart from the issue of pesticides and fertilizers, the relation between urban agriculture and the sustainable city is not just a matter of food or greening, it is also about inclusiveness and ownership. All things considered, when trying to make a city sustainable, there may be some good sense in promoting urban agriculture instead of manicured, sophisticated-looking green areas, as I advocated in a former post. Why not counteract urban sprawl by fostering what could be called “rural sprawl”, by introducing farming within the city? Such an urban agriculture should be considered as a common good, bringing people together and reshaping the whole urban fabric through long-lasting urban policies, especially those turning environmental “bads”—such as brownfields and wastelands—into environmental “goods”. Urban agriculture in interstitial, abandoned urban areas may be one of cities’ main seedbeds of creative innovation. The first thing to determine when dealing with the contribution of urban to urban sustainability is: Will this agriculture be at the service of the inhabitants?
What I love about geography is its inherent interdisciplinary nature. Geographers work within the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Cross disciplinary work is key to finding solutions to our most pressing social and environmental issues in the 21st century.
Innisfree McKinnon
The North American fetishization of urban agriculture, as a solution to urban food insecurity and dependence on rural agriculture, turns attention away more viable solutions to these problems. While the U.S. conceptualization of urban agriculture can certainly provide increased access for some small portion of urban dwellers to highly perishable food crops, it cannot provide yields needed to feed large urban populations. The recent interest boom in the U.S. in urban agriculture diverts attention from issues at the urban-rural interface that have a greater impact on urban sustainability.
Urban agriculture, like other green spaces, serves the public good, but it is unrealistic to expect that urban farms can provide sufficiency in the food supply needed for urban areas.
It is fallacious to proclaim that this is an urban age and so we should concentrate on urban systems in planning for sustainability, when much of the world’s population lives in sprawling settlements in the urban-rural interface. In the Global North, this most often take the form of suburban and exurban, automobile-dependent, sprawl. This sprawling development is problematic in terms of urban sustainability for several reasons. This pattern has a huge ecological footprint because of automobile dependence, embedded energy costs, and energy used to heat and cool large single family homes. Unchecked sprawl also threatens much of the world’s most productive farmland, as cities are often built near rivers and the rich riparian sediments that surround them.
North American urban agriculture is typically premised on a few elements. A farmer or farm director, along with a few part-time staff or interns, are expected to make a living from the sale of farm products to urban consumers, often in combination with income from educational programs or grants. This system, which must still compete in the market with more efficient rural production, cannot provide affordable food to the urban poor and leaves the farmer and farm employees struggling to make a basic income.
Even if this model exists in an urban area with large areas of abandoned land available, urban farms, because of their recreation and community building functions, tend to encourage redevelopment processes that increase land values and development pressures. Urban agriculture, like other green spaces, serves the public good, providing recreation, education, and increased social connections. Some urban agriculture should be protected as part of park and educational planning for cities, particularly to educate young people about food production, though it is unrealistic to expect that urban farms can provide sufficiency in the food supply needed for urban areas.
If we want to ensure food security and a localized food supply, a direct access strategy—like the Eastern Europe’s dacha system, where urban residents are provided with small farm plots within the urban-rural interface—rather than commercialized farming within urban centers might be more productive. These plots provide recreational and social values for their owners and contribute to household food security for low income families. A dacha-like system would also set aside productive farmland at the urban fringe, protecting it from harmful sprawl. Dachas are typically significantly larger plots than those that are available to urban residents through home gardens or small community garden plots.
The lack of affordable and secure access to land reduces the number of new U.S. farmers and threatens the economic viability of new small farms. Most small U.S. farms now rely on non-farm income to support their households. There isn’t enough land within central cities to grow significant amounts of food if we want to maintain urban densities, so land access must be made available in the nearby urban-rural interface by taking land off the market through public ownership, land trusts, or permanent conservation easements, thereby protecting land for small family farms and dacha-like plots. This would provide multiple societal benefits, and contribute to sustainability by ensuring food security for the poor, limiting sprawl, and by reconnecting urban people with the land.
Leslie McLees focuses on the social dimensions of urban farms in Tanzania to legitimate the ways that people not only survive, but thrive in cities.
Leslie McLees
Urban Nature and Social Sustainability
Much of the work on urban agriculture in developing areas has focused on nutrition or contributions to household income, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. The focus has been on the political economy of the practice, rather than on social and environmental sustainability, which is a common lens in more economically developed places.
In Tanzania, urban farms are nodes of connectivity in the city that integrate farmers and passerby in ways that sustain their economic and social security.
In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where my own research took place, the practice is legally ambiguous: technically it is legal, but no spaces are zoned for it. Yet open-space farms—with five to hundreds of farmers cultivating individual plots of veggies—can be found throughout the city. While the debate over the legitimacy of farming remains mired in the environmental concerns of the practice, the social components of how these spaces are actually used and embedded in the larger urban system can tell us how, and what, it can contribute to an urban social sustainability.
Farmers here are resting in the afternoon shade after working since sunrise. Here they will talk about life, politics, farming and more, while they wait for customers. Photo: Leslie McLees
From my own work, I found that the ways these spaces are used contributes to the livelihood and ‘sustainability’ of individuals beyond nutrition and money (though of course, both of those are important). Most farms are organized into professional groups, which provide social and economic support when individuals experience hardship. They help each other when someone is sick or travelling. They work together to resolve conflicts or buy materials. These groups are often one of the most important social networks the farmers engage in.
I was in Dar during an election year (2010), and saw how farms were important political gathering spaces, both for the ruling party (CCM) to distribute kanga (decorative cloth) and hats for people to wear and display, and for political rallies. In fact, some farms had small concrete platforms with CCM flags that provided the base for those rallies. While many farmers did not personally support the CCM, they outwardly demonstrated their support in order to not face harassment by city and party officials and to ensure that they continued to receive (often informal) support from government officials.
People in the city use farms as safe spaces. Clearing an area of brush is valued as eliminating hiding spaces for thieves (real or imagined) and removing snakes and other dangers from the pathways people travel. Children walk to the farms on the way to school and are watched (and sometimes chided) by farmers. Women I talked to who travelled through said they feel safe walking through farms rather than other brushy areas, both because of the safe pathways and because of the people there who they eventually get to know.
A farmer part of a photo voice project took this picture of her son to talk about how proud she was to be a farmer and to train her children to be self-sufficient. Photo: Farmer in photo voice project
Which brings us to one of the most useful ways people use farms: creating social connections. Customers, people walking through, people who live nearby, people looking for a day labor job, and more, all interact with farmers. These are spaces of interaction and connection where farmers and people using the farm make contacts that may help them somehow in the future. In a city with no Craigslist or help-wanted advertising, and dominated by the informal economy, these almost ephemeral, yet very tangible, connections can find someone a new job, a better house, a date, tools they need, and much more. Farms are nodes of connectivity in the city that integrate farmers and passerby in ways that sustain their economic and social security. In a city where life and well-being can be fragile, being outside and in the path of other people provides a substantial network of resources to rely on.
And it must be said that farms are not all hard work and scheming for connections. In fact, while all farmers in my research talked about how difficult farming is, many (though not all) of them said that they were proud to be farmers, to be their own boss, to contribute to feeding people, and to be independent. They enjoy the sociability of farms; chatting with customers, other farmers, and passersby. Farmers, too, have a sense of pride that reinforces—nay, sustains—their continuation of the practice.
Dr. Geneviève Metson is a US NRC postdoctoral research associate working on urban and food system sustainability with a focus on phosphorus.
Geneviève Metson
Urban agriculture (UA) can and should have a role in urban sustainability, but this role may be more indirect, perhaps even mental rather physical, than some of us may think. We cannot divide rural and urban sustainability when it comes to our food systems. Most people live in cities and, as such, the sustainability of the rural landscape that cities depend on to produce the large quantities of food they need must be viewed as a key urban sustainability priority. Urban and peri-urban agriculture I think may be a lynch-pin in decreasing the mental distance between urban consumers and “rural” producers, harnessing cities’ enormous purchasing power to benefit people and environments along the whole food chain.
Urban and peri-urban agriculture may be a lynch-pin in decreasing the mental distance between urban consumers and “rural” producers.
Much of UA research up to this point has focused on the local social and environmental benefits that UA may provide, and they are real; but they may not be the biggest contribution of UA to urban sustainability. Take for example my area of research: sustainable phosphorus management, an essential nutrient for plants. As cities concentrate people, they concentrate organic waste (food and garden waste, as well as human and animal excreta) which is high in phosphorus. If these wastes are not treated, they can create water quality and subsequent health concerns, but they also represent a resource if they can be recycled back into our food production system, contributing to a circular economy.
At first glance, UA provides a wonderful opportunity to recycle such nutrients, killing two birds with one stone: supporting and even increasing local food production by supporting high yields without increasing dependence on outside resources, while also helping to treat local waste. By definition, however, cities are quite dense and simply cannot recycle all urban nutrient waste streams. For example, UA would need to occupy three times the area of the island of Montreal to recycle available phosphorus in food and green waste from the city if farmers did not want to over apply nutrients (which could negatively affect water quality). Similarly, in Sydney, Australia, current organic waste contains 15 times more P than is needed by local farmers in the Sydney basin, and this gap is likely to increase as agricultural land is lost to urban expansion. I do not think that these examples mean that energy should not be put in to increasing UA and ensuring UA practitioners can contribute to sustainable nutrient management by recycling local waste streams. But we must also think about harnessing UA’s potential to change the larger urban food supply chain because, quantitatively, UA simply cannot do it all; it is not a panacea. With this in mind, the following question arises:
Can UA and sustainable practices in UA influence how cities use their purchasing power to influence their whole food system?
We require more research and practice to determine if and how UA can be an incubator to test technologies, practices, and policies that promote social equity and environmental integrity in cities, subsequently creating ripples through the global food system. Perhaps nutrient recycling technologies and distribution logistics, piloted with close-by urban farmers, municipalities, and private waste companies, can then be used to develop larger regional markets for recycled nutrients. By reminding urban consumers what it takes to grow food through UA, perhaps we can change how they purchase food from farther away. Cities, through their experience with regulating and supporting UA, could also decide to create policies that influence the full footprint of food (the total natural and human resources used to produce food) that is imported into their jurisdictional boundaries. Building sustainable and resilient food systems, which are an integral part of urban sustainability, will take a multi-pronged approach. I think UA can be part of this change and an important part of UA’s potential lies in changing how cities think of food globally.
Navin Ramankutty is a Professor at the University of British Columbia whose research addresses global sustainable food security challenges.
Navin Ramankutty
Urban Agriculture has an important role in urban sustainability, but the key pathways are probably not the ones you may be thinking of.
There are numerous ways to parse the question on whether urban agriculture has the potential to contribute significantly to urban sustainability.
Let’s take the issue of urban sustainability first. There seems to be a widespread notion that, for cities to be considered sustainable, they need to produce or access resources from and process waste within the city boundaries. Classic examples are studies showing that the ecological footprint of cities are much larger than cities themselves.
Urban sustainability does not require sourcing resources from nearby. Food transportation is not the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions from the food system. And urban food production potential is limited in places where it could make a difference.
But I find this reasoning flawed. The sustainability question should really be considering the counterfactual question: will the total footprint of humanity be greater if people lived more diffusely? If people choose to live in dense environments, they will certainly have to draw resources from the unpopulated hinterlands. Consider this extreme thought experiment: What if all of humanity lived in a single really tall building? Would sustainability dictate that our footprint be smaller than the building’s footprint? No. As long as our footprint doesn’t exceed the area of the planet, we are fine. A proper assessment of urban unsustainability requires more than a simple comparison of its footprint to its boundary.
But then, you ask, are we not emitting greenhouse gases by shipping food across great distances to meet the demands of urban dwellers? Yes, this is a problem. But again, one needs to consider the counterfactual. Is it better to buy bananas from Costa Rica, or to grow bananas in a local greenhouse using lots of energy? The right answer is that it will be more sustainable if people in temperate regions don’t eat bananas at all, but rather eat apples.
But numerous “life cycle analyses” have shown that the emissions associated with transporting food are minimal compared to the emissions associated with producing food. From that perspective, it is more important to consider what you are eating (beef versus lentils) than where your food is coming from. Of course, it will be more sustainable to consider both. But, if we take particular foods, there will be many contexts where it will be better to import the food than produce it locally. So, while sourcing food from great distances is not the most sustainable option, it might sometimes be more sustainable than producing it locally; and more importantly, eating local might not be our greatest leverage point for achieving food system sustainability.
I will finally take up the question of urban food production potential. Again, let’s do a thought experiment. Currently, about 12 percent of the world’s land is cropland, while 0.5–3 percent is urban (there is large variation in estimates, bu the truth is closer to the former, in my opinion). If we devoted 100 percent of our urban areas to food production (no dwellings anymore), urban crop yields would need to be 4–24 times higher to replace food that’s currently produced in cropland!! That’s a tall order. My research team published a study on this in 2014, looking at just vegetables, which is the focus of most urban agriculture. We asked the inverse question—what fraction of current urban areas would be required to produce 300 grams of vegetables per day (the WHO recommendation for individual consumption)? We found that, globally, we would need to devote 1/3 of urban areas, but there was great regional disparity. In rich countries, where food availability is not a major issue, we found that little urban land is needed to meet the demand for vegetables. But in poor nations, where in fact urban agriculture could serve a critical need, greater than 100 percent of the urban area was needed simply to meet recommended vegetable consumption. Simply put, in countries where urban agriculture could serve a critical need, we cannot even produce a sufficient quantity of vegetables.
In closing, I feel that some of the often-proposed benefits of urban agriculture may be a distraction from dealing with urban sustainability challenges. Urban sustainability does not require sourcing resources from nearby. Food transportation is not the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions from the food system. And urban food production potential is limited in places where it could make a difference. I believe that the most important way in which urban dwellers can address urban sustainability challenges related to food is by fostering a transformation of the food system through changing dietary patterns, reducing food waste, arguing for better land use policies, and supporting sustainable farming operations through their purchases. And urban agriculture can certainly play an important role in this regard, by making people care about the food system, what they eat, where their food comes from, how it is produced, and so on, and by making them more active participants in the food system.
Kristin Reynolds is a critical geographer and urban food systems scholar in New York City. Her research focuses on urban agriculture and social justice using action research approaches. Her co-authored book Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City (2016, University of Georgia Press) examines the efforts of urban agriculture activists, primarily people of color and women, to create more socially and environmentally just urban systems through farming and gardening initiatives.
Kristin Reynolds
Urban agriculture’s contribution to sustainability depends on a focus on social, economic, and political equity
Urban agriculture can provide many benefits to cities including increased access to fresh and culturally-acceptable food; venues for environmental and nutrition education; green space; and, as a form of green infrastructure, absorption of stormwater and support for urban biodiversity. Over the past two decades, planners, policymakers, and non-governmental funders have begun to recognize these and other benefits of city farms and gardens, and have lent more support to a practice that was for decades viewed as an inappropriate use of urban space.
Since urban agriculture can increase food access for low-income city residents, all forms of farming and gardening are presumed to do so. This narrative often gives short shrift to social, political, and economic equity.
In the United States, state-level and municipal governments are now supporting urban agriculture through measures such as formal food system or sustainability policy plans; changes in city zoning codes; and tax incentives for commercial urban farming. At the federal level, the United States Department of Agriculture has begun to recognize urban farming as a legitimate agricultural activity (defined as an operation grossing $1000 or more in sales each year) and has funded urban agriculture projects through a number of granting programs. Private foundations have also provided funding for a variety of activities that take place in gardens and farms such as nutrition education and job skill development for low-income youth.
Given all of its potential benefits, and the increased support for farming in cities, it is reasonable to see urban agriculture as a contributor to urban sustainability. Yet it is important to consider this question more deeply. The dominant urban agriculture narrative in the United States and many regions in the Global North often conflates potential benefits with generalizable characteristics. (For example, since urban agriculture can increase food access for low-income city residents, all forms of farming and gardening are presumed to do so, even though some commercial operations produce food primarily for sale to high-end outlets and other projects may grow mainly flowers or non-edible native plants.) This narrative, like mainstream sustainability and even urban resilience tropes, often gives short shrift to social, political, and economic equity. As urban agriculture has become more popular in the Global North, and as innovative or high-tech (e.g., rooftop agriculture; vertical farming) and commercial forms of urban agriculture are developed and expanded, critical social justice questions are often downplayed or ignored.
As I have examined elsewhere, projects led by individuals and groups with financial resources—often upper middle class and/or white people—are more widely recognized as important drivers of the contemporary urban agriculture system, and this feeds on itself: recognition begets more recognition, often in the form of financial or political support.
La Finca del Sur, South Bronx. Photo: Rob Stephenson
Meanwhile, there are many urban agriculture projects led by people of color and working class people, as there have been for generations. Many of these community leaders and activists use urban agriculture to address various forms of oppression and exclusion from mainstream economies and political decision-making in cities—in addition to growing food. Often they do this despite having minimal financial resources or being disconnected from policymaking processes through which they might advocate for resources to strengthen their initiatives. Examples of such groups include Friends of Brook Park, an environmental justice organization in the South Bronx (historically one of the lowest income congressional districts of the United States), which oversees a community garden and runs an on-farm alternatives-to-incarceration program for youth. La Finca del Sur, a non-profit farm and garden run by Latina and Black women (also in the South Bronx) focuses on community and women’s empowerment, as well solidarity with women farmers in the Global South. In Bed-Stuy, a historically low-income neighborhood in Brooklyn, members of Hattie Carthan Community Garden run a farmers market and provide a venue to realize self-determination through food production and related activities.
These and other projects like them use farming and gardening to explicitly address social, political, and economic equity in food and environmental systems. The question about whether urban agriculture can contribute to urban sustainability must include a discussion these critical social justice issues. Reconsidering urban agriculture along these lines; developing policy initiatives and funding programs to support social justice-oriented initiatives; and shifting the narrative about leadership in the urban farming and gardening movement will help us to realize urban agriculture’s full potential to help create sustainable and just cities.
Esther Sanyé-Mengual is Marie Curie Fellow at the Research Centre on Urban Environment for Agriculture and Biodiversity (RESCUE-AB) – University of Bologna (Italy)
Esther Sanyé-Mengual and Kathrin Specht
What can we expect from urban rooftop agriculture in terms of sustainability?
It is a common phenomenon that people consider food production and consumption as a one-way road, whereby food products are transported from rural areas to the cities. But there are broader visions for food production in the future. Urban agriculture is taking up the idea that the city itself can be productive, too, while so-called waste products (like organic “waste”, “waste” water, or “waste” heat can be used or re-used for food production.
Can urban rooftop agriculture make a substantial contribution to food security in Europe? Not in its current state.
We find the topic of urban rooftop farming particularly interesting because we see that roofs are largely unused spaces in most cities, and they have a great potential for food production without competing with alternative uses in the same way that urban agriculture “on the ground” often does.
We follow the understanding that sustainability has three different dimensions (environment, society, and economy) which need to co-exist in a balanced manner. All three dimensions must be considered in order to avoid the generation of negative environmental or social impacts when exclusively promoting economic development, for example.
Depending on their geographical context and goals, urban agriculture can have very diverse effects. Recently, we investigated the effects of rooftop agriculture in different European cities. One of our studies demonstrates that rooftop agriculture could increase the current production of local food in cities by using those roofs that are currently without a function. Such production would signify food production at “kilometer 0”, since production and consumption are co-located. In the city of Barcelona, local tomatoes produced in a rooftop greenhouse could substitute the demand for imported tomatoes from Southern Spain. This effect generates the reduction of environmental impacts (such as greenhouse gas emissions or energy consumption) compared to the imported tomatoes.
Roofgarden. Photo: Esther Sanyé- Mengual
The different initiatives of rooftop agriculture can be differentiated in four main groups.
Rooftop gardens. Here the food production is not the unique aim of the system. These initiatives are devoted to address social gaps and educational needs.
Rooftop farms are business-oriented projects, where food production is the main goal, although it can be combined with other activities.
Rooftop engineering initiatives are research- and business-oriented types, where technology development is the major aim (e.g. research projects, start-ups).
Landscape rooftop projects are initiatives where, similar to green roof systems, the greening of the space is the main function.
These four groups contribute differently to urban sustainability. While rooftop farms have a large contribution to food security, rooftop gardens focus more on community development at the social level.
At the moment, rooftop agriculture initiatives in Europe are limited in number and area. This means that rooftop agriculture is not a main source of urban food products, particularly considering the large urban population. However, recent trends in food consumption indicate that the demand for local and ecologically-friendly food is growing and urban agriculture could be a source to feed these types of consumers.
Similar to rural agriculture, the environmental sustainability of urban rooftop farming depends on the applied farming practices (use of energy, input of fertilizers, etc.). Therefore, urban rooftop agriculture is not sustainable per se, and the production can be as unsustainable as in conventional agriculture, depending on management techniques. However, urban agriculture covers many particular urban needs beyond producing food, such as education and social inclusion.
If we are asked to answer if urban rooftop agriculture can make a substantial contribution to food security in Europe, we can answer: not in its current state. Even though it has high potential to increase production quantities in the future, it can only be considered a part of the whole food system at the moment and a “plus” to rural production.
References:
Sanyé-Mengual E, Orsini F, Oliver-Solà J, et al. (2015) Techniques and crops for efficient rooftop gardens in Bologna, Italy. Agronomy for Sustainable Development 35:1477–1488.
Specht, K., Siebert, R., Hartmann, I., Freisinger, U. B., Sawicka, M., Werner, A., Thomaier, S., Henckel, D., Walk, H., Dierich, A. (2014). Urban agriculture of the future: an overview of sustainability aspects of food production in and on buildings. Agriculture and Human Values, 31(1), 33–51.
Dr. Shaleen Singhal is a Professor at TERI School of Advanced Studies with 21 years of research and academic experience working on sustainable urban development issues in India and UK. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK and a Visiting Fulbright Fellow for Yale University, US.
Shaleen Singhal
Urban Agriculture and Sustainability
Projections indicate that urban population rate of change will be significant in the Asia-Pacific region and particularly in China and India. It is also estimated that by 2020, there will be more than 500 cities with a million or more residents, and that the average size of the world’s 100 largest cities will be 8.5 million up from around 7.6 million in 2011 (UNHSP, 2011). While cities are considered to be the main engines of economic growth, accounting for 80 percent of global GDP while occupying only three percent of the land surface, they are severely responsible for unsustainable rates of resource consumption and environmental problems.
Urban agriculture directly contributes to the nexus of water, food, and energy.
In India’s aspirations for growth, cities and city-regions will have a very vital contribution. While promoting economic competitiveness, the particular focus has to be on human development indicators. To minimise unsustainable patterns of growth, optimise resource consumption, and deal with environmental and socio-economic degeneration challenges, cities will continue to be come into greater focus. The phenomenon of urban sustainability in India thus relates to the “cities striving to improve their performance by exploiting new opportunities for growth and development while counteracting inherited problems in a sustainable manner” (Singhal et al, 2010). The water-food-energy nexus is a vital component of sustainability significantly influencing the metabolism of rapidly growing large– and medium–sized cities and their associated peri–urban areas. Urban agriculture directly contributes to this nexus.
The growing practice of urban agriculture is expected to build the resilience of cities in India and other emerging economies for (i) longer-term sustainability as well as for (ii) short-term crisis management. These include the ecological dimension of the ecosystem approach, which focuses on minimising GHG emissions and the ecological footprint of cities for sustainability. Improved local food security and self-sufficiency, coping capacity to deal with change and unexpected food crisis, and reducing urban heat island effect, are some of the immediate known benefits of urban agriculture. Several rapidly urbanising cities, however, are faced with governance challenges; lack of availability of open space accompanied by fast land-use conversion of agricultural land; and poor structural organisation and representation of urban farmers. In such cities, as urban agriculture is mostly practiced along banks of rivers and natural drainage system, it is faced with a greater threat of pollution and polluted produce. This effect results from an increased pressure on already-inadequate infrastructure, such as poor sewerage, drainage, and solid waste management services (Singhal and Kapur, 2002), thus polluting water bodies that are expected to cater to urban agriculture.
To deal with this complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon of urban agriculture, comprehensive approaches need to be adopted for assessment and sustainable solutions for cities. A few emerging and innovative ways include: a system-based, dynamic approach to examine forward and backward linkages and boundaries of influence; an urban nexus approach focusing on the sustainable development goals; bottom-up planning of local areas and resources; and urban green infrastructure planning. Furthermore, a transdisciplinary learning process is the need of the hour to decode this very complex but extremely important phenomenon of urban agriculture in cities, particularly in emerging economies. Knowledge networks between cities in mature and emerging economies will facilitate such learning through robust collaborative research led by higher education institutions with contribution from practitioners, NGOs, and CBOs.
References
Global Report on Human Settlements 2011, United Nations Human Settlement Programme
Singhal, S. Berry, J. and McGreal, S. 2010. Linking regeneration and business with competitiveness for low carbon cities: lessons for India. In India Infrastructure Report 2010: Infrastructure Development in a Low Carbon Economy. Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
Singhal, S. and Kapur, A. 2002. Environmental management plans for the communities of Lucknow. International journal of appropriate technologies for water supply and sanitation – Waterlines. ITDG publishing, U.K. Vol. 20. No.4, April 2002.
Naomi Tsur is Founder and Chair of the Israel Urban Forum, Chair of the Jerusalem Green Fund, Founder and Head of Green Pilgrim Jerusalem, and served a term as Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, responsible for planning and the environment.
Naomi Tsur
The camp of “believers” in the efficacy of urban agriculture is still small but steadily growing. There are those that say there is no point in talking about it unless you can prove that a city can be food-secure on the basis of food grown in urban and peri-urban farms. It seems that we are required to submit proof that Community Sustained Agriculture can indeed sustain the entire community. Others posit that a developed system of CSA might threaten the livelihood of “real farmers”.
Before reckoning the area available for peri-urban food-growing, we have to convince the consumer of the advantages of locally produced food.
We are currently debating the role of urban agriculture in the context of its potential contribution to sustainable urban life. In that context, before reckoning the area available for peri-urban food-growing, we have to address a deeper layer of consciousness and promote basic food awareness. I believe this means that, on a parallel track, we have to convince the consumer of the advantages of locally produced food. This is a social marketing campaign that is waiting to happen. If it is successful, then consumer demand should pave the way for increasing numbers of CSA initiatives.
Thus far the policy-makers have been out of the equation at the national level in most countries. This seems to be a result of the perception that agriculture is national business, and therefore food production cannot be addressed at the local level. This is yet another expression of the deep disconnect in most countries between local and national levels of government.
Are we at an impasse or are we progressing towards more edible cities? Is it possible to measure the positive footprint of CSA, set against the negative impact of cities that bring their food in from great distances?
I have just come home from a 2-day conference on the theme of agriculture, nutrition, and the environment. Nutrition and public health experts are bringing a new voice to the table, seeking to combat the global plague of obesity. In Israel, nutritionists are joining forces with environmentalists in the drive to encourage local food production, and to incorporate food growing and nutrition lessons in the regular school curriculum. Unfortunately, the Ministry of Agriculture sees all this movement as a threat to serious farming, whatever that may be, and I know this is true of many other countries.
I firmly believe that although quite a few pieces of the urban food puzzle are not yet in place, a global movement supporting local food production is part and parcel of an increasingly urban world. In this brave new world, not only will cities become major agricultural players, but they will also realize the need to have a strong and resilient local economy, which will draw its strength to a great extent from having a self-sufficient food system. The kind of food system that can give real food security to a large city will go beyond the city’s boundaries and spread throughout the bio-shed, and will prosper through constant interaction with all the local food players, restaurants, caterers, food cooperatives, and many others in the hospitality industry.
This process is well underway with a tremendous groundswell in the CSA movement. In Jerusalem, where we have been convening a “Food for Jerusalem” forum for the last couple of years, with as many of the urban food-growing stakeholders as we can find, I believe that for serious peri-urban CSA to have the desired impact on the urban food cycle, the CSA farmers should form a coalition. As an organized group of entrepreneurs, they would become a movement, instead of an assortment of farm businesses in competition with each other for the same clients. As an organized force, the CSA farmers could back the kind of social marketing campaign needed to expand their customer reach, together. I am interested to hear if other cities have reached similar conclusions about the strategy needed to expand the urban agriculture movement further than the limited market it has gained.
Andre Viljoen is Professor of Architecture at the University of Brighton. His research, usually undertaken with Katrin Bohn, focuses on sustainable design.
Andre Viljoen and Katrin Bohn
Second Nature Urban Agriculture: Designing the Productive City
In the future, successful cities will be productive in many ways: socially, economically and ecologically. Networks of open space will be essential if cities are to remain desirable and environmentally sustainable. Landscape, like buildings, will become multifunctional, thereby enabling beneficial exchanges between the constructed and natural environments.
The concept of Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes proposes integrating networks of connected open urban spaces that are designed to coherently include food producing urban agriculture.
The phenomenal pressures on cities are well known; the UN department of Economic and Social Affairs 2011 projection for urbanisation estimates that by 2030 the average world percentage of residents living in urban areas will be 59.9 percent and 82 percent in “more developed regions”. Pressure from urbanisation makes access to open urban space an urgent concern.
Furthermore, urban populations are experiencing an unprecedented increase in diet related ill health, such as diabetes and obesity. If cities are to thrive, then urban planners and designers need to radically rethink the way cities overcome these challenges, so that they become desirable and environmentally stable.
The CPUL concept. Green corridors provide a continuous network of productive open space containing routes for pedestrians and cyclists. A variety of fields for urban agriculture and other outdoor work/lesiure activities are located within the network and serve adjacent built up areas. Image courtesy of Bohn&Viljoen.
The concept of Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs) was developed in 2004 by Bohn&Viljoen and aims to address these problems by proposing an ambitious but achievable strategy for integrating networks of connected open urban spaces that are designed to coherently include food producing urban agriculture. Urban agriculture, which refers to the production of fruit, vegetables, fish, and, sometimes, small animals, within cities, is not new, and each city and culture will have its own tradition to draw upon when establishing a CPUL. But what is new is the understanding of the multiple benefits, in addition to the production of sustainable food, that CPULs can bring to cities. It is likely that in the future, networks of open space will be as important to cities as clusters of buildings.
There is much evidence emerging for these assertions. For example, regarding urban biodiversity, in 2010 the United Nations University Institute for Advanced Studies issued a policy report on cities and biodiversity. It noted that, “as the rule of interdependent adjacencies in urban ecology has it: the more diversity, and the more collaboration ‘between unlikely partners’, the better the chances for biodiversity, sustainability, and resilience” (Hester, 2006). Linked to this idea is the concept of Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs), which represents a powerful urban design instrument for achieving local sustainability while reducing cities’ ecological footprints (Viljoen, 2005)’ (UNUIAS 2010: 31-32).
We may conclude that biodiversity delivers or supports much needed ecosystems services and that it can be achieved by creating “more, bigger, better and joined” (Lawton et al. 2010: 3) resilient and coherent ecological networks…CPULs.
The CPUL concept is being applied internationally. Spiel/Feld Marzahn, Berlin, Germany was initiated in 2011 as a larger scale community food growing project commissioned by the local authority and was designed by Prof. Katrin Bohn with students from the Technical University of Berlin who worked with local residents. This project demonstrates how CPUL spaces can reactivate underused public space and result in “place making”. It has been recognised in Germany for its contribution to the UNESCO decade of education for sustainable development. Photo courtesy of Bohn&Viljoen.
Implementing the CPUL city concept
There is already a lot of experience in how successful urban agriculture projects are established. Using this knowledge and relating it to the concept of multi-stakeholder planning, a four-point plan of CPUL City Actions has been developed, intended to provide a clearly stated overview of the various processes and activities required to implement CPULs over the long-term.
These four actions are: Action U+D = Co-ordinated and mutually supportive Bottom Up + Top Down initiatives and activities; Action VIS = Visualising the Consequences of CPUL proposals; Action IUC = Completing Inventories of existing Urban Capacities for supporting new initiatives; and Action R = Researching for Change. It would be rare to find successful long-term projects with not at least three, but usually all of the four actions evident, although often they have not been articulated as such. The UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council is currently funding a research network to explore how policy pathways can be developed to support the large number of emerging productive landscapes; the network’s website contains further information.
Setting out clear processes, such as multi-stakeholder planning, policy development strategies and the four CPUL City actions, should assist future stakeholders in realising better and more resilient projects in the future, while discouraging projects that are fundamentally flawed. If successfully implemented CPULs have the potential to create more experience for less consumption.
The Urban Agriculture Curtain, designed as a prototype by Bohn&Viljoen in 2009, shows how the CPUL concept can be applied within buildings. A vertical hydroponic system was developed with Hadlow College for use in London’s Building Centre, to supply salad crops during the “London Yields” exhibition.
This paper on design strategies for the integration of urban agriculture and sustainable urban food systems into cities was first published in 2015 by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) as part of their international British Papers Series, “Current thinking on sustainable city design.”
Katrin Bohn is an architect and a senior lecturer at the University of Brighton. Together with André Viljoen, she has worked widely on the design concept of CPUL [Continuous Productive Urban Landscape].
Claudia Visoni is a journalist, environmentalist and urban gardener from São Paulo.
Claudia Visoni
It’s very obvious that we urgently need more urban agriculture in every city around the world, maybe until rural and urban areas become so interconnected that we all will live (again) in the Garden of Eden. I’ll leave the figures to my talented colleagues and focus on the many cross-benefits of urban food production and community gardening.
Cultivating land in the city opens up the gates to the transition to a decentralized mindset that can fix diverse problems.
An urban edible garden is the opposite of a viaduct. A viaduct has just one purpose (speed up traffic from point A to point B) and several terrible side effects for every form of life around it. The edible garden, however, even if it’s only one flourished square meter in the middle of a “bad” neighborhood, is a refuge for nature and people, a spark of hope for a better world.
Let’s ignore for a moment the big environmental challenges humanity is facing right now and that our food system is neither resilient nor sustainable. Even if nothing like these problems were happening, I’d still be here speaking for urban agriculture. Cultivating land in the city opens up the gates to the transition to a decentralized mindset that can fix so many other problems brought by globalization and an economic system based on the destruction of biomes.
In addition to the sheer fact that food is produced, relieving the pressure cities put on rural and wild areas, urban and peri-urban agriculture can improve urban sustainability in at least 10 other ways:
Improvements the local climate through controlling excessive heat and air dryness;
Depaving of the soil, which contributes to avoiding floods;
Providing refuge for small fauna, especially bees;
Reducing garbage production, since organic waste is used to make compost and self-grown vegetables don’t require packaging;
Adaptating to climate change (the small-scale and diverse beds are more resistant than big monoculture farms to unstable and unpredictable weather);
Conserving public space (where we plant food, others tend not to litter or damage);
Reducing crime, since edible gardens require lots of work and people are always around…
Empowering communities. Is there a better place to meet the neighbors and make acquaintances than in a garden?
Educating about nutritional: we rediscover forgotten edible plants, every harvest is a pretext to exchange recipes, and… we start to eat more and more vegetables!
Providing free entertainment and health benefits: gardening is a physical activity in the open air combined with the opportunity for sunbathing, chatting, and laughter.
The case for cycling in cities could not be more obvious: it is an emission-free, noise-free, healthy, cheap, accessible mode of transport. However, there is a lot more to promoting and planning for cycling, particularly in terms of understanding the politics, identities, and cultures associated with it—not just at a country level, but within each city and even district. To illustrate this point, I will use London as a case study. There have recently been heated controversies related to urban cycling schemes which shed light on the complexities involved with promoting cycling specifically, and active, sustainable transport more generally.
Cycling is a socially complex mode of sustainable and active transport. Its successful implementation necessitates community input.
Background
It is may be helpful to begin with some background on planning for active transport modes such as walking and cycling. Globally, the 1980s and early 1990s witnessed a growth of interest in these modes from a planning and urban design perspective, particularly given the rise in environmental awareness and the sustainable development agenda (see references below for further details). The late 1990s and 2000s also saw a surge of research in this area from the public health community, which was interested in promoting physical activity and in understanding the influence of the physical environment on people’s travel choices and behaviours. This literature was detailed and provided valuable insights into interventions that could promote active transport. However, this body of work focused on epidemiological research methods and did not sufficiently address social perceptions and cultural identities related to walking and cycling. More socially-based research has recently emerged which is filling in some of these gaps.
One such study is the research led by Professor Colin Pooley at the University of Lancaster, England. He examined walking and cycling behaviours and attitudes in four English towns (Leeds, Leicester, Worcester, Lancaster). In addition to often-cited barriers like perceived safety risks of walking and cycling in the absence of segregated pathways, the study identified a general perception that walking and cycling were “abnormal” transport modes (as opposed to car travel), even for short distance trips. They argue that these factors can explain the substantially lower levels of cycling in the UK (1.5 percent of all trips), compared to neighbouring countries such as Germany (10 percent), Denmark (18 percent), and the Netherlands (26 percent). The policy recommendations from this study stressed the importance of tackling the broader social and cultural barriers to walking and cycling, in addition to providing the appropriate infrastructure.
London
In London, cycling has been a political topic since the 1980s when pro-cycling policies were introduced by Ken Livingstone (the Labour Party) after winning the Greater London Council (GLC) elections in 1981. Conservative borough (district) councils in London such as Kensington and Chelsea greatly opposed such schemes, partly due to political antagonism and partly due to a belief by their transport engineers that catering for cycling was not important. As soon as the GLC was abolished in 1986, Kensington and Chelsea council removed the cycle lanes they had been forced to implement.
New segregated cycle routes, Victoria Embankment, London. Photo copyright Huda Shaka.
Since then, cycling has regained political importance in London; the (Conservative) mayor called for a Cycling Revolution in 2010, claimed that cycling is arguably “the single most important tool for making London the best big city in the world”, and released a Vision for Cycling in 2013 . It has recently been argued that the promotion and practice of utility cycling in London can be conceptualised as part of a broader neoliberalisation processes, whereby what is being promoted is a “narrow productivist framing of cycling”, which focuses on shaping individuals as “entrepreneurs of the self”, for whom cycling will provide more efficient movement. This aligns with findings from research on social identities related to cycling in London published in 2010, which demonstrated that many London residents, particularly in inner London, associate cycling with independence, speed, and efficiency as well as with health benefits.
There are other discourses that shape the identity and culture of cycling in London. In his book One Less Car, Furness highlights how newspapers in London, particularly between 2005 and 2010, demonised cyclists for threatening the safety, freedom, mobility and way of life of car drivers. He sees this as an extension of the British “car driver as a victim” mentality promoted by the automobile industry. Another study noted that, in London, “cycling is disproportionately an activity of affluent, White men” who cultivate a particular “assertive” style which is “less appealing to those with other class, gendered and ethnic identities”. They also suggest that the relative “invisibility” of Black and Asian cyclists reduces the appeal of cycling in these communities.
It is not entirely surprising, therefore, that while the share of cycling as a mode of transportation within a journey increased substantially among male residents of inner London, cycling’s overall share of journey stages in London remains at 2 percent, unchanged since it doubled in 2005 (when the attacks on the London public transport network occurred). In fact, the UK Department for Transport recently highlighted that there has been a decrease in the proportion of London adult residents who cycle at least once a month, compared to 2010.
Mini-Hollands Controversy
This brings us to the controversy that has recently arisen in two outer London boroughs (Waltham Forest and Enfield) related to the implementation of local cycling schemes. The schemes are part of Transport for London’s (TfL) Mini-Hollands programme, aimed primarily at encouraging more people in outer London to undertake short trips by bicycle rather than by car. Approved in 2014, the Enjoy Waltham Forest and Cycle Enfield plans are due to be completed by 2018. The plans were developed by the individual borough councils and include a range of physical interventions such as new segregated cycling lanes and pedestrianised areas, which will be funded by TfL. The plans do not generally extend to the provision of educational or behavioural change campaigns; however, they do recognise the importance of normalising cycling, particularly amongst women and ethnic minorities. Waltham Forest and Enfield both have high percentages of Asian and Black minorities (38 percent and 29 percent, respectively).
Despite this recognition, the schemes have been implemented hastily, with little consideration of how to broaden the appeal of cycling. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are facing significant challenges from the local community, some members of which have formed anti-mini-Holland social media groups, started online petitions, taken to the streets to protest, and even filed a court case against their local council. While this opposition has garnered substantial coverage, the media and pro-cycling groups have tended to characterise protestors as fringe groups of “drivers” or “anti-cyclists”.
Pedestrians enjoying street with limited vehicle access (part of mini-Holland scheme); Waltham Forest, London. Image copyright Huda Shaka.
Comments on the online petitions provide a deeper insight into the cause of the protests and identity of protestors. The main contested issue in Waltham Forest is road closures limiting vehicle access on local residential and commercial streets. This has created congestion on other roads and has severely impacted access for less mobile residents such as the elderly and the disabled, as noted by many of the comments on the recent online petition. Signatories of the petition also lament the community divisions which the scheme has created, particularly along ethnicity and class lines. One of the comments also draws attention to the “patronising and polarising nature of the debate in which cyclists are painted as saints, single handedly saving the planet and the rest of us are dismissed as lazy, thoughtless and selfish, driving around in our gas-guzzling cars…”
In Enfield, the primary discontent seems to be with the introduction of a segregated cycle lane on a commercial street. The comments from petition signatories reflect the fact that many see cycling as a foreign identity and way of life, and not simply a transport option. “I believe that this ill-advised and indeed dangerous plan will disadvantage ALL road users other than a few cyclists. The demographic of this area is not one that will be taking to using bicycles in the future…” is an example of the comments included. This is a different discourse to that in Waltham Forest, where many of those in opposition to the scheme have insisted that they are for cycling and for safer cycling routes. Both Waltham Forest and Enfield petition signatories argue that the schemes have been implemented in an undemocratic and rushed fashion, without giving due to consideration to concerns by locals.
Interestingly, the third mini-Holland scheme, Kensington borough’s Go Cycle, did not face any community protests or vocal objections, although the scheme includes a number of cycle routes and the consultation process was not significantly different to the other two schemes. On the other hand, only 15 percent of Kingston’s population is Asian and Black. Furthermore, both Waltham Forest and Enfield are led by the Labour Party whereas Kingston is a stronghold of the Conservative Party.
Conclusion
In their book Cycling and Society, Horton, Rosen, and Cox make a very relevant comment, worth quoting in full: “Historically, geographically, socially and culturally, cycling is a complex and diverse practise. Yet it is increasingly promoted by national governments across the rich world as a simple, straightforward mode of mobility with a variety of beneficial effects.” They go on to suggest that cycling would be much more effectively promoted if policies were based on a better understanding of its complexity and diversity. The mini-Holland projects in London demonstrate that this is true at a city and even neighbourhood level as well as a national scale. Similar examples of politicised contestation of urban cycling schemes have been reported in other cities such as Toronto and Rio.
These examples reveal that simply introducing new physical realities (e.g. road closures, cycle lanes) overnight is not the way to promote sustainable and active transport in existing neighbourhoods, particularly for socially complex modes such as cycling. Furthermore, not all objections to cycling projects stem from ‘anti-cyclist’ attitudes, as demonstrated by the Waltham Forest case. Local communities may have other reasons to oppose active transport interventions, which should be carefully understood and addressed by planning authorities. Patronising and inflammatory discourse is never the answer. In addition, if the aim of urban policy makers is to reduce congestion, reduce emissions, and increase physical activity levels, then perhaps less politicised modes, such as walking, should be given more serious consideration.
Finally, just like any other planning intervention, it is inevitable that there will be winners and losers with planning for active transport. Transport planners know full well that effectively promoting alternative transport modes will require prioritising these modes over cars, thereby inconveniencing car users—at the very least. However, it is important for planner and policy makers to be conscious of social divisions and inequalities which may be worsened by ‘sustainable’ transport interventions, and to avoid such detrimental outcomes through more considered planning and implementation.
Cities are considered to be at the forefront of sustainability practices (Rosenzweig et al., 2010) aimed at addressing the impacts of global environmental change and socio-economic inequality. Recent developments in research on urban resilience promote ecological responses to climate change and other urban stressors (McPhearson et al., 2016; European Commission, 2015; Royal Society, 2014). Nature-based Solutions (or NBS) encompass a broad range of such ecological responses.
In India, the high level of economic inequality and recent droughts requires a rethink of the human-environment relationship.
Indian Prime Minister Modi’s Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (or AMRUT) proposes to rejuvenate the growing number of large cities in the country through infrastructure as well as management reform-based interventions. Unfortunately, the policy and planning community for Indian cities has yet to integrate the potential of NBS for building resilience and achieving sustainability goals.
Development of literature and knowledge on NBS brings together and builds on previous knowledge in biodiversity and ecosystems, sustainable urban development, natural resource management, and climate change response (European Commission, 2015). At the core of the practice of NBS, however, is the need to rethink the link between people and nature in cities, in order to address problems of urbanization. At a theoretical level, it may require redefining ecology in cities to an ecology of and for cities (McPhearson et al., 2016).
NBS tools relevant to cities include restored and constructed wetlands, preserved urban forestry, and greenfield afforestation and greened brownfields; as well as greening of grey surfaces such as rooftops and walls and natural flood control techniques (Kabisch et al., 2016; European Commission, 2015). NBS could be considered “an umbrella term for all related applications of ecosystem services, natural capital, and ‘lessons from nature’” (Potschin et al., 2015: pp2).
Anthone Appa, a peri-urban farmer and shepherd, has taken his sheep to graze for eight hours daily for the last fifty years. As his environs get increasingly built-up, his daily ‘journey’ grows longer. Unless local planning factors in the resource requirements of such nature-based livelihoods, they will not remain viable. Their loss is a loss of livelihood diversity for the city, eroding the resilience of not just Anthone Appa’s family, but ultimately of Bangalore itself. Photo courtesy of Sumetee Gajjar.
City-scale NBS tools are predominantly from European cities (see, for example, urban ecologist Dagmar Haase’s blog on the topic). In addition, practitioners from complementary fields such as landscape architecture also study city-based NBS from their particular perspectives (see, for example, a recent survey of cities from across the world which are re-inventing their relationship with their rivers).
The concept of NBS still needs to be recrafted for it to have value in application and relevance to policy in the Indian context. Currently, people in India study the fractured relationship between city residents and urban nature from the lens of urban commons (see Unnikrishnan and Nagendra, 2013; Narain and Vij, 2016) or the failure of environmental governance (Purushothaman, 2016). There is a recent shift towards acknowledging the role of nature in cities for resilience-building (such as wooded groves of Bangalore), in particular to inform urban planning and policy-making in India. The International Union for Conservation of Nature recently convened a workshop bringing together Delhi’s state government; the national Ministry for Environment, Forests and Climate Change; a range of state-level agencies as well as private actors to collectively plan towards using urban biodiversity as a means for promoting NBS. This will be an interesting space to watch, both in terms of its extension to other mega cities and medium sized cities in India, as well as the way in which NBS is contextualized to Indian culture and values.
A compendium of solutions for resilient cities
The Urban Climate Change Research Network (or UCCRN) is a coalition of international researchers that was formed at the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit in 2007 to establish the status and understanding of climate response at the city level. UCCRN’s first assessment report, ARC3, was released in 2011, and was lauded by the global scientific community and city leadership for its thorough assessment of the effect that climate change could have on public health, local infrastructure, and economic vitality of city-regions in so-called developed and developing countries.
The UCCRN recently launched its second assessment report (ARC3.2), supported by more than a hundred case studies from the developed and developing world, showcasing climate mitigation and adaptation efforts of cities from across Europe, Latin America, Africa, Australia, and Asia. City initiatives cover a range of services and sectors—transportation, public health, housing, energy security, water management, solid waste, and disaster preparedness. Re-conceptualization of city systems is recommended in order to achieve the dual goal of greenhouse gas reduction as well as climate adaptation, and to move cities towards environmental sustainability, greater equity, and resilience against disasters. A large number of such recommendations are centered on NBS.
For example, Jerusalem is predicted to face higher temperatures and moisture stress, exposing the city’s flora and fauna to adaptation challenges. The city has responded with the establishment of the Gazelle Valley Conservation Park, an initiative that can rally citizens and businesses towards further nature-based adaptation actions. Urban authorities in Colombo, Sri Lanka recognize the potential of the inter-connected system of wetlands in the city for natural flood control. Researchers are undertaking scientific assessment of future climate risks to the city through downscaling of climate projections in order to garner political support for conserving urban wetlands.
The ARC3.2 report represents a larger pool of cities (ranging from mega to small in terms of population size) than its predecessor did, and offers much for city leaders from developing countries to consider. However, temporally truncated case studies tend to glaze over the historical developmental and governance challenges urban settlements of developing countries, such as India.
Indian cities such as Bangalore, Surat, Hyderabad, and Gorakhpur are listed in this compendium of approaches and initiatives for urban planners, city officials, policy makers, and city leaders to learn from and potentially adopt. Researchers studied Bangalore along with the cities of Santiago, Chile, and Los Angeles to understand how different cities utilize adaptation options to address shortages in water supply. City planners’ view of a city—as a closed system with limited, external inputs (such as the Cauvery River); or an open system with multiple water supply options that exist within city boundaries (such as groundwater that can be stored in lakes and retained in wetlands or rain water that can be harvested through the built environment)—underpins these options. These researchers have found the position of a city in the river basin to be a major determinant of water adaptation strategies adopted.
Gorakhpur, one of the most flood-prone districts in Northern India, has focused on building the capacity of local authorities to understand local impacts of climate change in the Gangetic plains. City officials are able to consider and re-allocate funds towards climate compatible development, and thereby proactively minimize loss of life and property to frequent and extreme flooding events.
Surat, another flood-prone city in Western India, fostered collaboration among city stakeholders to get involved in the management of water in the upstream reservoir on a regular basis (for more details, read this article on Citiscope). Recognizing the contribution of poorly planned development to incidents of urban flooding, Surat’s Municipal Corporation no longer permits builders to construct on the floodplain.
A critical review of the Indian case studies shows that although planning approaches for Bangalore have been cited, they are yet to translate into a difference in the treatment of nature in the city. Gorakhpur and Surat were able to implement NBS largely due to the targeted support of the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network, a five-year initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation.
In high growth cities, which provide little in the way of quality of life for majority of their poor and disadvantaged households, NBS for climate change may not appear too urgent (as compared to addressing basic services backlog), or attractive (for ease of implementation, as compared to engineering-driven solutions), unless backed by public policies that recognize the potential for NBS.
A peri-urban village tank in Kolar District, is no longer connected to the larger water network in the region. Proximity to Bangalore and input intensive farming methods have led to greater personal wealth, and therefore rapid construction of larger homes and hardening of ground surfaces. The tank water is used by many households for domestic cleansing purposes, exposing them to high health risks. The tank itself can flood easily during extreme rainfall events. Photo courtesy of Sumetee Gajjar.
A mission for urban transformation
In 2015, the Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India launched AMRUT, mainly to provide universal coverage of basic services and civic amenities and reduce pollution in cities, as a national priority. While the AMRUT mission courageously aims for urban transformation, it does so in the absence of a grounding in what such an endeavor would require, both in terms of socio-economic equity, as well as a re-connection with nature. This is one city-specific policy that could unlock the potential of NBS in Indian cities; but in its current articulation it pays lip-service to nature in the city as “green spaces and parks”!
The AMRUT mission is divided into eight components of water supply, sewerage, septage, stormwater drainage, urban transport, green spaces and parks, administrative reforms (capturing elements of mission governance), and capacity building. Aspects of sustainability are found in each of the components, but are not necessarily linked to each other. For example, the ‘water supply’ component includes rejuvenation of water bodies for drinking and recharging of groundwater. However, the role that urban lakes play in maintaining biodiversity and regulating urban floods is not acknowledged.
Recommendations for green spaces and parks within AMRUT are limited in their vision. Urban commons are valuable not just for recreational purposes, but also for their cultural, associational, and spiritual value. The instrumentality of each component is important, because that will determine whether a park or a lake becomes or stays a living part of the urban ecology, or functions as a fenced green island amidst a concrete jungle.
A limited role for resilience in AMRUT
Within the AMRUT mission, resilience is understood in the context of securing projects against potential disasters.While the intention is to attend to the vulnerability of the poor and the disadvantaged, the potential for building the city’s resilience at several interlinked scales remains unaddressed. Waste recycling and reuse, as well as reduction in unaccounted water in supply networks, is encouraged, but mostly through engineering and structural norms applied at the design stage of the “service level implementation plan”.
AMRUT guidelines recommend building resilience against urban floods through construction and maintenance of bulk infrastructure such as stormwater drains. Technical solutions, which are capital intensive and highly disruptive of urban functions during their construction phase, may be deemed appropriate at the scale of mega cities. However, smart, low-cost solutions also exist that preserve and build on existing natural assets in small and medium-sized urban settlements of India, as well as in rapidly urbanizing peripheries of big cities.
For example, in place of a higher capacity stormwater drainage network, natural flood control techniques—an NBS tool—could be utilized. Cities could mandate a balance of porous surfaces and paved surfaces on the ground that would reduce stormwater run-off substantially. These measures could be accompanied by enforcing wetland conservation and strict prohibition of formal and informal settlements on flood plains and lake beds.
Construction over lake beds, wetlands, and in dangerous proximity to a river’s course are leading causes of flooding in both coastal and non-coastal cities and towns in India (for example, the Uttarakhand floods in 2013, Srinagar floods in 2014 and 2015, and Chennai floods in 2016). Designing stormwater drains for the most extreme rainfall event is wasteful of land, building materials, and financial resources in multiple ways.
Multiple risks to urban resilience
At a recent orientation programme conducted with officials stationed at urban local bodies in Rajasthan, an arid to semi-arid state or province of India, Indian Institute for Human Settlements faculty learnt about the practical limitations of translating a mission for urban transformation in water-constrained cities of India. A majority of the officials expressed that the two biggest threats faced by their cities (such as Jaipur, Bikaner, Bharatpur and Ajmer) were water scarcity as the urban population expands and, not surprisingly, urban floods as the city’s built-up footprint grows.
The officials were quick to identify additional problems of urbanization, such as increased health risk due to human agglomeration in under-serviced and hazard-prone locations in cities and their vicinities. They also shared that the people most at risk in these locations are those without access to modern medicine or private health care.
Multiple deprivations further erode the capacity of the poor and disadvantaged to recover from extreme events such as heat waves and urban floods. The pattern of urbanization being followed in India means that natural assets within older, established core parts of the city are becoming green islands as cities build over lakes and water bodies, urban forests become dumping grounds, and highly productive, peri-urban agricultural land is converted into special economic zones (Karle SEZ, North Bangalore among others), with dubious societal benefits. All these aspects of urbanization render our cities and their inhabitants vulnerable to urban floods and water scarcity. Vulnerabilities which result from severe disruptions can surely not be addressed solely through linear solutions such as the construction and maintenance of stormwater drains, or the development of fenced-in green spaces and parks!
A ray of hope
As it stands, AMRUT is aspirational towards building urban resilience, but its transformational agenda seems to be focused solely on administrative reforms. The new urban mission is too limiting in the way that it relegates resilience to dealing with urban flood events. It also fails to leverage the potential of grounded NBS to address both local environmental change, as well as socio-economic inequity.
AMRUT guidelines require that projects under this mission seek convergence with the Smart Cities Mission, Heritage City Mission, Digital India, and Housing for All, among other nationally promulgated missions aimed at urban development. The hope is that cross-fertilization with pre-existing schemes and programmes will enable ‘learning from the past’ to inform a mature interpretation of urban resilience. In particular, building the capacity to work with nature at multiple scales (households, city infrastructure and regional networks). Successful initiatives from cities such as Gorakhpur, Indore, and Surat could provide a useful resource.
Given the high level of economic inequality in the country, intensified by successive, devastating droughts in recent years, a rethink of the human-environment relationship is required in India. As hundreds of cities across India adopt AMRUT, a huge opportunity for NBS may be lost unless city managers are encouraged to work with local residents, across social and economic classes to understand how nature already exists in their midst in the forms of urban forestry, wetlands, and urban agriculture; and city-makers work with these forms to increase urban resilience. City solutions that can thrive and regenerate without capital-intensive inputs from state agencies might help define the New Urban Agenda, which will be declared at the upcoming global conference for sustainable urban development, HABITAT III, in October 2016.
Cities which are able to embrace nature by weaving built infrastructure with green infrastructure will emerge as winners in the long term. City-scale NBS are informed by the condition and potential of nature in a city, dynamics of demographic and land-use change, lived vulnerability to extreme events, and projected impacts of climate change. Within Indian cities, NBS will need to be adopted at the stages of design (of buildings and fixtures) and planning and upgrade (of new and existing settlements).
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Our world is rapidly urbanizing at a rate that is unprecedented in the history of human kind. In 2014, the urban population reached nearly 4 billion people and it is predicted to gain an additional 2.5 billion people, most of whom will reside in African and Asian cities. Although the corresponding urban land cover represents only 1 to 3 percent of the planet, cities are centers of significant power and influence on people, society, economies, and natural resources. The rapid expansion of the global urban population has resulted in more intensification, densification, and outward expansion of existing cities and the creation of new cities.
A new urban reformation is spreading across the globe, which demands changes in how we create new cities and expand existing ones.
There are now numerous mega-cities in the world such as Tokyo, Delhi, New York, Mexico City, and Shanghai that support populations of upwards of 20 million people at densities of over 120,000 people per km2. As cities continue to grow, they stress social, economic, and ecological systems, for they require large amounts of resources, strain transport and other infrastructure, and often create ‘concrete jungles’ that lack greenery and open spaces. In 2011, a UN Global Report on Human Settlements warned that the future synergistic interactions between urbanization and global climate change ‘…threaten the quality of life, and the economic and social stability of human societies around the globe’ making them two of the fundamental themes of the 21st century. The magnitude of the global impact of urbanization has been highlighted in a recent issue of Science (20 May 2016) that features a special section entitled ‘Urban Planet’.
The discipline of urban ecology arose in the late 1990s, motivated in part by the rapid rate of urbanization and its often negative impacts on humans and the planet. It was formed through an amalgamation of a diversity of disciplines including geography, ecology, sociology, architecture, planning, and human health, to name a few. The science of urban ecology is primarily focused on increasing our understanding of the ecological and human dimensions of the structure and function of urban ecosystems. Practitioners are engaged in developing evidence-based designs, plans, and construction methods to create and maintain sustainable and resilient cities. We feel that the creation of more livable and healthy cities in the future can only be realized through the synergies achieved by bridging the gap between the science and practice of urban ecology.
Urban ecology: from emergence to reformation
Today, large and small cities are struggling to address myriad environmental and social challenges that impact human health and well-being, including poor waste management systems, inadequate energy supplies, poor food quality and availability, as well as environmental problems such as air, soil, and water pollution. In addition, there are direct and indirect effects of the creation of more urban land on local, regional, and global biodiversity and critical ecosystems.
Over the last 20 years, discontent has grown amongst urban dwellers worldwide, accompanying the erosion of their quality of life and its impact on their well-being. A well publicized example of this occurred in 2013 in Istanbul, when a large protest erupted over the building of a shopping centre in one of its most famous parks (Gezi Park). The residents were angry and frustrated at the loss of one of the last green spaces in that part of the city.
Figure 1. Components of the discipline of urban ecology ultilised to bridge the gap between science and practice. Photo of Melbourne, Australia by James Relph.
Other examples of the growing environmental activism in urban centres around the globe include the recent mass protests in China and Vietnam by residents who do not want to live near industrial plants that pollute the environment. We propose these are examples of a new urban reformation that is spreading across the globe, which demands changes in how we create new cities and expand existing ones. This change in approach (i.e., reformation) explicitly calls for the inclusion of principles of ecology and social justice in the development process.
To address and mitigate the social and environmental challenges associated with the rapid urbanization of our planet, urban ecology researchers and practitioners are synthesizing ecological and social data from cities around the world to identify ecological and social generalizations, principles, and theories that can help guide new approaches to design, construction, and management. Historically, cities have been created and managed based on best practices in planning and engineering, as well as the architectural and design standards of the day. Thus, modern cities have essentially been built and managed in such a way that people, buildings, transportation systems, water, energy, nature, and economic systems were studied, planned, designed, and managed separately in professional, academic, and administrative silos. The adoption of a more holistic or system approach that explicitly includes ecological and social justice principles thus forms the cornerstone of this new urban ecology reformation.
Bridging the gap between science and practice
Urban ecology research has commonly focused on identifying mitigation and adaptation actions to help reduce the negative impacts of human activities. Many cities around the globe are actively working to improve the health, liveability, resilience, and sustainability of their city, and there are several global initiatives to support these efforts, including the C40 Cities, 100 Resilient Cities and the ICLEI Cities Biodiversity Centre’s Local Action for Biodiversity (LAB) program. Research partnerships are being developed to inform future actions on a diversity of themes, including understanding, protecting, and enhancing biodiversity; creating and managing ecological linkages; and creating biodiversity-friendly environments by minimizing negative impacts on animals, plants, soils, and ecosystems. Public participation initiatives are encouraging and assisting the public to experience and value biodiversity and urban ecology in general. By incorporating these elements into mitigation and adaptation strategies, they are effectively bridging the gap between the science and practice of urban ecology (Fig 1). Worldwide, there are a number of examples of cities that are active participants in the new urban ecology reformation including Baltimore (US), Chicago (US), Curitiba (BR), Durban (SA), London (UK), Phoenix (US), Portland (US), Sydney (AU) and Vancouver (CA) to name a few.
Melbourne trees and trams along the Royal Parade. Photo: City of Melbourne
One example of a city which is actively participating in all of the global initiatives, as well as providing leadership in the areas of research partnerships and public participation, is the City of Melbourne, Australia. To date, the City of Melbourne’s actions to create and maintain a green, healthy, liveable, and resilient city include a number of strategies and initiatives that cover climate change, open space, water, vegetation, and biodiversity. The city’s Urban Forest Strategy has received international recognition, for both the approach and targets it sets for its highly developed municipality. The City of Melbourne has also worked to share this knowledge more widely through the “How to Grow an Urban Forest” guide, which was developed and delivered in conjunction with 202020 Vision program. It is clear to us that Melbourne is one of the leaders in this new urban ecology reformation, and there are many other cities in Australia that have also joined this movement. While we still face many challenges associated with an “Urban Planet”, it is clear that the discipline of urban ecology and the many research-practice, and public-private partnerships that utilize this knowledge will play a leading role in our efforts to reduce the impacts of urbanization on urban dwellers and the environment, and create a more promising outlook for the future of our planet.
Mark McDonnell, Ian MacGregor-Fors, and Amy Hahs
Melbourne, Veracruz, and Parkville
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.
A review of A Sequel to Suburbia: Glimpses of America’s Post-Suburban Future. By Nicholas A. Phelps. 2015. ISBN: 9780262029834. MIT Press. 248 pages. Buy the book.
James Joyce suggested that the creative work of an author—and I also include the work of an artist or landscape architect—presumes the intellectual level of the audience that is needed to appreciate it. Having attempted to read Ulysses myself and come up short, the remark makes a lot of sense. After a few pages of author Nicholas A. Phelps 2015 book, Sequel to Suburbia my mind drifted to Joyce’s wisdom and to the question: For whom and for what purpose is this book intended?
Those who expect reinforcement of their particular views of suburbia may encounter a refreshing challenge in “A Sequel to Suburbia”.
The title Sequence to Suburbia is engaging, especially to a planner and landscape architect, like me, interested in the problems and the design potential of the unprecedented suburban pattern. The caption of the book that follows, Glimpses of America’s Post-Suburban Future, should extend the attraction to city planners, professors, or practitioners, implying that the book is forward-looking, useful, and will offer productive insight for one’s own work. On these points, the book will not disappoint, especially if the reader is familiar with the problem of the modern city and how to restructure it as a theoretical activity that is principally academic and research-tempered.
Enthusiasts of urbanism and landscape will encounter familiar issues and “contradictions” of suburbia in the forward and exposition of book. For example, the promise suburbia made for a new kind of civility that would be settled in nature but never materialized as garden, green and diverse mix of urban uses were replaced by optimized homebuilding strategies. But in addition to other, frequently alleged problems of suburbia, such cultural decentralization, lost human potential through travel distances and the consumption of natural resources, Phelps adds that some time after World War II, America as a whole gained from the movement of business out of cities, while the outer suburbs themselves barely benefitted, as simultaneously, the inner cities bore the cultural and financial costs. The familiar précis and recitation of topics sets up an expected delight and twist in the direction of the book.
Books about The New Urbanism such as The Geography of Nowhere, by James Howard Kunstler, or alternatively, counterarguments that are pro-suburbia such as Robert Bruggeman’s Sprawl; A Compact History, tend to polarize the debate with mercurial, and at times, snarky rhetoric. While Phelp’s research-driven exploration seems to lean towards the former in the beginning, the text takes an unexpected change of direction with the following.
Quoting Phelps, “Yet, if the Zeitgeist is of a sequel to suburbia waiting to be written by some architects, planners, and civil society organizations under the manifesto’s of a New Urbanism, TOD, smart growth, and the like, that picture is not one received by all. Indeed – and here’s the rub – arguably, the majority of citizens, architects, planners, politicians, land speculators, and construction, banking, and insurance companies are happy for the story of suburbia to carry on.”
What is perhaps the best contribution by the book, and one that recommends it as an additional to any shelf on the topic, is the realization that Phelps is studying suburbia with an open mind. In lieu of the pedantic or preachy, this transforms the book into something that the reader can appreciate objectively by considering that perhaps the question of suburbia isn’t a matter of replacement or the need for a sequel but rather its refinement. This is a refreshing counterpoint to broader debate about suburbia that in some cases can unfortunately descend into a kind of uncritical zealotry. Considering the author’s background, the writing style and prose that delivers the book’s objectivity may be a challenge for professionals to appreciate.
Nicholas A. Phelps is a professor of urban and regional development at University College London. A prolific writer, his online dossier indicates that he has written fifty-some books and published articles across a spectrum of major academic journals. It is interesting that Phelps wrote Sequel to Suburbia, since his primary academic field is economic geography, not planning or urban design. The statistics, quantities, and economics that dominate the intellectual world in which he dwells are unquestionably part of a city. But in a city, the quantitative co-exists with a qualitative realm that includes a vast and unmeasurable dimension of human emotion, wonder, and imagination. The two together make the true city.
Perhaps Phelps’s familiarity with his own quantitatively-driven field explains the impoverishment of drawings, diagrams, and the kinds of maps that one might typically expect in a text that outwardly appears to be about urban planning and design. If sensibilities, such as those reflected by The New Urbanism, represent a raison d’être, Phelps’s somewhat non-orthodox exploration of suburban planning and analyses of American suburbanism is heightened by his roots in English culture. Here he examines North American suburban patterns with the cool objectivity of a foreigner studying a specimen from a distance, versus, say, how an anthropologist might take on a similar project by living within a culture to more thoroughly understand the non-quantitative idiosyncrasies that can elude data collection.
The book is modest in length, which makes it approachable as a reading project. Eight chapters are organized onto 180-pages and a 51-page appendix that includes footnotes and an index to support them.
The overview in Chapter One advances the central question of the book: “While the shine has worn off the outer suburbs of the ‘first modernity’ (a term Phelps frequently uses, which is of his own invention) is there sufficient documentation and cultural agreement and intellectual consensus to glimpse the makings of a distinctly new post-suburbanity?”
From this point, the text proceeds with an admission that a cohesive field of suburban study and a nomenclature of its many vaguely defined parts has yet to emerge. In reinforcing this point, Phelps provides a useful enumeration of terms that have attempted to capture the essence of the spatial vagueness of the American metropolis and its different constituent elements, including:
Galactic Urbanization
Post-Metropolis
Edge City
Technoburbia
Edgeless Cities
Boomburbs
He concludes the exposition by offering that a recent—planetary urbanization—may “end the terminological proliferation”.
The next six chapters are organized into symmetrical sets of three that mirror each other in content construction. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 explore three distinct theoretical assessments of American suburbia by Phelps; they prefigure a set of case studies that demonstrate the same set of three assessments that continue in Chapters 5, 6 and 7.
Respectively, the case studies are: Chapter Five, downtown Kendall, Florida near Miami; Chapter Six, Tyson’s near Alexandria, Virginia (formerly known as Tyson’s Corner until the city elected to reconsider its brand identity and drop the second word); and Chapter Seven, the expansive suburb of North Chicago, Schaumburg.
While the three case studies offer a kind of small, medium, and large geographical examination, their selection raises critical questions, especially in how Phelps points out that each example possesses somewhat unique qualities. It is curious that cities such as Phoenix, Houston, or Atlanta, which are textbook demonstrations of a vast and generic proliferation of suburbia that is unaffected or unmodified by the interference of geographical circumstances and natural features such as rivers and mountains are not included. And the musings of James Joyce became relevant again in considering the summary offered in Chapter Eight which leaves the question of suburban reform, revision or diminishment, open and inconclusive.
For whom and for what purpose is this text principally written? Clearly, it seems to favor academics and theoreticians doing research. Urban enthusiasts who are more accustomed to the flowering and nostalgic concepts of the New Urbanism will find this text turgid and frustrating when they encounter simple points enveloped in fog. Consider the following, “The prospects for the reworking of suburban space are crucially dependent on the extent and manner in which any rescaling of the state can address corollaries to private accumulation.” I understand all the words, but not when they are put together like this.
Those who expect that a new book about suburbia will reinforce their particular view of suburbia—either pro or con—even before turning the first page, may encounter a refreshing challenge. Wading through the rhetoric takes some work and persistence to reach the ultimate realization that Sequel to Suburbia, while skeptical of the topic on the one hand, remains open to the consideration that suburbia is an established cultural fact at this point in history, more in need of refinement than elimination. In this respect, the title, Sequel to Suburbia, becomes clearer as a question than as a declarative or imperative. To embolden the readers as their own arbiters sets the book apart as a text that is intelligent, refreshing, and useful.
When it comes to community murals, nothing substitutes for persistence and perseverance. But the results are worth the effort.
I frequently lead natural history walks around the 160-acre Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, Portland’s first official urban wildlife refuge that lies on the east bank of the Willamette River, not far from the city center. The mural overlooks the refuge and the tale of its origins invariably intrigues my guests. I thought the making of the mural, particularly to those contemplating a large-scale project, might be of interest to The Nature of Cities’ readers. I certainly learned a lot by working with muralists, artists, building owners, foundations, and the public while helping create the 55,000 square foot wetland mosaic.
Origins: a 70-foot heron
The mausoleum exterior. Photo: Mike Houck
In 1986, I had convinced our Mayor, Bud Clark, and Portland city council to adopt the Great Blue Heron as the city’s official city bird. For the past 30 years, we have held an annual Great Blue Heron Week. I had been thinking for several years after the heron’s induction as the city’s nature icon that it would be cool, as those who watch Portlandia will recognize, to “put a bird on a wall, and call it art.” I knew which wall I wanted to put a bird on, but had no idea how I might pull it off. In the winter of 1991, walking along one of Portland’s thoroughfares, my eye was drawn to an enormous, beautiful representation of a forty-foot tall Blitz-Weinhard beer bottle. After much shouting and gesticulating to the painter perched 70 feet above me, I learned that he worked for the Portland-based ArtFX Murals, whose office was just around the corner. Finding the office door wide open, with no one in sight, I left a Post-It note indicating I wanted them to volunteer to paint a Great Blue Heron mural on a huge building overlooking the refuge.
Lynn Kitagawa’s watercolor.
That evening, ArtFX’s Mark Bennett called to say he lived directly across the Willamette River from the building I had in mind, the Portland Memorial Mausoleum. He said he was sick of looking at the “butt ugly,” grey, west-facing wall of the building, which loomed over the wetlands below. Sure, he said, “give me $1,500 to pay an assistant and I will donate my time.” With an artist in hand, I approached the mausoleum’s owner who, knowing the building’s west facing wall was an eyesore to the neighborhood, said he’d consider it, but expressed concern that loved ones whose relatives were interred in the mausoleum-crematorium might oppose the project. Audubon Society of Portland volunteer and medical illustrator, Lynn Kitagawa, donated a beautiful watercolor for the mural template. So, I conducted my own opinion poll. I bought an easel and mounted Kitagawa’s watercolor in the mausoleum’s foyer with a note asking for feedback. Visitors all gave a thumb’s up, which resulted in permission to use one of the mausoleum’s west facing walls as a Great Blue Heron canvas. With artist and canvas on board, I went to the local Miller Paint store, a century old Portland firm, which donated the paint. Finally, a local resident who overlooked the wetlands rounded up the scaffolding. In May of 1991, we dedicated the 70-foot-high, 50-foot-wide heron, and the mausoleum owners received so many thank-you calls and letters that Bennett, along with the owners, asked if we could do the entire building. Mark even drafted up a sketch. Unfortunately, the $20,000 price tag was beyond my means. So, we celebrated the heron mural and left it at that.
Great Blue Heron mural, on the rear of the mausoleum, faded due to age prior to the second phase of the project . Photo: Mike Houck
Painting the Big One
Twenty-seven years later, Bennett called me out of the blue, asking, “When are we gonna finish that building?” A few hours later, as we stood on the bluff overlooking the wetland and mausoleum, kicking the dirt, appraising the size of the project and eyeing the now-faded heron which was framed by dull grey walls studded with quarter-inch rebar. Bennett said, “My son Shane and I really want to finish this job. We’ll do it for $30,000.” Seeing the “sticker-shock” expression on my face, he quickly informed me a commercial project that size would be $180,000. A great deal, but still…time to get to work!
Adopting the design concept
Bennett had worked up a general design with the proviso that it would depict resident wildlife. I asked Audubon’s conservation director, Bob Sallinger, to share a few pints of beer with local artist and muralist Dan Cohen and Mark’s son, Shane, who had been thirteen at the time we did the heron mural. The four of us refined Mark’s rough sketch, creating a wetland motif that featured both the wetland’s migratory and year-round residents. Cohen then created paintings that would provide the concept for each of the eight walls, two of which faced south, while the others faced west and would be visible from across the Willamette River.
Portland Memorial Mural Schematic, Mark Bennett, ArtFX Murals.Scale information, Mark Bennett, ArtFX Murals.
Dan Cohen concept painting.Dan Cohen concept painting.
Fundraising
I then went to work on my least favorite activity—writing grants and begging for money. First stop, the Regional Arts and Culture Council (or RACC), without whose permission there would be no mural. Cohen and I had to attend three meetings with the Council’s mural committee, one of which involved my creating a 3-D model of the mausoleum so that they could get a better grasp of the actual design. Not only did we get permission, but RACC also provided a $10,000 grant, which opened the door to leveraging funds from other sources. Spirit Mountain Community Fund committed the next $20,000, and Miller Paint once again donated $10,000 worth of paint. That left $30,000 to seal the deal. The city’s Bureau of Environmental Services’ Community Watershed Stewardship Program, the Willamette Fun(d) of the Oregon Community Foundation, and Portland Parks and Recreation filled the funding gap.
Mike Houck model of Portland Memorial Mausoleum, with Dan Cohen’s images.Presentation to Regional Arts and Culture Council. Photo Mike Houck
But wait, there’s more!
Now that I had the money, I went to the mausoleum to confirm we were ready to start work, only to find it had been sold! Panic! I had to set up a meeting with the new owners. To my great relief, the new owners had been briefed and not only gave their enthusiastic permission, but kicked in another $2,000. Finally, we were set to begin work in early summer of 2008. We didn’t get started until fall, the first of what would be innumerable delays. What had begun as a three-month project dragged on for more than a year.
I had to remind myself I was getting a deep, deep discount. The Bennetts had commercial projects in Los Angeles, New York City, and Las Vegas. I was in no position to grouse about schedules. Additionally, I had lost my earlier scaffolding donor after all those years, so I still had one big problem to solve. After searching for several weeks, Northwest Scaffolding Services agreed to provide the scaffolding—and although they provided it at a discount, it still turned out to be the most expensive item of the project, given it lay idle while the farther-son team worked on their paying gigs. In fact, by now I was working almost exclusively with Shane, his father having gone into semi-retirement in Costa Rica.
Modeling the Sistine Chapel
The process by which they applied the images to the mausoleum walls was similar to that used by Renaissance painters, and reputedly like Michelangelo’s technique on the Sistine Chapel. Using images I provided, Shane shone them onto paper with an opaque projector. Behind the paper was a metal plate which, when he traced the image—feather by feather—set up an arc with his “electronic pencil.” The electric arc produced thousands of minute holes that were burned through the paper. Once the entire image had been transferred to paper, the gridded out roll was taken to the scaffolding. Shane and his assistants then unrolled the paper, grid-by-grid, and daubed charcoal dust across arc-produced holes, creating a crude outline of the image on the wall. This painstaking process was repeated hundreds of times until the composite image emerged, again, feather-by-feather. The resulting crude outlines guided their more refined painting.
Shane Bennett tracing images. Photo: Mike Houck
Rebar and primer
But, once again, there’s more! As I noted at the outset, every wall was studded with thousands of quarter-inch rebar jutting several inches out from the wall. Before any work could begin, all of those metal rods projecting from the mausoleum walls had to be ground off. Then the walls had to be power washed and a coat of primer applied. Throughout the project, there always seemed to be one more step before work could progress.
Grinding Rebar. Photo: Mike HouckRebar. Photo: Mike Houck
First up to be painted were the Hooded Mergansers, an Osprey grasping a steelhead trout in its talons, and a Red-tailed Hawk. Before long, the uppermost south-facing wall had several huge great egrets, giant great blue herons in flight, and a Peregrine Falcon surrounded by a flock of Vaux’s Swifts. Shane, Dan, and their crew finished two huge black cottonwoods on the largest west-facing wall, with a perching bald eagle and a great horned owl on their branches. Dan took some artistic license by inserting an “eye” in one of the tree’s knotholes and huge, furry feet on the great horned owl, both of which are visible only from the trail that passes at the foot of the building. The most fascinating process, however, was watching the Great Blue Herons and Great Egrets, with their fantastic wingspans, emerge day-to-day.
Great Egret Sequence. Photos: Mike HouckGreat Egret Sequence. Photos: Mike HouckGreat Egret Sequence. Photos: Mike HouckGreat Egret Sequence. Photos: Mike HouckGreat Egret Sequence. Photos: Mike HouckGreat Egret Sequence. Photos: Mike HouckGreat Egret Sequence. Photos: Mike Houck
After disassembling and moving the scaffolding several times, the final south-facing wall was almost finished. As I was photographing Shane on that last south wall, a female Anna’s Hummingbird kept buzzing around his face. He asked what it was and I sent him an image of the more colorful male Anna’s that evening. Two days later, I was delighted to see he’d added another image to the wall—the vibrant Anna’s male, the mural’s final image. Remembering how the original heron had faded, the final touch was a UV coating, ensuring the murals would remain vibrant for many years.
Anna’s Hummingbird male. Photo: Mike Houck
On October 2, 2009 the mural was dedicated, 28 years after the great blue heron adorned the mausoleum. A hundred people walked from Portland Memorial’s chapel onto the roof to view the mural up close. At more than 50,000 ft.2, Shane, Mark, and Dan had installed the largest hand-painted wall mural in North America. What had been a “butt ugly” eyesore for many decades was now a colorful invitation to cyclists, runners, and walkers to slow down a bit as they traversed the newly completed Springwater on the Willamette Trail, which bordered the western edge of the wetlands and afforded a spectacular view of the mausoleum and a chance to appreciate the city’s first official urban wildlife refuge.
Mural and Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. Photo: Mike HouckMural dedication. Photo: Dwight Porter
The final touch was the unveiling and installation of a portrait of the wetland’s early advocate, Al Miller. Forty-six years earlier, Al had recruited me and several other graduate students from a Portland State University seminar to help convince the city not to fill the wetlands, a campaign that succeeded in 1988 with the city council’s adoption the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge management plan, which I and two others had written. I gave pictures of Al to Dan Cohen, who captured Al’s persona, binoculars and all, in a portrait, which was then mounted in one of the mausoleum’s west-facing walls. Today, Al overlooks the wetlands that he and others worked in the 1960s and into the 1970s so hard to protect.
Al Miller’s portrait unveiling by artist Dan Cohen and Beth Parmenter, Al’s wife.
Lessons learned
First and foremost, my motto is “endless pressure, endlessly applied.” Nothing substitutes for persistence and perseverance. You’ve got to believe and create your own reality.
Second, get your permit(s) and first funding and use it to leverage additional funding. If I had not secured the permit and funding from the Regional Arts and Culture Council I do not think the project would have proceeded, both in getting the required permit and initial funding.
Third, “run to daylight”, an old American football adage that instructs a player to find gaps through which to make a play. If the hole the play called for closes, look to “daylight”—another opportunity to get it done.
Fourth, find a partner as passionate as you, or perhaps more so. In my case, Mark and Shane Bennett had at least as much passion for success as I did in this project, which surprised and delighted me.
Finally, I think among the many reasons urban nature advocates need to expand their partnerships is the need to connect art with nature. Look for partnerships with groups such as our Regional Arts and Culture Council. As it turns out, I was unaware that Portland has an active mural culture. Had I known this, I would have reached out to them for support. Later, I testified before Portland City Council to support that community. Diversifying urban nature advocacy should include the arts, which is why I am pleased The Nature of Cities launched Up Against the Wall: A Gallery of Nature-Themed Graffiti and Street Art.
Afterward
Sadly, the same winter that this project was finished, Shane was killed in a Colorado snowmobile accident. Poignantly, as his mourners walked onto the mausoleum roof, a Bald Eagle—one of Shane’s favorite birds and one that routinely flew above him while he worked on the mural—flew directly overhead, circled a few times, and glided west over the refuge and Willamette River. Mark now lives full-time in Costa Rica and Dan continues his artwork in Portland. I, fortunately still lead tours around the two-mile loop trail, and have the opportunity to tell the mural story on each circuit of the Bottoms.
With the camera rolling, Hernandez danced through crowds of people packed into the ten-acre park, giving viewers an unplanned tour of one of the city’s most celebrated—and, at times, contested—open spaces.
Shortly after the struggle to preserve Washington Square, Jacobs would go on to publish The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a critical look at the state of urban planning and design in the mid-20th century.
While it’s true that Jacobs changed the way we think about cities, relatively little is ever said about her views on urban parks. In honor of the 100th anniversary of Jacobs’ birth, we took a moment to revisit her views on “the uses of neighborhood parks” as she laid them out in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
This podcast episode, produced by Philip Silva, catches up with Andy Hernandez (who goes by the stage name Coati Mundi) thirty-five years after his romp through Washington Square Park. We also invited two notable New Yorkers to reflect on the critique of urban park planning in Chapter Five of The Death and Life of Great American Cities: Mary Rowe, a Senior Fellow at Project for Public Spaces, and Adrian Benepe, the Commissioner for New York City Parks under former Mayor and open space enthusiast Michael Bloomberg, and current a Senior Vice President at the Trust for Public Land. Benepe and Rowe offer contrasting views of Jacobs’ legacy as it relates to urban parks.
A cuisine is a “culinary language” that communicates values and forms bonds between people just as effectively as words. This was one of the messages of Mr. Gastón Acurio Jaramillo, Peruvian chef and “ambassador of Peruvian cuisine”, in his keynote speech at the 4th World Congress of Biosphere Reserves in Lima this past March.
The production, preparation, and consumption of food products is a language with which to “read” the landscape.
Acurio is known as Peru’s top celebrity chef and founder of the renowned restaurant Astrid y Gastón among others, and also for being partly responsible for the recent recognition of Peruvian cuisine as one of the world’s best food traditions. In keeping with the idea of the Biosphere Reserve, he attributed the richness of Peru’s culinary tradition to its people’s strong respect for nature.
It is easy to see how food embodies both nature and culture at a basic level, but this idea of cuisine-as-language also illuminates how food can support a kind of biocultural connectivity across the wider physical and cultural landscape. Promising lessons can be found here both for cities and for protected areas.
“Biosphere Reserve” is a protected area designation in which sites are designated for “science and sustainability” under UNESCO’s Man and Biosphere programme. The 4th World Congress of Biosphere Reserves was both the first World Congress held outside of Europe and the first in Latin America. With the Biosphere Reserves programme’s emphasis on reconciling biodiversity conservation with its sustainable use, it was fitting that the Congress should be held in Peru, where culture has cultivated mutual benefits with nature for millennia.
Major outcomes of the 4th World Congress of Biosphere Reserves were the “Lima Declaration” and the “Lima Action Plan”, which provide direction and concrete steps for the future development of Biosphere Reserves. This follows on the previous “Madrid Action Plan”, which was in effect for the ten years leading up to the 4th Congress, and is intended to bring the programme into agreement with newer developments, including the UN’s post-2015 development agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Biosphere Reserves do not generally encompass urban areas, but rather consist of three zones: a core zone where the ecosystem is most strictly protected; a buffer zone with human activities compatible with sound ecological practices; and a transition zone with a higher level of sustainable economic and development activities. This model—areas of increasing human activity radiating outward from a strictly protected area—makes an interesting mirror image to a city, where human density tends to decrease radiating outward from the urban core.
Connectivity is thus key to conservation in the Biosphere Reserve concept. So holding the first World Congress in a so-called “developing” country in Lima highlighted how cities can be thrown off balance, in part thanks to a lack of connectivity with nature, as shown by the city’s stark contrast with the natural areas shown in many participants’ presentations.
As a first-time visitor to Lima
My apologies to any colleagues from Lima, but to a first-time visitor, Lima seems mostly notable as an example of an unhealthy relationship between people and nature. Don’t get me wrong—there are many great things about the city—its important historical sites, fashionable shopping districts, and, as mentioned earlier, world-class food scene. But it is also a city that has more than tripled in size since 1970 to become the second-largest city by population in South America, and its infrastructure and services have struggled to keep up. Much of the city is noisy, dirty, crowded, and experiences high poverty and crime.
The most prominent geographical feature in sight as soon as I walked out of my hotel was a hill called the “Cierro el Pino”, and it makes an illustrative case. It was designated as a “human settlement” in 1972 after many indigenous and other disadvantaged people had moved to the city and settled on less desirable land, such as its steep slopes. Of course, its jumble of buildings lacked services and infrastructure, and became known for poverty and crime. Since its designation, it has received basic services, but progress is slow and it is still a far cry from the city’s affluent and fashionable districts.
The Cierro el Pino in Lima.
One thing that makes the Cierro el Pino a telling case, besides its official designation as a “human settlement” and the results it has had, is its contrast with the more famous landscapes in other parts of Peru. What does it tell us that the hilly areas of Lima are among the most dysfunctional places in the city, while it is precisely the steep slopes of the Andes that provide the most characteristic biocultural landscapes in Peru’s rural areas?
Steepness is not the issue
The mountain landscapes around Cusco are as stunning as you’ve heard they are. Terraces dating to the Inca Empire provide not only a great deal of arable land on slopes that should have been impossible to farm, but have also served as an important site for developing agricultural knowledge. Since each terrace on each slope represents a slightly different set of conditions than those above, below or to the sides of it, terraces in this “agricultural research station” could be used to systematically investigate crops’ suitability to different conditions and adapt them for use in different areas.
Terraced landscapes in the Sacred Valley near Cusco.
The terraces were still planted with local crops until quite recently, but since they have been designated as cultural artifacts and placed under the management of the Ministry of Culture, they only contain mown grass. This seems a shame, since from the perspective of my own work with the Satoyama Initiative, a population that actively relied on them for food would be most motivated to maintain them for the long term, providing mutual benefits between humans and nature. Plus, both quinoa and potatoes are beautiful when in bloom, so just think how these terraces would look if they were covered in purple, white, and red flowers.
Still, although these terraces are now maintained only for their cultural and historical, and not their biological and agricultural, value, the same kind of work is being revived and carried on nearby. In the Potato Park, my colleagues and I were shown potato research plots, managed and maintained by the indigenous Quechua-speaking communities living within the park itself. They grow and monitor different varieties of potatoes in steeply-pitched plots at 100-meter altitude increments to identify and record which are suitable for specific microclimates. Seed-banking to conserve the diversity of varieties and hybridization to develop new varieties are also underway.
A researcher explains an agricultural research plot in the Potato Park.
Because of the kind of biocultural diversity that has been maintained in the landscapes in the Andes, there are well over a thousand varieties of potatoes to be found in the area. By contrast, almost all of the potatoes found in supermarkets in the United States are of two varieties—the Russet Burbank and the Yukon Gold—while, in my experience, a good U.S. supermarket may have five or six varieties. For an afternoon snack in the Potato Park, the locals brought out a basket of at least that many different varieties of potatoes, which we ate sitting in a circle along with locally-harvested herbs.
Eating your words
If cuisine is a language, then what was being communicated high in the Andes outside Cusco was very different from what is communicated by the haute fusion cuisine served by Chef Acurio in Lima; “a potato served sitting on the ground by local indigenous people with local herbs” is a different statement than “Peking guinea pig dressed with rocoto and purple corn crépe”, one of Astrid y Gastón’s offerings. One difference is that the mountain landscape is more strictly faithful to locally unique traditions and conditions, while the city is a melting pot in which the local tradition is influenced by and blended into a fusion with many traditions from far afield.
It seems telling that words for foods are among the most untranslatable, and usually become incorporated into languages as new words—take recently trending words like “açaí” or “sriracha”—rather than translated. Living in Tokyo, I am sometimes asked the English word for some food item and find myself at a loss—the English word for sushi is “sushi”. Foods seem to exist unto themselves, and while they can be transplanted into other linguistic contexts, they remain essentially themselves.
This is true not only for their linguistic context, but for their context in cuisine-as-language. After all, potatoes originally taken from South America and used to make gnocchi in Italy are still thought of as potatoes—not transmuted or translated into a completely different thing, but recontextualized.
Looking at cuisine-as-language, then, “potato” is a word in the English language, but a potato is also a word in the language of cuisine. And, just as very different sentences can be made from the same words, steamed potatoes served sitting on the ground by indigenous people with local herbs is different, semiotically, from French fries eaten at a fast-food joint during a short lunch break in a huge city.
Put another way, just as language requires a great deal of knowledge and cultural background to be comprehensible, a statement in the language of cuisine becomes coherent due to a surrounding cultural and natural context that makes it possible and locates it within a larger tradition.
Seen in this light, food—the production, preparation, and consumption of food products—becomes a language with which to “read” the landscape. A landscape contains a diversity of natural and cultural elements—a biocultural system in which they mutually reinforce each other—just like each word in a language relies on all the other words to give it meaning and, in turn, gives them meaning.
This “meaning” is what gets lost when an area like the Cierro el Pino falls out of balance with nature. Cultural elements transported from other landscapes, divorced from their biocultural context, get thrown together into a disjointed babel, and it can take many years of hardship before they can be reconstituted into a functioning, meaningful system.
As has been pointed out in The Nature of Cities before, it doesn’t have to be like this. There can be a bright side to indigenous urbanization if it is done with proper respect for living in harmony with nature. People shifting from rural homelands to urban areas do not have to lose so much of their culture if production systems such as the terraces around Cusco can provide knowledge of food production and food traditions for all types of conditions. This knowledge, when put into practice, creates a biocultural connectivity between rural, urban and peri-urban areas—the kind of connectivity ideally found among the radiating zones of a Biosphere Reserve or a city—and improves environmental conditions and human livelihoods in all of them.
This is how we can take lessons from Chef Acurio’s conception of cuisine as language in understanding how seemingly very different areas—from urban centers, such as Lima, to protected natural areas, such as Biosphere Reserves—can benefit from the same management principles. All are integrated with varying degrees of success into wider biocultural landscapes, and are connected and given meaning, in part by food and its production, processing, and consumption traditions. If I have been successful, this should give readers of The Nature of Cities some “food for thought” (sorry!).
The Rockefeller Foundation announced its third and final set of its “Resilient Cities”, rounding out a group of 100 cities that have demonstrated success in and commitment to enhancing resilience to climate change and other natural or man-made disasters, among other urban challenges. These cities, along with hundreds of others without the designation, are experimenting with different ways to “climate proof” their infrastructure, to strengthen disaster preparedness and response capabilities, and to integrate considerations of natural hazards and climate change impacts into planning processes.
To date, adaptation plans rarely seek to change development patterns or drivers of socio-spatial inequality
To date, academics, policymakers, and advocates have emphasized studying the ways in which cities are vulnerable; the barriers to local action; tools and assistance to help them take action; and the development of new technological, design, and partnership solutions to facilitate implementation. But few studies have asked: who actually benefits from urban adaptation plans and projects? Do projects prioritize the vulnerability of the most disadvantaged and marginalized groups? Do projects succeed in reducing vulnerability and, if so, for whom?
In a new research article published in May 2016 by the Journal of Planning Education and Research, we and six other colleagues respond to this research challenge and present the results of a large empirical study examining the equity impacts of land use planning for urban climate adaptation in the Global North and South. We selected eight cities—Boston, New Orleans, Medellin, Santiago, Dhaka, Surat, Manila, and Jakarta—that are at the forefront of adaptation planning. The adaptation interventions these cities have created together represent a spectrum of planning strategies, including developing explicit adaptation plans, linking adaptation to disaster risk reduction or broad efforts to promote resilience, and meeting longstanding infrastructure and developmental backlogs. By and large, these plans seek to reduce the threats of flooding, landslides, and drought through technological fixes—mostly green or grey infrastructure—and land use policy changes. These projects are imagined as a benefiting the city as a whole, but do not explicitly evaluate their impacts on different social groups, particularly in relation to other ongoing societal changes.
A 2006 plan commonly known as the “Green Dot Map” proposes converting low-lying neighborhoods into parks after Hurricane Katrina. Image: The Times-PicayuneRendering of potential “Water Walk” along Lake Forest Boulevard in New Orleans East in the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan. Image: Urban Water Plan
As a result, we find that these efforts, while technically rational on their own, can nevertheless exacerbate existing inequalities through “acts of commission” and “acts of omission” that either disproportionately affect or displace disadvantaged groups, or protect and favor the interests of advantaged groups. These mechanisms crop up in places with very dissimilar developmental and environmental conditions. They echo past experiences with land use and infrastructure development, but represent a “double injustice” because disadvantaged groups who contributed the least to global carbon emissions are bearing the brunt of climate change impacts and social costs of adaptation, even as they are being excluded from the benefits of climate adaptation action.
Many cities are investing in engineered infrastructure to reduce flood risks, even though this tends to increase future flood losses as more people build behind the protective infrastructure. These structures provide an illusion of safety in a process known as the levee effect, only to be overtopped during the next record-breaking storm or infrastructure failure. Flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina broke the levees and made palpable the effects of decades of racial segregation that relegated poorer, predominantly black communities to lower-lying areas such as the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly, and New Orleans East. Even worse, the immediate planning processes post-disaster proposed to “shrink the footprint of the city” by converting some of the worse hit (black) communities to parks that would create new ecological buffers for more privileged neighborhoods. The proposal, logical from a purely ecological planning perspective, produced an outcry against the now infamous “Green Dot Map” as a thinly veiled and unethical attempt to remove poor blacks from New Orleans.
Planning has since shifted to community-scale rebuilding on the one hand, and rebuilding massive new levees on the other, which controversially removes much of New Orleans from the FEMA flood map. New urban plans and design strategies also try to reintegrate water into the fabric of the city through strategies such as rain gardens and bioswales to infiltrate and slow stormwater. However, at no time has the municipality fundamentally included community-based planning into its own planning practice and decision-making, nor changed its land use planning for greater socio-economic and racial integration, even as gentrification of former low-income and black neighborhoods, such as Tremé, exacerbates racial divides.
The Great Garuda plan will house 1.5 million residents on new seawalls in the bay, while evicting tens of thousands of low-income residents from along the city’s riverbanks. Image: Kuiper
Across the world in Southeast Asia, Jakarta, Manila, and Dhaka echo this pattern. In Indonesia, the government responded to Jakarta’s devastating floods in 2007 by proposing a new city for 1.5 million people on a massive series of seawalls in the Jakarta Bay in the shape of the country’s national symbol, the Great Garuda. The plan, supported by the Dutch government, also calls for the eviction of extensive kampong settlements along the city’s many riverbanks in order to widen and dredge the canals and rivers, without addressing existing and new housing needs for the poor. In Manila, the government approved a flood risk management master plan after a 2009 typhoon flooded as much of 70 percent of the metro area that, among numerous grey and green infrastructure proposals, would remove 100,000 poor households (as many as 800,000 people) from alongside waterways. In Dhaka, embankments in the western side of the city built in the 1990s were designed without consulting residents, caused major disruptions to adjacent communities, and excluded extensive low-income settlements.
Such climate adaptation projects discriminate in the application of land use rules between wealthier groups who have greater political clout and access and low-income and informal residents without land title and access to decision-making structures. In Medellin, the city proposed a Metropolitan Green Belt to protect the valley’s upland slopes to reduce landslide risks. Although over 230,000 residents live within what has been designated the protected area, higher-income neighborhoods are not being resettled and indeed are being allowed to expand, while thousands of lower-income residents have been designated as being located in areas of “non-recoverable risk” that will be relocated to housing towers in the valley. In Manila, no one is permitted to develop within three meters of waterways, but the government enforces the law where it is easiest to do so: in informal settlements, even though it has permitted 41 percent of the region’s waterways to be filled over the years for roads, malls, and middle and upper-class housing.
Medellin’s Green Belt proposes a zone of consolidation in the urban valley, a zone of transition with parks and risk mitigation efforts, and a zone of protection. Photo: Municipio de Medellin
Adaptation projects are often done without participatory processes and values that prioritize the interests of the most disadvantaged. From the outset, the definition of the problem (flooding, landslides) and the choice of strategies (green or grey infrastructure) obscures the root causes of vulnerability, such as income inequality and the right to housing, as Fadi Hamdan explored in his TNOC post. Such proposals indicate that hazard risk is not an intrinsic physical condition, but a value judgment about the kind of development and people who can pay for the protective infrastructure. At best, disadvantaged communities can stop particular proposals, like the Green Dot Map, but often have little voice in the design and implementation of overarching strategies. Where planning processes do emphasize public participation—as Santiago’s climate adaptation strategy did—facilitators nevertheless prioritize producing consensus around a narrow set of issues over addressing underlying causes of inequitable access to water and the capture of natural resources by elite private corporations.
Finally, the costs of climate adaptation have led many cities to rely on private sector leadership. In Surat, India, the Rockefeller Foundation supported a six-year resiliency planning process that began by cataloguing the vulnerability of the city’s 400 slums in low-lying areas, but ultimately did little to consult local communities and pursued infrastructure redevelopment strategies that focused on protecting refineries and textile mills. In Boston, the city developed proposals for public assets and worked with the business community to develop proposals for private property owners to respond to flooding and storm surge. Downtown asset management firms developed relationships with emergency service providers for direct access during disasters, invested in temporary flood barriers, and institutionalized these strategies through industry plans and reports. By contrast, only one low-income community in the city has begun adaptation planning with the support of the Kresge Foundation. One approach in Dhaka—to facilitate autonomous adaptation by letting private developers landfill areas for middle and upper class housing—has worsened flooding in surrounding areas and provides a cautionary tale for many cities beginning down this road. As Richard Friend’s TNOC blog noted, market-based solutions cannot forge transformative and inclusive urban futures, especially if they are implemented without state control or oversight.
Elevated walls mark land claims and show the height of a future real estate development site in eastern Dhaka. Photo: Zachary Lamb
In each of these four areas—the provision of infrastructure, enforcement of land use regulations, inclusion in the planning process, and engagement with the private sector—we find acts of commission and acts of omission. Acts of commission occur when infrastructure investments, land use regulations, or new protected areas disproportionately displace disadvantaged groups to areas that are themselves unsafe or do not allow communities to thrive, create long-term environmental gentrification, prioritize elite groups’ agendas and definitions of vulnerability, or support disaster capitalism rather than community development. Conversely, acts of omission are plans that protect economically valuable areas over low-income or minority neighborhoods, frame adaptation as a private responsibility rather than a public good, avoid enforcing land use regulations against wealthy communities, or fail to involve affected communities in the process or recognize their alternative proposals for development. These processes operate within cities, but are further exacerbated by unequal planning capacities between cities in a region, and between regions or countries. Left unabated, these mechanisms help form ecological enclaves of the resilient “haves” and vulnerable “have nots”.
Certainly not all adaptation projects produce such unequal and unjust outcomes, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s own framework for resilience and accompanying package of technical assistance to its 100 resilient cities calls out social justice. Nevertheless, our research presents the first effort to comparatively assess how land use planning for climate adaptation can exacerbate existing inequalities. It demonstrates the need for further critical assessments of emerging adaptation plans, and to open up difficult conversations around the sometimes competing priorities for the expansion of affordable housing, urban densification in post-industrial waterfront and coastal communities—not least to reduce carbon emissions, adaptation to climate impacts, community empowerment, and municipal fiscal health.
A fundamental challenge is that, to date, adaptation plans rarely seek to change development patterns or drivers of socio-spatial inequality. Where adaptation plans do call for equity and justice, as many California state documents do, the language tends to be vague and goal-oriented, making them difficult to be enforced or measured. Some cities, such as Baltimore, have emphasized participatory planning processes that better engage disadvantaged communities. These strategies and principles for environmental justice, from the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991 and the 1994 U.S. Executive Order 12898, provide a basis for thinking about equity and justice in adaptation planning. But there is an urgent need to find examples where climate adaptation and resilience projects have moved towards more equitable outcomes and to identify specific normative principles, design strategies, and evaluative outcome metrics for alternative adaptation strategies that highlight equity and justice.
Linda Shi and Isabelle Anguelovski
Cambridge and Barcelona
In Memoriam: This research honors and builds upon the work of Professor JoAnn Carmin, whose scholarship pioneered the field of urban climate adaptation governance.
Isabelle Anguelovski is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is a social scientist trained in urban and environmental planning and coordinator of the research line Cities and Environmental Justice.
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.
In 1977, the Tbilisi intergovernmental conference on environmental education endorsed a set of guiding principles for environmental education. Some principles, including considering the environment in its totality, viewing environmental learning as a continuous lifelong process, and taking a historical perspective into account, lend support for intergenerational approaches to environmental education. This set of approaches to environmental education is particularly pertinent in cities, where working toward sustainable development involves addressing a host of complex environmental, historical, and social issues.
Intergenerational components of environmental education programs enrich the learning experience for participants of all ages.
A child who has limited firsthand experience with the process of urbanization and accompanying economic, demographic, and environmental changes may have difficulty gaining a cognitive understanding and an emotional appreciation of the environmental challenges facing cities. Environmental education programs, resources, and materials certainly contribute to such learning. However, learning is enhanced when the child has direct access to the living experience and perceptions of older people who can share their experiences of changes in the urban environment over time. At the root of an intergenerational paradigm for environmental education is activating environmental learning through facilitating interactions between generations.
Intergenerational programs have been defined broadly as social vehicles that create purposeful and ongoing exchange of resources and learning among older and younger generations (Kaplan, Henkin and Kusano, 2002). With regard to urban environmental education, the focus of intergenerational programs turns to ways in which young people, older adults, and the generations in the middle can work together to explore, build awareness, gain understanding, and improve the urban environment.
Environmental education funding, research, and program design tend to target young people as the primary audience (Kaplan and Liu, 2004). One of the most significant social changes of our time, however, is the rapidly expanding number of older adults. In countries experiencing rapid urban-development, such as Taiwan, Japan, and the U.S., older adults will soon become the largest segment of the population.
This demographic shift can be viewed positively. Contrary to negative age-related stereotypes, many older adults living in cities are healthy, lively, and actively engaged in civic affairs, including in volunteer initiatives aimed at protecting the urban environment. There are some notable accounts of environmental initiatives aimed at reaching and involving the older adult population (Ingman, Benjamin and Lusky, 1999; Benson, 2000), including older adult environmental volunteerism found in the U.S. (Bushway et al. 2016) and in Australia (Warburton and Gooch, 2007). However, the level of engagement of older adults in environmental education initiatives targeting younger generations still has room to grow. The relative disconnection of older adults from schools, environmental centers, and other settings that educate people about the environment represents a missed opportunity for strengthening community relationships in urban communities and instilling in children and youth a deeper sense of environmental awareness and connection.
Scholars have documented the potential benefits of intergenerational environmental education (Ballantyne, Fien and Packer, 2001; Vaughan et al., 2003). However, the adults in some studies were passive learners who were not utilized as educators or co-learners during the learning process. The intergenerational initiatives highlighted in this chapter go beyond the goal of multi-generational inclusion or simply including members of different generations. An ideal intergenerational program creates opportunities for people of different age groups to learn about each other’s knowledge, experiences, skills, and perceptions. As participants learn about the impact of the environment in each other’s lives, they gain an awareness of common concerns. This contributes to an understanding of the interrelationships among people and the environment and a sense of how to work collaboratively to influence environmental policies and practices (Kaplan and Liu, 2004).
In cities, the teacher-student ratio is commonly high and the teachers’ workload is heavy. In many countries, particularly in urban areas, the proportion of older adults in the population is growing. Well-designed intergenerational programs provide an institutional anchor and vehicle for taking advantage of this demographic trend; educated, civically engaged older adults who care about future generations and wish to make a contribution to their environmental learning can be recruited, trained, and engaged as human resources in support of environmental education programs (Kaplan and Liu, 2004).
Benefits for children
Many urban children do not live near their grandparents and have limited contact with older adults. Older adults in an intergenerational activity can serve as role models for younger participants to observe and imitate, which are important forms of learning (Bandura, 1977). Older adults also have life experiences that can make environmental content in textbooks more relevant and meaningful to young learners. For instance, older adults can readily share how they use natural resources with children in a community festival. Children learn things such as how to conserve water by using remaining bathwater to water flowers. As another example, while teaching topics such as chemical pollution hazards, an older adult who used to work as a toxics prevention agent or suffered from past pollution accidents can share his or her own experiences. Such conversation helps children to relate to environmental issues and to view environmental health risks from a lifespan perspective (Schettler et al., 1999). Environmental educators can structure intergenerational dialogue to nurture such long-term environmental perspectives (cf. Wright and Lund, 2000).
Benefits for older adults
Intergenerational programs provide older adults with opportunities to stay active, expand their social networks, and make valued contributions to society (Kaplan, Henkin and Kusano, 2002). A powerful motivation for older adults to volunteer for environmental stewardship activities is wanting to leave a legacy—both for the earth and for their grandchildren (Warburton and Gooch, 2007); a desire to leave a legacy could also motivate older adults to volunteer in environmental education programs.
Benefits for the city
Intergenerational approaches to environmental education seek to promote dialogue, collaborative learning, and mutual understanding.
Intergenerational programs tend to involve a broad spectrum of organizational partners and collaborators, thereby extending the reach and influence of environmental education and action messages across cities. The Lincoln Place “Futures Festival” event held in Pittsburgh provides an example of how a collaborative planning process involving residents of all ages, and representatives of local community organizations and agencies from multiple sectors, can broaden the visioning process to encompass the natural as well as the built environment. The process of having to reach consensus and integrate their diverse ideas into large murals encouraged participants to work together to create age-inclusive, economically vibrant, and ecologically sustainable visions for the future of Lincoln Place (Kaplan et al., 2004).
What do intergenerational environmental education initiatives look like?
Intergenerational environmental education initiatives can take place in multiple urban settings including schools, environmental education centers, parks, playgrounds, community centers, retirement centers, city streets, community gardens, and even vacant lots. Such educational initiatives can also be launched by different organizations and inter-organizational partnerships. A school that wants to let students know about the history of a local urban forest, for example, can partner with a local historical society whose members include older adult residents willing to share the history of the site and discuss factors that influenced changes. An urban environmental center wanting to hold an air pollution monitoring fair that attracts residents of all ages can work with youth service and senior volunteer organizations to establish intergenerational teams working together to develop, set up, and staff interactive exhibits at the fair.
Educators across the global are creating models to stimulate intergenerational dialogue and co-learning about the natural environment. For example, Tanaka (2007) describes a school-based project in Japan in which students and adult volunteers developed a miniature biosphere to heighten their environmental awareness and appreciation. Chand and Shukla (2003) describe an intergenerational biodiversity contest in India designed to enhance learning about plants and promote values of conservation and respect for traditional ecological knowledge. Garden Mosaics is a science education and national outreach program developed by Cornell University that combines community action and intergenerational learning. Through interviewing elder gardeners, youth ages 10-18 learn about the mosaic of plants, planting practices, and cultures in urban community and other gardens (Figure 1). Youth participants balance what they learn from elder gardeners with learning from “Science Pages” developed at Cornell, which explain key science principles behind the practices youth observe and learn about from elders in the gardens (Kaplan and Liu, 2004).
Figure 1. Young people and an educator in Abraham House, the Bronx, New York City, learn from an elderly gardener (right) in a community garden. Credit: Alex Russ.
Two additional examples, one from a formal education in Taiwan and the other from non-formal education in the U.S., illustrate elements of intergenerational urban environmental education programs (Table 1). The first program took place at He-cuo Elementary School in Taichung, Taiwan’s third largest city. The teachers and principals invited senior adults from the community to participate in a series of intergenerational activities. The senior volunteers’ opinions were taken into account throughout the planning process. Over the ten years of the program, new activities and volunteer recruits were continually integrated. On a city tour, children learned about old trees in the He-cuo community and listened to the elders’ stories about the trees. In other activities, participants observed juxtaposed old and new photos to learn about environmental changes over time, and students learned about differences between rural and city lifestyles through displays of traditional farmers’ equipment. These and other activities combined to have an impact on student, teacher, and even nearby residents’ awareness of community changes associated with urbanization. The program also helped students weave this historical context into their sense of local identity.
Table 1. Urban intergenerational environmental education programs in Taiwan and the U.S.
He-cuo Elementary School
Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center
Country
Taichung, Taiwan
Pennsylvania, USA
Organization
School
Environmental education center
Setting
Downtown area
Suburban recreation area
Program approaches
Subject class, extracurricular activity, community family fair, and special day event
4-day summer camp for children from urban areas
Elderly participants
Community senior residents
Members of retirement centers
Young participants
Elementary school students
Fifth grade students signed up by their teachers
Main subject
Community environment and traditional artistry
Nature conservation and urban development
Examples of urban resources
Plants and animals, life style, and community changes over time
Traditional living style and urban development issues
The second example is a 4-day-residential program located at the Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center, approximately 14 miles south of downtown State College, Pennsylvania. The researchers conducted an experimental study to determine the effectiveness of an intergenerational program versus a mono-generational program (Liu and Kaplan, 2006). In the intergenerational condition, a group of older adult volunteers participated in the program as co-learners and assistant instructors working with students to teach about traditional tools, such as darning eggs (an egg-shaped piece of wood inserted into the toe or heel of a sock during mending), and to share environment friendly living habits. In another activity, the students were asked to discuss the possibility of converting the Environmental Center into a shopping mall. Students recognized that the development would have negative environmental consequences. At that point one of the senior volunteers shared a pertinent example from personal experience; residents of her childhood community successfully organized against a massive development plan that entailed replacing natural woodland with an airport. Such real life stories helped students to better understand the process of community change and the potential influence of local residents.
How to implement intergenerational environmental education initiatives?
Beyond program activities per se, organizational partnerships have a bearing on program structure and success. The critical step is to invite local leaders, stakeholders, and senior volunteers to join the planning process of the environmental education program. In the above example, the He-cuo Elementary School recruited older adult participants from local organizations including a Salvation Army center, a Taoism temple, a women’s club, a traditional orchestra, and a puppet performance museum. These organizations have had a long-term relationship with the He-cuo school starting at the beginning of the environmental education activities. They also help with school functions, such as student enrollment, holiday festivals, and student club advising, thereby broadening the school-community partnership beyond the environmental education program. Other organizations in urban areas can make good partners for helping to recruit local youth as well as older adults, such as 4-H clubs, scout troops, after-school programs, universities, animal shelters, and senior and community centers.
Across the globe, intergenerational environmental education programs are being implemented in diverse urban settings.
In order to build partnerships, environmental educators can seek out organizations with similar or complementary interests and objectives. For instance, a university may hold a class for elders about urban plants, and the adult students can partner with an elementary school’s nature class. Or the older members of a community photography club can be invited to play a role in an intergenerational activity aimed to enhance environmental awareness.
Integration of an intergenerational component into environmental education activities also introduces complexities and considerations with regard to program design. The following principles contribute to productive group dynamics and learning effectiveness in intergenerational programs (Kaplan and Liu, 2004).
Prepare participants of both generations before the program begins.
Draw upon both the youth’s and adults’ experiences and talents.
Promote extensive dialogue and sharing among participants.
Focus on the relationship among participants as well as the task.
Pay attention to safety for different age groups.
Design tasks that require the active participation of both generations to be completed.
Conclusion
Sustainability is an intergenerational concept. Meadows, Meadows, and Randers (1993) define a “sustainable society” as “one that can persist over generations; one that is far-seeing enough, flexible enough, and wise enough not to undermine either its physical or its social system of support.” When considering how natural resources are used/misused over time, as well as strategies to preserve and enhance the environment, it is important to engage in long-term thinking and strategic policy making. Environmental educators can structure intergenerational dialogue to nurture such a long-term environmental perspective of the environment (cf. Wright and Lund, 2000). At the same time, older adults who volunteer in such programs gain opportunities to stay active, contribute, and connect meaningfully with young people in their communities.
Shih-Tsen Nike Liu and Matthew Kaplan
Taichung City and University Park, PA
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.
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Vaughan, C., Gack, J., Solorazano, H. and Ray, R. (2003). The effect of environmental education on schoolchildren, the parents, and community members: A study of intergenerational and intercommunity learning. Journal of Environmental Education, 34(3), 12-21.
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Environmental education is often associated with environmental learning and pro-environmental behaviors. Some approaches to environmental education, however, also enable young people’s personal growth through the development of confidence, self-efficacy, and other assets that support an individual’s well-being. This chapter explores the intersection of urban environmental education and positive youth development. It can inform teachers, environmental educators, science educators, youth workers, and others who want to advance environmental learning and a positive developmental trajectory for young people in varied educational settings, such as school classrooms, after-school programs, community organizations, youth development organizations, churches, camps, nature centers, science centers, museums, and gardens.
Positive youth development is an assets-based approach for cultivating competencies essential to personal well-being.
We begin by defining positive youth development and applying it to environmental education. We then describe three programs from the U.S. and Australia to illustrate different pedagogies for integrating positive youth development in environmental education aimed at urban sustainability. By “youth,” we refer to the transitional period between childhood and adulthood, which varies across cultures. The United Nations defines youth as individuals age 15-24; however, others include children younger than 15 or young adults older than 24 in their definitions. The programs we describe also included some children younger than 15.
Positive youth development in environmental education
A paradigm shift in the youth development field has occurred from a focus on reducing specific problems like unintended pregnancy or drug use to “positive youth development,” which builds upon young people’s strengths to develop competencies essential to well-being. Among multiple frameworks describing positive youth development, one of the most comprehensive describes four categories personal assets promoting well-being: physical (e.g., good health habits); intellectual (e.g., critical thinking, good decision-making); psychological (e.g., positive self-regard, emotional self-regulation); and social (e.g., connectedness, commitment to civic engagement) (Eccles and Gootman, 2002). In addition to its emphasis on strengthening assets, positive youth development acknowledges that developmental experiences do not occur as isolated events, but throughout young people’s daily lives as they interact with peers, family, and non-familial adults in schools, after-school programs, and their broader communities.
Settings that promote positive youth development in the U.S. have been found to share similar characteristics (Eccles and Gootman, 2002):
Physical and psychological safety (e.g., safe facilities, safe peer interactions);
Appropriate structure (e.g., clear and consistent expectations);
Supportive relationships (e.g., good communication);
Opportunities to belong (e.g., meaningful inclusion);
Positive social norms (e.g., rules of behavior, values and morals);
Support for efficacy and mattering (e.g., responsibility granting, meaningful challenge);
Opportunities for skill building; and
Integration of family, school, and community efforts.
The more of these features within an urban environmental education program, the more likely that positive youth development outcomes will result. However, all features need not be present and some might require adaptation to be culturally relevant in other countries.
Youths’ physical and psychosocial development is also influenced by the quality of the urban environment, such as environmental toxins, noise, indoor air quality, and access to green space (Evans, 2006). Urban environmental education can enable young people to play a role in ameliorating environmental conditions that negatively impact well-being. Around the globe, youth have demonstrated their capacity to assess and act to improve environmental conditions in cities (Hart, 1997, Chawla, 2002). When youth have genuine opportunity to address environmental concerns, they can develop valuable personal assets and also increase their own and others’ well-being by enhancing urban environments (Figure 1). In short, urban environmental education can promote positive youth development and youth, in turn, can positively contribute to urban sustainability and resilience.
Figure 1. Urban environmental education that encompasses young people’s participation in improving urban environments can also build assets promoting their well-being, while also changing environmental conditions that impact youth development.
Studies suggest that when youth participate in programs where they act positively for the environment, they themselves grow positively in various ways (Schusler and Krasny, 2010). For example, Hawaiian students working together to select, investigate, and act on a local environmental issue improved their critical thinking; reading, writing, and oral communication skills; familiarity with technology; self-confidence; and citizenship competence (Volk and Cheak, 2003). A food justice education program in New York City proved a valuable developmental experience for youth because it offered somewhere to belong, be pushed toward developing one’s potential, grapple with complexity, practice leadership, and become oneself (Delia, 2014). The evaluators of two environmental service-learning programs in East Africa, Roots & Shoots and Wildlife Clubs of Uganda, found that youth in both programs most valued forming relationships with club members, leaders, and community members as an outcome of environmental education (Johnson-Pynn and Johnson, 2010).
While more research is needed into the opportunities and barriers of integrating positive youth development with urban environmental education, the two can be synergistic when programs are intentionally designed with both in mind. To illustrate the synergy that arises between urban environmental education and positive youth development when youth are offered genuine opportunity to effect environmental change, we describe three programs below. The first involves young people in participatory action research through a child-framed approach. The second develops young people’s leadership capacities as peer educators. And the third facilitates youth civic engagement through local environmental action. In each urban environmental education example, young people were given the opportunity to understand and effect change in urban environments and, as a result, also developed assets promoting their own well-being (Figure 1).
Youth as co-researchers
Children and young people are experts on their own lives, yet research involving children is often conceived of and led by adults. Barratt Hacking, Cutter-Mackenzie and Barratt (2013) call for including children as researchers rather than objects of investigation. To that end, the project “Is ‘Nature’ Diminishing in Childhood? Implications for Children’s Lives” engaged young people in Australia in research about childhood and nature from their own perspectives. The project used a child-framed methodology incorporating qualitative and quantitative research in five distinct stages. It involved 10 children ages 9-14 as co-researchers in each of two sites, one urban and the other an urban fringe suburb.
When environmental education enables children and youth to contribute to improving urban environments, it can not only increase cities’ sustainability and resilience but also foster young people’s personal growth.
Stage 1 involved training sessions where the children and youth learned about qualitative research, specifically ethnography (participant observation, semi-structured interviews) and arts-based methods (photography, video, mapping), which enabled the children to study themselves and local culture (Cutter-Mackenzie, Edwards and Widdop Quinton, 2015). One child’s description of this experience was typical: “I am excited about being able to voice my opinion…There are lots of young people who are passionate to be heard, but this is the only project I have heard of or taken part in that allows them to do so.” Such opportunity to be heard may contribute to positive developmental assets, such as self-efficacy and a sense of social integration.
In Stage 2, children and youth conducted research over two months examining nature-deficit disorder within their own cultural settings. The children received a device with Wi-Fi and GPS for mapping everyday experiences, appropriate research protocols, and a secure dropbox for uploading data. The latter encouraged children and youth not only to take responsibility for their data but also begin preliminary analysis (Barratt Hacking et al., 2013). Stage 3 involved children analyzing their data during research think tanks completed over one intensive session. Participants presented, discussed, mapped, and analyzed their findings. Focus group interviews with the children co-researchers and their parents or guardians also served to triangulate the research findings.
Stage 4 incorporated an online survey that the children co-researchers co-developed with researcher Cutter-Mackenzie. Finally, Stage 5 centered on disseminating the young people’s research to academics, practitioners, and other children. The young people prepared ways to communicate their findings including a documentary and photomontage (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Photomontage designed and created by young co-researcher showing what she described as “nature by road” taken at different times throughout the day. She explained that roads in her community both connected (like “blood lines”) and disconnected children to nature. Credit: Graciella Mosqueira.
Together the stages of this child-framed methodology highlight how youth can genuinely engage as research collaborators. Through such experiences, children may develop positive developmental assets, such as self-efficacy, connectedness, and research, critical thinking, and communication skills. The results of children’s research also may enhance understanding of children’s experiences of nature in ways that can inform design and management of urban environments (Figure 1).
Youth as peer leaders
Peer education involves people with similar characteristics or experiences learning from each other. Used successfully in the health field, it also can be effective in other arenas, including environmental issues (de Vreede, Warner and Pitter, 2014). Evidence suggests that educating teens to facilitate learning experiences for younger youth can have positive developmental impacts for both younger program recipients and “teens as teachers” (Lee and Murdock, 2001). This strategy provides teens with ownership over the direction of program activities, leading to investment in the outcome of their work (Larson, Walker and Pearce, 2005).
A peer education or “teens as teachers” strategy was piloted in a 4-H environmental education initiative in New York City during the summer of 2015. 4-H is the youth development component of the Cooperative Extension System at many US public universities. Twenty New York City 4-H teens attended the 4-H Career Exploration Conference at Cornell University, where they participated in science and leadership mini-courses led by faculty and staff. During the closing assembly, New York City 4-Hers engaged over 400 peers and adult volunteers in creating “Pollinator Seed Bombs” as part of the National Pollinator Initiative, a US presidential directive to conserve pollinators and thus protect the nation’s food supply. Seed bombs are compressed bundles of clay, compost, and/or soil containing seeds that can be tossed into a bare patch of land to grow new plant life (kidsgardening.org). The 4-H teens and adult volunteers pledged to share their new knowledge and seed bombs with friends and 4-H clubs in their respective communities. One New York City 4-H Peer Educator reflected, “I could see action being taken to improve the world and I was proud to have been a part of it!” This illustrates how participating as an environmental peer educator contributed to this teen leader’s self-efficacy and feelings of mattering, which are positive developmental assets.
When they returned home, the New York City 4-H teens also served as “teen teachers” for the 4-H Exploring Your Urban Environment summer day camp program (Figure 3). The teens were trained to implement a 5-week program with younger youth in eight community agencies in New York City. The teen leaders connected 392 youth to their communities through service-learning opportunities that promoted environmental stewardship and community beautification. In a survey assessing program impacts, all 35 teen teachers agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “I can make a difference in my community through community service;” commitment to community service is a social asset for positive youth development. Teens’ psychological assets were also enhanced as reflected by their agreement or strong agreement with the statement, “I am more confident in helping others.” These results align with our conceptual framework (Figure 1), highlighting the positive impact that connecting youth to their environment in meaningful ways can have for the youth as well as their environment and communities.
Figure 3. In New York City, “teen teachers” in the 4-H Exploring Your Urban Environment program guided younger children releasing butterflies as part of their environmental stewardship project. Credit: Teishawn W. Florestal-Kevelier.
Youth as civic actors
Youth civic engagement refers to young people developing their civic capacities by actively collaborating with others to shape society. One form of youth civic engagement is environmental action, whereby learners collectively analyze a problem and act to solve it. Environmental action can involve directly improving the environment, such as planting native vegetation to restore habitat in a city park, or can indirectly influence others to act through education or policy advocacy. Critical to environmental action is shared decision-making; participants collaborate in defining a problem and then envision and enact solutions (Jensen and Schnack, 1997; Hart, 1997). Adults can experience tensions in sharing decision-making power; navigating these tensions is essential to ensuring genuine opportunity for youths’ participation and positive development (Schusler, Krasny and Decker, 2016).
A youth development specialist and an environmental educator collaborated in an after-school program to facilitate a project in which seven middle school students produced a documentary about “Green Homes” in the City of Ithaca and surrounding towns in upstate New York. The adult leaders chose the project focus, i.e., producing a video about green building, and invited youth to participate. Youth then made decisions with educators’ guidance throughout all facets of video production over seven months, from planning to filming, editing, and debuting to area residents their 18-minute documentary. The role of the adult leader and youth participants in decision-making in this project reflects results of a study on youth environmental action programs, in which educators spoke about striking a balance between providing needed guidance as well as opportunities for youth to assume decision-making and leadership (Schusler et al., 2016).
The students’ video featured three local homes demonstrating building with natural materials, recycled materials, and renewable energy. It also included a “green home” for dogs and cats at the Tompkins County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The “pet home” highlighted the use of recycled materials, natural lighting, a geo-exchange heating and cooling system, and native landscaping.
Participatory action research, peer education, and youth civic engagement can lead to positive change for both urban environments and youth living within them.
Youth reported gaining knowledge about green building and being motivated to do more. As one youth said, “it’s really inspired me to look more at our environment and what I can do to help.” They also spoke of developing skills in video production, problem-solving, communication, teamwork, interacting with adults, persisting to complete a long-term project, and being patient. They valued the opportunity to contribute to their community. As one reflected, “This is going to have an impact on how people build their homes. People that see [the video], at least they’re going to do some of the minor things talked about. And maybe when they see that kids have done something like this, people will give the kids much more respect in the community.” This form of indirect environmental action—youth acted to try to influence residents to make environmentally friendly choices—demonstrates one way that young people develop assets while educating others towards increased urban sustainability (Figure 1).
Conclusion
Participatory action research, peer education, and youth civic engagement are three approaches that have been used in urban environmental education to advance sustainability and foster positive youth development. These three approaches are not mutually exclusive; for example, youth environmental action often involves young people as researchers to understand a situation before proceeding in collective action to change it for the better, and thus integrates participatory action research and civic engagement. All three approaches value young people’s capabilities, build upon their strengths, and offer opportunity for genuine, meaningful participation with the potential for impact on the environment and their communities. They also require adult leaders who provide a caring environment, as well as appropriate levels of guidance, expectations, and freedom for youth to take on leadership and other responsibilities. Through such experiences, young people can contribute to creating more sustainable and resilient cities while developing valuable physical, intellectual, psychological, and social assets that enhance personal well-being.
Tania Schusler, Jacqueline Davis-Manigaulte, and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie
Chicago, New York City, and Gold Coast, Australia
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.
References
Barratt Hacking, E., Cutter-Mackenzie, A. and Barrratt, R. (2013). Children as active researchers: The potential of environmental education research involving children. In Stevenson, R.B., Brody, M., Dillon, J. and Wals, A.E.J. (Eds.), International handbook of research on environmental education (pp. 438-458). New York: Routledge/AERA.
Chawla, L. (Ed.) (2002). Growing up in an urbanizing world. Paris: UNESCO Publishing.
Cutter-Mackenzie, A., Edwards, S. and Widdop Quinton, H. (2015). Child-framed video research methodologies: Issues, possibilities and challenges for researching with children. Children’s Geographies, 13(3), 343-356.
Delia, J.E. (2014). Cultivating a culture of authentic care in urban environmental education: Narratives from youth interns at East New York Farms! (Masters thesis). Ithaca, New York: Cornell University.
de Vreede, C., Warner, A. and Pitter, R. (2014). Facilitating youth to take sustainability actions: The potential of peer education. Journal of Environmental Education, 45(1), 37-56.
Eccles, J. and Gootman, J.A. (Eds.). (2002). Community programs to promote youth development. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
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Hart, R.A. (1997). Children’s participation: The theory and practice of involving young citizens in community development and environmental care. London: Earthscan.
Jensen, B.B. and Schnack, K. (1997). The action competence approach in environmental education. Environmental Education Research, 3(2), 163-178.
Johnson-Pynn, J.S. and Johnson, L.R. (2010). Exploring environmental education for East African youth: Do program contexts matter? Children, Youth and Environments, 20(1), 123-151.
Larson, R., Walker, K., and Pearce, N. (2005). A comparison of youth-driven and adult-driven youth programs: Balancing inputs from youth and adults. Journal of Community Psychology, 33(1), 57-74.
Lee, F.C.H. and Murdock, S. (2001). Teen as teachers programs: Ten essential elements. Journal of Extension, 39(1).
Schusler, T.M. and Krasny, M.E. (2010). Environmental action as context for youth development. Journal of Environmental Education, 41(4), 208-223.
Schusler, T.M., Krasny, M.E., and Decker, D.J. (2016). The autonomy-authority duality of shared decision-making in youth environmental action. Environmental Education Research.
Volk, T.L. and Cheak, M.J. (2003). The effects of an environmental education program on students, parents, and community. Journal of Environmental Education, 34(4), 12-25
Jackie Davis-Manigaulte is a Senior Extension Associate, Family Program Leader for Family and Youth Development and Director of Community Relations with Cornell University Cooperative Extension in New York City.
Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie is the Deputy Head of School Research, as well as the Research Leader of the SCU ‘Sustainability, Environment and Education’ (SEE) Research Cluster at Southern Cross University.
Early childhood—which is generally defined as ages three through eight—is a foundational period when children rapidly move through milestones in physical, cognitive, social, emotional and language development (McCartney and Phillips, 2006). Cities offer unique environments for learning because they present young children with high densities of people from different backgrounds and cultures, buildings and public spaces that may reflect hundreds or even thousands of years of human history, and political systems that regulate environmental behaviors and decision-making.
Early childhood environmental education in cities draws on ideas of John Dewey, Reggio Emilia preschools, environmental education in the built environment, and education for sustainability.
In parks and along riverbanks, in vacant lots and gardens, the natural world weaves its presence. This chapter begins by identifying successive schools of thought in early childhood education that have encouraged the exploration of urban environments with young children. These traditions have pursued similar aims: creative self-expression, democratic decision-making, collaborative learning among peers and multiple generations, communication skills, and a deepening of children’s experiential, place-based learning. This chapter illustrates diverse ways these aims can be achieved in cities, including participatory planning and design, mobile preschools, greening the grounds of schools and childcare centers, gardening, and forest and nature schools in metropolitan areas. It draws examples from both resourced and poorly resourced schools and childcare centers in the global North and South.
In the 1890s, John Dewey’s progressive education sought to prepare children to adapt to an ever changing world through democratic processes of problem solving (Zilversmit, 1993). Central to this philosophy was the ideal of community—that children need opportunities to work with others in a spirit of empathy and service to the world. Dewey’s lab school demonstrated that essential skills like reading, writing, and mathematics could be taught by following children’s own interests in communication, investigation, constructing things, and artistic expression. Dewey’s ideas encouraged project-based learning, which in some schools extended to explorations of local urban and natural environments.
The Reggio Emilia approach to preschool education, which grew out of the ruins of World War II in northern Italy, shared many goals of progressive education. It too sought to replace authoritarian systems of education with more tolerant, communal, equitable, and child-centered values that nurture democracy (Hall and Rudkin, 2011). Adopted by all municipal preschools in the city of Reggio Emilia, its influence has spread worldwide.
Because progressive education and the Reggio Emilia approach encouraged community democratic processes and projects that were motivated by children’s own interests, they opened spaces for investigation of the urban environment. Learning about the city and shaping it through participatory processes of urban design and planning were central aims of the built environment education movement that arose in Great Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1969, the Skeffington Report to government made community consultation an integral part of planning. The Town and Country Planning Association responded by launching the “Bulletin of Environmental Education,” which advocated education to make people more aware, knowledgeable, and responsible for their interactions with the environment “in a manner explicitly constructed to enable them to work with others to take greater control of the shaping and management of their own world” (Bishop, Kean and Adams, 1992, p. 51). In combination with progressive initiatives in British primary schools that included learning through direct experience, team teaching, and field trips into neighborhoods, built environment education led to systematic curricula that brought architects, planners, artists and other experts into classrooms and sent students into the city to investigate and give input on local issues.
Ideals of community and democracy that run through progressive education, the Reggio Emilia approach, and built environment education persist in current expressions of education for sustainability in early childhood education. As Phillips (2014) observed in her discussion of education for sustainability, even very young children want to do “real things” that contribute to solving social and environmental problems. Integration of social and environmental systems, characteristic of education for sustainability, is also evident in the current international movement to naturalize grounds and plant gardens in schools and childcare centers as a means to bring nature into urban children’s lives (Danks, 2010).
Taken together, these pedagogical approaches suggest a set of more specific strategies that can inform early childhood environmental education in cities (Table 1). We illustrate these approaches and strategies using case studies of participatory planning and design and garden education below.
Participatory Planning and Design
Garden Education
Creative Self-Expression
Art-based methods, including murals, nicho boxes, videos, three-dimensional models
Songs, storytelling, cultural exchange
Collaborative Learning
Peer-to-peer and multigenerational learning through dialogue with city leaders and designers
Multigenerational and multicultural exchanges
Experiential, Place-Based Learning
Field trips and research about sites
Native plants and foods, ethnobotanic gardens
Development of Empathy
Recommendations for wildlife habitat in urban spaces including butterfly gardens and creek restoration
Community service, cultural exchange
Sample Recommendation
Tree houses near the library and creek to view and read about nature
Dissipation pond for rain catchment and water play
Participation in planning and design of urban spaces
Growing Up Boulder is a child friendly city initiative that was formed in 2009 and is a formal partnership between the City of Boulder, Boulder Valley School District, and the University of Colorado’s Program in Environmental Design. While the initiative engages children of all ages, its work with young children (ages 3-8) has included participatory design of city parks, playgrounds, large-scale public spaces, neighborhoods, and open space. Growing Up Boulder fosters creative self-expression and collaborative learning through its methods of engagement, from nicho boxes (multimedia boxes inspired from Latin American folk art) and murals to three-dimensional models of recommended redesigns, which allow children to effectively express their ideas (Derr and Tarantini, 2016).
A critical aspect of Growing Up Boulder’s work with young children is developing partnerships in which teachers understand the value of participation in early childhood. One such partnership has been with the Boulder Journey School, a Reggio Emilia school. The school’s philosophies of honoring children’s own modes of expression, instilling a “pedagogy of listening,” and promoting children’s right to active citizenship (Hall and Rudkin, 2011) support participatory design and planning with ages 4-5. For example, Boulder Journey School students contributed to the redesign of Boulder’s Civic Area, a public space in the city’s downtown, through field trips, drawings and photographs, a presentation to city council, and participation as jurors in the city’s design competition (Derr and Tarantini, 2016).
Urban environmental education facilitates children’s contact with and learning about urban nature and the built environment.
Growing Up Boulder has also partnered with third graders (ages 8-9) from an ethnically and economically diverse school that utilizes the International Baccalaureate curriculum. Projects have included neighborhood design for increased density as well as redesign of public space (Derr and Kovács, 2015). The most recent project focused on resilience in partnership with Mexico City, as part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities network. The project allowed creative self-expression and collaborative learning both within and across schools, through video and mural exchange.
In Growing Up Boulder projects, children consistently consider the rights of others and show empathy toward other people and nature (Chawla and Rivkin, 2014; Derr and Tarantini, 2016). For example, in considering parks and open space, Boulder Journey School students researched physical features of insects and developed simple costumes of antennae and wings (Figure 1), and in the classroom, teachers projected large insect shadows on a wall so that children could experience the scale at which humans appear to insects. In their recommendations, students showed concern that insects might be hurt by visitors on trails and wanted to protect the insects and their homes. Growing Up Boulder has found that desires for nature protection and enhancement emerge across projects and ages, in early childhood and beyond (Chawla and Rivkin, 2014).
Figure 1. Children demonstrate empathy by dressing as insects on a field trip to a city park. Credit: Tina Briggs.
Children’s access to nature in the city
Bringing children to nature
In an effort to increase young children’s access to nature, many Canadian and European cities have established forest schools in which urban children walk to nearby forests or green spaces for some or all of their day (Elliott et al., 2014). Forest schools reach preschool through second grade and are integrated into both private and public school settings. In forest schools, children visit the same place on a regular basis, thus coming to know it and its cycles intimately. Teachers respond to children’s interests by listening to and writing down children’s ideas and then deepening students’ knowledge of nature and place. In Canada, forest schools also provide aboriginal specialists who integrate stories and cultural knowledge into place-based education (Elliott et al., 2014).
In response to shrinking school grounds that lack natural play areas, cities in Scandinavia and Australia have created mobile preschools, in which children ride a bus to natural areas and cultural places in the city. From their research with a mobile preschool in Sweden, Gustafson and van der Burgt (2015) caution that while this model may foster independence and increase children’s access to urban places, such programs face practical limitations from changes in weather conditions, the frequent need for outdoor toilets, and discussion of rules of behavior for different physical settings. This model provides a contrast to forest schools, which provide routine opportunities for learning through repeated visits to the same place.
Bringing nature to children
Naturalized childcare centers in North Carolina, U.S., are similar to forest schools in bringing nature to children where they learn and play. Moore and Cosco (2014) have found that community and ecosystem health fosters physical activity and a diversity of play types. Research comparing behaviors before and after naturalizing school grounds found children spent more time outdoors in all seasons; teachers created more vegetable gardens; children exhibited decreases in negative social behaviors, increases in imaginative play, and increases in play among peers with different abilities; and the community expressed increased pride about school grounds.
Successful models for early childhood environmental education develop citizenship and promote sustainability.
Perhaps the largest movement to increase children’s access to nature within the city is school gardens. As the following examples illustrate, gardens embody a whole systems approach to understanding life’s interconnections and involve children in interacting with plants and animals as they care for them. Tending a garden helps children to develop an ethic of caring, and to connect with themselves, the seasonal cycles, and the creatures that share the garden (Noddings, 2005). Integrating stories about plants, insects and animals into environmental education engages children in life’s wonders on a metaphorical and affective level. Songs tied to natural cycles deepen children’s relationship with what they plant by allowing children to sing, dance, and act as part of their experience.
Gardens at daycare centers: Puebla, Mexico and Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
A small international organization, A Child’s Garden of Peace, partnered with Casa Cuna, the only free daycare in Puebla, Mexico, to create a garden and nature education program on the daycare’s grounds (Figure 2). Secondary schools and universities in Puebla (population 2 million) require several hundred hours of community service from their students. As a service project, about 60 youth prepared the Casa Cuna ground for planting. None had ever held a shovel or planted a garden. They worked with children, aged 2 to 5, to plant herbs, vegetables, flowers and fruit trees. Everyone learned together. The garden also includes a shade structure where children rest and participate in garden-inspired art and music activities. Children’s senses lead their garden explorations. The youth and children water the garden daily, discover what has bloomed or become ripe for picking, and carry the harvest to the school kitchen.
Figure 2. Multigenerational planting at a daycare center in Puebla, Mexico. Credit: Illène Pevec.
When early childhood centers lack land for a garden, large pots filled with soil can provide planting space. In Rocinha, Brazil’s largest favela where over 100,000 people live on a granite hillside, the Associação Social Padre Anchieta Daycare has no land except the building’s footprint. The school’s roof provides a small outdoor play area, and one 10-square-foot area bordered by a 6-inch raised edge became a small garden with the addition of compost donated by a local environmental group. Children used the small plot and large plastic pots to plant garlic, onions, beets, lettuce, collards, herbs and flowers, which in turn enhanced nutrition and flavor of meals, attracted pollinators, and added color and life to the daycare, creating a sanctuary from street dangers.
Educational gardens: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
The “Spirit of Nature” garden was initiated by two University of British Columbia students at the Grandview/U’uquinakuh Elementary School and Grandview Daycare Center in 1998. Children, teachers and neighbors engaged in all phases of planning and implementation. Models created by children inspired a landscape architecture student’s one-acre design including a butterfly garden, wild bird habitat, ethnobotanic garden, school vegetable garden, community garden, an outdoor classroom modeled after an indigenous longhouse building, and a dissipation pond. The dissipation pond—in which sand and crushed shells mimic a coastal beachfront and absorb falling rainwater—represents a compromise between children who wanted a pond and the school board who prohibited it for liability reasons (Bell, 2001). The rain catchment system provided a superb play space, affording opportunities for dam building and leaf sailing on rainy days. The Vancouver Coastal Health Authority has funded a garden coordinator/classroom educator since 2001. Lessons for early grades integrate science, culture, and math. For example, students make graphs to measure seedling growth and use an abacus fence to count harvests. The librarian also hosts story times that thematically link garden eating with books about the plants being eaten.
A variety of approaches, including participatory planning, forest kindergartens, mobile preschools, and school gardens, can be integrated into urban early childhood education.
Gardens can facilitate cross-cultural knowledge exchange in diverse urban communities. Elders who live adjacent to the garden in Grandview’s public housing created a book titled “The Web of Life” to share their childhood garden experiences as indigenous peoples of Canada and as immigrants from other countries. The First Nations’ school members also held a community-wide ceremony in which native chiefs, dancers and singers came in full regalia to bless the gardens and longhouse with its totem poles carved on site. As they play in the native maple tree’s shade or under the longhouse roof on a rainy day, children experience wildlife attracted by the native plants and engage in a cultural environment honoring local heritage (Pevec, 2003).
Conclusion
This chapter describes educational approaches that encourage children’s exploration of built and natural settings in cities. These approaches provide opportunities for children to express empathy for other living beings and respect for diverse cultures. Through the participatory design of a playground, a garden space, or a public park, children develop a sense of agency and competence and increase their understanding of the processes that shape a city. Through field trips and gardening, they learn about natural cycles and systems. These experiences lay a foundation for the development of environmental responsibility and stewardship. According to the ideas of John Dewey, Reggio Emilia preschools, and built environment education, social and environmental challenges cannot be solved through authoritarian, technocratic decision-making. Successful problem-solving requires the intelligence, creativity, and collaborative resourcefulness of all sectors of society, including young children. Early childhood is the time to begin teaching these skills. By bringing children out of their childcare centers and classrooms into the built and natural spaces of their cities, and by involving children in naturalizing built surroundings, urban environmental education contributes to cities where human constructions and natural processes can productively co-exist for all ages.
Victoria Derr, Louise Chawla, and Illène Pevec
Boulder, Boulder, and Basalt, CO
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.
References
Bell, A. (2001). Grounds for learning: Stories and insights from six Canadian school ground naturalization initiatives. Canada: Evergreen.
Bishop, J., Kean, J. and Adams, E. (1992). Children, environment and education. Children’s Environments9 (1), 49-67.
Chawla, L. and Rivkin, M. (2014). Early childhood education for sustainability in the United States of America. In Davis J. and Elliott, S. (Eds.), Research in early childhood education for sustainability: International perspectives and provocations (pp. 248-265). London: Routledge.
Danks, S. (2010). Asphalt to ecosystems. Oakland, California: New Village Press.
Derr, V. and Kovács, I. (2015). How participatory processes impact children and contribute to planning: A case study of neighborhood design from Boulder, Colorado, USA. Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability.
Derr, V. and Tarantini, E. (2016). “Because we are all people”: Outcomes and reflections from young people’s participation in the planning and design of child friendly public spaces. Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability.
Elliott, E., Eycke, K., Chan, S. and Müller, U. (2014). Taking kindergarteners outdoors: Documenting their explorations and assessing the impact on environmental awareness. Children, Youth and Environments, 24(2), 102-122.
Hall, E.L. and Rudkin, J.K. (2011). Seen and heard: Children’s rights in early childhood education. New York: Teachers College Press.
Gustafson, K. and van der Burgt, D. (2015). ‘Being on the move’: Time-spatial organization and mobility in a mobile preschool. Transport Geography, 46, 201-209.
McCartney, K. and Phillips, D. (Eds.). (2006). Blackwell Handbook of Early Childhood Development. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing.
Moore, R. and Cosco, N. (2014). Growing up green: Naturalization as a health promotion strategy in early childhood outdoor learning environments. Children, Youth and Environments, 24(2), 168-191.
Noddings, N. (2005). The Challenge to Care in Schools: An alternative approach to education. 2nd edition. New York: Teachers College Press.
Pevec, I. (2003). Ethnobotanical gardens: Celebrating the link between human culture and the natural world. Green Teacher, 70, 25-28.
Phillips, L.G. (2014). I want to do real things: Explorations of children’s active community participation. In Davis, J. and Elliott, S. (Eds.), Research in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (194-207). London: Routledge.
Zilversmit, A., (1993). Changing schools. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
I find myself choosing the title for this contribution at a time of personal, public, and professional dilemma. Strangely, the dilemma stems from the need to vindicate the question itself.
Food grown in local urban settings can reduce the negative impact of conventional agriculture on natural resources and contribute to the restoration of habitats for local flora and fauna.
While it is perfectly acceptable to ask how green, how healthy, how prosperous or how popular a city is, the concept of a sustainable urban food cycle is not yet officially established on most city agendas.
In many cities, food-growing community gardens, urban farms, and rooftop vegetable gardens are perceived as “nice to have”. Yet, in spite of the knowledge that there are many benefits in locally grown food, which are frequently mentioned by contributors to TNOC, urban and peri-urban agriculture are not yet perceived as a “must have” on the required menu for sustainable cities.
In my city, Jerusalem, I established the “Food for Jerusalem” forum just two years ago. We began to seek out and to convene the many stakeholders in and around the city who deal with local food, who are involved either in growing it, supplying it, consuming it, cooking it, or educating children and adults about its importance. The Jerusalem Bioregion Center, working through the Jerusalem Green Fund, had begun to address the issue of community-based urban and peri-urban agriculture after realizing that conventional agriculture constitutes one of the greatest threats to biodiversity, given the way it fills up extensive areas with monoculture crops and encourages the use of pesticides to destroy insects and other threats to the crops. Conventional agriculture poses a threat to consumer health, since a lot of the pesticides that farmers apply are absorbed into the crops and then constitute part of the meals we eat. Genetic engineering of crops is another troubling aspect of large-scale conventional agriculture. While it is true that the jury is still out on genetic engineering, it is undoubtedly not proven to be beneficial. Still, these are the systems that currently provide the enormous amount of food needed to feed the world.
We began to realize that the diverse ways in which food can be grown in an urban setting can not only reduce the negative impact of conventional agriculture on natural resources, but can also contribute to the restoration of habitats for local flora and fauna, if maintained according to the principles of organic farming. Moreover, although we had originally entered the world of local food production through the portal of biodiversity, we soon discovered the many other ways into this arena, which many hope will take center stage in the global conversation about sustainable urbanism, to take place in Quito, Equador, in October 2016 (HABITAT III). The Quito meeting, twenty years on from HABITAT II, will try to serve up the magic formula for sustainable urbanism, and urban food production will be on the agenda for the first time.
Intensive commercial roof-top vegetable-growing in a Jerusalem suburb. Courtesy of the Jerusalem Bioregion Center.
The list of benefits from local food production is a long one, but here are a few of them:-
War, natural disaster, or a failed economy can cut off cities from their food supplies, leaving local communities without food or water. Local food production can contribute to food security.
Transportation of food into cities accounts for some 30 percent of the emissions of most cities. Local food production can contribute to reducing the city’s ecological footprint.
Locally grown organic food can be free of pesticides and, therefore, much healthier. Nutrition experts have tested this out and as a result many of them are joining the urban food- growing coalition.
Kids who learn to grow vegetables at school will be happy to eat them and to focus less on junk food. This is an interesting case of the proof of the “pudding” being in the eating, and there are interesting statistics from schools that have thriving vegetable gardens, where the students are keen to eat what they themselves have grown, admitting that it gives them great pride to take ownership of the vegetable growing process in their schools.
Neighborhood initiatives such as community gardens not only provide healthy food, but also strengthen community solidarity.
In many contexts, local food production, together with local hospitality, provides a sound basis for sustainable tourism. This works best when bolstered with local arts, crafts, and music, and of course the local scenery and landscape.
All of the benefits listed above add up to increased urban resilience
As the “Food for Jerusalem” forum has developed, it is truly remarkable how diverse our stakeholders are. We have schools that are incorporating food-growing in the curriculum of grades 4 and 5, a variety of community gardens, an urban farm that employs youth at risk, senior citizens’ daycare centers, commercial use of roof space for vegetable-growing and “edible neighborhood” initiatives, to mention only a few. It has also become apparent that food growing has the potential to generate cross-boundary collaboration as well, and Israeli and Palestinian communities are beginning to meet and learn best practices from each other.
Food grown in community gardens in Jerusalem. Courtesy of the Jerusalem Bioregion Center.
We have taken the time to meet and argue about the goals of our work in growing food in and around our city. All the stakeholders agreed on the goals, while each one contributes to achieving different aspects of them. The Jerusalem Municipality is a member of the forum, but not its convener. The role of convening the stakeholders in the Food for Jerusalem forum was undertaken by the Jerusalem Bioregion Center, which works throughout the region, regardless of municipal or geopolitical boundaries.
Major goals of the “Food for Jerusalem” initiative, as agreed on by member stakeholders
Establish and regularly convene a stakeholder forum of food-growing initiatives and foster cooperation among the diverse projects
Promote national legislation to facilitate rezoning of local land for urban food growing, while fostering cooperation among all levels of government—local, regional and national
Integrate food production into urban planning in Jerusalem, by means of a development policy that relates both to food growing and biodiversity as part of the ecological infrastructure of the region
Map and catalog existing initiatives. Identify and develop additional food-growing areas in and around the city
Investigate the potential for alternative food growing environments (roofs, walls, indoors, etc.)
Introduce new technologies that are economically and environmentally sustainable for the urban environment.
Identify, analyze, and quantify the economic, health, and social benefits of developing a local food system
Strengthen the local economy by promoting initiatives based on the food cycle
Incorporate the food cycle and healthy eating in the curricula of formal and informal educational frameworks, including active engagement in food-growing
Establish sustainable water sources for food-growing initiatives in and around Jerusalem
The above goals are admirable, representing a concerted community effort to make the local food cycle sustainable, healthy and secure; that can surely not be faulted. However, if sustainability is really the goal, then what we are doing barely scratches the tip of the proverbial iceberg. As an avid follower of the Food for Cities contributions, I am aware that what is happening in our city is no different from other parts of the world. In the Global North, it is the environmentalists who are preaching urban food-growing and developing all kinds of technologies to grow food horizontally on roofs, vertically on walls, to mention only a few of our antics. In the Global South, dire poverty, and lack of fresh water mean that local food-growing could be the difference between surviving and starving. In fact, both are right, since the environmentalists are aware of the impact of the global food market on emissions, whereas people in survival mode do what they must.
Kids grow their own vegetables in a Jerusalem School. Courtesy of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel.
At the HABITAT III global meeting in October, 2016, one of the main focuses will be on how to provide healthy food and clean water for a rapidly increasing world population, most of which will be concentrated in urban settings. All the right decisions and declarations will be made, but they will, of course, be “non-binding”.
This leads me to question the wisdom of the title of this piece, even though I chose it myself. The question that needs to be asked is not “How Edible is My City?”, but “How Can we Brand the Local Food Cycle with a Positive Image?”, thereby ensuring this issue is positioned firmly, securely, and center stage when discussing the ingredients of SDG number 11, the Sustainable and Inclusive Cities goal. We have to think of ways to make cities all over the world vie with each other over the question of where more local food is being produced and consumed. This is going to be a long and difficult haul, but of course it must be noted that the process has already effectively begun, as is evidenced by the increasing number of local food-growing initiatives in and around cities today. It is now up to all of us to help the process to accelerate and to prove the efficacy of a thriving local food cycle in strengthening urban resilience.
A review of Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable World, Edited by Jared Green. 2015. ISBN: 161689300. Princeton Architectural Press. 176 pages. Buy the book.
In the last several years our culture has taken a dystopian turn. Movies broadcasting bleak futures, such as TheHunger Games series and Snowpiercer, have enjoyed box office success. More darkly, movements advocating self- sufficiency, like preppers, have moved out of the fringe and into the mainstream.
At its best, this book brings together small projects centered on community-level planning and the informal. While focusing on the practical, it posits the need for thinking big again.
We are, it seems, more than ready to accept cataclysmic climate change and social unraveling as inevitable—one only needs to figure out where to stash the gold and guns. This is in stark contrast to decades past, when confidence and a can-do spirit were the norm. How did we move to a culture of apocalyptic expectation? Where’s the hope to be found in a world marked by migration, strife, and ecological distress?
It turns out that not everyone is going to roll over and accept the worst as our lot. Designed for the Future, an edited collection of micro-interviews compiled by Jared Green, looks for bright spots in a gloomy sky. Green, a journalist focused on design and urbanism, asked prominents in the field what we can do to bring forth a better future.
The authorbegins by taking us through his process: he located people with stature in the fields of policy, planning, and architecture (just to name a few), and asked them to identify a project (not their own) that gives them hope for the years that lie ahead. These segments read, at times, like program notes for the Aspen Ideas Festival. The anecdotes are fragmentary—like something overheard at a dinner party—but they are also relatively direct, theory-less, and straightforward: use green spaces to capture stormwater, build hospitals with gardens, transform industrial wastelands into parks, build libraries in poor areas, and the list goes on…
If the book’s cheerful eco-urbanism starts to feel grating, it also reminds us of how damn cynical we have become (myself included). This transformation seems to have happened almost overnight. Solutions-talk has become outré; instead, we prefer to move quickly from outrage to apathy. In the design world, we often put on an haute snark, pointing at problems while doing very little to ameliorate them. Much of our architectural and visual culture encourages this, and it ist a relief to see practitioners showcased in this book who still insist on envisioning workable solutions to today’s most pressing problems.
These practical interventions, as the title suggests, are mostly modest in scale and eminently do-able. They aim to: create play spaces with recycled materials, incorporate agriculture into our urban fabric, and liberate parking spaces for human—not car—use. These are things being done by progressive planners, landscape architects, urban designers, and others with very little money and a whole lot of love. These projects deserve to be amplified and more widely adopted. Hopefully, books like Designed for the Future will encourage the shapers of the built environment to see the potential in ground-up projects that take sustainability and community needs as the their starting points.
The book is especially good when it takes on landscape architecture and the power of demonstration in city-building. The High Line is a great example of what designers can do. This elevated railbed was once a route for moving animals to meatpacking warehouses on Manhattan’s West Side. Long disused—it was at one point slated for demolition—the structure was converted to a linear urban park starting in the early 2000s. Jeff Shumaker, the chief urban designer for New York City’s Department of City Planning, notes that what today seems so natural a choice was anything but a sure thing. That the project has been wildly successful, or that it has become an engine for luxury development sprouting up around it, should not count as a strikes against it. Future gentrification isn’t a reason not to build nice things. Designers need to be sensitive to the needs of communities, and the botched history of grand projects, but they also need to have an aesthetic vision.
NYC’s High Line during development. Photo courtesy of Sam Holleran.
Nor can designers do it alone:, they need policy and politicians to support them, and projects—even the best designed—need vigilant maintenance and stewardship (as the High Line has shown). That takes both time and money. What separates design and architecture from art is that it must engage with the crude forces of capital and the whims of politics to get projects built and then taken care of over time. In assessing Olmsted’s Central Park for the book, Naomi Sachs—founder of the Therapeutic Landscapes Network, aptly notes that the 778-acre park has existed for over 150 years. That it has remained in a city obsessed with renewal illustrates that it has become equally beloved by succeeding generations of New Yorkers. This reminds us that when we create projects, we must imagine a future public, and make sure that subsequent generations will fall in love with the places and things we create. Somewhere down the road, we hope all of the decisions we’ve made will appear manifestly necessary.
Using design as a lens for imagining our future does come with some built-in problems. Too many of the people interviewed see design as an inherently good thing—it slices through bureaucracy, it saves the day, it spans jurisdictional boundaries and unifies all! Sadly, design isn’t our white knight. It’s a way of looking at the world, and it can be good and bad. There is some implied violence in design processes. Designers are not always in it for the betterment of the world. Even when projects have good intentions—like urban renewal plans built on utopian aims—they can trigger disastrous effects. MoMA curator Paola Antonelli’s Design and Violenceproject, a compendium of objects and ideas that manifest power in subtle and overt ways, clearly shows this. Included in the collection one finds: Mikhail Kalashnikov’s groundbreaking automatic rifle, border walls, computer viruses, and arcade games. Designed for the Future fails to acknowledge design’s ugly side, and in so doing loses a great deal of perspective. This is a clear blind spot.
The worst fear, then, is that our best designs will also prove our most ill-considered. T.S. Eliot quipped that “most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions”. This is still up for debate, but stories of best laid plans gone awry are all too familiar. Snowpiercer, the 2013 South Korean science fiction film,offers up a vision of a bleak and frozen planet caused by geoengineering gone wrongbad. Instead of fixing global warming, the ‘hack’ renders the earth’s crust an arctic tundra. The confident promise of creative solutions is perhaps not just cause for hope, but for a little well-founded fear, too. When we consider design, the future, and envelope-pushing ideas, we also need to address the real concerns that spring up when we talk about altering our built environment and modifying our natural world. The fear isn’t just that we will get something totally wrong, but also that we will only get things partly right, that we might craft a positive future, but only for a limited number of people.
Dystopian futures often have “saved spaces”—oases in the wreckage. In Octavia E. Butler’sParable novels, these spaces are Earthseed, a string of egalitarian multi-racial communities set against the backdrop of an unraveling America ruled by a dystopic president (whose motto is, incidentally, “Make America Great Again”). In The Hunger Games novels, the haven is District 13, an underground labyrinth from which a new, benevolent society will be brought forth. Both spaces have limited membership, and they are geographically and financially constrained to a lucky few. Today, many may feel that a better world is being made—but not for them.
Some of the ideas in Green’s book suggest how to scale the benefits previously available only to the select few so that they are available to a great many more. Nicolas Buchoud, of Renaissance Urbaine in France, looks at ways to extend the good living of central Paris to the suburban banlieues through a regional plan; Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, looks at how the U.S. and China can develop wind energy projects together; and Maria Aiolova refreshes Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map to imagine a global flow of thermal energy.
Copenhagen’s coast, one of the models held up in Green’s book. Photo courtesy of Sam Holleran.Tempelhof Field, Berlin’s freewheeling public space. Photo courtesy of Sam Holleran.Photo courtesy of Sam Holleran
These are big ideas that aim to change the lives of millions of people, and there is certainly the possibility that design could overstep. In North America, failed mega investments in urban renewal, suburban roadways, and water-intensive agriculture have soured citizens to large-scale intervention in the built environment and, more broadly, the role of “big government.” These attitudes have implications for the design professions—with their implied arrogance and structural violence—and for the role of government in shaping the physical world of its citizens. But will timidity address the very real and urgent problems we’ve been saddled with? This is something I found myself turning over when reading Green’s book: how do we press forward, temperately? Can we design with self-awareness, a grounding in social justice, and a healthy dose of skepticism?
Faced with a looming ecological collapse and humanitarian crises left and right, don’t we need big, new ideas? At its best, this book brings together small projects centered on community-level planning and the informal, with bigger currents and some fabulously out-there ideas managinge to sneak themselves in. While focusing on the practical, it posits the need for thinking big again.
In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy slammed into the New York and New Jersey shoreline, with winds of 145 kilometers per hour and a storm surge 4.3 meters above mean low water. The superstorm flooded the city’s subways, destroyed thousands of homes, washed away beaches and boardwalks, and caused at least 53 deaths and over $18 billion in economic losses. On the other side of the world, between 2006 and 2014, Singapore experienced multiple 150-year record rainfalls and droughts. How can cities experiencing climate-related flooding and other disturbances protect their citizens now and into the future?
Climate change education addresses immediate safety and risk reduction, as well as longer-term actions to enhance environmental quality.
Environmental education—including school and public programs developed by universities and government agencies as well as initiatives that emerge from the efforts of grassroots organizations—can play a role in responding to and preparing for climate change and related disasters. But in so doing, environmental educators face a dilemma: how can we hold true to our foundational values of enhancing the environment, including efforts to mitigate climate change, while addressing the reality that climate change has already irreversibly changed our environment and that we need to adapt and transform? We address this question using examples of formal school curricula, engineered infrastructure development, and public outreach in Singapore, and through an exploratory “three Rs” approach to climate responsive environmental and sustainability education in the U.S.
Singapore has responded to climate change through a combination of building infrastructure to ensure safety, implementing climate change requirements in the school curriculum, and public education (Figure 1). An example of infrastructure is engineering efficient drainage systems. Reflecting government directives, climate change has been incorporated into the grade 8 and 9 syllabus with a focus on “variable weather and changing climate” (Chang, 2014). Climate change education in Singapore seeks to help learners develop knowledge, skills, values and action to engage with and learn about the causes, impacts, and management of climate change. Students are expected to be proficient in climate change science, make informed judgements about climate change issues, convince others of their beliefs about the causes of climate change, and take personal action to reduce their carbon footprint. Complementing these infrastructure and school efforts is public education on floods, which is focused on public preparedness. For example, Singapore’s Public Utilities Board communicates flood updates on the radio, Facebook, Twitter, and other websites. The public is actively engaged through crowd-sourced reporting of flood locations. In response to droughts, public education has focused on information dissemination and on providing an advisory to households to voluntarily manage water demand.
Whereas Singapore’s multi-pronged efforts are impressive, Chang and Irvine (2014) recognize the need for a more integrated approach to prepare the public. For instance, they suggest developing a program to help the public prepare for precipitation extremes by identifying vulnerabilities and risks, creating an understanding of the notion of adaptive capacity (e.g., through improving drainage systems), and monitoring precipitation. They also promote a relief action program that describes what can be done for post-event recovery. In short, Singapore, which similar to many coastal cities around the world is highly vulnerable to sea level rise, has embarked on a comprehensive approach to protect and educate its citizens and can be expected to take on even greater efforts in the future.
Figure 1. Like many coastal cities, most of Singapore is no more than a few meters above sea level; thus efficient drainage systems and education for public preparedness for floods are essential. Credit: Alex Russ.
Climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education: reclamation, resilience, and regeneration (three Rs)
Education that focuses exclusively on reducing our carbon footprint, or mitigation, is no longer realistic given that changes in climate are already occurring and threatening livelihoods, communities, ecosystems, and biodiversity.
In addition to efforts like those in Singapore that help residents prepare for and respond to the immediate threat of disasters, Hauk (2016) has called for more fundamental rethinking about how we address ongoing climate instability. She had proposed the three Rs approach to climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education. The Rs include reclamation, a form of mitigation or reducing our impact on and improving the environment; resilience, which incorporates notions of adaptation and adaptive capacity; and regeneration, which is most closely aligned with transformation or envisioning new social-ecological processes and systems. We suggest how environmental education can support each of these processes below.
Reclamation
Reclamation involves designing systems to reclaim lost ecological and social capacity. It can include ark-like preservation or conservation via sanctuaries, weather-proof libraries, seed banks, and reserves that maintain cultural lifeways. Whereas we often think of reclaiming in terms of mine reclamation, here we refer to reclaiming more complete sustainable living systems such as those incorporating indigenous ecological knowledge. Innovative technologies, including those informed by deep biomimicry (Mathews 2011), can contribute to reclamation. Because reclamation is driven by an ethic of caring, and by political and social structures that allow for the expression of that caring, it depends on a culture’s commitment to sustainability. Further, because it invites reconsideration of marginalized ecosystems and lifeways, reclamation also depends on the cultural commons, and the continuity and honoring of elder cultures that provide an alternative to practices with a high carbon footprint (Bowers, 2013). While this seemingly excludes the possibility of reclamation for many cities, remnants of social and ecological memories are often retained, for example, by farmers who have immigrated or migrated to urban centers and grow vegetables and herbs in community gardens. Cuba’s permaculture and organic farming revolution and use of appropriate technologies following loss of Soviet support in the 1990s provides an example of reclamation. Such urban agriculture, as well as smaller-scale urban allotment and community gardens, bring together multiple generations and people with different skills, and thus create opportunities for environmental learning.
Resilience
A person, a community, an ecosystem, or a social-ecology system can be resilient. Thus, psychology, sociology, and ecology have developed definitions of resilience, all of which have in common notions of hardship, disturbance, recovery, adaptation, and in cases where an individual, community, or system experiences “tipping point” changes, transformation (Table 1).
Type of resilience
Definition
Community
Ability of communities to cope with and recover from external stressors resulting from social, political and environmental change (CARRI, 2013)
Ecological
Magnitude of disturbance that a system can experience before it moves into a different state with different controls on structure and function (Holling, 1973)
Psychological
Processes of, capacity for, or patterns of positive adaptation during or following exposure to adverse experiences that have the potential to disrupt or destroy the successful functioning or development of the person (Masten and Obradovic, 2008)
Social-ecological systems
Capacity of a social-ecological system to adapt or transform so as to maintain ongoing processes in response to gradual and small-scale change, or transform in the face of devastating change (Berkes, Colding, and Folke, 2003)
Krasny, Lundholm, and Plummer (2010) suggest four ways in which environmental education programs can contribute to social-ecological and other forms of resilience.
Environmental education can foster attributes of resilient social-ecological systems such as biological diversity, ecosystem services, and social capital (cf. Walker and Salt, 2006).
Through collaboration with government agencies and nonprofit and community organizations, environmental education organizations can become part of polycentric governance systems, which offer options for adapting to and bouncing back from small disturbance and major disasters (cf. Ostrom, 2010, cited in Krasny et al. 2010).
Resilience can help bridge the controversy over whether environmental education is an instrument to promote behavior change, or a means to foster critical thinking and emancipation, by showing that environmental education can foster social-ecological systems (instrumental) and psychological (emancipatory) resilience simultaneously.
Parallels among concepts from learning theory and social-ecological resilience may contribute to badly needed cross-disciplinary approaches to address linked social and environmental problems. For example, learning theory suggests that discrepant or unexpected events foster transformational learning, and social-ecological systems resilience suggests that major disturbances spur new approaches to environmental management and environmental education.
A study of environmental educators who experienced Hurricane Sandy in New York City revealed that educators commonly used the term resilience to describe their programs. They drew on their environmental education practice to create working definitions of resilience, which roughly mirrored the academic definitions of psychological, community, and social-ecological resilience. A program emphasizing psychological resilience sought to equip participants with the skills to respond to future disturbances; programs designed to support community participation in planning reflected community resilience; and those that fostered engagement in civic ecology practices, such as oyster and dune restoration, reflected social-ecological resilience (DuBois and Krasny, 2016).
Education for adaptation and transformation can foster healthy ecosystem and community processes, consistent with reducing carbon footprint.
Although educators in the New York City study commonly did not make a distinction between resilience and adaptation, they spoke about resilience more often. Possible explanations include being influenced by resilience-focused funding and resilience-related city government reports. But an intriguing possibility is that the notion of resilience as a pathway forward in the face of personal hardship as well as larger systems disturbance made this term resonate with educators. Or, as one educator put it: “Adaptation—sometimes there is a, I don’t want to use the word helplessness—but less of a proactive feeling than resiliency. Resiliency says it’s a pathway and process—the words adaptation and mitigation—not a lot of love in there.”
Regeneration
Regeneration involves creating more fundamental, transformational change, recognizing that climate change is altering ongoing social-ecological processes and that systems may lose the ability to adapt (Hauk, 2016). Such transformations are consistent with the reorganization phase following tipping point disruptions in the adaptive cycle, and with the emergence of entirely new processes at multiple scales (Gunderson and Holling, 2002; Krasny et al, 2010). Similar to resilient systems, regenerative systems are characterized by multiple and multi-scale feedback mechanisms, including feedbacks among social capital, empowerment, urban food production, justice, and knowledge-sharing networks. For example, students engaged in community gardens may build social capital, which in turn may foster willingness to engage in further action for the common good—including actions that require creating new systems for managing collective resources such as urban open space. Urban environmental education can play a role in regeneration not only by helping young people engage in activities such as creating and monitoring artificial algal systems designed to filter contaminants or produce energy, but also by reflecting on the human, community, and ecosystem processes that enable such systems to thrive. We can think of regeneration as “re-weaving living systems.” Williams and Brown (2012, pp. 44-45) argue that these more radically transformative approaches “redesign the mindscape” while restructuring environmental and sustainability education through “the development of a regenerative metaphorical language to inform sustainability teaching and learning.” The learning is characterized by cooperation, mutual reciprocity, and vibrancy, and catalyzes transformations in the structure and pedagogy of learning contexts.
Summing-up
All three Rs—reclamation, resilience, and regeneration—can occur simultaneously. In fact, we may envision them as embedded processes, with reclamation occupying the more limited vision, followed by resilience and finally regeneration. Further, all three processes may depend on horizontal networks of nongovernmental organizations, scientists, government, and community groups that mobilize actions, and vertical integration of community action with larger political structures so as to effect larger changes (Soltesova et al., 2014).
Environmental education can incorporate reclamation, resilience, and regeneration. Environmental education for reclamation occurs when students become involved in preservation, conservation, and the establishment of sanctuaries of exemplar systems, including in small urban parks or gardens. Environmental education for social-ecological resilience focuses on building adaptive capacity, including through creating social networks to support collaboration and learning, which are in turn applied to an ongoing process of collaborative and adaptive management or so-called “learning by experience.” Similar to environmental education for resilience, environmental education for regeneration incorporates an emphasis on feedback processes and nurtures participation in stewardship activities; however it adds a focus on learning through creating entirely new systems, like algal energy production, and on reflecting on how new types of complex systems operate.
The “reclamation, resilience, and regeneration” climate education framework encompasses learning about mitigation, adaptation, and transformation.
Conclusion
Returning to our original question about the challenges environmental education faces in an age of climate change, we contend that environmental education can integrate mitigation and adaptation in cases where adaptation is grounded in processes that occur in healthy ecosystems and communities (Krasny and DuBois, in press). Examples of so-called “ecosystem-based adaptation” include restoring populations of oysters that provide filtering and other ecosystem services, and restoring dunes to serve as natural barriers for storm surges. Environmental education also can address adaptation in a manner consistent with its social values, including participation and equity, by incorporating “community-based adaptation” options. These include efforts to engage youth and adults in collaborative, hands-on stewardship and monitoring. Although many such initiatives may not sound like environmental education per se, we propose a definition of urban environmental education that in addition to structured lessons, encompasses the learning that occurs through engagement in hands-on reclamation, restoration, and creating or monitoring regenerative systems. In some cases, this will mean that engagement in restoration and other forms of stewardship, normally considered a goal of environmental education, occurs prior to and creates a context for learning.
How might we integrate environmental education alongside mitigation, adaptation, and transformation, and the three Rs climate responsive education? We can start by drawing on a long-term tradition of environmental education that has focused on mitigation. When efforts to foster pro-environmental behaviors address conservation, environmental education is consistent with the first R, reclamation. Climate responsive environmental education expands to encompass ecosystem- and community-based adaptation, which is consistent with the second R, resilience. Finally, climate responsive environmental education encompasses transformation or regeneration, the third R (Table 2). Although we refer here to social-ecological resilience and transforming social-ecological systems, environmental education also fosters psychological resilience and transforms individual lives. Both individual and social-ecological systems resilience and transformation are critical to addressing climate change.
Climate Response Categories
three Rs
Examples
Mitigation
Reclamation
Preserves that incorporate indigenous knowledge, seed banks
Adaptation
Resilience
Ecosystem- and community-based adaptation (e.g., dune restoration)
Transformation
Regeneration
“Reweaving” new systems (e.g., algal energy production system)
In this chapter, we present two paradigms for climate change education in cities. The first is based on the real-life experience of Singapore, a small, coastal city-state in constant risk of flooding whose options are limited by its size and location. Here, a more government-directed approach to ensure the safety of individuals and their water supply has been successful in saving lives.
The three Rs tries to move beyond existing ways of thinking and political structures that reinforce social and economic injustices and environmental degradation. It also suggest moving beyond top-down control strategies for emergency preparedness, despite the fact that such strategies may be desperately needed to save lives and infrastructure in the short run. Finding the balance between real-time responsiveness to ensure safety and save human lives, stewardship action coupled with reflection and integrated understandings of social-ecological systems, and long-term capacity building to create transformed energy and social systems, is a critical challenge facing environmental education as we address social and ecological changes brought about by a warming and more erratic climate.
Marianne Krasny, Chew-Hung Chang, Marna Hauk, and Bryce DuBois
Ithaca, Singapore, Portland, 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.
References
Berkes, F., Colding, J. and Folke, C. (2003). Navigating social-ecological systems: Building resilience for complexity and change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bowers, C.A. (2013). The role of environmental education in resisting the global forces undermining what remains of indigenous traditions of self-sufficiency and mutual support. In Kulnieks, A. Longboat, D.R., and Young, K. (Eds.), Contemporary studies in environmental and indigenous pedagogies: A curricula of stories and place (pp. 225-240). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
CARRI. (2013). Definitions of community resilience: An analysis (pp. 14): Community and Regional Resilience Institute.
Chang, C.H. (2014). Is Singapore’s school geography becoming too responsive to the changing needs of society? International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 23(1), 25-39.
Chang, C.H. and Irvine, K.N. (2014). Climate change resilience and public education in response to hydrologic extremes in Singapore. British Journal of Environment and Climate Change, 4(3), 328-354.
DuBois, B. and Krasny, M. E. (2016). Educating with resilience in mind: Addressing climate change in Post-Sandy New York City. Journal of Environmental Education.
Gunderson, L. H. and Holling, C. S. (Eds.). (2002). Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Washington DC: Island Press.
Hauk, M. (2016). The new “three Rs” in an age of climate change: Reclamation, resilience, and regeneration as possible approaches for climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education. Journal of Sustainability Education, 7(2).
Holling, C.S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 4, 1-23.
Krasny, ME and B DuBois. (in press). Climate Adaptation Education: Embracing Reality or Abandoning Environmental Values? Environmental Education Research.
Krasny, M.E., Lundholm, C. and Plummer, R. (2010). Resilience, learning and environmental education. Environmental Education Research (special issue), 15(5-6), 463-672.
Masten, A.S. and Obradovic, J. (2008). Disaster preparation and recovery: Lessons from research on resilience in human development. Ecology and Society, 13(1), 9.
Soltesova, K., Brown, A., Dayal, A. and Dodman, D. (2014). Community participation in urban adaptation to climate change: Potentials and limits for community-based adaptation approaches. In Schipper, E.L.F., et al. (Eds.), Community-based adaptation to climate change: Scaling it up (pp. 214-225). New York: Routledge.
Walker, B. H. and Salt, D. (2006). Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Williams, D. and Brown, J. (2012). Learning gardens and sustainability education: Bringing life to schools and schools to life. New York: Routledge.
Dr. Chang Chew Hung is concurrently the Associate Dean for Professional Development, at the Office of Graduate Studies & Professional Learning,and an Associate Professor of Geography Education with the Humanities and Social Studies Education Academic Group, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Marna Hauk, Ph.D., is a professor, regenerative designer, and collaborative creativity catalyst. She innovates experiential educational programs for wild Gaian thriving.
Bryce DuBois is a doctoral candidate in the Environmental Psychology program at the City University of New York. Bryce is also an Extension Associate with the Civic Ecology Lab in the department of Natural Resources at Cornell University (PI: Marianne Krasny).
I previously wrote about how 
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Foraging is not just about recreational engagements with city plants. 
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Books about The New Urbanism such as The Geography of Nowhere, by James Howard Kunstler, or alternatively, counterarguments that are pro-suburbia such as Robert Bruggeman’s Sprawl; A Compact History, tend to polarize the debate with mercurial, and at times, snarky rhetoric. While Phelp’s research-driven exploration seems to lean towards the former in the beginning, the text takes an unexpected change of direction with the following.
Finally, I think among the many reasons urban nature advocates need to expand their partnerships is the need to connect art with nature. Look for partnerships with groups such as our Regional Arts and Culture Council. As it turns out, I was unaware that Portland has an active mural culture. Had I known this, I would have reached out to them for support. Later, I testified before Portland City Council to support that community. Diversifying urban nature advocacy should include the arts, which is why I am pleased The Nature of Cities launched Up Against the Wall: A Gallery of Nature-Themed Graffiti and Street Art.
The author begins by taking us through his process: he located people with stature in the fields of policy, planning, and architecture (just to name a few), and asked them to identify a project (not their own) that gives them hope for the years that lie ahead. These segments read, at times, like program notes for the 
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