Quarantine Fatigue and the Power of Activating Public Lands as Social Infrastructure

20 December 2020Essay, North America, People & CommunitiesCommunities, Covid, North America, Parks, Participation/Democracy, StewardshipLindsay Campbell

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This essay is part three in a series. Since 13 March 2020, our team of social science researchers has been keeping a collective journal of our experiences of our New York City neighborhoods and public spaces during COVID-19. Read the essays from spring and summer here.

1. Winter is coming: Second wave and quarantine fatigue

In New York City, after a bit of respite this summer, infection rates are rising again as we are facing a second wave. Among our research team, we have friends and family who have gotten ill, a reminder that the virus is very much still present as a threat. In our communities, we observe that there is persistent need and acute risk of hunger—with municipal agencies, religious organizations, and mutual aid groups continuing to serve as frontline providers of food relief and social services to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. After just eight weeks of in-person schooling, NYC public schools moved to an all-virtual format on 19 November. Yet, indoor restaurant dining, gyms, and nail salons still remain open in December, raising ire among some parents and prompting multiple opinion pieces on the matter (see also this). This rollercoaster of openings and closings continued as the city announced a plan for resuming in-person learning in public schools starting in mid-December. No more than days after this announcement, plans for reopening changed again. Fatigue sets in from constantly having to recalibrate things like daily work-school-shop schedules and many routine activities. Everything is fluid—testing our own adaptive capacities.

NYC Parks’ Red Hook, Brooklyn pool repurposed as a NYC Health + Hospitals COVID testing site. Photo: Lindsay Campbell

We have all had to adapt, cancel, or move to virtual our planned family fall gatherings and holidays. The CDC issued official guidance encouraging Americans not to travel for Thanksgiving celebrations, which was amplified in the social media space through norming and shaming like the trending meme “I’d rather have a zoom Thanksgiving than an ICU Christmas.” Further, we navigated a patchwork quilt of COVID-related restrictions that varied by state and county, including everything from travel-related quarantines, to curfews, to business shutdown, to bans on outdoor socializing outside the household. We feel the weight of our own personal decisions and responsibilities as we navigate household variation in risk perception, and socio-cultural norms–which are not uniformly shared.

Excerpt from Laura’s journal, 21 September:

I wanted to share a few reflections from Rosh Hashanah this past weekend. On Friday I baked challah and cooked a big meal for my zoom family dinner. Since COVID has made many of our usual holiday traditions unsafe it felt important to focus on the things I could still do, like make an apple cake that filled my apartment with a familiar smell and connect virtually with family members who are normally too far away to see this time of year. Saturday my partner and I drove to Connecticut for an outdoor picnic lunch with my family and the tashlich service (where we throw bread into water to symbolically cast away our sins). My brother-in-law led a short and socially-distanced service in the parking lot of his Synagogue; every other parking space was filled by one family unit and they asked us not to sing along for COVID reasons, a reminder that the new year was starting in a very different context. But then we did tashlich in a nearby pond and the simple act of throwing breadcrumbs into water felt unchanged. Back in Brooklyn on Sunday I went to an outdoor “shofar across Brooklyn” service at Grand Army Plaza and reflected on the power of participating in ritual in a public space.

As we move into our tenth month of the COVID-19 pandemic, quarantine fatigue is real. Recognizing that there are axes of incredible difference based on social vulnerability that shape personal exposure to risk, we are all–in unique ways—experiencing the sustained impacts of this public health crisis, the cascading economic effects, and the transformations of our social worlds.

Excerpt from Lindsay’s journal, 30 October:

On the personal front, I think I’ve finally realized that I am entering a stage of fatigue. I’m working a ton, I’m home with Mia, Ricardo does almost all the cooking, but still I find myself with zero time—no exercise, not seeing friends. Time is just flying by. I miss the sum total of lived experience in the city. No, I don’t miss commuting, but as my friend Minna said, “I miss the randomness.” It’s all just starting to wear down—the sameness, being home all the time, connected only through the computer. I miss my SOCIAL WORLD. I keep thinking about Erika’s comments from Frank Snowden. So hard to put a finger on, to capture, and to see, but that erosion of our social bonds is real, personal, and deeply felt.

Yet, we have seen an amazing range of adaptations that allow us to sustain and continue our social and economic lives. Here in New York City, we have moved more of our lives outdoors—particularly in our parks and open spaces, which have become even more the lifeblood of the city, hosting outdoor fitness classes, classrooms, book clubs, birthday parties, playgroups, community dialogues and more. Municipally-enabled programs of Open Restaurants, Open Streets, and Open Storefronts transform and repurpose the public right-of-way for diverse uses. Yet, these programs cannot fully support or save whole sectors—arts and culture, retail—the economic impact is staggering. As of September, fewer than 10% of Manhattan office workers had returned, with cascading impacts on retail, restaurant, and service providers connected to those workers. For colleagues that work in these sectors, we have little to offer but sympathy and worry, mumbled apologies and distress.

Overall, many have expressed the feeling that the novelty of distanced socializing and outdoor dining is waning. With shorter and colder days, comes a grim sense of preparing for a long winter. We are now all acting like amateur meteorologists (as well as amateur epidemiologists), keenly aware of sunrise, sunset, temperature gradients, and wind chill factors. Many people are getting serious about thermals, boots, jackets, and space heaters. But all the best gear and “can do” attitude doesn’t fully shake the feeling of dread and worry about what lies ahead over the next few months. Yet, with recent announcements on the development of vaccines, we can see a light at the end of the tunnel. With spring, summer, and vaccines ahead, we redouble our efforts to stay safe and sustain ourselves and our communities through this winter.

We cannot write about this fall without reflecting on the impact of the election. As federal employees and researchers, it is not our role to take a political stance. But as observers of our social worlds and cultural milieus, we can plainly see that once again our public spaces serve as crucial sites for contestation, celebration, and protest. We are reminded that there are few places other than public lands that have the capacity to absorb all of our strife and angst, our protest and peace. And sometimes, all of it can be expressed in one weekend and within a single public space.

2. The power of public lands and the possibilities of social infrastructure

Given all of these overwhelming divisions and chronic challenges, how can our public realm continue to offer social support? When and how can our shared public spaces at minimum meet a wide range of needs and, at best, help us to come together or transcend these differences?

First and foremost, the power and potential of public lands lies in the fact that they are just that—public and open to all. We have been conducting a series of interviews with city, state, and federal land managers across the northeast, asking them to reflect on the role of the forests and parks that they steward in light of the events of 2020—including both COVID-19 and the uprisings around racial injustice. A consistent theme we heard echoed again and again at every scale of government is that these lands are for everyone:

A New York City Parks administrator said, “[our park] is a place for people to come together and is welcoming of all people” and “We have this incredible open space resource. It’s an educational resource and a recreational resource, but we have to find out how we can best be of use to those [under served] communities.”
A New York State Parks official said, “public lands are for all.”
A National Forest representative said, “make people see that this forest, this public land is YOURS.”

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a renewed attention to the importance of green space and nearby nature as a crucial resource that supports all dimensions of physical, mental, social, and emotional health and well-being. Going further, the pandemic has shined a light on pre-existing inequities in the distribution of, access to, and financing and programming of these greenspaces across landscapes and communities. As has been well-known in environmental justice circles for decades, access to parkland and tree canopy is uneven, including along dimensions of race and class (see, e.g., Grove et al., 2018; Heynen, 2003, Schwarz et al., 2015; Watkins & Gerrish, 2018).

The NYC City Council Parks and Recreation Committee held a hearing on 22 October on this very issue: “Improving the Equity of Green Space throughout the City in Light of the COVID Epidemic.” Not only did the NYC Parks Commissioner, Mitchell Silver, offer testimony, but dozens of non-profit partners, advocacy groups, labor unions, community gardeners, park workers, and committed residents and stewards spoke out on the need for an equitable open space system, now more than ever. As Forest Service researchers, we too offered testimony, reflecting in particular on the importance of civic groups and their role in activating these public spaces as social infrastructure. While it is important to focus on the physical resource of parks and open space, it is not enough. We also need to support people and organizations that care for these green spaces, so that they can truly function as equitable and inclusive social infrastructures. Community organizations play a pivotal, but often unseen role in supporting public open spaces and activating them as social infrastructure — leveraging significant person power, time, and resources (Landau et al. 2019).

NYC Parks COVID social distancing signage at Valentino Pier, photo by Lindsay Campbell. Followed by activist signage using the same design and identifying racial justice issues, installed in Prospect Park and Dr. Ronald McNair Park. Photos: Laura Landau

During times of disturbance, these civic stewardship groups act as “green responders”. After a crisis, first responders help to stabilize life and property. As part of longer-term recovery and preparedness cycles, stewards can help to rebuild communities and landscapes through environmental action (Campbell et al. 2019; Svendsen and Campbell 2010). The act of caring for local places can transform not only the physical environment, but also our relationships to those places and to each other. In the wake of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd—two crises that co-occurred and intersected, we saw many stewardship groups spring into action to address new needs that came from the pandemic and the uprisings around racial injustice:

One group added a set of “recovery icons” to their open source digital mapping materials, so that stewards and activists around the world can map assets such as food banks, temporary housing, and hand-washing stations.
Another group that was impacted by loss of funding for the city’s public composting program responded by partnering with other compost groups to advocate for a partial restoration of the community compost budget.
A group in the Rockaways more than doubled their farm share program and offered free Thanksgiving dinners to support community members in need. In addition to their food justice work, their educational team also created a documentary reflecting the lives and stories of their youth participants during the pandemic.
A group in Flushing pivoted to providing online content – including a virtual environmental justice book club – to keep participants connected in conversation and community and fight “quarantine monotony”.
During the protests in the wake of the George Floyd murder, banners riffing off the NYC Parks official COVID social distancing signs appeared in some parks in Brooklyn. While they are not park of the parks’ official signage, they have been left up and serve as a reminder that public lands serve as sites of expression.

Civic engagement is critical to public space. In addition to providing labor and increasing capacity, it strengthens democracy via empathy, innovation, and fostering social trust. For example, a study of volunteer tree planters participating in the MillionTreesNYC found that–other than voting or attending religious services–tree planting was many participants’ first act of volunteerism; follow up interviews found that they went on to be more highly civically engaged in their communities in other ways. As such, we find that environmental stewardship can be an on-ramp to other forms of engagement (Fisher et al. 2015). Civic stewardship can increase community and cultural relevance by providing locally tailored and specific programming, events, and activities. Prior to the pandemic, one local friends-of park group in Queens organized nighttime dance parties, public health fairs, and arts activities for children to bring diverse residents together around issues they cared about–all with a fun and educational tone. And this summer, a group in Brownsville, Brooklyn responded to the shifting needs of their community members by building out a focus around mental health care and wellness. In addition to new needs that have emerged during the pandemic, groups have also continued annual events, like raking leaves, which can feel like rituals, grounding neighbors in time and place.

Neighbors and friends creating a garden in an empty street tree bed in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Photo: Lindsay Campbell

Excerpt from Lindsay’s journal, 26 October

This past weekend, I did some long-overdue stewardship on Pioneer Street, after having been dormant for a few seasons. Marisa (friend, neighbor, and garden steward at Pioneer Works) and I organized it and ALL the kids in our building came out to help. We created a new stone border on the empty tree pit outside our door, planted an indigo bush, moved a sumac from the planter, planted bulbs I had bought, and echinacea Marisa brought. We also replanted the planter with grasses and wildflowers. We made hand-made signs espousing our love for our human and plant neighbors, and took a tea break served off the back of a wagon. It was hard work and fun — and it was the first time since the pandemic that I had seen so many of my neighbors together. Now this tree pit that Ricardo and I had tended as a household in the past became truly a shared space, stewarded by our building and with our neighbors down the block.

Astoria Park Alliance LeafFest. Photo: Michelle Johnson

Overall, we have an over-reliance on, but under-resourcing of civic stewardship groups in frontline communities. A “both/and” approach is needed to support an equitable system of stewardship across public, civic, and private sectors. The public sector provides crucial parks maintenance workers as paid jobs–and is currently facing devastating losses to this essential permanent and seasonal workforce in light of budget cuts.

Volunteerism and civic leadership also provide important sources of personal meaning, community contribution, and social ties, particularly in these times of high unemployment and underemployment. Vibrant urban public open spaces require government and NGO programs that enable and foster civic engagement at all times of year and in all neighborhoods.

Our public landscapes have the capacity to absorb so much of our personal trials and our societal tribulations. But it is active stewardship that can, at its best, transcend politics and build trust between people. When we have trust in each other, we have hope. Reflecting on the experience of everyday people during our nation’s hardest times in the 20th Century, NYC-born Studs Terkel once reminded us, “Hope springs up, it doesn’t trickle down.”

Lindsay Campbell, Erika Svendsen, Laura Landau, Michelle Johnson, Sophie Plitt
New York

On The Nature of Cities

About the Writer:
Erika Svendsen

Dr. Erika Svendsen is a social scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station and is based in New York City. Erika studies environmental stewardship and issues related to hybrid governance, collective resilience and human well-being.

About the Writer:
Laura Landau

Laura is currently pursuing a PhD in geography at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on the civic groups that care for the local environment, and on the potential for urban environmental stewardship to strengthen communities and make them more resilient to disaster and disturbance.

About the Writer:
Michelle Johnson

Michelle Johnson is a research ecologist with the USDA Forest Service at the NYC Urban Field Station.

About the Writer:
Sophie Plitt

Sophie Plitt is National Partnership Manager the the Natural Areas Conservancy. Sophie works to engage national partners in a workshop to improve the management of urban forested natural areas.

Rah! Rah! for Rail: Solving Transportation in Cities

5 October 2015Place & Design, Review, Science & ToolsDesign, Livability, Planning, Pollution, TransportationEric Sanderson

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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A review of Rail and the City: Shrinking Our Carbon Footprint While Reimaging Urban Space, by Roxanne Warren. 2014. ISBN: 9780262027809. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 336 pages.

Like a dog with a bone, some of us just can’t let go of the notion of rail in cities. I’m certainly one of them. Since most cities dedicate more than 50 percent of their land area to transportation, and for 100 percent of contemporary cities, the majority of that space is dedicated to the almighty automobile, it is difficult to imagine how the nature of cities gets much better without dealing with the car. And it is easy to see electric rail systems as a compelling alternative, speeding us along green rights-of-way that lead to quiet, mixed-use, work/residential neighborhoods, with access to new spaces for playing and relaxing. One can see cities striving for these idyllic biophilic combinations in Europe and parts of South America, even in Asia, but the arguments put forth by numerous authors from diverse perspectives (myself included) have fallen on deaf ears for generations of Americans, who have found the combination of oil, cars, and suburbs more compelling still.

The most recent person to gnaw this particular femur is the New York City architect and light rail advocate, Roxanne Warren, in Rail and the City: Shrinking our Carbon Footprint While Reimagining Urban Space. Warren bites deep into what she calls the triple tyrannies: traffic congestion, dependency on petroleum, and paved environments. She shows that these three tyrants are mere henchmen at the beck and call of the American emperor pro temp: the automobile. Warren shuttles us through seven chapters that take on various aspects of why the car is bad (urban sprawl, pollution, space requirements, climate-changing pollution) and why trains are good (more space efficient, more energy efficient, better for healthy lifestyles, better for the disabled and elderly).

A long-time leader in “Vision42”, a fascinating proposal for a Manhattan light rail line extending across the island from river to river along 42^nd Street (and possibly circling back via a loop along 34^th Street), Warren knows well the pros and cons of what she writes. Reading her book, I feel like I can hear her in the offices of New York City politicians, or speaking before community groups, or honing the case with her rail friends at conferences, reinforcing her case emphatically and drawing the links between transportation and land use, land use and quality of life. The advantages for urban railways are manifold: less air pollution (including carbon dioxide, as suggested by the subtitle); more available space; less noise; complementarity with walking and bicycling; and the potential to encourage renewable energy. But still, most people don’t get it.

Warren argues that change is on its way, if incrementally, and we should not lose hope. She points out that streetcar mileage has actually been increasing in America over the last few decades (though not in New York City, where the rail du jour is the subway), and that there appears to be a shift in attitude as millennial Americans are opting for car-sharing schemes and urban lifestyles with greater appetite than previous generations. “Flexibility and mobility” [she quotes Richard Florida] “are key survival principles of the modern economy.” She sees what I see and what many others have seen before: that streetcars and light rail systems can provide exactly what’s required to maximize space and minimize energy consumption, as long as the cities around them are built with sufficient density and diversity to support rail travel.

Mixed use and density are not a problem in Warren’s New York. In fact, the main obstacle to light rail in cities, or indeed any form of shared transportation, is that Americans love their privacy and hate the additional governmental cost of public transportation. For all of us who appreciate the benefits of rail in cities, perhaps we need to adopt a new tactic that focuses on interests, not positions. Our interests are in shrinking our carbon footprint and making cities better, not the advocating for or against any one technology. In this light, the part of Warren’s book I found most thought-provoking was a short passage about autonomous cars.

Autonomous cars are not something I wrote about in Terra Nova: The New World Without Oil, Cars, and Suburbs (Abrams, 2013), which covers much the same ground as Warren’s book, nor something that Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl wrote about in Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil (New Society Publishers, 2010), another volume in this vein that I highly recommend. Warren dismisses self-driving cars as just the latest continuation of the space-hogging habits of the vehicles we drive ourselves, but I have begun to wonder if she, or the rest of us rail advocates, should be so hasty. If self-driving cars were electric, they would have the same benefits as light rail and other electrified rail systems, pushing the emissions out to the power plants where they could be replaced by renewable, non-polluting sources such as wind and solar. Warren points out, and autonomous car advocates are fond of telling, that most cars spend 96 percent of the time doing nothing, sitting around filling space that otherwise could be more profitably used. If urban Americans shifted from car ownership to car-sharing, on an “Uber” type model, with self-driving cars that we call up by app, then we would need many fewer cars (by some estimates 40 percent fewer). Fewer cars would mean fewer roads and parking lots and less traffic congestion. And if computers are doing the driving, autonomous cars could move closer together in platoons, perhaps even hitch together, without needing that psychological cushion space that human drivers require. Costs go down because there are no railways, just the streets we have today, and acceptance goes up because not only is it faster, quicker, quieter, cheaper (no car insurance required) and more fuel efficient, but also private.

In other words, is there a way to have all the benefits of rail in city without the rails? If so, then all of us who care about nature in the city should get ready for a ride.

Eric Sanderson
New York City

On The Nature of Cities

Ramsar COP 13: What can Artists Contribute to Urban Wetland Restoration?

2 August 2018Art & Awareness, Essay, Europe, FRIEC, FRIEC Essay, StoriesArt, Asia, Parks, Policy, Pollution, Stewardship, Water, Wetlands/Rivers/StreamsChris Fremantle

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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Threats to wetlands include unsustainable urban development, pollution from cities, industry, agriculture, and invasive species, to name a few. But the biggest threat is one of perception.

The Ramsar Convention (also known as Convention on Wetlands) is the first of the major intergovernmental convention on biodiversity conservation and wise use. It was signed in 1971, in the City of Ramsar in Iran. This October, the 13th Ramsar Conference of the Parties (COP 13) will take place in Dubai, with a focus on “urban wetlands”.

The Convention has highlighted artists’ important roles in wetland conservation, having previously published Wetlands – an inspiration in art, literature, music and folklore. This document highlights a wide range of ways in which wetlands inspire artists, writers, poets, musicians and storytellers.

But why are artists involved? And what can they do?

In 1991, Artist Betsy Damon established Keepers of the Waters. Working with landscape architects and scientists in China (among other places) she helps us understand water as a living thing, building gardens that use a transparent, natural processes of purification. Participatory science methods underpin Brandon Ballengée’s studies of malformed amphibians in wetlands, resulting in peer reviewed papers and installations in galleries and museums. Artist Jan Mun works with bioremediation companies to grow mushroom fairy rings, absorbing oil industry pollution in New York.

Photographs of Betsy Damon’s “Living Water Garden Park” in Chengdu, China | Images courtesy of the artist

These are three brief examples. There exist countless more, and ecoartscotland is out to find and highlight them. In support of upcoming Convention on urban wetlands, we will be using a hashtag #art4wetlands, to highlight a wide range of examples of artists working on conservation and wise use.

Art: changing wetland perceptions & instigating actions

Despite our scientific understanding of their critical roles both for humans and other species, wetlands are still among the most widely threatened habitats world-wide. Threats include unsustainable urban development, pollution from cities, industry, agriculture, and invasive species, to name a few.

But the biggest threat is one of perception.

Wetlands are, to quote the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, “…misunderstood and undervalued by people, leading to a desire to replace them with more ‘useful’ and ‘productive’ options such as housing developments and agricultural land.”

Changing such “perceptions of value” is one of the typical roles we expect of art. Indeed, this is an important role.

However, there are also other, perhaps more direct ways that artists are involved with wetland conservation. Artists across all disciplines are now actively involved using their creative skills in support of projects to preserve, restore, and interpret wetlands. At the heart of many artists’ projects is changing perceptions of wetlands, not just by representing them beautifully, but through on the ground action, often framed as ecoart (ecological art) or ecovention (ecological intervention).

Over the next few months, ecoartscotland will be publishing examples from all six of the Convention’s regions (Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America & the Caribbean, North America, and Oceania), specifically those which have to do with the topics of wetland pollution, biodiversity loss, and inappropriate development.

We have assembled a programme highlighting artists working in different ways on issues such as habitat restoration, pollution and biodiversity loss. Below is a sampling of highlighted projects in these areas.

Pollution

Waterwash ABC is a project on the Bronx River led by artist Lillian Ball which created an intelligent buffer zone to absorb stormwater run-off from a parking lot. The project also restored native habitat, engaged local communities, opened up public space behind private businesses, and installed educational signage showing how the remediation works.

Jan Mun, mentioned in the opening of this article, worked within the Superfund site at Newtown Creek, a tributary of the East River and border between Brooklyn and Queens that has a legacy of industrial waste and pollution. Mun was supported to work with the Newtown Creek Alliance on the clean-up of oil industry pollution with a grant from the socially engaged arts foundation A Blade of Grass. Working with expert Paul Stamets, Mun used myco-remediation, mushrooms which absorb petroleum products and heavy metals. Artists have been effectively involved in various forms of remediation using plants since the artist Mel Chin—collaborating with Dr Rufus Cheney—was instrumental in the first field test Revival Field in 1991. Artists Georg Dietzler and Frances Whitehead have also done ground-breaking work on phyto- and myco-remediation.

Biodiversity loss

Also mentioned earlier in this article, Brandon Ballengée’s hybrid practice as a scientist and an artist underpins his Malamp project (1996-ongoing), documenting malformed amphibians and investigating the causes. This work involves participatory science through fieldwork in urban, suburban, and rural contexts across North America and Europe, resulting in peer reviewed papers in scientific journals as well as installations in art galleries. Ballengée’s eco-actions bring together groups comprising scientists and other interested individuals to participate in fieldwork collecting and documenting amphibians.

Urban development

As the largest threat to urban wetlands, you would clearly expect urban planners and architects to be at the forefront of protecting wetlands, but artists are also playing important roles from New York City, USA, to Chengdu, China.

The City as Living Laboratory programme has done extensive work on the potential for daylighting culverted urban waterways (including current proposals for Tibbett’s Brook). Many streams and rivers in urban landscapes have been closed over and now function as sewers and storm drains. Wetlands can absorb stormwater and slow it, reducing the likelihood of flooding where culverted watercourses once overwhelmed create more flooding problems.

Urban water is often polluted and opportunities to create urban wetlands to clean water are increasingly being taken as opportunities to also engage the public in a deeper understanding of water, pollution and their environment. The Living Water Garden (1998) in Chengdu, China, resulted from the artist Betsy Damon’s 40-year concern with water. The garden mimics a natural wetland process to clean a small proportion of the river water, and the process is clearly laid out through the sculptural forms so the city inhabitants come away with a deeper understanding of the function of wetlands. Damon’s work has been highlighted by Ramsar’s Culture Network.

Artists can bring together experts with communities in non-threatening ways, connecting up multiple ‘agendas’ including social justice and diversity with healthy water systems. Here, art plays a central role, engaging all sorts of people and demonstrating new and different ways of seeing and understanding our wetlands and our world.

#Art4Wetlands and Ramsar COP13

You can join the movement, by sharing your own examples of artists contributing to wetlands conservation and wise use with the hashtag #art4wetlands (If you are not on Twitter we are archiving the thread on Wakelet).

What should you tag? We are on the lookout for art in any artform that makes a difference, particularly new, perhaps little-known examples, particularly from Africa, Asia, Oceania, South America and the Caribbean.

The projects ecoartscotland is highlighting are changing perceptions on the ground, engaging experts and local inhabitants in practical and beautiful ways. They are contributing to our understanding of wetlands as well as to their health.

We look forward the stories, ideas, and inspirations that transpire over the coming months leading up to the COP13 urban wetlands conference!

Chris Fremantle
Ayrshire

On The Nature of Cities

Re-culturing an Urban Collective Ethos of Sustainability

3 September 2017Essay, People & CommunitiesAsia, Awareness, Culture, Economics, Justice, Pollution, ValueHarini Nagendra

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Dialogue focused on more sustainable and resilient futures, though necessary, is insufficient by itself. At its core, these movements must be driven by a new collective culture, shaped by normative ideals of equity, justice and sustainability.

In August 2017, I spent three days at the very stimulating Resilience 2017 conference, listening to conversations between nearly a thousand attendees—students, scholars, practitioners, musicians and artists—interested in understanding how we can craft a more resilient and sustainable earth system, one that keeps its people and its ecology in good health. The conversations at the conference were deeply thought provoking, and covered a range of issues—from using queer ecology to facilitate the blurring of the boundaries between science and policy, to ideas of how to link art and science in innovative ways for education. These topics, seemingly very diverse, had one common thread: the idea that our cultural connect with nature stands disrupted, and needs to be re-envisioned to shape a more resilient and sustainable future.

Nowhere is this more true than in cities. Cities contain incredibly dense combinations of people from very different social contexts, amalgamated in ways that they would never be in rural areas. This can produce cultural symphony, or cacophony! The breakdown of societal restraints on gender, caste and other artificial barriers, and the resultant opportunity to converse across boundaries, can stimulate great innovation and creativity. Indeed, many cities excel at this. But the unprecedented socio-economic heterogeneities and inequalities that we find in cities have also led to petty daily conflicts and riots, scenes of banal crime and horrific brutality. The often-lamented loss of urban connect between neighbours leads to a fragmentation of urban communities. Perhaps as a consequence, many cities have witnessed the rapid disappearance of urban ecosystems—with forests, wetlands, parks and lakes giving way to high rise apartments and garbage dumps. Provoked by the obvious deterioration, many cities are forging nascent efforts to develop new urban commons. In an urban context, this requires dialogue between communities and the State, as Sheila Foster’s recent research on the “Co-City” demonstrates. Yet dialogue, though necessary, is insufficient by itself. At its core, these movements must be driven by a new collective culture, shaped by normative ideals of equity, justice and sustainability.

Vegetables wrapped in plastic in a “modern” Indian grocery store, focused on high end “healthy” organic produce. Ironic, when you think of the health impacts of the plastic wrap on the vegetables, in addition to the environmental impacts. Photo: Harini Nagendra

This is particularly challenging in cities of the Global South—in countries such as India. In Mumbai, 10,000 families migrate into the city each month. By 2025, India may have the largest number of migrants in the world, of whom most will end up in cities. Some will be affluent, tech-sector workers. Many more will live in slums, often on very little. Yet across most sectors of society, levels of consumption are on the rise in India’s cities. This is clear by a casual look at the constitution of urban garbage in most cities for instance, choked with plastic—plastic that comes from the supermarkets and stores in the city that advertise and sell packaged toys, gadgets and even vegetables wrapped quite pointlessly in plastic film.

A small shrine under the canopy of a large sacred tree in peri-urban Bangalore. Photo: Harini. Nagendra

When a culture of conspicuous consumption overtakes cities, it subverts existing cultures. Many argue that India has had a “natural” affinity towards sustainability, with diverse faiths that consider nature as sacred. In cities such as Bangalore, sacred Ficus trees survive when other species are cut down to make way for infrastructure projects, for instance. But as urban settlements grow, so does the desire to convert a humble shrine under the canopy of a tree into something larger. Thus many trees are enclosed within walls to build a small shrine, which slowly grows to prominence to become a large temple. The original tree, its branches trimmed and its roots enclosed, becomes weak and eventually gives way to the representation of sacredness in built form.

A sacred tree, with its branches heavily pruned, has given way in significance to the representation of sacredness in built form in the shrine below. Photo: Harini Nagendra

Urban water systems have also been subjected to this alteration in the nature of the sacred. Many religious festivals in India involve water. During the famous Durga puja season in Kolkata, tens of thousands of idols of Durga are purchased by individual homes and community associations, and later immersed in the city’s lakes and the sea. These were once small in size, made of clay taken from lake beds, painted with vegetable dyes, and then later returned to the same lake via immersion. Now, community associations compete to install larger and larger idols, which despite a ban are mostly made out of plaster of Paris, painted with toxic lead and mercury-based paints. When immersed, these idols pose a significant challenge to the same lakes that the Goddess is supposed to protect. Yet again, the normative core idea, of the worship of nature, has given way to a representation in very different form.

Gauri and Ganesha, shaped by my daughter using mud from our garden – later immersed in a bucket, which we poured back into our garden, symbolising the cycle of sustainable life. Photo: Harini Nagendra

When I returned from Resilience 2017, in my home town of Bangalore, the Ganesha festival was just beginning. Worshipped as the Lord of Beginnings and the Remover of Obstacles, the Ganesha festival is an important one for many Indians. In Bangalore, as in Calcutta, the harmful environmental effects of submerging plaster of Paris Ganesha idols in the city’s already polluted lakes is well known. Yet despite a ban that has been in existence for the past 3 years, the streets continue to be lined with these idols. In recent years, there has been a growing citizen movement to encourage a return to “natural” materials—Ganesha idols made with wet clay, with grains and seeds, and other natural material. Many people that I know have now moved away from plaster of Paris idols to these natural materials, and indeed, they are becoming more visible on street fronts and in shops for sale, than in the years past. In my home, my daughter now uses the mud from our garden to make our Gauri (Ganesha’s mother) and Ganesha—we later immerse them in a bucket, and carefully pour the mud back into our garden, under the canopy of our mango tree. From earth to earth, this simple practice beautifully symbolises the cycle of life.

Large painted idols of the Indian Goddess of knowledge and music Saraswati, being prepared for sale in Kolkata’s famous Kumartuli locality. Photo: Harini Nagendra

Yet overwhelmingly, the collective collection of plaster of Paris Ganeshas far outweighs those of natural materials—by a large amount. While many individuals have moved towards more sustainable practices, often motivated by conversations with like-minded friends, we continue to speak in silos. Most community associations prefer the artificial idols, being bigger, more colourful, and more conspicuous. And it turns out to be particularly difficult to have conversations with a motley urban collective, on seemingly waffly issues such as sustainability.

What does this tell us about the attempt to re-culture the urban commons, via a new collective movement? Changing culture is not easy—changing collective culture is particularly challenging. And yet this is the task we have at hand, if we are to engage in collective urban conversations about urban resilience and sustainability. Bangalore’s lakes, in which idols of Gauri and Ganesha have been immersed for centuries, now also host immersion of Durga idols, thanks to the city’s now substantial Bengali population—and act as sites for other festivals such as Chat puja as well, in response to migrants from other parts of the country. How does the city engage in conversations with each of these collective groups about sustainability? And yet—how can it not?

Informal settlements or slums provide a fascinating context within which to study the evolving culture of sustainability, for instance. As I describe in my book Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future many slums in Bangalore, though composed largely of migrants, have a high collective ethos of urban conservation, planting and carefully nurturing a wide diversity of species in cramped spaces, despite challenges of water availability. Indeed, the greatest proportion of native species we find in Bangalore is in its’ slums. The strong social ties between neighbours, and the high dependence on nature, seem to play a role in fostering this collective sense of sustainability. This may be more complex in wealthier residential communities, where many do not know their neighbours well.

The challenge of re-culturing a collective urban ethos of sustainability is profound, but essential, for urban resilience in the Global South. There are no easy answers. But equally, there is no escaping the need to make progress on this front.

Harini Nagendra
Bangalore

On The Nature of Cities

Re-envisioning Cities Through Bottom Up Neighbourhood Planning, Not Top Down Master Planning

7 February 2020Essay, People & Communities, Place & DesignArchitecture, Asia, Design, Ecosystem services, Green Infrastructure, Participation/Democracy, Planning, Water, Wetlands/Rivers/StreamsPK Das

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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A sustainable ecology of cities is possible when we successfully combine environmental and socio-economic dimensions equally in our plans and actions. In fact, it is the extent of their integration and inclusion that should form a criterion by which we evaluate our success.

If there is one thing that I have to state as being the most important learning from my living and working in Mumbai, it is the need for collective intervention to combat the current trend of exclusionary urban development with an objective of achieving social and environmental equity and justice for all. Also, as a necessary condition, each individual intervention should have to be linked to other larger democratic rights struggles, thereby building networks of interventions towards evolving an alternate vision of the city.

It is with this objective that I consider building relationships collectively between people and with nature as an important mission. This mission includes an understanding of such relationships and networks of interactions, particularly those that develop in the process of collective interventions by citizens on demands pertaining to social and environmental justice and how they contribute to the larger interest of sustainability of cities.

I would like to view cities from social and environmental perspective and understand how the two together constitute a necessary condition, and what their union means for the achievement of a higher state of sustainability. The two are inextricably entwined and neither is exclusive. Thus, a sustainable ecology of cities is possible when we can successfully combine environmental and socio-economic dimensions equally in the plans and actions that we pursue. As a matter of fact, it is the extent of their integration and inclusion that form a criterion by which we evaluate the value of our work and engagements.

Very often we find ourselves absorbed into zones of comfort and complacence, engaging in issues and places that have already been developed or achieved exclusivity. But to get out and engage with situations of instability and discomfort, dealing with the invisible yet perceived barriers across city landscapes, and their unification, is indeed challenging.

After all, what can be more equal between nations, influenced by neo-liberal globalisation, than the question of land mis-utilisation, exclusionary city planning, and the deplorable state of the environment in which vast numbers of people are discriminated and subject to climate change risk. It is for these reasons that the local struggles of the marginalised and discriminated people for equality and sustainability, across borders and nation states, are indeed global in their essence and spirit.

What we are deeply concerned about is the constant division of our cities into disparate fragments, both in social and spatial terms. Polarisation of people and communities in terms of their religion, race, caste, class, faith, gender, nationality is leading to social instability and tension. Indeed, our cities are producing and reproducing backyards of exclusion, discrimination, hatred, neglect and abuse; even natural habitats are being systematically destroyed leading to increasing levels of social intolerance and climate catastrophe, thus undermining the very idea of cities and their sustainability.

As these conflicts begin to dominate the city landscape, we are compelled to intervene, particularly on behalf of the excluded, discriminated, and much abused backyards of people and places that are, in most instances, situated in the borders, edges, peripheries, and margins.

Our discourses on cities have relied on the understanding of social relationships and how the modes of production have influenced their formation. In support this statement, I would like to refer to David Harvey and his book Social Justice and the City, when he quotes from Karl Marx: “The totality of these relationship of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life, conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. In terms of Marxist terminology, the urban and the process of urbanization are simple superstructures of the mode of production (capitalist or socialist)”.

Further, in the same book, Harvey has analysed social relations, built form and environment and how each influences the other, but his reference to environment is restricted to built-environment and does not include the natural ecosystems. I quote: “Urbanism may be regarded as a particular form or patterning of the social process. This process unfolds in a spatially structured environment created by man. The city can, therefore, be regarded as a tangible, built-environment- an environment which is a social product.”

Interestingly, Pickett, Cadenasso and McGrath in their book, Resilience in Ecology and Urban Design, quoting McGranahan and Satterthwaite, present a much wider understanding of the environment. I quote: “A great deal of the urban sustainability literature tends to promote the so-called ‘brown agenda’ of environmentalism, which emphasizes the need to solve immediate needs of the billions of people who live in degraded, unsanitary conditions and grueling poverty, while the ‘green agenda’ emphasizes protection and enhancement of ecosystems to support future generations and other species. Reconciling green with brown agenda issues, however, is at the heart of more encompassing viewpoints on sustainability, recognizing that poverty and environment conservation are inextricably entwined (McGranahan and Satterthwaite 2002)”.

Such reconciliation is indeed the essence of the Irla movement, of which I am a part.

This phenomenon is realized in many world cities, more critically experienced in the cities of developing nations. While cities are expanding, public spaces are rapidly shrinking, in both physical and democratic terms. The democratic “space” that ensures accountability and enables dissent is also shrinking—very subtly but surely. This means space for wider public participation and dialogue are shrinking. It is in these prevailing conditions that we are compelled to pursue the idea of public spaces as being the foundation of city planning. Public spaces ensure physical, social and democratic well-being of all. The city’s shrinking open spaces are of course the most visible manifestation, as they directly and adversely affect our very quality of life.

It is in this context, I consider our struggles to pursue the idea of unification of cities through architectural and design endeavors as being important; while engaging closely with social and environmental movements. Our priority has to be to establish close relationship between architecture and people, placing strong emphasis on participatory planning from the very beginning and at every stage.

A Mumbai example, with active participation of the author.

Through a neighbourhood-based development approach it is possible to decentralize and localize projects, thus breaking away from monolithic planning and design ideas that are disconnected from most people (and often serve the interests of the few, not the many). “Master Plans” for cities are generally top-down models, drafted by elite groups of designers, and fail to engage with citizens on their ideas.

With localised projects, the planning of cities will hopefully become a bottom-up process with participation of all people providing opportunity for collective intervention. Importantly, neighbourhood-scale work is a more collaborative approach to the city and place-making. For citizens, such projects allow the immediate reclamation, redesign, and re-programming of public spaces within their localities.

Along with the promotion of neighbourhood plans it is necessary to develop city-scale sustainability ideas and plans and through that process evolve alternate vision for cities. Networking and unification of the various neighbourhood plans would be a good way forward.

It is neighbourhood plans that must form the basis of city planning. Such an effort requires a paradigm shift in the mindset of formal planning, obsessed with building barricaded mono blocks that divide and brutally fragment city landscapes, to include sustainable ecology and environment as the central aspect of city development plans, prepared with the objective of unification, with peoples participation right from its inception. It is for the fulfilment of this objective, not real-estate and construction turnover that constitute the predominant idea of successful development, that the rejuvenation and integration of the natural areas and open spaces with an idea of expanding public spaces ought to be set out as a mission. Intervention, integration and re-envisioning being a key strategy and effective instrument for bringing about the much needed socio-environmental change.

P.K. Das
Mumbai

On The Nature of Cities

Re-naturing Cities: Theories, Strategies and Methodologies

6 November 2017Essay, Europe, Place & DesignAwareness, Biodiversity, Climate change, Communities, Conservation, Culture, Design, Development, Economics, Ecosystem services, Governance, Green Infrastructure, Justice, Planning, Policy, Resilience, South America, Sustainability, Tools, Value, What is urban nature?Fabiano Lemes de Oliveira

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There is strong interest in the theme of re-naturing cities, since “naturalizing” cities can help address multiple global societal challenges and generate benefits, such as the enhancement of health and well-being, sustainable urbanisation, the provision of ecosystems and their services, and resilience to climate change. But, what are the theories, strategies and methodologies that can be used to re-nature our cities? How can we plan with nature? What are the models and approaches that can be used to enhance the presence of high-quality green spaces in our urban areas? And how to move from theory to practice? These were essential questions debated in a four-day workshop organised in Goiânia, Brazil. Funded by the British Council and Fundação de Apoio à Pesquisa do Estado de Goiás (FAPEG), under the Newton Fund Researcher Links Programme, the workshop brought together policymakers and approximately 40 researchers from the UK and Brazil from a range of disciplines, such as urban ecology, town planning, biology, architecture, landscape planning and geography.

Brazilian and UK workshop participants deep in discussion. Photo: Renaturing Cities Team

The workshop was a forum for transnational synthesis of knowledge on the topic and generated valuable insights into how academics, planners and policymakers could apply this knowledge to their cities and regions. All selected participants, coordinators and tutors presented their research. These included speeches by organisers Fabiano Lemes de Oliveira on his green wedges research and Pedro Britto’s on the social side of sustainability; as well as talks on urban agriculture by Silvio Caputo, the ecology of green roofs by Heather Rumble and the blue space planning of Goiânia by Karla Emmanuela. There were eight research sessions: Planning Greener Cities; Urban and Environmental policy; GIS, Building Information Modelling (BIM) and City Information Modelling (CIM) for Re-naturing; Blue Spaces; Ecology and Biodiversity; Climate Change and Resilience; Perceptions, Health and Wellbeing; and Between Formal and Informal.

Visiting the Parque Macambira Anicuns in Goiânia. This will be the largest linear park in the world, with 35.5 hectares spanning 24 km. Photo: Renaturing Cities Team

Research sessions were complemented by development sessions on publishing and research methods, among others. Field trips informed participants of relevant case studies. A great strength of the workshop was the presence of representatives from the city of Goiânia and the different thematic groups prepared manifestos for re-naturing cities, which were then translated into spatial planning ideas for the city. Policymakers interacted and responded to the proposed strategies, which will inform the discussions for the revision of the Goiânia masterplan (Fig. 3). The following is a synthesis of each thematic group’s conclusions:

Planning greener cities

This session made manifest the need for considering urbanisation and nature together, the importance of proactive and positive planning, the definition of systems of interconnected green and blue spaces at multiple scales, the roles of communities in shaping their environment and the benefits of considering urban metabolism as a way to further embed the understanding of processes in spatial planning. A positive and systemic mode of planning has the capacity to integrate needs, potentialising the benefits derived from the different systems and resolving their pitfalls in an integrated manner. As such, Camila Sant’Anna called for a focus on hybrid landscapes, where the green-grey divide no longer exists. The overcoming of such dichotomy and the challenges of implementation were explored at the metropolitan scale by Julia Leite Rodrigues’ proposal for ecological corridors and green wedges for São Paulo, and at the city-scale by Karin Meneguetti in her application of landscape ecology principles to various cities in the south of Brazil. In order to move from planning theory to implementation, Ian Mell emphasised the importance of understanding the economic and social values of existing and proposed green infrastructure, as well as the assessment of policy. Daniela Perroti, in turn, explored how urban metabolism—understood as the sum of the technical and socio-economic processes that occur in cities, resulting in energy and material supply, growth, and elimination of waste—could present frameworks for the planning and designing of greener and more resilient cities. The session highlighted the need for a conjoined understanding of natural and man-made processes if we are ever to be successful in re-naturing our cities.

Urban and environmental policies

If we were to re-naturalise our living environments, understanding the different connotations of the term, local challenges and opportunities is crucial. How can re-naturalisation take place in an increasingly urbanised world? How can urban, rural and environmental policies be intertwined? José A. T. e Silva addressed these questions from the perspective of the Brazilian hyperurbanisation reality. He argued that, in a country where approximately 90 percent of people live in urban areas, the integration of different public policies needs to occur and be considered at varying scales for an effective improvement in the balance between urban and non-urban. From the legal perspective, Luciene Araujo highlighted that the relationship between city and the countryside ought to be considered in a systemic manner and that payment for ecosystem services and economic incentives for re-naturing ought to become mainstream practice. The session was marked by feeling that there is a problematic misalignment between Brazilian urban policies and the needs of re-naturalisation. Mariana Santos highlighted the frequent disconnect between planning and policy, in particular in regard to water resources. Glauco Cocozza closed the session speaking of the impact that policies and private land ownership can have on the fragmentation of urban green spaces and impoverishment of their ecosystem services, using Uberlândia as a case study. Final discussions centred on how economic and political actors, as well as effective public participation, could be interlinked and triggered to bridge the gap between reality and a greener future.

GIS, BIM and CIM for Re-naturing

An essential point of discussion in this session was how to employ computation and big data to deepen our knowledge of urban and natural spaces, as well as to better balance urbanisation and nature in our cities. Elena Cantarello, for instance, looked into quantifying the resilience of multiple ecosystem services and biodiversity in a temperate urban forest using Landis-II as a modelling tool, and also presented a cost–benefit analysis of ecological networks assessed through spatial analysis of ecosystem services using ArcGIS and Ilwis. Rômulo Ribeiro and Josiane Giesta called for the use of GIS as a way to enhance the precision of objective data collection for city planning and how the provision of BIM/ CIM training for planning officers can support the development of public policies locally. The theme of data collection and its use, but from a participatory, people-centred perspective was also discussed. Junia Borges proposed the use of crowdsourcing and Volunteer Geographic Information (VGI), leading to the creation of substantial databases that, in turn, would support decision-making processes. Combining objective and subjective data through a mixed-methods approach, Ying Li mapped people’s use of public spaces and their preferences in order to develop an assessment tool and design guidance.

It was evident that this is a growing field of research, with much potential to support evidence-based decision-making processes. The use of such tools for the construction of solid, openly available and retrievable knowledge about our cities and green spaces, if combined with a participatory, systemic and integrative planning approaches, could provide pathways for the construction of greener and more balanced cities.

Discussing the challenges and opportunities around green urban planning with city representatives to inform the revision of the Goiânia masterplan. Photos: Renaturing Cities Team

Blue spaces

The planning of blue infrastructure has increasingly become a fundamental strategy to build resilient and sustainable cities. This session focused on water from four distinct perspectives: contemplative, memory, planning and technology. Deborah Cracknell looked into people’s psychological and physiological response to water landscapes, in particular aquariums, showing that these were at least as preferred and potentially restorative as green space. Mary Gearey explored how our connections to our intimate landscapes alter our perception of climate change impacts and our future lives together. She argued for the need to understand how local actors perceive and respond to changes in their local environment to help develop strategies and tools in support of sustainable futures. José Guilherme Schutzer called for drainage basins to be at the centre of regional planning. Lastly, Komali Kantamaneni focused on the role of technology in supporting resilient environments in face of extreme weather events. The multifaceted dimensions of blue spaces were central to the discussions held about the importance of further understanding the roles that blue spaces play for both the resilience of living beings and their environments.

Ecology and biodiversity

Discussing contrasts between urban ecological research in the UK and Brazil, a biodiversity hotspot, was enlightening for all those involved in the Goiânia workshop. The city environment offers rich opportunities for ecologists; understanding the unique mix of organisms and how these can contribute to improving urban ecosystem functioning is key to renaturing. Recognition that cities can be a valuable habitat for many plants and animals is growing. It was quite apparent, however, that whilst some of the barriers and opportunities for urban colonisation were common between different geographical locations, some stark differences existed in terms of the perceptions of urban ecology and the mechanisms being adopted to promote biodiversity in cities.

Researchers from the UK capitalised on technology in cities, highlighting the potential of using green roofs, green walls, engineered soils and other green infrastructure to mitigate habitat loss. For example, designing green roofs and soft-landscaping using ecomimicry of locally important habitats was shown to generate improved remediation for habitat lost in brownfield development. Another theme was the need to frame urban ecological research in terms of the economic and societal benefits it can provide, the ‘ecosystem services’. In this context, brownfield sites were again, identified as a key urban habitat, given the potential of brownfield soils for capturing carbon through the formation of soil carbonates.

Our Brazilian counterpart, Fabio Angeoletto, described the challenges of urban ecology in Brazil, highlighting that nature is often thought of as occurring outside cities. The research being conducted in Brazil focused on collecting the detailed evidence needed to understand urban ecosystems and protect biodiversity, without applying an economic value. Fabio’s work spans from understanding the impact of domestic cats on city animals to trying to halt the reduction in nest sites for the blue and yellow macaw, Ara ararauna.

UK and Brazilian ecologists draft a manifesto for protecting and enhancing biodiversity in Goiânia. Photo: Renaturing Cities Team

We discussed that this latter approach, “reductionist” research, is often assumed to have been done in the UK, with pressure to produce more “emergent” research that is immediately applicable. But there is still much we don’t understand about urban ecosystems, limiting our ability to effectively apply ecological solutions. Thus, together, the approaches of UK and Brazilian ecologists, could provide effective strategies for renaturing, valuing nature as a tool to improve cities whilst capitalising on the inherent ability of nature to inspire us.

Climate change and resilience

The five presentations of this session covered a spectrum of approaches to climate change and urban resilience that ranged from technology-based solutions to enhanced stakeholder participation. Presentations focused on two particular aspects of climate change, namely, Urban Heat Island (UHI) and flooding.

The technology-based approaches to climate change and resilience include the use of modelling software, providing an accurate understanding of the physical factors triggering higher mean temperature, which was applied in a study on the area of Salford University campus. The same study presented several techniques for data collection, the equipment necessary for this collection and the appropriate scale of study. A second presentation focusing on the UHI, presented a case study in Leeds, which specifically examined the potential for mitigation of the greenery, demonstrating how trees are more effective than grassland. Finally, a presentation of an urban microclimate mapping project in Goiania demonstrated the value of developing long-term scenarios – through dedicated software – which can be used as tools to generate policies addressing negative impacts of the UHI.

Stakeholder engagement-based approaches included a study on a governance model of flood risk management, which puts at its heart local communities and the nurturing of people’s connectedness and risk awareness. Similarly, a case study looking at three South American border cities in spatial proximity, albeit each one in a different country, exposed the significance of cooperation and coordination across boundaries, which can lead to higher effectiveness of policies that are already, to some extent, addressing climate change locally.

The range of studies presented suggested that research in this area must integrate both approaches and explore solutions capable of merging engineered approaches with a deeper understanding of socio-political dynamics.

Perceptions, health & well-being

This session explored the influence on the level of urban well-being of several factors comprising the shape and characteristics of the built environment as well as the methodological approach to design interventions fit for purpose.

The connection between health and a fair built environment was illustrated in a study on some Brazilian cities. A fair city is one in which access to services, the provision of green areas and the quality of the built environment at large is available to all. The study demonstrated the connection between urban areas where equitable availability is lacking and threats to health, such as obesity. The effect of the spatial configuration of places on people’s behaviour was clearly demonstrated in a study on three squares in Belo Horizonte, where the quality of walking was influenced by the design of such squares. The amplitude of open spaces, presence of water, biodiversity and climatic conditions were found to be key aspects that, in the perception of passers-by, improved the square’s attractiveness and urban value.

Other studies focused more on theories and approaches to enhance urban well-being. The first one emphasised the importance of embracing complexity to improve the well-being of communities. Interaction with green spaces, a recognised condition that can improve life quality, must be complemented with other factors such as physical activity and social interaction in order to yield multiple benefits. Embracing complexity also entails the hybridisation of theories and approaches on urban design well-being with those related to behavioural change and environment-behaviour. The second one reviewed theories that specifically connect nature with well-being such as biophilia, environmental psychology and ecological models of human health. It proceeded to review methodologies to ascertain this connection, based on statistics and ethnographic approaches. It finally presented a project focusing on the construction of an edible green wall in a school in Scotland, which put in practice some of the findings derived by the theories mentioned.

The workshop participants and organisers enjoying a Brazilian greenspace. Photo: Renaturing Cities Team

Between formal and informal

Although Brazilian cities have, historically, developed with a strong presence of nature, rapid and often uncontrolled growth poses serious risks to the environment and quality of life of urban dwellers. In this context, do formality, informality and in-between conditions lead to different pathways for re-naturing cities? How do such conditions forge our relationships with nature? What are the roles of policy and practice in situations where bottom-up meets top-down?

Veronica Donoso investigated social practices in social housing open spaces. Often in in-between conditions, these spaces were explored from their potential in redefining and being defined by people’s wishes, aspirations and relationship with the city in which they live. An historical perspective of the changing nature of what re-naturing meant for cities in the long run was brought about by Aline Silva, who presented an archaeology of historic gardens in Recife, João Pessoa and Fortaleza in Brazil. This was allied with a longitudinal study of tree species selection. As such, Silva correlated time-located ideological views of these landscapes with the choice of species. Fabiana Izaga explored the changing nature of informal landscapes in favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Large-scale events such as the World Cup and the Olympics impacted not only on the formal city, but also led to processes of transformation of favelas. Tourism has linked the visitors’ interest in the favelas themselves with their environment.

The often conflicting dimensions of places discussed in this session tend to point to conditions of varying hybridism, which must be understood for an effective, inclusive and positive transformation of cities.

Final remarks

The workshop culminated with the development of a manifesto for re-naturing cities and its application to the city of Goiânia. Given the collective nature and multidisciplinary ethos of the manifesto, the following key recommendations synthesise preoccupations and recommendations that can be applied to cities across the world:

Efforts to re-nature cities must involve a proactive planning approach.
The planning and implementation of networks of green and blue spaces must be systematically integrated into comprehensive planning frameworks.
A shared understanding of the urban challenges and their potential solutions ought to be co-developed, alongside an inclusive approach to participation.
We must take an evidence-based approach to re-naturing cities. This requires the collection of baseline data, monitoring and establishment of measurable targets that allow an actionable approach to urban biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem service provision.
We must make the business case for the value of urban green and blue infrastructure by identifying and communicating the social, economic and environmental benefits at multiple scales to communities and decision-makers.
The development of policy mechanisms to potentialise the re-naturing of cities needs to be developed and implemented in practice. This should include the definition of key baseline indicators and incentives for further re-naturing.
Environmental justice for all must be an objective. This involves better understanding of how urban green infrastructure and biodiversity influence health and well-being, and policies aimed at overcoming inequalities regarding access to ecosystem services.
Re-naturing is as much about a sustainable future as it is about a resilient one. Re-naturing strategies must aim at reducing cities’ environmental impact on the planet as well as offer mitigation strategies.
New technologies and novel nature-based solutions for re-naturing cities need to be considered. This can range from the creation of scenarios using GIS that simulate the outcomes of proposals and policies, to the use of social media to garner public opinion and values, through to engineering soils to capture carbon and mitigate climate change impacts.

Fabiano Lemes de Oliveira, Heather Rumble, Mark Goddard, Fabio Angeoletto, Pedro Dultra Britto, Silvio Caputo, Stuart Connop, Karla Emmanuela Ribeiro Hora, Caroline Nash, Braulio Romeiro

On The Nature of Cities

About the Writer:
Heather Rumble

Heather’s interests are broad. Whilst Heather’s work still focusses very strongly on the soil ecology of urban habitats, she has also worked on the hydraulic properties of living walls and the ecology of invasive species. She is currently working on a project that explores the barriers and benefits of using hydroponic systems in community gardens.

About the Writer:
Mark Goddard

Mark is a research ecologist interested in the ecological and social drivers of biodiversity in urban green spaces, in particular private gardens.

About the Writer:
Fabio Angeoletto

Fabio is a researcher and permanent professor of the Master’s degree course in Geography at UFMT, Rondonópolis campus - research line Geotechnology Applied to Environmental Management and Analysis. In addition, he coordinates the project Urban Biodiversity of Rondonópolis.

About the Writer:
Silvio Caputo

He is a Senior Lecturer at Portsmouth School of Architecture. Silvio’s PhD investigation is on Urban Resilience, intended as the capability of cities to perform sustainably over their entire life cycle. Connected to the idea of urban resilience is also social- ecological resilience and related practices such as urban agriculture, which is his current focus of investigation. He recently co-edited ‘Urban Allotment Gardens in Europe’ published by Routledge, a book illustrating the outcomes of a COST Action on urban allotments, which looks at urban agriculture from a cross-disciplinary perspective.

About the Writer:
Stuart Connop

Dr Stuart Connop is an Associate Professor at the University of East London's Sustainability Research Institute specialising in biomimicry/ecomimicry in urban green infrastructure design.

About the Writer:
Caroline Nash

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

About the Writer:
Braulio Romeiro

Braulio is the head of the Department of Architecture and Urbanism at Universidade Federal de Goiás. In 2008 he was awarded his Master’s degree by the University of São Paulo (EESC). His research interests include the relationships between art, architecture and the city.

Re-Wilding: Cities by Nature

30 April 2017Essay, Place & Design, Science & ToolsArchitecture, Culture, Design, Ecosystem services, Resilience, Suburbs, What is urban nature?, Wildlife People InteractionsKevin Sloan

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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The historic gardens of Western civilization typically include segments that were municipal areas, hunting grounds, or, on occasion, fragments of the region’s original forest. Many of the Italian, French, and English gardens that establish the history of landscape gardening were interventions added within or onto lands that, originally, were uncultivated royal reserves. While the architectural garden is typically what history records as advancing principles and concepts of landscape, architecture, and urban design, what is often overlooked is the importance of the uncultivated landscape that remained around the garden—or, in some instances, sections of it that were assimilated into Renaissance designs.

The idea advanced by re-wilding is the memory of a landscape type—a woodland, wetland, prairie—made manifest.

For example, what is typically known as the Villa Lante in Italy is a Renaissance garden set within a much larger natural preserve that was also owned by the founding Gambara family. Before political activities moved out of Paris to Versailles and it became a garden, the site served as a hunting lodge surrounded by an uncultivated forest. Likewise, King Henry the XIII originally acquired the area known today as Regent’s Park in London for hunting and leisure before historical circumstances began a process of transforming it from private lands into the public park that it is today.

Versaille. Image courtesy of arch.ced.berkeley.edu

The uncultivated areas of these gardens served as settings for hunting, horseback riding, and strolling with allies and adversaries—and as an intellectual counterpoint to the metaphors, abstractions, and narratives to the architectural gardens they supported. While the uncultivated segments may be less interesting to history and design students when compared with the architecturally elaborate gardens they complemented, the appearance of megacities and the intersection of their challenges with environmental issues provide reasons to reconsider a new purpose and potential for uncultivated landscapes.

“Re-wilding” is an emerging discourse within contemporary landscape design—an intriguing topic with possibilities and interesting issues. Where historic gardens made the natural reserves secondary and placed them in service to architectural gardens and their cultivated experiments, re-wilding offers the potential to make “wildness” the priority, putting the cultivated landscapes in service to UN-cultivation. What follows in this article is an overview of select terms, case studies, and examples related to the emerging topic of re-wilding.

Re-wilding: terms, definitions, and clarifications

Re-wilding describes a landscape design and construction approach that reestablishes and/or restores an area of land to an uncultivated state. It may also involve the reintroduction of species that have been driven out or exterminated by previous events; g enerally, however, re-wilding accepts that it is impractical, if not impossible to reestablish a textbook example of an “original” landscape and its ecology. Modifications to the reconstituted landscapes produce synthetic alternatives that avoid the trap and problem of ecologically achieving the original landscape.

All architecture—and landscape architecture, by extension—is fiction. Whether the fiction involves a narrative, metaphors, or abstractions, what separates shelter from architecture and landscapes from non-landscapes are ideas, shaped and constructed. The fiction advanced by re-wilding is the memory of an intended landscape type—a woodland, wetland, prairie—that is heightened by suppressing the appearance and evidence of human hands. Adding or including wildlife into the production, where possible and appropriate, further amplifies the design program and intention for re-wilding.

In any design work, appropriateness is an important parameter. Where contemporary landscape architecture enjoys the poetic potential that suggests metaphors of a wild landscape—such as wading grasses and native plants in an urban park—art is not the objective for re-wilding.

Re-wilding is a memory trope that drives establishment of a wild landscape, as close as the physical, urban, and ecological parameters will allow. In the same sense that an uncultivated environment performs multiple services, such as groundwater recharge, water quality improvements, and environmental cooling, the re-wilded landscape should offer the same potential. The addition and/or attraction of wildlife not only increases the ecological services that a re-wilded landscape can perform, it heightens and intensifies the intellectual presentation of the memory project.

Re-wilding also accepts that any such work is as constructed, engineered, and human-made as any other landscape trope that is concerned with the conventions of abstraction, transformation, ambiguity, and poetics. An encapsulation of the intellectual intent may best be explained through Simon Schama’s seminal work, Landscape and Memory.

John Bunker Sands Wetland Center. Photo: Dallas Trinity Trails

Landscape & Memory—critical to understanding re-wilding

In his seminal book, Landscape & Memory, historian, documentary filmmaker, and writer Simon Schama introduced a compelling insight into the meaning and perceptions of landscape. “Before it can ever be repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind,” Schama wrote. “Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.”

Landscape is a uniquely human phenomenon and activity. Its reality does not center on flora and/or fauna, but rather, in the associations that humans have tenaciously imprinted on nature and internalized in meanings, relationships, and emotions that are recalled through experience.

As a cultivated example, the fine lawn of an American front yard is the “memory” of an English garden and noble estate. In the example of an uncultivated landscape, the American Great Plains is a “landscape of venture” because American history and westward expansion imprinted and mythologized legends and events. To paraphrase Simon Schama: “The prairie has no awareness it represents progress and the future to American lore. But we do.”

A key to understanding re-wilding accurately is making clear that the objective is as much about memory as it is about reconstituting natural plant systems and animal species. Tapping into the memory and recall associated with a particular landscape type through a synthesis and adaptation of a “wild” landscape is the goal and intellectual intention.

The Sprint World Headquarters Campus: a case study for memory and re-wilding.

A significant 68-acre portion of the landscape architecture for the 212-acre Sprint World Headquarters Campus in suburban Kansas City was a first step towards what can be retroactively viewed as a re-wilded Konza prairie and wetland.

Sprint World Headquarters Campus. Photo: Kevin Sloan Studio

Sprint World Headquarters Amphitheater. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio

Sprint World Headquarters Prairie Edge. Photo: Kevin Sloan Studio

Surrounding a corporate campus of 21 mixed-use office buildings that are linked by seven elaborately designed garden quadrangles is a reconstituted landscape of Konza Prairie grasses and a 17-acre wetland that is located at the low-point of the campus topography. Because the interaction of 14,000 employees was to be concentrated within the habitable quadrangles, the seven landscapes are variations on garden metaphors. By contrast, the perimeter of the campus is a non-irrigated belt of prairie grasses and native plant materials that, after installation, have attracted coyotes, foxes, and several species of birds and waterfowl in the wetland and its preserved stand of timber.

Given that the corporate campus is situated within suburban Overland Park, Kansas —a southern suburban of Kansas City, Kansas—burning the installation twice a year to rejuvenate an academically authentic ecology wasn’t realistic or feasible. Memory and the “sense of prairie” became the actual goal and a workaround to the practical problems, which were solved by planting a modified mix of grass species that were adapted to mowing and to the invasive species that were present in the suburban context.

Applications for re-wilding and their benefits

Urban planning experts extol density, saying that “density offers hope”. However, suburban megacities are typically settled at exceptionally spare densities that make them virtually impossible to densify by conventional means. For example, the metropolitan area of Dallas-Fort Worth in the United States is settled at an average human density of one person per acre, as are other American cities, including Atlanta, Albuquerque, and Houston. Phoenix contains less than one person per acre. New York, Paris, and Hong Kong have densities well above 100 persons per acre. In some cases, during the workday, these cities reach densities of 500 to 1,000 persons per acre.

While the New Urbanism and urban planning examples of European cities provide potential planning methods that can apply to nodes, concentrations, and areas of greater agglomeration, they generally do not apply to the thin and diffuse geography of a suburban megacity. As a result, wildlife is beginning to emerge within suburban megacities, not merely as varmints and rodents, but rather as members of vertical food chains that include predators such as coyotes, red fox, bobcats, javelinas, and bald eagles.

Graduate programs in wildlife are establishing in suburban megacities such as Dallas-Fort Worth to study this new and expanding phenomenon. Taken together, the documentary evidence and the unassailable persistence of the emerging wildlife afford a new and originally unforeseen possibility to retroactively rationalize the low density geography of a suburban megacity as a new kind of phenomenon where civilization and wild life coexist.

In the formative history of the American suburb, the sparse density of suburban sprawl was conceived as a development pattern that could be rapidly proliferated. As a landscape character and image, the mowed lawns and clipped hedges of American suburbia merged dwelling with the nature of an Arcadian, English-like landscape. However, Arcadia requires cultivation: mowing, watering, and extensive resources for upkeep, which strain personal households and homeowners associations to sustain. Front yards, rights of way, and parks that were once seen as the fine lawns of a noble estate could begin to transform into a new and more practical landscape blending civilization and wildlife.

This is a profound and new way of reconceiving and restructuring suburban cities that also overturns the old urban paradigm juxtaposing cities with wilderness. The premodern paradigm is a two-dimensional construct that locates civilization, law, and culture inside a physical and psychological world that is protected from an uncivilized wilderness surrounding the city, outside. However, vague and blurred geographies of suburban megacities have allowed wild species the opportunity to take hold and even establish food chains. Whereas wilderness and nature were once a matter of “outside”, wild species are now rising as a new ecological layer within the city.

Using Google to search “Bobcat City” will link to a video produced by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation that documents the study of urban wildcats (that is, bobcats) in the low-density geography of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Related to this example and activity, The Dallas-Fort Worth Urban Wildlife Club and Face book page tracks and documents a daily record of other wildlife and species when they are spotted.

The shift from cultivated English landscapes, to the contemporary impulse for native plants and then, ultimately, carefully planned wild reserves within an incorporated city geography—a geography where birds, pollinators, predators, and others coexist with human civilization—affords an intriguing new way to live. That this possibility is materializing retroactively in suburban megacities, rather than as an intention that was part of the original suburban project, also holds the promise of shaping a sustainable future where children and generations grow up in a metaphorical “wild classroom,”cultivating an awareness and an immediate relationship with nature that could be a reminder about the human condition and its relationship to Earth.

The Dallas Trinity River project: a case study, re-wilded

Over the course of some 40 years, eight celebrated landscape architects and their firms have proposed design concepts to transform a half-mile wide, engineered floodway through downtown Dallas-Fort Worth into an urban park. Known as the Trinity River Project, the 7.5-mile long, 2,000 acre, treeless landscape formed by earthen levees of erosion-control grasses and pothole wetlands, teases the imagination with potential.

However, the floodway is also a hydrological bottleneck that concentrates stormwater runoff that is collected in several million urban acres upstream in Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The practical demands generated by the floodway present a stupefying set of problems that no single design has yet to comprehensively solve.

When the expansive floodway is brimming from levee to levee with stormwater, the hydrostatic head and the flow velocity through the area has been measured at nine feet per second—a speed calculated by engineers as the frictional equivalent of a 177-mile per hour wind or Category Five hurricane scouring across the flat and treeless landscape surface. Other collateral effects compound the impact of the current and flooding.

Trinity silt deposits. Photo: Kevin Sloan

Trinity Marsh, becoming. Photo: Kevin Sloan

Expansive silt bars are deposited with each flood event. The June 2015 flood, which resulted from monsoon-like rains that lasted for over one continuous month, deposited silt bars approximately 20 inches deep over jogging trails and walkways, as well as Trammell Crow Park, a small pond and respite built in the late 1980s. In addition to the silt bars, enormous trash snags tend to accumulate around and between the piers of several vehicular bridges that cross the floodway. The agglomerations of plastic bottles, driftwood, suburban toys, and other sharp objects brought into the floodway can grow to several acres in size. The debris presents a formidable problem for maintenance, upkeep, and the related costs to accomplish it. Recently, silt bars created by the June 2015 flood rendered the area’s trail system and its attendant parking lots unusable for over a year.

Beyond to observable debris, environmental experts point out that the incoming stormwater flow is rich in concentrated urban toxins that become incorporated within the silt layers. As an expert cleverly explained at a symposium on the Trinity River, the floodway is a clever “self-healing landfill” that safely encapsulates the toxins within countless layers of silt that naturally form after each rain event.

Setting the hefty demands of this landscape aside, what observers see today is a landscape that resembles a grassy marsh with wading birds, waterfowl, coyotes, red fox, and other wildlife drawn to the area by its ecology and the food sources it presently offers.

A concept known as the “Balanced Vision Plan” has been prepared for the landscape by WRT, a renowned Philadelphia-based landscape and planning firm; it has achieved federal approval by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Founded by the legendary landscape architect Ian McHarg, over seven or so years of work, public meetings, and design, WRT developed a solution for Trinity Marsh that included naturalizing meadows; wetlands; active recreation fields organized by a chain of lakes and marshes; and a network of trails, paths, and accessible parking that ties it all together.

Thus far, WRT and their team of consultants and engineers have advanced the technical documentation and specifications for this project to a 35 percent point of completion. Sixty-five percent of the process remains to complete before the project can be publicly bid for construction.

As the project awaits authorization to proceed, a group of former City Council members, conscientious activists, and civic enthusiasts have come forward to laud the virtues of the Balanced Vision Plan and also to use the documentation work that remains to be done as an opportunity to heighten the naturalizing systems the BVP includes into a re-wilding project.

MVA plan. Photo of study model: Kevin Sloan

Recently, a second plan for Trinity Marsh has emerged through the support and backing of Dallas patrons. It is championed by Mayor Mike Rawlings and designed by the world-renowned New York firm Michael van Valkenburgh and Associates, or MVA. The MVVA plan concentrates on a 250-acre area in the immediate vicinity of two iconic bridges that were designed by another famous engineer and architect, Santiago Calatrava.

The MVVA scheme features a sophisticated work of landscape architecture that is purpose-designed and hardened to handle the formidable flooding demands of the Trinity. The proposal extends several other waterfront projects and accomplishments by MVVA in New York and the U.S. MVVA also designed the landscape architecture around the George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, designed by Robert A.M. Stern.

Recently, D Magazine, a regional journal published monthly that covers cultural topics and is widely read by an educated business and corporate population, devoted an entire issue , “Wild Dallas”, to the topic of re-wilding the Balanced Vision Plan. The March 2017 journal included several articles by contributors to the design, renderings, and paintings of what the area would look like as a Nature Project. In coordination with the issue, D Magazine also sponsored a conference in uptown Dallas.

Conference experts included Dr. Robert Moon, renowned master gardener and caretaker of the venerated Nasher Sculpture Center Garden; Tanya Homayoun of the Trinity River Audubon Center; Becky Board, member of the Dallas Parks and Recreation Board; and myself. Former City Councilwoman, Angela Hunt, spearheaded the conference and the effort to implement the WRT Balanced Vision Plan as a re-wilded nature reserve that will be within walking distance of downtown Dallas.

Re-wilding as redefinition

As contemporary landscape architecture converges on ecological and environmental interests, re-wilding offers a new kind of expressive potential for design by redefining how the landscape will perform, and as what. The goal of re-wilding places equal emphasis on the accommodation of a wildlife program with the human condition that it will serve. The first step is to establish re-wilded, synthetic nature that is as close to the original as is practically possible. Then, design to put people into the re-wilded area in such a way that the two can coexist.

Re-wilded Trinity River. Image: Vincent Hunter AIA, D Magazine

In this light re-wilding poses no threat to, nor is it a critique of, artful landscape experimentation. Paths, benches, and pavilions can easily fit into a re-wilded space and can designed with an artful hand. However, artful indulgence to stylize the embankments of a wetland levee, for example, would be an interference with the intended landscape character of a re-wilded wetland.

Given that any design hypothesis can be taken to an extreme, re-wilding should be viewed as a particular approach to naturalistic design that pushes beyond metaphors and abstractions to approach reality as closely possible. Metaphors, which can be powerful when skillfully employed in landscape architecture, exist only as aids—secondhand conditions for a real, factual reconstitution of an original landscape.

Re-wilding should be prudently considered and understood through the lens of two irreducible issues. One is appropriateness; the site, program, and location for where re-wilding might be considered. Secondly, re-wilding fundamentally requires considering the designing for a program of wildlife as equally important to designing the landscape as a place that can be inhabited by people.

With respect to appropriateness, for example, the prairie grass installation around the Sprint Campus in Kansas City establishes a landscape of memory that could attract wildlife—none were deliberately introduced into it. An academic reconstruction of the Konza prairie wasn’t practical, since the fire required to rejuvenate the original species, along with the invasive suburban species it would have been susceptible to, required an “adjusted” plant mix to be resilient and practical. After 15 years, thick stands of wading grasses have attracted coyotes and red fox. Several species of raptor are frequently seen plunging into the grasses for the shrews, field mice, and voles it also contains—an activity that only heightens the memory trope rising from within the campus: the original landscape.

Rather than conventional modalities, which are driven by theory, technology, or personal design style preferences, re-wilding offers an intensely performative landscape that takes the notion of naturalism to an extreme. Re-wilding is not a postmodern retrogression, receding from the future and the uncertainties it presents. Going forward, I am intrigued to observe and participate in re-wilding’s development and proliferation as an organizing concept in landscape architecture.

Kevin Sloan
Dallas-Fort Worth

On The Nature of Cities

Read this! 90 recommendations for the one book about (or relevant to) cities that everyone should read

14 December 2016Art & Awareness, Europe, People & Communities, Place & Design, RoundTable, Science & ToolsAfrica, Agriculture, Architecture, Art, Asia, Awareness, Biodiversity, Biophilia, Climate change, Communities, Conservation, Culture, Design, Development, Disasters/Red zone, Ecocities, Economics, Ecosystem services, Education, Experiencing Nature, Gardens, Justice, Landscape, Livability, North America, Parks, Participation/Democracy, Planning, Policy, Resilience, South America, Sustainability, What is urban nature?David Maddox

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.

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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.

Pippin Anderson, Cape TownRambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, by Emma Marris

Gloria Aponte, MedellínCities and Natural Process, by Michael Hough

Ana Luisa Artesi, Buenos AiresHorizon 101 – Reflections and Paintings, by Jala Makhzoumi

Xuemei Bai, Canberra王如松:《高效、和谐–城市调控原理与方法, Efficiency and Harmony: Principles and methods of urban system regulation and control, by Rusong Wang

Stephan Barthel, StockholmThe Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs

Jane Battersby, Cape TownHungry City, by Carolyn Steel

Adrian Benepe, New YorkThe Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro

Genie Birch, Philadelphia & New YorkThe Works: Anatomy of a City, by Kate Ascher

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

Eduardo Brondizio, BloomingtonDreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil, by Robin Sheriff

Steve Brown, SydneyStories from the Sandstone: Quarantine Inscriptions from Australia’s Immigrant Past, by Peter Hobbins, Ursula K Frederick and Anne Clarke

Lindsay Campbell, New York Crabgrass Frontier, by Kenneth Jackson

Lena Chan, Singapore Design With Nature, by Ian McHarg

Katrine Claassens, Cape TownPreludes, by T.S. Eliot

Lorenzo Chelleri, L’AquilaThe City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, by Lewis Mumford

Bharat Dahiya, BangkokBanaras: Making of India’s Heritage City, by Rana P.B. Singh

PK Das, MumbaiEcology and Equity, by Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha

Samarth Das, MumbaiHousing Without Houses: Participation, Flexibility, Enablement, by Nabeel Hamdi

Marcelo de Souza, Rio de JaneiroFrom Urbanization to Cities, by Murray Bookchin

Anna Dietzsch, São PauloThe Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs

Paul Downton, MelbourneEcocity Berkeley: Building Cities for a Healthy Future, by Richard Register

Katerina Elias-Trostmann, São PauloCities for a Small Planet, by Richard Rogers

Thomas Elmqvist, StockholmGlobal Cities: A Short History, by Greg Clark

Jayne Engle, MontrealSharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities, by Duncan McLaren and Julian Agyeman

Ana Faggi, Buenos AiresCities for People, by Jan Gehl

Martha Fajardo, BogotaDesign With Nature, by Ian McHarg

Emilio Fantin, BolognaL’anima dei Luoghi: conversazione con Carlo Truppi, by James Hillman

Ben Feldman, Los AngelesLast Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, by Richard Louv

Sheila Foster, New YorkTriumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, by Edward Glaeser

Niki Frantzeskaki, RotterdamGreening the Red Zone, by Keith Tidball and Marianne Krasny

David Goode, BathSwifts in a Tower, by David Lack

Divya Gopal, BerlinNature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future, by Harini Nagendra

Andrew Grant, BathThe Night Life of Trees, by Durga Bai, Bhajju Shyam, and Ram Singh Urveti

Bram Gunther, New YorkBaltimore School of Urban Ecology: Space, Scale, and Time for the Study of Cities, by J. Morgan Grove, Mary Cadenasso, Steward T. Pickett, Gary E. Machlis, William R. Burch Jr., Laura A. Ogden

Jonathan Halfon, New YorkThis Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein

Fadi Hamdan, BeirutAl Muqaddimah, by Ibn Khaldoun

Zoé Hamstead, BuffaloThe Manhattan Project: Theory of a City, by David Kishik

Mathieu Hélie, MontrealDelirious New York, A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, by Rem Koolhaas

Tom Henfrey, BristolThe Oregon Experiment, by Christopher Alexander

Cecilia Herzog, Rio de JaneiroThe Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design, by Anne Spirn

Mark Hostetler, GainesvilleSustainable Landscape Construction: A Guide to Green Building Outdoors, by J. William Thompson and Kim Sorvig

Mike Houck, PortlandThe Last Landscape, by William H. Whyte

Todd Lester, São PauloThe Practice of Everyday Life, by Michel de Certeau

Nina-Marie Lister, TorontoThe Culture of Nature: The North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez, by Alexander Wilson

Shuaib Lwasa, KampalaUrban Environments in Africa: A Critical Analysis of Environmental Politics, by Garth Myers

Patrick Lydon, SeoulSmall is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, by E.F. Schumacher

Yvonne Lynch, MelbourneThe City and the Coming Climate, by Brian Stone Jr.

Ian MacGregor-Fors, VeracruzConcrete Jungle: New York City and Our Last Best Hope for a Sustainable Future, by Niles Eldredge & Sidney Hohenstein

Mahim Maher, KarachiKarachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City, by Laurent Gayer

Jala Makhzoumi, BeirutDamascus City: A Study in Urban Geography, by Safouh Khair

François Mancebo, ParisThe Right to the City, by Henri Lefebvre

E.J. McAdamsCity Eclogue, by Ed Roberson

Rob McDonald, WashingtonCity Trees: A Historical Geography from the Renaissance through the 19th Century, by Henry Lawrence

Brian McGrath, NewarkNature’s Metropolis, by William Cronon

Timon McPhearson, New YorkConcrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York, by Matthew Gandy

Hitesh Mehta, MiamiLife between Buildings, by Jan Gehl

Patrice Milillo, Los AngelesThe Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life, by Richard Florida

Mary Miss, New YorkThe Great Derangement, by Amitav Ghosh

Franco Montalto, PhiladelphiaCradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart

Polly Moseley, LiverpoolThe Growing Stone, by Albert Camus

Harini Nagendra, BangaloreLandscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India’s High-Tech City, by Smriti Srinivas

Kate Orff, New YorkGreat Expectations, by Charles Dickens

Susan Parnell, Cape TownNew Babylon New Nineveh: Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914, by Charles Van Onselen

Raquel Peñalosa, MontrealThe Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs

Steward Pickett, PoughkeepsieThe Granite Garden, by Anne Spirn

Stephanie Pincetl, Los AngelesArchitecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture, by Bernard Rudofsky

Christine Platt, DurbanArrival City, by Doug Sanders

Andrew Revkin, New YorkThe Well-Tempered City, by Jonathan F.P. Rose

Debra Roberts, DurbanDesign with Nature, by Ian McHarg

Eric Sanderson, New YorkCarfree Cities, by J.H. Crawford

Jason Schupbach, WashingtonThe Image of the City, by Kevin Lynch

Richard Scott, LiverpoolCities For People, by Jan Gehl

Paula Segal, New YorkInvisible Cities, by Italo Calvino

Huda Shaka, DubaiDubai Amplified, by Stephen Ramos

Laura Shillington, Managua & MontrealThe City & The City, by China Miéville

Philip Silva, New York Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon

David Simon, Gothenburg Designing Public Policy for Co-production: Theory, practice and change, edited by Catherine Durose and Liz Richardson

Kevin Sloan, Dallas-Fort Worth The Matrix of Man: Illustrated History of Urban Environment, by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy

Laura Spinadel, Vienna Campus WU: A Holistic History, by Ila Berman

[/contributor]

David Tittle, London Cities in Civilisation, by Peter Hall

Anne Trumble, Los Angeles Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, by Ursula K. Heise

Naomi Tsur, Jerusalem If Mayors Ruled The World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities, by Benjamin Barber

Chantal van Ham, Brussels Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning, by Timothy Beatley

Shawn Van Sluys, Guelph The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, by Sarah Schulman

Claire Weisz, New York The Fall of Public Man, by Richard Sennett

Mike Wells, Bath Green Design: From Theory to Practice, by Ken Yeang and Arthur Spector

Diana Wiesner, Bogotá Naturaleza Urbana. plataforma de experiencias, edited by María Angélica Mejía

Kathleen Wolf, Seattle With People in Mind: Design and Management of Everyday Nature, by Rachel Kaplan, Stephen Kaplan, and Robert L. Ryan

About the Writer:
David Maddox

David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director.

Introduction

We have assembled a list of 90 must-reads on cities from a diverse group of TNOC contributors—a nature of cities reader’s digest. The recommendations are as wide-ranging as the TNOC community, from many points of view and from around the world. They are a reflection of the breadth of thought that cities need. And, as my grandmother would have said: “This will keep you off the street and out of trouble”.

The prompt seems easy, but it turns out to be difficult to recommend the one thing everyone should read on cities, and what we have created here is a remarkable and diverse reading list. You will likely think of other essential works yourself, and when you do, leave them here as a comment. There is a rich conversation to experience simply by exchanging ideas on great books.

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

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

The books are listed in a random order. Refresh your screen to see the list displayed in a different order.

Get busy.

—David Maddox

Pippin Anderson, Cape Town

Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World
by Emma Marris
2011, Bloomsbury USA

Touches critically on so many debates in ecology (well, in many quarters they are not debated). Re-wilding, novel ecosystems, are invasive aliens always bad, old conservation models … etc. Her writing feels effortless and then she gives you lots to kick back against. Rather like finding yourself eating an exotic flavour of ice cream (ice cream—yum, popcorn flavoured—gosh!).
Buy the book.

Gloria Aponte, Medellín

Cities and Natural Process
by Michael Hough
1995, Routledge

Nobody concerned with urban habitat should miss this book, available in English and in Spanish, that reaffirms the role of nature in the city. In six easy to read chapters, landscape as a process is highlighted and understood as the link between nature, humans, and built environment. The author demonstrates that total control (of nature) is impossible and that in attempts to do it, the result is least diversity for the most effort.
Buy the book.

Ana Luisa Artesi, Buenos Aires

Horizon 101 – Reflections and Paintings
by Jala Makhzoumi
2010, Dar Onboz

I strongly recomend Jala Makhzoumi’s “101 horizons”, for students and people involved in Landscape in cities as a fundamental reading to see a different point of view.

From a room with a view of the Mediterranean, in an artistic and emotional story, with poetry and illustrations, and also … blank spaces, Jala describes a Landscape where all Theories and Methodologies are surpassed by the day to day of a terrible and seemingly endless war. Despite all the fears, Jala paints, draws, dreams, wishes … expressing from her soul, so that we can understand the depth of this moment.

The text in both languages, Arabic and English.

Xuemei Bai, Canberra

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

Efficiency and Harmony: Principles and methods of urban system regulation and control
by Rusong Wang
1988, Hunan Education Publisher

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

Stephan Barthel, Stockholm

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

It opens up a view of the city as an ecosystem. It is a must read for anyone combating the “hot planning topic of densification”. Such an agenda builds, to some degree, on Jacobs’ thinking—but with a selective interpretation of it. She was one of the first describing how social capital is built in neighborhoods in large cities, and one of the first describing how the gentrification process works (but long before any of those terms were theorized). She lacked an understanding about the benefits humans obtain by interacting with natural environments, which is her drawback. But hey, no one is perfect. Great book, great humanist, and great systems thinker!
Buy the book.

Jane Battersby, Cape Town

Hungry City
by Carolyn Steel
2008, Random House

Food fundamentally shapes our cities’ ecologies, economies, and social lives, but most people hardly ever consider how it reaches our plates in cities. Hungry City traces food from farm to fork and beyond. It will not only make you look at food in a new way, but will give you a new perspective on cities; as Steel herself says, “In order to understand cities properly, we need to look at them through food”.
Buy the book.

Adrian Benepe, New York

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

The Power Broker by Robert Caro, and not necessarily as a pro Jane-Jacobs morality tale.

For example, Robert Moses tripled the NYC park system in size—the biggest periods of park creation and expansion in NYC’s history.
Buy the book.

Genie Birch, Philadelphia & New York

The Works: Anatomy of a City
Kate Ascher
2007, Penguin Press

Kate Ascher introduces this portrait of urban infrastructure based on New York City with a wise observation: “Rarely does a resident of any of the world’s great metropolitan areas pause to consider the complexity of urban life or the myriad systems that operate around the clock to support it.” She then offers a richly illustrated compendium that explains five systems: transport of people and freight, power, communications, water, and sanitation. While slightly outdated due to the absence of a current description of today’s technology, it is an accessible and informative primer. The final chapter, “The Future,” lays out key concerns.
Buy the book.

Timothy Bonebrake, Hong Kong

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

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

Eduardo Brondizio, Bloomington

Dreaming Equality:
Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil
by Robin Sheriff
2001, Rutgers University Press

An ethnographic analysis of race relations from the perspective of residents of a Rio favela.
Buy the book.

Steve Brown, Sydney

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

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

Lena Chan, Singapore

Design With Nature
by Ian McHarg
1969, Natural History Press

A must-read book. Inspirational. I first read it in 1981, still find it relevant, and always discover something new each time I re-visit it.
Buy the book.

Lindsay Campbell, New York

Crabgrass Frontier
by Kenneth Jackson
1985, Oxford University Press

Because to understand the city, we have to understand the suburb. While conditions have changed since this 1985 book, Jackson investigates the role of multiple forces, including technology, transportation, federal policy, culture, and demographic shifts in shaping the suburban form of the United States. I read it as an undergrad in my first geography course, and this book sparked my interest in studying urban planning and later human geography. Particularly insightful is his chapter on early federal policies—such as the Federal Highway Act, Home Owners Loan Corporation (origin of redlining), and the Federal Housing Act, showing the institutionalized roots of spatial unevenness and inequality in our urban and suburban form.
Buy the book.

Lorenzo Chelleri, L’Aquila

The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
by Lewis Mumford
1961, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

There is no book like this in addressing how and why cities evolved, from the medieval villages to the modern post-industrial metropolis. Mumford was among the few able to grasp and communicate, through a clear and extraordinary narrative style, the very “nature” of cities, explaining the root causes of the processes which remain at the forefront of urban studies debates. His half century old insights explain most of the problem we’re still facing and about which any reader could deepen her knowledge with hundreds of books. But no other book could provide you the big picture, the bases for understanding “what is a city”.
Buy the book.

Katrine Claassens, Cape Town

Preludes
by T.S. Eliot
1911

Now more than 100 years old, this poem is a haunting look at a turn-of-the-century city, which—despite its description of a London where cab horses “steam and stamp” and lamps must still be manually lit—is shockingly modern. In a smoky, densely populated city, nature lingers, clinging uneasily, with “sparrows in the gutters” and vacant lots offering fuel for fires.
Buy the book.

Bharat Dahiya, Bangkok

Banaras: Making of India’s Heritage City
by Rana P.B. Singh
2009,  Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Based on more than three decades of intensive research and intimate acquaintance with the sacred geography and urban cultural history of India’s ancient living city, Professor Rana P.B. Singh, in this pioneering volume, provides an excellent narrative of the making of Banaras—also known as Kashi or Varanasi. This book is a lead reference for understanding the cultural landscape, sacred geometry and cosmogram, archetypal architecture, vivid ritualscapes, and magnificent riverfront heritagescapes of Banaras that portray and maintain the dignity of India’s rich history and culture. This splendid volume also serves as a role model for the multidisciplinary studies of urban cultural landscapes in South Asia and beyond.
Buy the book.

P.K. Das, Mumbai

Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India
by Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha
1995, Routledge

It is a must read, published by Penguin Books India, but before that by Routledge in 1995. Over the years, I have read parts of this book several times and have extensively quoted it in my talks and writings.
Buy the book.

Samarth Das, Mumbai

Housing Without Houses: Participation, Flexibility, Enablement
by Nabeel Hamdi
1995, Practical Action

Hamdi focuses on participatory planning as an essential component of sustainable development, with local communities at the forefront leading discussions and contributing to the production of neighborhoods in cities. The failures of the state and market forces to provide housing have been demonstrated in numerous cases, and the book discusses how architects and designers along with citizens are responsible for building just cities. Hyper-local knowledge of local citizens is an incredible resource that architects can tap while making their cases for production of neighborhoods. The book also emphasizes how local bodies need to work in unison with state powers to promote equitable development, with a balance of new production and preservation of cultural aspects of daily living. The traditional roles of architects need to be challenged and evolved in order to develop strategies for development from the ground up in today’s context. This is a must read for all!
Buy the book.

Marcelo de Souza, Rio de Janeiro

From Urbanization to Cities
by Murray Bookchin
Revised ed. 1996, Cassel & Co.

I think his reflections on cities and urbanization deserve much more attention that has been devoted to them so far. A few reasons:

1) Bookchin pioneered the analysis of urban ecology and political ecology from a critical viewpoint. His book Our Synthetic Environment (published under the penname “Lewis Herber”) was published a couple of months before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; probably due to the fact that his analysis is much more radical, Rachel’s book turned into a bestseller, while Bookchin’s book not…

2) Bookchin’s books The Limits of the City (1974), Post-Scarcity Anarchism (essays written between the mid-1960s and early 1970s) and, above all, Urbanization without Cities (1992) are as important or even more important than Lefebvre’s The Right to the City and The Urban Revolution—but everyone talks only about Lefebvre, who was in some regards not as profound or original as Bookchin.

3) Bookchin’s “social ecology” is a very important framework for the type of analysis we need in the 21st century.
Buy the book.

Anna Dietzsch, São Paulo

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

The classic. Because it is the mother of everything we think is good for cities now: walking, meeting people, being diverse.

And worth re-reading, because it has been so much quoted and talked about, some of the ideas and principles have been kind of distorted.
Buy the book.

Paul Downton, Melbourne

Ecocity Berkeley: Building Cities for a Healthy Future
by Richard Register
1987, North Atlantic Books

The first book with “ecocity” in its title and perhaps the key text of the ecocity movement, this slim volume describes a vision of Berkeley (but it could be any city) as a place of wildness and life, dense with vegetation and people but empty of cars, with a narrative propelled by exuberant enthusiasm and a kind of wild-eyed joy that is rare in city literature. From buildings covered with trees and vegetation to precarious glass-bottomed walkways, recovered creeks, and cars converted into planter boxes, this is the book that let loose many of the memes that now populate city disourse and urban design. Neither conventionally academic nor stiflingly professional, Ecocity Berkeley is richly illustrated with naive and quirky drawings that help communicate sublime and sophisticated ideas about fitting a city within the full embrace of nature—read it alongside Murray Bookchin’s Limits of the City for a radical social and political analysis of urbanisation and the incomparable Lewis Mumford’s City in History for a comprehensive overview of cities that, like Ecocity Berkeley, remain absolutely pertinent to understanding that we cannot make a healthy future without balancing our cities with nature.
Buy the book.

Katerina Elias, São Paulo

Cities for a Small Planet
by Richard Rogers
1998, Basic Books

In this book, Richard Rogers speaks to everyone: no matter the reader’s level of experience in urbanism and architecture, Roger reels in his readers, who in exchange are taken on a journey through the history of urbanism, urban decay, ecological design, and ultimately, humanity. This book is a potential classic in urban literature, and a fantastic entry point for beginners, or a recap for specialists, to contemplate the role of our cities and their potential for being a driving force for greater sustainability.
Buy the book.

Thomas Elmqvist, Stockholm

Global Cities: A Short History
by Greg Clark
2016, Brookings Institution Press

The book gives a very interesting overview of past waves of globalisation events and the formation of city networks going back 4,000 years, up to the patterns and processes underlying today’s globalisation and formation of large city networks.
The book ends with an analysis and discussion of the globalisation and cities of the future. Although there are vast differences between the networks of cities along the ancient Silk Roads and the 21st-century system of global value chains and competitive advantage, there are also striking parallels. The author argues that the leaders of today’s cities can learn much from how those in previous waves built and sustained their competitive attributes, and how to avoid becoming locked into unsustainable or unproductive cycles of development.
Buy the book.

Jayne Engle, Montreal

Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities
by Duncan McLaren and Julian Agyeman
2015, MIT Press

Everyone should read this book because it makes a case that the guiding purpose of the future city should be understanding the whole city as shared space, and acting to share it fairly. It brings together the notion of the city as a commons with a critical perspective on the sharing economy. Its compelling theory and a rich mix of city cases move the conventional smart city discourse from multinational companies driving city change, to technological innovation in the service of social innovation and well being for all urban dwellers.
Buy the book.

Ana Faggi, Buenos Aires

Cities for People
by Jan Gehl
2010, Island Press

Very easy to read for everyone, this book shows how real urban life takes place in the streets. A livable city is one that considers the human dimension and offers a friendly and safe environment. The book, available in English and in Spanish, gives many useful recommendations for planning and management.
Buy the book.

Martha Fajardo, Bogota

Design With Nature
by Ian McHarg
1969, Natural History Press

Written in the 60s, it could be seen as very outdated—most of the ideologies are largely realized and the methods are practiced. However, it is still relevant for anyone who is interested in humans’ relationship with nature and how can we improve it.
Buy the book.

Emilio Fantin, Bologna

L’anima dei luoghi: conversazione con Carlo Truppi
by James Hillman
RCS, Milano

L’anima dei luoghi (The Soul of the Place) is the transcript of a dialogue between the psychologist James Hilmann and the architect Carlo Truppi; it is aimed at understanding the profound identity between culture and nature. The nature of the place is rediscovered as a new subject of reference that has to establish new relations of meaning and to change human perceptions. To respect a “territory” by protecting it ecologically, instead of destroying it, means allowing its energy to live, to survive over time, and to come down to us. Hilmann’s perspective shows us how geographic coordinates can be seen as an expression of the soul of the place, and it also explains how in the same place, churches of different religions, and villages and cities of different ethnicities and culture, have given rise to a stratification of signs and memories. The book has not been translated to English.
Buy the book.

Ben Feldman, Los Angeles

Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder
by Richard Louv
2008, Algonquin Books

As a landscape architect, father of a four-year-old and uncle of two autistic nephews, reading the book further clarified a personal cause of purpose to make a case for creating meaningful places to expose children to nature in its many forms.
Buy the book.

Sheila Foster, New York

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
by Edward Glaeser
2011, Penguin Books

It is a well-written, comprehensive paean to cities of all kinds across the world. It is also full of insights and policy prescriptions which, whether one agrees with them or not (and there is much I disagree with), challenges assumptions about how and why some cities succeed and others falter. A terrific read for our urban era in which cities will play an outsized role in economic life, politics, and culture.
Buy the book.

Niki Frantzeskaki, Rotterdam

Greening the Red Zone
by Keith Tidball and Marianne Krasny
2013, Springer

I love this book. It shows how communities can take up greening actions as a means to regenerate their areas and reconnect communities with the past and the future. With case studies around the globe in cities that experience devastation because of natural disasters or wars and conflict, the book shows how nature in cities can restore identity and reignite hope for the future.
Buy the book.

David Goode, Bath

Swifts in a Tower
by David Lack
1956, Methuen

Everyone dealing with the ecology of cities should read this, wherever you are in the world. David Lack was a great ecologist and a great writer who produced a wonderful story about the swift, explaining the intricacies of its life in amazing detail and especially its adaptation to city life. His book is a classic in the literature of urban ecology. We all need to understand the detailed workings of urban ecology; there are so many mysteries. This book provides a way into that world that you won’t forget, and you will certainly look at swifts with new eyes.
Buy the book.

Divya Gopal, Berlin

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

The book is a good mix of research findings and narratives from locals about urban nature in an Indian city. It helps the reader to understand the various factors (colonial past, economics, poverty, development, etc.) that play a role in “what” and “how” urban nature is in the Indian sub-continent, and perhaps is applicable to many other cities in developing countries.
Buy the book.

Andrew Grant, Bath

The Night Life of Trees
by Durga Bai, Bhajju Shyam, and Ram Singh Urveti
2006, Tara Books

This is a hand printed, illustrated book that I turn to when thinking about trees in cities. It captures the luminous spirits of trees at night, as portrayed by the Gond tribe in central India, and communicates the intimate relationship between the people and the forest that goes well beyond simple functional dependency into a way of life and thought. It is a visual reference for how we can relink our imagination and culture with urban nature.
Buy the book.

Bram Gunther, New York

Baltimore School of Urban Ecology: Space, Scale, and Time for the Study of Cities
by J. Morgan Grove, Mary Cadenasso, Steward T. Pickett, Gary E. Machlis, William R. Burch Jr., Laura A. Ogden
2015, Yale University Press

A great story about an early and pioneering long-term ecology study city and how the study team blended social and ecological attributes to more deeply understand urban systems. Well written and speaks to all of us working in this arena.
Buy the book.

Jon Halfon, New York

This Changes Everything
by Naomi Klein
2014, Simon & Schuster

It might be a little too politically orientated for the list (although it shouldn’t be), but it does a fantastic job looking at the political and economic structures that are impeding large scale actions to address climate change. A little light on concrete solutions, but some worthwhile examinations on the roles of community organizing, protection of indigenous rights, and natural disaster recovery as the catalysts for system wide change.
Buy the book.

Fadi Hamdan, Beirut

Al Muqaddimah
By Ibn Khaldoun
1377

In particular, Chapter 4. Some modern thinkers view it as the first work dealing with the philosophy of history or the social sciences of sociology, regarding the evolution of cities. It is an attempt at critical thinking in 1377 AD; unfortunately, that AD-thinking is much needed in 2016 in our Middle East region, and perhaps even beyond. Of course, much of what it says is now not applicable, but the critical thinking methodology is remarkable for its time. Buy the book.

Zoé Hamstead, Buffalo

The Manhattan Project: Theory of a City
by David Kishik
2015, Stanford University Press

This book is the elaboration of a “hypothesis” that Walter Benjamin did not commit suicide at Portbou, but in fact faked his own suicide and successfully fled Nazi Germany. In the book, The Manhattan Project is his manuscript, discovered in the NY Public Library (after his actual death), which articulates a theory of a place and the ways in which the form of the city shapes us in situated ways. New York is seen as an urban implosion, deriving its power from increased density and diversity—the economic, artistic, environmental, and equity dimensions of this urbanist movement are explored in relation to works and worldviews of Mumford, Jacobs, Arendt, and a slew of other important thinkers. It is a playful and thought-provoking work that experiments with place-based, fictional philosophy in the urban context.
Buy the book.

Mathieu Hélie, Montreal

Delirious New York, A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
by Rem Koolhaas
1997, The Monacelli Press

The concept of a retroactive manifesto is a paradigmatic stepping stone from the design stance of city planning to the ecological, emergent stance we need to embrace for urbanism to succeed as a science and practice.
Buy the book.

Tom Henfrey, Bristol

The Oregon Experiment
by Christopher Alexander
1975, Oxford University Press

Christoper Alexander’s “Pattern Language” trilogy sets out a compelling vision and agenda for a new participatory approach to architecture and urban design, where planning and settlement act as ongoing generative processes that reflect the deepest creative impulses of the universe itself. Of the three books, The Oregon Experiment is the most compact, and situates the philosophy set out in The Timeless Way of Building and methodology of A Pattern Language within the context of implementation of a real-world case study. Buy the book.

Cecilia Herzog, Rio de Janeiro

The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design
by Anne Spirn
1984, Basic Books

The book that made me look at cities in a totally new way is Anne W. Spirn’s The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design. It goes deep on how landscape interventions can impact the quality of the urban environment for better or worse. It even predicts what is happening now in many cities around the world.
Buy the book.

Mark Hostetler, Gainesville

Sustainable Landscape Construction: A Guide to Green Building Outdoors
by J. William Thompson and Kim Sorvig
2007, Island Press

This book is important because the best design can fail if it is not implemented properly during the construction phase. For example, heritage trees that are marked for conservation in a subdivision development can subsequently die if heavy earthwork machines run over the root zone during construction.
Buy the book.

Mike Houck, Portland

The Last Landscape
by William H. Whyte
1970, Doubleday Anchor

Everyone, but particularly those working on park open space (I hate that term), and planning issues (regional especially) should read this old, but never more relevant, book. A comprehensive, holistic rationale for integrating nature into the city and natural resource planning across the urban and rural (regional) landscape. Inspires me today as much as on my first reading 35 years ago.
Buy the book.

Todd Lester, São Paulo

The Practice of Everyday Life
by Michel de Certeau
1984, University of California Press

…and specifically the chapter on “Walking in the City” in which he offers an “operational concept” that attempts to subordinate urban growth to user needs. While one of the primary references for his 1984 work—the World Trade Center—no longer exists and has certainly been surpassed in terms of largesse, de Certeau reaches ahead and amply problematizes extreme edifice for cities “founded by utopian and urbanistic discourse.” He reminds of the “tactics” required to navigate the contemporary city, and equally reaches back to LeFebvre’s “demand [for] a transformed and renewed access to urban life.”
Buy the book.

Nina-Marie Lister, Toronto

The Culture of Nature: The North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez
by Alexander Wilson
1991, Between the Lines Press

The late Alexander Wilson (a Canadian landscape designer and cultural critic) pre-dates Cronon in exploring the hierarchical dualisms that underlie our perceptions of nature in an urbanizing world. Wilson asserts that the environmental crisis is a cultural crisis, beyond the confines of landscape, which itself is full of deeply conflicting ideas about the natural world—and these are manifest most powerfully in our cities and suburbs. (For those who can’t access this out-of-print Canadian volume, you might go to David Orr’s [2002] The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention [Oxford Press] for related reasons, but that would be a second recommendation, so…. there.)
Buy the book.

Shuaib Lwasa, Kampala

Urban Environments in Africa: A Critical Analysis of Environmental Politics
by Garth Myers
2016, University of Chicago Press

This book analyses power and resultant cityscapes through the Situated Urban Political Ecology lenses. Drawing on various examples from Africa, it reflects on how power shapes urban environments, leading to different configurations. Myers argues that urban African environments go beyond just power versus counter power to a structure of feeling—that assessing urban physical environments merely as sites of risks misses seeing these cities as wellsprings of environmental opportunities.
Buy the book.

Patrick Lydon, Seoul

Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
by E.F. Schumacher
1973, Harper & Row

An economic text for those in search of an economy that works for people and the environment, Schumacher’s treatise has been called one of the most influential books published in the past century. Based in the kind of socially and ecologically connected thinking where the well-being of people and cities sprouts from something more basic than sheer economic and industrial growth, the writing offers invaluable philosophical and practical wisdom for those looking to achieve the trifecta of social, economic, and ecological sustainability. Regardless of the discipline, every successful sustainability plan is bound to find its roots tucked somewhere in the theories of Small is Beautiful.
Buy the book.

Yvonne Lynch, Melbourne

The City and the Coming Climate
by Brian Stone Jr.
2012, Cambridge University Press

Climate change will fundamentally challenge the way we design, build, and manage our cities. In this book, Stone explains the pertinent climate science and articulates the profound impact of climate change and urban heating, which are currently affecting our cities. He puts forth a range of interventions that can be considered for adapting our cities and building resilience in a positive manner.
Buy the book.

Ian MacGregor-Fors, Xalapa

Concrete Jungle: New York City and Our Last Best Hope for a Sustainable Future
by Niles Eldredge & Sidney Horenstein
2014, University of California Press

This book is a walk-through of New York City, from the geological origin of the land on which it sprawls to the current social-environmental actions that are being considered to tackle the city’s issues. Although the book focuses on NYC, much of its content applies to large cities around the globe. It is very well written, mostly for a general audience, and provides fantastic details.
Buy the book.

Mahim Maher, Karachi

Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City
Laurent Gayer
2014, OUP & Hurst

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

Jala Makhzoumi, Beirut

Damascus City: A Study in Urban Geography
by Safouh Khair
1982, Ministry of Culture Publications, Damascus

In Arabic, a holistic narrative of natural and cultural processes that shaped urban morphology. The book is a must to understand evolution of the three components that shaped the morphology, architecture, and cultural landscape of this ancient oasis city.

François Mancebo, Paris

The Right to the City
by Henri Lefebvre
(in French, Le droit à la Ville)
1968, Peninsula

Let’s turn to the great classics. The Right to the City is a touchstone for people working on social production of space and justice in the city. Some, like Susan Feinstein, consider that The Right to the City is more a rhetorical device than a policy-making tool. Still, this book, published in 1968, has inspired countless academic authors and practitioners in urban planning and urban design up through today.
Buy the book.

E.J. McAdams, New York

City Eclogue
by Ed Roberson
2006, Atelos

One of the few American poets with field experience in biology, Ed Roberson brings his innovative poetic forms and radical imagination to singing the ecological, political, and racial ecosystems of the city. If The Nature of Cities community is going to read one poetry book in 2017, this is it!
Buy the book.

Rob McDonald, Washington

City Trees: A Historical Geography from the Renaissance through the 19th Century
by Henry Lawrence
2008, University of Virginia Press

What is mind-blowing in this book is the painstaking reconstruction of tree cover and parks in major cities from the 16th century on. It really changes your perspective to learn, for instance, that the Dutch practice of having trees along canals spread to trees along streets in Amsterdam, and that the initial response of most observers from other countries was bewilderment (why in the world would you want trees in a city?!). The book provides the detailed historical evidence that how we have tried to use nature in cities has changed and expanded multiple times since the renaissance, and (optimistically) could expand again even in our current urban century.
Buy the book.

Brian McGrath, Newark

Nature’s Metropolis:
Chicago and the Great West
by William Cronon
1992, W. W. Norton & Company

For me, an architect, Nature’s Metropolis helped me see cities in a much more complex way.
Buy the book.

Timon McPhearson, New York

Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City
by Matthew Gandy
2002, MIT Press

Concrete and Clay wonderfully traces the development of New York City and the shifting and contrasting views within key development projects integrate a “metropolitan nature” in the city and the region. The focus on capital and political power in decision-making and the impact this has on urban environments is a useful history that remains important as a story about the impacts of urban development on all nature in the context of an urbanizing planet.
Buy the book.

Hitesh Mehta, Miami

Life between Buildings: Using Pubic Space
by Jan Gehl
1980, John Wiley & Sons

A must-have for any library shelf on city planning. First published in 1980, it was both enlightening and thoughtful, and even then asked the fundamental question “What has happened to life in cities?”. The book has had a lasting influence on the quality of public open spaces and has especially helped architects and urban planners better understand the larger public life of cities. Focused on how humans use public spaces, Gehl places substance and quantitative research behind urban planning.
Buy the book.

Patrice Milillo, Los Angeles

The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life
by Richard Florida
2002, Basic Books

This book explains how important placemaking is and the economic power wielded by creativity.
Buy the book.

Mary Miss, New York

The Great Derangement
by Amitav Ghosh
2016, University of Chicago Press

I really enjoyed this book because of the way Ghosh makes clear the important role of “culture” in thinking about the climate crisis, whether it’s the role the writer / artist has in making such a topic central to our thinking about the world or the way our “political culture” has brought us to this point. Ghosh writes with great insight and allows us to track these links in a very compelling way.
Buy the book.

Franco Montalto, Philadelphia

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
by William McDonough and Michael Braggart
2002, North Point Press

I have found Cradle to Cradle seminal in my development. It makes the critically important distinction between eco-effective and eco-efficient design. The former is a radical departure from how we’ve made things for most of the industrial history of the world. The latter is simply a slower way of destroying the world. I believe this book is of interest to all involved in the design process, regardless of scale.
Buy the book.

Polly Moseley, Liverpool

The Growing Stone
by Albert Camus
1957

In French, La pierre qui pousse. A short story, this is brilliant in terms of a story of myth blending with city engineering. It’s about inequalities, about myth-making, about changing the narrative of a town in a deeply democratic way. When I read it a centenary on from Camus’ birth, it blew my mind.
Buy the book.

Harini Nagendra, Bangalore

Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India’s High-Tech City
by Smriti Srinivas
2001, University of Minnesota Press and Orient Longman

My book is set in the southern hemisphere, a fascinating account of how traditional and modern cultures, ecologies, and visualisations of the sacred and the civic influence each other, in the backdrop of the globalising city of Bangalore. It focuses on an iconic sacred event, the annual Karaga performance. Conducted by a traditional community of gardeners, the Karaga is organised around a network of garden and lake sites. Many of these sites have now vanished from the city, but survive vividly in memory and imagination, while others are still physically extant, though substantially altered in form and function. Through the lens of the Karaga, Smriti Srinivas describes the complex, changing matrix of cultural, political, and social ties to nature in an Indian city where tradition and modernity are two sides of the same coin. The book provides a scholarly insight into social transformations in a modern Indian city, but at the same time takes you deep into the lives and imagination of people in the city, describing how they see and value nature, and how this has changed over time. It’s one of my favorite books, on my favorite city. Happy reading!
Buy the book.

Kate Orff, New York

Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
1860

A novel that traces how cities began forming the modern backdrop for humanity and a portrait of the multiple human stories and twists of fate (luck, cruelty, love) that cities foster.
Buy the book.

Susan Parnell, Cape Town

New Babylon New Nineveh: Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914
By Charles Van Onselen
2011, Jonathan Ball Publishers

I love Gwendoline Wright’s volume on the Politics of Urban Design in French Colonial Urbanism because it’s the South speaking back to the North—but the “urban” book that really got me hooked on doing city research and convinced me, as a geographer, that there was a real value in a historical perspective, is Olsen’s two-volume set of essays about Johannesburg. Beautifully written, place and people sensitive—but with a much bigger understanding of political economy.
Buy the book.

Raquel Peñalosa, Montreal

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

Because of its intemporality, it is always inspiring to new generations—to transform the City, and mostly its people. It remains fresh and pertinent in its transversality, dealing with social, urban, human, gender, and generational issues in a simple and engaged manner.
Buy the book.

Steward Pickett, Poughkeepsie

The Granite Garden
by Anne Spirn
1984, Basic Books

Anne is one of the pioneers and continuing deep thinkers about the relationship of ecological, geological, and climatic processes and context that interact with urban design. Her approach is based on data and knowledge, yet informs the creative and human-centered intentionality of urban design. Her writing is a joy to read, and her insights are still fresh today.
Buy the book.

Stephanie Pincetl, Los Angeles

Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture
by Bernard Rudofsky
1965, The Museum of Modern Art

It shows the wisdom and creativity of builders who did not have a formal education, but were observant and inventive. The traditional forms and materials both came from local places and were built to shelter from heat and cold and to take advantage of natural phenomena such as wind and sun to create livable cities and communities. The end results were cities and villages that addressed local conditions for thermal and human well-being.
Buy the book.

Christine Platt, Durban

Arrival City
by Doug Sanders
2011, Windmill Books

It is a remarkable book telling the story of what happens to people arriving in a series of world cities. It explains how they have adapted to the barriers that face them and gives us a much keener understanding of just why the peripheral—or arrival—places in our cities are the way they are. It covers cities in countries as far flung as China, Iran, and France.
Buy the book.

Andrew Revkin, New York

The Well-Tempered City
by Jonathan F.P. Rose
2016, Harper Collins

It’s a welcome summary of studies and cases showing that the social and cultural infrastructure of cities can be as important as the physical infrastructure.
Buy the book.

Debra Roberts, Durban

Design with Nature
by Ian McHarg
1969, Natural History Press

This was one of the first “how to” books addressing nature and cities. Instead of just theorizing about the city and how it might be changed, McHarg offered a practical approach to urban design that allowed the incorporation of nature into city plans. His “overlay” thinking paved the way for subsequent GIS based planning approaches, without which it would be impossible to protect nature and biodiversity in the 21st Century city.
Buy the book.

Eric Sanderson, New York

Carfree Cities
by J.H. Crawford
2002, International Books

Little known but much loved by those who have had the pleasure of reading it, J.H. Crawford’s book, Carfree Cities, walks through every aspect of what it would be like to live in a town or city without cars. Thoughtful and surprising, this short book will remind you of Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language, Jan Gehl’s devotion to livable cities, and Richard Perl’s systemic understanding of how transportation shapes urban form, all before Google’s Self-Driving Car or Uber were on the horizon. Illustrated by Arin Verner.
Buy the book.

Jason Schupbach, Washington

The Image of the City
By Kevin Lynch
1960, MIT Press

An absolute essential, in this short book, Lynch revolutionized the way city planners thought about how people move through and view their cities. The basic lessons of what elements a well-designed city has are all here. It will shift your thinking of how residents of a place conceive of their city, and change the way you look at a city yourself.
Buy the book.

Richard Scott, Liverpool

Cities for People
by Jan Gehl
2010, Island Press

Considering cities through five human senses is a good place to describe how we react to the spaces around us, and how best to respond to them. It’s a great starting point for planning better cities.
Buy the book.

Paula Segal, New York

Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
1972, Harcourt Brace & Company

Invisible Cities, for understanding that cities themselves are organisms that run on empathy.

Always good to re-read to remember that everything we build or reconstruct will be seen with many, many different eyes and be part of many, many different stories.
Buy the book.

Huda Shaka, Dubai

Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography
by Stephen Ramos
2010, Routledge

While Dubai has received some attention from architects and planners recently, the literature on it has been somewhat superficial. This book considers the evolution of the city over the past 50 years and links it to major infrastructure development, an often over-looked aspect. The city of “glam” is actually a city of “ports”. The book provides insights into the politics and economics of development in the Arabian Gulf.
Buy the book.

Laura Shillington, Managua & Montreal

The City & The City
by China Miéville
2003, Penguin/Random House

The fundamental idea in The City & The City is that two different cities occupy the exact same geographical site. The spaces in the cities overlap, but they are legally separate entities. The cities in the book symbolise the ways in which there are multiple and diverse spaces in real cities, but how certain spaces (and the people who produce and occupy them) are “othered”.
Buy the book.

Philip Silva, New York

Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
Edited by William Cronon
1996, W. W. Norton & Company

Nature’s Metropolis (1992), Cronon’s history of Chicago and its Western hinterland, would probably be a more obvious fit for this list. Yet Uncommon Ground is a primer for deconstructing many widely held misconceptions about the relationship between humans and nature, including the place of cities in an environmentally enlightened society. The introduction alone should be required reading for any student of cities and the environment.
Buy the book.

David Simon, Gothenburg

Designing Public Policy for Co-production: Theory, practice and change
Edited by Catherine Durose and Liz Richardson
2016, Policy Press

This is arguably the best guide to the shortcomings of conventional public policymaking and the potential of co-production methodologies. The diverse authors, a mix of academics and practitioners based in the U.K. and U.S.A., draw on long experience at the (mainly urban) public policy-practice interface to explore the potentials and challenges of experience with diverse forms of transdisciplinary co-design or co-production.
Buy the book.

Kevin Sloan, Dallas/Fort Worth

The Matrix of Man: Illustrated History of Urban Environment
by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy
1968, Pall Mall Press

Every time I open The Matrix of Man: Illustrated History of Urban Environment by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, I learn something important.

This is a book that contains an inventory of urban models as well as speculations on the contemporary city as it was imagined in the 20th century. While recent texts discuss mega-cities as they have unfolded, this book was published as they began to appear.

Beautifully and intelligently written, the book’s author, Moholy-Nagy, was the wife of a Lazlo Moholy Nagy, a seminal figure in the early 20th century who also taught at the Bauhaus.
Buy the book.

Laura Spinadel, Vienna

Campus WU: A Holistic History
by Ila Berman
2013, BOA buero fuer offensive aleatorik

Unlike the global village, which in its attempt to homogenize is increasingly exclusive, we understand that holistic villages, like the Campus WU, are the places that celebrate diversity and inclusion. Our actions can give form to holistic societies. That is our hope and a dream we want to share with all those who we meet along our way and which on the Campus WU was the common denominator and the holistic fire that united us before the proposed challenge. And so it was that on the back cover of the book Campus WU: A Holistic History, I wrote: “It is about the making of places that seek a dialogue with creation, with the hope of encouraging the people who experience our spaces to unconsciously perceive them. The reality is showing me that something magical happened in Vienna and that thousands of people allow themselves to be seduced by this utopia that became reality.”

David Tittle, Chatham

Cities in Civilisation
by Peter Hall
1998, Pantheon

Professor Hall brings together a lifetime of scholarship on the nature and functioning of cities to weave an extraordinary story of economics, politics, anthropology, and culture across millennia and continents. It is a huge tome, but at the same time is enjoyably readable and a great resource for understanding the city’s role in the history of our species, and the complex combination of factors that make for great cities.
Buy the book.

Anne Trumble, Los Angeles

Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species
by Ursula K. Heise
2016, University of Chicago Press

Heise effectively argues why any advocacy on behalf of endangered species must understand the cultural frameworks that shape what we think is and isn’t valuable in nature. As Heise illustrates in her twisting and turning narrative through the diverse ways humans make cultural assumptions about nature, conflicts and convergences of these things in the Anthropocene open up a new vision of multi-species justice. Imagining Extinction makes it clear that cities are ground zero for this vision.
Buy the book

Naomi Tsur, Jerusalem

If Mayors Ruled The World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin Barber
2013, Yale University Press

Why? Because it addresses boldly, if impractically, the total dysfunctionality of the global division of the world into so-called nations. In an increasingly urban world, the reins of management will be more effective in the hands of cities, especially if their jurisdiction takes in their entire bio-shed. In a world ruled by cities, we can hopefully talk more about urbanism, nature, sewage, garbage, transportation, education, health, prosperity, and cultural diversity—and less about war and peace…
Buy the book.

Chantal van Ham, Brussels

Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning
by Timothy Beatley
2010, Island Press

I would recommend urban planners to read Timothy Beatley’s Biophilic Cities; it is such a great way to think about what nature means for all of us and especially those who live in cities, and how it can benefit urban citizens in every part of the world.
Buy the book.

Shawn Van Sluys, Guelph

The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination
by Sarah Schulman
2013, University of California Press

In The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, which Mike Young reviewed for ArtsEverywhere.ca, Sarah Schulman shows how the gentrification of many neighbourhoods in New York during and after the AIDS crisis correlates to the forgotten politics and socialities of queerness as it intersects with racial and economic struggles. The gentrification of space is the gentrification of the mind through the erasure of histories, relationships, rights, and differences.
Buy the book.

Claire Weisz

The Fall of Public Man
by Richard Sennett
1977, W. W. Norton & Company

The book that made the first cultural argument about the loss of the civic commons that was the genesis of urbanity.

Also a great piece of writing.
Buy the book.

Mike Wells, Bath

Green Design: From Theory to Practice
by Ken Yeang and Arthur Spector, eds.
2011, Blackdog Architecture

Yeang and Spector have been doing the green thing in cities—not just thinking about it—longer than almost anyone. This book is a temperature take on where we are and should be in delivery of green, sustainable, biodiverse cities in practice. It links across all or most design themes—not just addressing low or zero carbon, or water sensitive urban design, and stopping there, but making the point that the sustainable city has to be truly green, vegetated, biodiverse, and biophilic, too. Architects need ecologists to design good cities.
Buy the book.

Diana Wiesner, Bogotá

Naturaleza Urbana. plataforma de experiencias
edited by María Angélica Mejía
2016, Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt
The Spanish version of the book can be downloaded here.

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

Kathleen Wolf, Seattle

With People in Mind: Design and Management of Everyday Nature
by Rachel Kaplan, Stephen Kaplan and Robert L. Ryan
1998, Island Press

The book explores how to design and manage areas of “everyday nature” in ways that are beneficial to and appreciated by humans. The book translates many years of empirical studies into practical design and management approaches, and it is a readable and flexible guide for practitioners and managers in many fields. It takes theory and research evidence to small-scale changes that improve quality of life.
Buy the book.

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

21 December 2017Art & Awareness, Europe, People & Communities, Place & Design, RoundTable, Science & ToolsAfrica, Architecture, Art, Asia, Awareness, Biodiversity, Biophilia, Climate change, Communities, Conservation, Culture, Design, Development, Disasters/Red zone, Economics, Ecosystem services, Governance, Green Infrastructure, Health, Justice, Landscape, Livability, North America, Parks, Participation/Democracy, Planning, Policy, Pollution, Resilience, South America, Stewardship, Sustainability, Water, Wetlands/Rivers/StreamsDavid Maddox

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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Join our conversation

Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.

show/hide list of writers

Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.

AFRICABooks on or directly relevant to urbanism in Africa.

ASIABooks on or directly relevant to urbanism in Asia, from the Middle East to Japan.

AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALANDBooks on or directly relevant to urbanism in Australia and New Zealand.

EUROPEBooks on or directly relevant to urbanism in Europe.

LATIN AMERICABooks on or directly relevant to urbanism in Latin America, from Mexico through South America..

NORTH AMERICABooks on or directly relevant to urbanism in The United States and Canada.

Isabelle Anguelovski, BarcelonaUrbanismo en el Siglo XXI, by Jordi Borja i Seabastiá and Zaida Martínez

Will Allen, Chapel HillGreen Metroplis, by David Owen

Pippin Anderson, Cape TownFynbos: Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation of a Megadiverse Region, Allsopp, N., Colville, J., and Verboom, G.A.(Eds.)

Ana Luisa Artesi, Buenos AiresImágenes del Espacio Público. Paisaje, ciudad y arquitectura, una historia cultural de Buenos Aires. 1880 – 1910, by Mirás Marta

Gina Avlonitis, Cape TownGrowing Together – Thinking & Practice of Urban Nature Conservators, by Bridget Pitt and Therese Boulle

Xuemei Bai, Canberra王如松:《高效、和谐–城市调控原理与方法, Efficiency and Harmony: Principles and methods of urban system regulation and control, by Rusong Wang

Stephan BarthelLiving cities – an anthology in urban environmental history, by Mattias Tegnér and Sven Lilja

Adrian Benepe, New YorkMotherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem

Nathalie Blanc, ParisThe Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa

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

Carmen Bouyer, New YorkMannahatta: A Natural History of New York City by Eric Sanderson

Rebecca Bratspies, New YorkThe Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Eduardo Brondizio, BloomingtonRainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development, and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon, by J. Browder and G. Godfrey

Steve Brown, SydneyStories from the Sandstone: Quarantine Inscriptions from Australia’s Immigrant Past, by Peter Hobbins, Ursula K Frederick and Anne Clarke

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

Katrine Claassens, Cape TownWelcome to our Hillbrow, by Phaswane Mpe

Lorenzo Chelleri, L’AquilaLa Cittá nella storia d’Europa, by Benevolo Leonardo

Katie Coyne, AustinRubyfruit Jungle, by Rita Mae Brown

Bharat Dahiya, BangkokThe State of Asian Cities 2010/11

PK Das, MumbaiAnil Agarwal Reader, volume-1,2& 3. Pratap Pandey and Sunita Narain (Eds.)

Marcelo de Souza, Rio de Janeiro O espaço dividido: Os dois circuitos da economia urbana dos países subdesenvolvidos, by Milton Santos

Anna Dietzsch, São PauloA Cidade Polifonica – Ensaio sobre a antropologia da comunicação urbana, By Massimo Canevacci

Meredith Dobbie, VictoriaThe Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People, by Tim Flannery

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

Paul Downton, MelbourneGreen Urbanism Down Under: Learning from Sustainable Communities in Australia, by Timothy Beatley and Peter Newman

Ana Faggi, Buenos AiresPlanificar la Ciudad. Estrategias para intervenir territorios en mutación, by Guillermo Tella

Martha Fajardo, BogotaShaping Terrain: City Building in Latin America 2016 René Davids (Ed.)

Emilio Fantin, BolognaL’architettura del tempo. La città multimediale, by Sandra Bonfiglioli

Richard T. T. Forman, BostonUrban Ecology: Science of Cities, by Richard T. T. Forman

Sheila Foster, New YorkPowerbroker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro

Niki Frantzeskaki, RotterdamNature-Based Solutions to Climate Change Adaptation, Nadja Kabisch, Horst Korn, Jutta Stadler and Aletta Bonn (eds.)

David Goode, BathThe Unnoficial Countrysid, by Richard Mabey

Gary Grant, LondonEcoUrbanismo, by Miguel Ruano

Amy Hahs, BallaratLandprints. Reflections on Place and Landscape, by George Seddon

Haripriya Gundimeda, MumbaiA Place in the Shade: The New Landscaoe and other Essays, by Charles Correa

Fadi Hamdan, BeirutUrban Development in the Muslim World, Hooshang Amirahmadi and Salah El-Shakhs (Eds.)

Steven Handel, New BrunswickA Natural History of New York City, by John Kieran

Ursula K. Heise, Los AngelesNew York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Mathieu Hélie, MontrealThe Geography of Nowhere, by James Howard Kunstler

Cecilia Herzog, Rio de JaneiroBrasil, Cidades – Alternativas Para a Crise Urbana [in Portuguese], by Hermínia Maricato

Mark Hostetler, GainesvilleThe Green Leap A Primer for Conserving Biodiversity in Subdivision Development, by Mark Hostetler

Mike Houck, PortlandThe Last Landscape, by William H. Whyte

Christian Iaione, RomeEuropean Cities, by Patrick Les Galés

Alpana Jain, DelhiCelebrating Public Spaces of India by Archana Gupta and Anshuman Gupta

Maggie Lin, Hong KongCommunity Design: Reimagining “community”, beyond space, but human connections, by Yamazaki Ryo

Nina-Marie Lister, TorontoThe Granite Garden by Anne Whiston Spirn

Shuaib Lwasa, KampalaUrbanisation, Urbanism and Urbanity in an African City: Home spaces and House Cultures, by Paul Jenkins

Patrick Lydon, SeoulJust Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan, by Azby Brown

Ian MacGregor-Fors, XalapaAportes a la Ecología Urbana de la Ciudad de México [Contributions to the urban ecology of Mexico City], by Eduardo Rapoport and Ismael R. López-Moreno

Anjali Mahendra, DelhiUrbanisation in India: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Way Forward”, by Isher Judge Ahluwalia, Ravi Kanbur and P.K. Mohanty

Mahim Maher, KarachiKarachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City, by Laurent Gayer

Jala Makhzoumi, BeirutMuqaddimah, by Ibn Khaldun

François Mancebo, ParisLa Ville san Qualités, by Isaac Joseph

Rob McDonald, WashingtonThe Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, by James Howard Kunstler

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

Harini Nagendra, BangaloreFinding Forgotten Cities: How The Indus Civilization Was Discovered by Nayanjot Lahiri

Peter Newman, PerthPlanning Boomtown and Beyond Sharon Biermann, Doina Olaru and Valeria Paul (Eds.)

Charles H. Nilon, ColumbiaFitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution, by William Bunge

Raul Pacheco-Vega, AguascalientesWater and Politics: Clientelism and Reform in Urban Mexico, by Veronica Herrera

Susan Parnell, Cape TownHow to Steal a City, by Crispin Oliver

Daniel Phillips, BangaloreNature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future, by Harini Nagendra

Steward Pickett, PoughkeepsieThe Nature of Cities: Ecological Visions and the American Urban Professions, 1920-1960, by Light, Jennifer S.

Stephanie Pincetl, Los AngelesNature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon

Rob Pirani, New YorkNature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon

Jose Puppim, Rio de JaneroConfidência do Itabirano ( Confidences of an “Itabirano”) A Poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Toby Query, PortlandBlack Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors by Carolyn Finney

Mohan Rao, BangaloreThe New Landscape, by Charles Correa

Debra Roberts, DurbanZoo City, by Lauren Beukes

Mary Rowe, TorontoEmergence: the connect lives of cities, software and ants., by Steven Berlin Johnson

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

Oliver Scheffer, ParisCities and Forms, by Serge Salat

Karen Seto, New HavenNihon No Toshi, by Pradyumna Prasad Karan and Kristin Eileen Stapleton

Huda Shaka, DubaiPlanning Middle Eastern Cities, Yasser Elsheshtawy (Ed.)

Laura Shillington, Managua & MontrealReclaiming Indigenous Planning, Ryan Walker, Ted Jojola and David Natcher (Eds.)

David Simon, Gothenburg Climate Change at the City Scale; Impacts, Mitigation and Adaptation in Cape Town, Anton Cartwright, Susan Parnell, Gregg Oelofse and Sarah Ward (Eds.)

Kobie Brand, Michelle Preen, Thea Buckle, Jessica Kavonic, and Meggan Spires, The State of African Cities 2014: Re-imagining sustainable urban transitions

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

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

Chantal van Ham, Brussels Making Urban Nature, by Piet Vollaard, Jacques Vink and Niels de Zwarte

Yolanda van Heezik, Dunedin Tāone tupu ora: Indigenous knowledge and sustainable urban design, Stuart, K., & Thompson-Fawcett, M. (Eds.)

Mike Wells, Bath Nature in Towns and Cities, by David Goode

Diana Wiesner, Bogotá Naturaleza Urbana. plataforma de experiencias, edited by María Angélica Mejía

Pengfei XIE, Beijing 社區設計 by 山崎亮 History of Chinese Urban Planning 中国城市规划史, by Wang Dehua（汪德华）

Lorena Zárate, Mexico CityJueces y conflictos urbanos en América Latina, Antonio Azuela y Miguel Ángel Cancino (Eds.)

About the Writer:
David Maddox

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get busy.

—David Maddox

AFRICA

Gina Avlonitis, Cape Town

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

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

Pippin Anderson, Cape Town

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

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

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

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

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

Katrine Claassens, Montreal

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

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

Nadja Kabisch, Berlin

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

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

Shuaib Lwasa, Kampala

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

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

Susan Parnell, Cape Town

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

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

Elisabeth Peyroux, Paris

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

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

Debra Roberts, Durban

Zoo City
by Lauren Beukes
2010

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

David Simon, Gothenburg

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

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

ASIA

Xuemei Bai, Canberra

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

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

Timothy Bonebrake, Hong Kong

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

Bharat Dahiya, Bangkok

The State of Asian Cities 2010/11

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

P.K. Das, Mumbai

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

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

Haripriya Gundimeda, Mumbai

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

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

Fadi Hamdan, Beirut

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

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

Keitaro Ito, Kyushu

The City of the Unseen
by Fumihiko Maki

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

Alpana Jain, Delhi

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

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

Maggie Lin, Hong Kong

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

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

Patrick Lydon, Osaka

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

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

Anjali Mahendra, Delhi

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

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

Mahim Maher, Karachi

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

Jala Mahkzoumi, Beirut

Al Muqaddimah
By Ibn Khaldoun
1377

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

Harini Nagendra, Bangalore

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

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

Daniel Phillips, Bangalore

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

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

Mohan Rao, Bangalore

The New Landscape
by Charles Correa
1985

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

Karen Seto, New Haven

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

Huda Shaka, Dubai

Planning Middle Eastern Cities
Edited by Yasser Elsheshtawy
2004

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

Keijiro Suzuki, Yamaguchi

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

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

Pengfei XIE, Beijing

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

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

AUSTRALIA and NEW ZEALAND

Steve Brown, Sydney

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

Meredith Dobbie, Victoria

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

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

Paul Downton, Melbourne

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

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

Amy Kristin Hahs, Ballarat

Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape
by George Seddon
1997

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

Peter Newman, Perth

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

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

Yolanda van Heezik, Dunedin

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

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

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

EUROPE

Isabelle Anguelovski, Barcelona

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

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

Stephan Barthel, Stockholm

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

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

Nathalie Blanc, Paris

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

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

Lorenzo Chelleri, Barcelona

La Cittá nella storia d’Europa
by Benevolo Leonardo
1993

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

Ian Douglas, Manchester

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

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

Emilio Fantin, Bologna

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

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

Niki Frantzeskaki, Rotterdam

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

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

David Goode, Bath

The Unofficial Countryside
by Richard Mabey
2010

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

Gary Grant, London

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

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

Christian Iaione, Rome

European Cities
by Patrick Les Galés
2002

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

François Mancebo, Paris

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

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

Olivier Scheffer, Paris

Cities and Forms
by Serge Salat

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

Chantal van Ham, Brussels

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

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

Mike Wells, Bath

Nature in Towns and Cities
by David Goode
2015

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

LATIN AMERICA

Ana Luisa Artesi, Buenos Aires

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

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

Eduardo Brondizio, Bloomington

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

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

Marcelo de Souza, Rio de Janeiro

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

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

Anna Dietzsch, São Paulo

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

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

Ana Faggi, Buenos Aires

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

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

Martha Fajardo, Bogotá

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

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

Cecilia Herzog, Rio de Janeiro

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

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

Ian MacGregor-Fors, Xalapa

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

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

Juliana Montoya, Bogotá

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

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

José Puppim, Rio de Janeiro

Confidência do Itabirano (Confidences of an “Itabirano”)

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

Raul Pacheco-Vega, Aguascalientes

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

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

Luis Sandoval, San José

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

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

Diana Wiesner, Bogotá

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

Lorena Zárate, Mexico City

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

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

NORTH AMERICA (not including Mexico)

Will Allen, Chapel Hill

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

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

Adrian Benepe, New York

Motherless Brooklyn
By Jonathan Lethem
2000

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

Carmen Bouyer, New York

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

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

Rebecca Bratspies, New York

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

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

Lindsay Campbell, New York

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

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

Katie Coyne, Austin

Rubyfruit Jungle
by Rita Mae Brown

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

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

Gornick’s memior is located in New York City, and she described how the city became part of her sense of self and the friendships she shares with other New Yorkers. Loneliness, emotional connectivity, the power of space to create containers for life experiences are the main themes. New York emerges as protagnoist, changing physically and socially, as Gornick’s incisive commentary about urban life and the friendships she sustains as she ages intersects with descriptions of urban change more broadly.
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Richard T.T. Forman, Boston

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Natural History of New York City
by John Kieran

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

New York 2140
Kim Stanley Robinson
2017

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

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

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

The Last Landscape
by William H. Whyte
1970

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary W. Rowe, Toronto

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

Johnson provides a brilliant analysis of self-organizing systems that occur in nature and in human creations, including cities.
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Laura Shillington, Montreal

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

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

Jay Valgora, New York

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

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

11 September 2013Essay, Science & ToolsBiodiversity, Coasts, Communities, Disasters/Red zone, Ecosystem services, Resilience, Sustainability, WaterJohn Kostyack

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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While I was enjoying my August beach vacation, the federal government was releasing its plan for rebuilding the New York City metro area and the New Jersey shore in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. I grew up in the New Jersey suburbs and spent many summers on the Jersey shore, in some of the very towns hardest hit by that epic storm. So I was pleased to see that the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Strategy offers a very thoughtful, albeit incomplete, action plan for helping this region bounce back from the devastation and prepare for the next big storm.

Preparing for the next storm

NWF volunteers spent the day planting native grasses to help rebuild dunes devastated by Hurricane Sandy

Although there should be no retreat from efforts to reduce the carbon pollution that drives climate change, there is no question that we must also prepare for the inevitable change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that sea levels in the NYC metro area will rise at least a half a foot and up to 2.5 feet by mid-century. Because of this inexorable sea level rise, we know with certainty that every major storm that hits the region going forward will push sea water further inland than before. And the tropical storms that fuel this surge are expected to become more frequent and more powerful as the climate warms. Extreme rainfall of every variety is expected to become more intense, worsening flood risk across the region. Arguably the most detailed and farsighted climate change adaptation plan ever produced by the federal government, the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Strategy should be of interest to anyone who cares about building cities resilient to intensified floods and storms. And with very substantial funding to fuel the strategy — a roughly $50-billion Sandy relief package approved by Congress in early 2013 plus significant additional public and private dollars — local leaders will be able to move quickly into implementation. Many features of the Strategy merit attention. Here are just a few:

Educating people about flood risk and practical steps they can take to reduce that risk.
Making science-based analysis of climate risks a part of all project planning.
Using insurance and other market forces to reduce building in hazardous locations.
For the first time ever, applying climate resiliency principles and guidelines to all federal investments — federal infrastructure construction as well as state and local infrastructure construction using federal dollars.

This last point is especially important. Until now, the many federal actors involved in climate change adaptation have lacked any agreed upon approaches to building climate-resilient communities. Now, every agency charged with investing the billions in Sandy recovery funds will fund only those projects that conform with the best science on preparing for climate change.

Emphasizing green infrastructure

Perhaps most importantly, the new guidelines call for capturing the benefits of nature-based (“green infrastructure”) solutions to protecting communities from intensifying storms and floods. Green infrastructure is defined as including:

Protecting communities from storm surge using the natural defenses provided by land and water systems such as wetlands, vegetated sand dunes, and forests.
Building stormwater management systems that soak up and store water using natural areas and natural processes.
Otherwise integrating natural systems and processes, or engineered systems that mimic natural systems and processes, into infrastructure.

This move by top federal officials to help steer the sizable Sandy investments toward green infrastructure is an exciting sign that the nation is truly beginning to shift away from its historic over-reliance on sea walls, dikes, levees and other “hard infrastructure” flood protection solutions. Although hard infrastructure is warranted in some cases, in many cases it is ineffective in controlling floods and causes extensive damage to wildlife and other natural resources.

Aerial views of the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy to the New Jersey coast (U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Mark C. Olsen). — Aerial views of the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy to the New Jersey coast. U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Mark C. Olsen.

Building, protecting and restoring green infrastructure provides significant opportunities to restore wildlife. At the same time, it reduces flood damage to communities, creates open space and recreational opportunities, provides clean water and clean air, reduces the urban heat island effect, and saves taxpayer dollars. For example, the strategy notes how oyster reefs, installed several years ago parallel to the shoreline on Pimlico Sound in North Carolina, have absorbed some of the energy of storm-generated waves and decreased erosion in that region. Oyster reefs are among the many green infrastructure options now under consideration for protecting shorelines in the NYC metro area.

Missing: a wildlife restoration vision

One key flaw in the strategy is its failure to outline any kind of vision for wildlife restoration in the NYC metro area and Jersey shore. In fact, the plant and animals species of the region are barely mentioned. The New York City Parks Department alone has over 10,000 acres of forests, woodlands, freshwater wetlands, and saltwater marshes. Surrounding suburbs are likewise blessed with a diverse array of species and habitats. Historically, the Atlantic flyways teemed with migratory birds and the rivers and estuaries teemed with fish, shellfish, amphibians and reptiles. What part of the region’s rich natural legacy do the people of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut want to bequeath to future generations?

Beach-nesting birds—like these black skimmers—were among the wildlife hit hardest by Hurricane Sandy. Photo by Jack Rogers.

As we embark upon a centuries-long project of redesigning our communities to accommodate sea level rise and intensified floods and storms, how wildlife fits into the puzzle is a key question. When I lived in the NYC metro area, I had the great pleasure of fishing in the Ken Lockwood Gorge of the Raritan River, hiking and fishing in New York’s Catskills Mountains, crabbing down the New Jersey shore, canoeing in the Pine Barrens, and birdwatching in the Dismal Swamp. These interactions with nature shaped my worldview about the interconnectedness of people and wildlife and helped drive me to a life in conservation. I hope that future generations of kids in the region have similar experiences and help lead tomorrow’s conservation movement. By conserving wildlife, we provide those crucial formative nature experiences for kids and families – and we bring back the diversity of life forms that is so essential for healthy and resilient ecosystems.

Integrating wildlife into green infrastructure strategies

Some might argue that the best place for planners to express their wildlife vision is in a wildlife or natural resources plan. But by their inclusion of green infrastructure in their rebuilding plan, the Hurricane Sandy task force implicitly acknowledges that the natural and built environments are so closely intertwined that they must be dealt with holistically. Now local leaders must take the next step and build the wildlife restoration element of the region’s green infrastructure strategies. If they do this, we will end up with abundant wildlife and safer, more vibrant communities.

John Kostyack
National Wildlife Federation

On The Nature of Cities

This post was also published on NWF’s Wildlife Promise blog.

Rebuilding Bosnia and Herzegovina Cities

24 January 2019Essay, Europe, People & CommunitiesCommunities, Disasters/Red zone, Economics, Europe, ResilienceJennifer Baljko

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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Walking though the Bosnia and Herzegovina and the cities of Trebinje, Mostar, Livno and Bihac stirs up unexpected emotions. These cities reveal glimmers of how a country torn apart by war more than 23 years ago is rebuilding and where it is planting seeds of economic and social hope.

There is a sadness in Bosnia and Herzegovina that will follow me for a long time. Of all the wonders and troubles we have witnessed during our walk through Asia and Europe, the visible signs of this country’s post-war hardships break my heart the most in this multi-year journey.

Our route takes us along mostly rural border areas wrapping around the south and west of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). It’s hard for me to process the disparate things I see each day. Beautiful mountains with thick pine forests. Warning signs about land mines nailed to trees. Wide open grasslands and lakeside wildlife reserves. Newly constructed houses decorated with flowerpots spilling over with colorful blooms. Facades riddled with bullet holes and houses destroyed by grenades. Villages abandoned by families fleeing war, and memorial stones remembering those who died fighting. Young and old people looking for a way forward.

A road we walked with mountains and grasslands. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona on Foot

The bigger cities of Trebinje, Mostar, Livno and Bihac help soothe the emotional unrest and physical discomfort that overwhelms me during humid summer days and rainy evenings. They offer some perspective that, perhaps, can only be appreciated slowly at three kilometers an hour. These cities reveal glimmers of how a country torn apart by war more than 23 years ago is rebuilding and where it is planting seeds of economic and social hope.

A long awaited arrival

We finally reach the Balkans during the summer of 2018, and walk into Bosnia and Herzegovina on a hot day in August. It’s a milestone I simultaneously wished for and worried about since we set out from Thailand in January 2016.

Being in BiH means we are even closer to Barcelona, and closer to home, a concept that feels more significant after 2.5 years of journeying by foot. But, more than this tangible sense of nearing the end of a goal, BiH, in my mind, has for generations been a place where a reckoning with the ghosts of human tragedies and the need for great healing must one day intersect. I’m anxious about what our footsteps will lead us to see.

Along the banks of the Trebišnjica River in Trebinje. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona on Foot

A stroll in the park along the Una River in Bihac. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona on Foot

Making our way through Livno. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona on Foot

With absolute certainty, I can say our arrival to Bosnia and Herzegovina hits me on a deeply personal level, with Balkan blood shaping some strands of my DNA. I am half Croatian, and since the 1990s when images of war griping former Yugoslav regions flashed on my American television screen, I wanted to know BiH and its people loosely connected to me through veins of history, culture, traditions and distant family memories. Since antiquity, the roads of so many different lives and lifestyles have met in this East-Central European country, this land between worlds, and it made sense to us as we mapped our route that these same roads would gradually link our Asian and European footsteps.

What I didn’t expect, however, was the weight of walking through recovering war zones where we can feel the ethnic, religious and economic discontent simmering below the surface. It also had not occurred to me how it would feel to follow similar roads today’s masses of Asian, Middle East and African immigrants and refugees use to reach England, Germany, or other European Union countries. The impact of these various dynamics made BiH one of the most difficult countries for us to walk.

To lessen the sadness we still have a hard time describing, we meander through some of the country’s bigger southern cities, Trebinje, Mostar, Livno and Bihac, searching for solace in the day-to-day comforts of parks, riverside promenades, markets and coffee shops.

Turning to tourism

Perhaps not surprisingly after months of walking in open spaces and quiet, rural areas with few people, we are a bit deflated to see the throngs of tourists visiting Trebinje and Mostar during August’s peak vacation weeks.

The cities are clearly capitalizing on their proximity to the hyper-tourist seaside city of Dubrovnik across the border in Croatia.

The famous Mostar bridge. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona on Foot

Trebinje serves as base camp for vacationers who want cheaper accommodations than what they would find along the Adriatic coast 30 kilometers away, says a young man who helps his parents sell carpets and manage a holiday apartment while waiting for a call back to his better-paying seaman work.

In its own right, the small city, located in Republika Srpska one of BiH’s two legal entities, has enough things to keep visitors busy for a few days. There’s a pretty historic stone bridge, Serbian-Orthodox churches, and its main square has a market and is filled with restaurants, cafes and bars—essentials for hungry travelers. The dry, yellowed hills circling the city provide a dose of nature and panoramic views. I, however, live the city in a different way. I watch the sun set over the river while I fold our clean laundry, admiring the way the light shimmers on the water and not yet willing to immerse myself into urban distractions.

Walking with many mountain views. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona on Foot

While tourists crowd on Mostar’s famous bridge, we sit near the Neretva River and watch the birds. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona on Foot

About eighty kilometers northwest from Trebinje, Mostar, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina entity’s economic and cultural hub with approximately 106,000 people and BiH’s fifth largest city, buzzes with day-trippers and bus groups. They crowd onto the reconstructed Ottoman-era “Stari Most” (Old Bridge) that was destroyed in 1993 by Croat military forces during the Croat-Bosniak war. They watch locals dive into the Neretva River and buy kitsch souvenirs that look more Turkish than Balkan from the dozens of shops squeezed on either side of the bridge. We stroll around the old city, and note the number of churches, monasteries, mosques, synagogues and religious-based cemeteries pointing to the historical ideological overlap that has shaped and continues to mold the city. It’s clear, though, that the city’s future heavily depends on tourism; the sheer number of hotels, hostels and apartments available for rent suggests that anyone who has a little bit of money is converting any space they have into rooms for sightseers making rounds from Dubrovnik to Sarajevo, BiH’s capital city further north.

We ponder Trebinje and Mostar’s development models on the strip of beach below the Stari Most, discussing the short and long-term pros and cons of such dependency. We eventually fall silent watching water birds hold their ground as the fast-moving river sweeps around them. How nature fits into cities under construction is far more interesting to us than scouring shelves for Turkish coffee pots and war paraphernalia.

The scars of war

Livno is the next notable town we wander through.

The city is in the Croatian Catholic zone of BiH. We know this because people throughout our BiH walk identify themselves and the cities they live in with both ethnic and religious distinctions. It’s one of the strangest naming encounters we have experienced thus far, but our conversations with various people of different backgrounds and residencies confirm that this dual label appears to be a new normal here. Post-war prejudices divide people into groups, we notice: Serb/Herzegovin Orthodox, Bosniak Muslims and Croatian Catholics. Livno is one of the cities that seems to reinforce the separation.

“The Croatian Catholics have rebuilt their houses. They are starting over, and want to leave memories of the war behind them,” a Croatian Catholic man in his 60s tells us while we wait out a storm. He grew up in a small village not far from Livno and travels from Zadar, Croatia, where he now lives, to take care of a house and garden his family own on the BiH side of the boundary line. “You’ll see this as you walk. About 20-30 kilometers after Livno, you’ll be in the Orthodox area. They haven’t rebuilt their homes yet. There are still bullet holes in their walls.”

We don’t know what to make of this kind of bigotry. It’s narrow-minded, dismissive, and shocking. But, we find ourselves in a state of astonishment as we walk and see first-hand what this man meant.

For a couple days of walking before Livno, we notice the houses and gardens. They are new, nicely painted, two or three-story single-family houses with porches, manicured gardens and fruit trees. There are nicer cars parked in the driveways, and better quality farm equipment.

This superficial affluence, a slightly different variety than we have observed elsewhere, takes on some airs as we enter the city. We see several local joggers and cyclists out exercising along the river, something we haven’t seen very of much of since we entered the Balkans. Women leisurely stroll the pedestrian street during the late morning and men at cafes hurry through their coffees. Kids walk by wearing soccer shirts brandishing the Croatian flag and names of Croatian players.

On the heals of Trebinje and Mostar, our couple hours in Livno give us a sense that BiH has turned a corner and is sort of patching itself together, at least from a rebuilding standpoint.

A few days later that image is erased with big strokes.

As the Zadar man predicted, we start seeing the signs of another reality further up the road. Villages are mostly empty, abandoned and forgotten. Houses are in a precarious state, their rooftops blown away and walls overgrown with vines. Pitted façades tell the story of rounds of bullets fired and forever lodged in the memories of those who still call these buildings homes.

“That’s from the Croat soldiers,” says an old Serb Orthodox woman, pointing towards the gaping hole in the wall near her second floor window. “We don’t have enough money to fix it.” She heads off to gather up her chickens for the night, a brief moment of resignation and frustration shades her smile as she leaves us to sip the Turkish coffee she prepared for us.

A few days further on, we see what hoped we wouldn’t see: Warnings about land mines hidden in the forest and roped off areas near deserted hamlets where teams are meticulously trying to find and detonate them. The lump in our throat that we first had when we saw a similar scene near one of the mountain passes in the Pamir region of Tajikistan returns. We do everything we can to not cry on the side of the road.

For many walking days, I wonder how people can stay in this country and why those who now have lives aboard would come back. I think about the unfairness of it all, and question what will become of BiH and what will happen to the cities and towns and the people who tell us of the limited opportunities and resources they have here. What is the just way to recreate BiH cities and villages, and how will they and the people who live in them conjure up enough resilience, social cohesion and financial support to reach a new plain of equality and livability? I have no answers, and tread forward in an uneasy silence for long stretches of time.

Winter is coming

The heaviness associated with the tragedy of war, human displacement and seeing people struggling to create a viable future sticks with me until Bihac.

Bihac, a predominately Bosniak Muslim city on the banks of the Una River, encapsulates the dilemma many European cities now face. Because of its proximity to Croatia (which is part of the European Union) and, thus, the shortest land route across Croatia to Slovenia (another EU country leading the way towards Austria, Germany and Italy), Bihac has become a holding place for thousands of transitory Asian, African and Middle East immigrants and refugees. People we met along the way and several newspaper reports estimate that anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 migrants are currently living in grim, makeshift camps and occupying dilapidated, abandoned buildings in and around the city. No one really knows how many migrants are there, but concerns about how they will make it through the cold winter months are mounting. Locals themselves have a hard enough time getting through the winter. The care needed for this amount of homelessness is exponential.

“I’m living in a damp abandoned building. The guys at the hotel let me take a shower in one of the rooms that had to be cleaned,” an Algerian man tells us, coughing sporadically, while slowly sipping the soda we bought him at the hotel’s restaurant. We notice the two uniformed policemen who sit at the table behind us, watching us as they wait for their lunch. “I crossed into Croatia, but the police caught me, ripped up the documents the Bosnian police gave me and smashed my phone. Do you happen to have an extra phone you don’t need? But I know you could also get in trouble for helping me.”

If I did have a phone I could afford to part with, I would give it to him. I offer him a meal instead. He politely declines. We shake hands as we say our farewells, bidding each other safe passage on our respective onward journeys. He fades into the crowd of the many other migrants lingering at cafes, shopping at the supermarket and hanging out in the park near the river.

I feel the injustice, and it shakes me to my core. Lluís and I walk out in the open, on roads where everyone can see us, with passports us that give us the privilege to go almost wherever we want. This Algerian man and people like him, on the run from who knows what they left behind, use their phone’s GPS to track a route through mountains and forests that are home to land mines, wolves and bears. They hide in hope.

We pass over the river. Like in Trebinje, I watch the sun start to drop over the city. I watch the water flow, unaware of the human sadness hugging its banks.

I don’t know exactly where my footsteps will take me next. But, I, too, hold hope. I hope the cities of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the people who live in them will create a way forward that opens doors for all of them.

Jenn Baljko
Bangkok to Barcelona on Foot

On The Nature of Cities

Reclamation and Mining: A Dangerous Fight for Sustainability in the Philippines

9 May 2019Essay, People & Communities, Place & DesignAsia, Business, Economics, Participation/Democracy, Planning, Protest, Resilience, SustainabilityRagene Palma

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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Campaigning and working for sustainability is a difficult and dangerous job in the Phillipines with very little recourse to legal protection for those fighting for environmental protection.

The Philippines has repeatedly taken blows causing environmental degradation. Last month, a dead whale was found with 40 kilograms of plastic in its stomach. In the same month, Metro Manila experienced a water crisis, affecting millions, and increasing risks in sanitation and waste management. In relation to this, protests have been held to oppose a planned dam that would affect environmentally critical areas and at least 1,500 households. Since last year, Chinese coast guards have harvested giant clams and destroyed hundreds of acres of coral reefs within our own territory, and frustratingly, our government has refused to legally address this. In 2017, at least 41 environmental activists and defenders were killed, including those who protected ancestral lands. The Phillippines country has also remained in the world’s top rankings of countries at risk to climate impacts, and major global polluters of plastic waste.

Campaigning and working for sustainability is a difficult and dangerous job. While the above-mentioned list of challenges already seems burdensome, especially for a developing country, we continue to face environmentally-damaging threats from “done deal” projects between our government and the Chinese government. As an environmental planner, I am very concerned about sustainability of our resources. Let me bring to the table two pressing matters that need more effort on environmental assessments, improved legislation, and inclusive planning.

Reclamation Projects at the Manila Bay

The Manila Bay is an iconic landmark in the capital city, but it has also faced problems, time and again, such as rampant poverty, reclamation for giant commercial estates, and informality that crowds around said estates. As of this writing, there are at least 22 lined up that may affect 20,000 hectares—at least 10% of the bay area. The Philippine Reclamation Authority acknowledges that there will be environmental impacts, and has released statements that reclamation areas will have mitigating systems, but this has gone without presenting environmental impact assessments to the general public. To date, only five impact assessments are available at the Department of Natural Resources Environmental Management Bureau.

The Centre for Environmental Concerns PH, a non-governmental organization, has constantly provided information on the reclamation plans. Maps show impacts on ecosystems, which include affected mudflats and mangroves, habitats of water birds and fish, and coral reefs. The socio-economic sector will also be heavily affected, and this includes issues of livelihood loss for fishermen and displacement.

Source: Center for Environmental Concerns PH

During the Second People’s Summit on the Impacts of Reclamation, held 26-27 March 2019, issues concerning the reclamation plans and sentiments of various people’s organizations were discussed. Another pressing matter was the increased risk to hazards that the reclamation projects would bring. Dr. Jay Batongbacal of the University of the Philippines Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea discussed how the projects would create raised lands, affect water flow, and potentially cause long floods in already low-lying areas of Manila Bay.

Denuded mountains in Zambales

Reclamation and territorial disputes in the West Philippine Sea are hugely controversial matters in the country. Concerns predominantly revolve around the demand and supply of soils for the planned islands.

In 2016, claims were made accusing the Chinese government of extracting Philippine soils from the Zambales mountain range to build artificial islands. Though it was confirmed by a mining corporation that the soils were, indeed, transported to China, the extraction activities from the many mining sites continued, resulting in mountains denuded of trees, and damaged ecosystems. Mining activists have vocally raised concerns on reduced suitable farmlands, health issues (such as asthma and pulmonary diseases), and flood risk. In the same year, Zambales residents filed a petition to the Supreme Court with regard to the Writ of Kalikasan (Environment), but were denied a temporary environmental protection order, and eventually were dismissed, and called moot and academic. In 2018, an appeal for the same case was denied. Earlier this year, in February 2019, the mayor of the municipality in question, who blocked mining operations, was convicted of graft and usurpation of legislative powers.

Continuing the fight for sustainability

These two cases—reclamation and mining—are examples of how developing areas struggle with two pressing global issues: environmental sustainability, and at the end of the day, social justice (which does not really stray far from environmental issues).

Planners and urban managers should be at the forefront in recognizing the urgent issues that concern our landscapes and societies. More importantly, standing our ground on planning principles should enable us, and the local governments we work with, to take action. These cases bank on compliance to permits, and legal protection, making destruction of the environment allowable. Projects proceed despite protests and the lack of consultation—or guise of said process, for that matter.

While dangerous politics take the steering wheel, continuing the fight for sustainability would mean looking into understanding “development” beyond the context of economic gain, local planning that is not dependent on compliance, and revisiting legislation that truly protects our natural resources against exploitation.

Ragene Andrea L. Palma
Manila

On The Nature of Cities

Redefining Urban Nature for a Carbon-Negative City

5 September 2023Essay, North America, People & Communities, Place & DesignEducation/Knowledge/Learning, Green Infrastructure, North America, What is urban nature?Sarah Hinners

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When we are all more ecologically-empowered citizens of urban ecosystems, we gain the ability and agency to adapt to dynamism in those ecosystems because we are no longer distanced from them.

I frequently ask students, colleagues, practitioners, and fellow ecologists to consider how a city can become more like a forest. I started to do this in 2019 when I (perhaps belatedly!) came to understand that just reducing our carbon emissions ― even to neutral ― is not enough to prevent the most drastic climate change scenarios. In parallel with our emission reductions, we must be increasing our active removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. There are many technological strategies in development to do this, each with its own set of advantages and limitations, and I’m sure these will play a significant role. However, I’m a Nature-based Solutions (NBS) kind of girl so my mind goes to ecology. After all, our planet has already evolved an amazing carbon absorption system called the biosphere.

With a population of over 8 billion and growing (although more and more slowly all the time! The global population growth rate just dipped under 1% for the first time in 2022) and the majority of those people in urban areas, is there an opportunity in all that urban growth to pull a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere and lock it away in cities? While, of course, also cutting the carbon emissions associated with those cities? Hence my question: how can a city become like a forest?

A forest’s carbon sequestration power is driven by photosynthesis and depends on the availability of other potential limiting factors, water and temperature being two biggies on a global scale. The agents of photosynthesis are trees. (This whole analogy could also pertain to a grassland; however, trees create a structure that is more analogous to a city in that it is sheltering to organisms on a human scale.) Via photosynthesis, trees, and other plants draw carbon out of the air and fix it into the material structure of their tissues (biomass). Trees are particularly great at this because they are long-lived and a large proportion of their tissue is composed of wood, which takes a long time to decompose, even after the tree dies. The shorter-lived parts of the tree, the leaves, are shed periodically and these decompose, releasing some of that carbon back into the atmosphere but some of it is also stored in the soil and cycled back into other living things. Trees and other plants also carry out the opposite chemical reaction to photosynthesis ― respiration, in which carbon dioxide is also released back into the atmosphere. Thus, we want to come out on the right side of the photosynthesis-respiration equation; in order to have net carbon removal from the atmosphere, photosynthesis needs to be greater than respiration. A young, growing forest will generally be a net carbon remover, while a mature forest in which growth is slow and trees are dying may be closer to neutral. As seen through this lens, wildfires are especially devastating in the era of climate change because that’s a whole lot of fixed carbon being rapidly returned to the atmosphere.

So, moving on from this little ecology lesson, what would it mean for a city to be like a forest? It would mean that the city actively takes energy from the sun and carbon from the air and converts them into the structure of the city itself. It literally grows itself, or at least it grows its own structural materials. Furthermore, it recycles old structures into materials for new structures. Thus, the city’s buildings are made of biomass.

The closest we come to that now is when we build with wood. Mass timber (also known as cross-laminated timber or CLT) is widely touted as a building material that, with recent innovations in processing and structural design, can reasonably be anticipated to achieve carbon-negative buildings. The problem is that those trees are grown elsewhere, in real forests, and truly sustainable forestry practices cannot supply the growing cities of the world by going all in on mass timber. In order to gain the benefit of the stored carbon in those trees, we need to expand the footprint of the city to include the forest where the trees are grown. In a global carbon budget, this is still a win: the carbon is stored away in buildings for at least some decades, and back in the forest some new trees can grow and take up even more carbon. This, however, is cheating on the concept and the forest (which is far more than trees) loses. The nature of cities has always been to rely heavily on imports of resources from elsewhere and to export large amounts of waste. This has become more and more extreme with larger cities and greater population densities. As we pack more and more people into an area, how do we create room for core ecological processes such as primary production and nutrient cycling? In order for a city to be like a forest, then, it needs to be generating and cycling its own materials. Where and how can this fit within a crowded city?

I suggest that it needs to be incorporated into the very materiality of the city itself. That every space or surface where something can grow should be a place for something to grow. As many readers and writers in this space will no doubt agree, we use the small quantity of unpaved, unbuilt space in dense cities rather poorly on the whole. Where plantings exist, they generally fail to meet the criteria of multifunctionality that the intensity of city life demands. Specifically, in this case, we have taken the “productivity” function of ecosystems outside of the city almost entirely. In ecology, “primary productivity” is literally a measure of carbon sequestration and storage; it is the amount of carbon taken from the atmosphere and turned into plant biomass. Urban forests, with all their benefits and ecosystem services, are not generally managed to yield timber… but they could be. As a result of this lack of a loop-closing mechanism in urban forestry, we miss tremendous opportunities and suffer much expense when trees need to be removed.

In 2020, my city experienced a powerful windstorm in which thousands of trees were blown down. There was really no other option on such short notice, so most of that potentially valuable wood was carted away and turned into wood chips. I have long wanted to see an urban forestry-based reuse enterprise that turns wood from downed or dead trees into other products. (Some cities have this already, but it is far from ubiquitous.) Even more intentionally, for example, bamboo is a plant that grows rapidly, in relatively small spaces and with few nutrients, and generates excellent building materials. It is just as effective at screening a building, attractively highlighting an entrance, and providing strategic shade, as many of the shrubs or other plants we currently use in small spaces. In appropriate climates, it could be intentionally and attractively planted, grown, and harvested throughout the urban environment.

Of course, in a big, dense city, there is just so little land left for growing plants in ways that require access to soil, water, and sunlight. We need to think beyond these conventional systems. Other examples of the potential for “growing” building materials are the bricks made of fungal mycelia and bioplastics made from algae. Both of these have the tremendous benefit of being organisms that consume “waste” of the sort cities produce in abundance and they don’t require all three of the soil/water/sunlight triad. Fungi are decomposers; they feed on our organic wastes to grow their own biomass and they can do it in the dark! When we eat mushrooms, we are eating the “fruiting body” or reproductive structure of the fungus, but the main “body” of the fungus is its mycelium: a vast, dense network of rootlike threads. In the right conditions, the fungal mycelium can be grown within a cast shape, dried, and hardened, thus producing, for example, mycelial “bricks” that may be used as building materials and contain stored carbon.

Algae are photosynthetic proto-plants that require water and light but not soil. They absorb nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) from our wastewater to fuel their growth, thus generating both biomass and purifying water. Algae can also be harvested and used in a variety of materials such as bioplastics. I don’t know if they can be used in a material hard enough to build with, but they can certainly be used in finishing materials such as ceiling tiles. I picture the walls of buildings embedded with clear tubes filled with harvestable algae absorbing light and treating the building’s wastewater. A pioneering example is the BIQ building in Germany, which happens to use its algae to generate energy, but you could easily use them in other ways.

A picture of a glass and green building — BIQ mit Bioreaktorfassade (Am Inselpark 17) auf der IBA Hamburg in Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg
Credit: NordNordWest

If we can rapidly switch to carbon-negative materials, then the new buildings and redevelopment that occur in the next decades can make the critical switch from contributing carbon to the atmosphere (part of the problem) to removing carbon from the atmosphere (part of the solution). We harness carbon drawdown to what is already a relentless economic engine and it takes it from there! In doing so, we also reinvent urban nature, in the sense that daily life of the urban human becomes, in many ways, re-embedded directly within its local ecosystem, even if that doesn’t look like it did in previous millennia (see my previous essay on what that might look like: https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2019/09/16/smart-vs-green-technology-paradigms-battle-it-out-for-the-future-city/ ).

Some principles for the city-as-forest paradigm:

Ecology and economy both have the same Greek etymology (oikos, meaning “home”). Where we have “waste”, this implies not just an ecological gap/opportunity but an economic one. Although “it’s been said, many times in many ways”, urban waste must become a resource that helps to sustain the city itself, and the least expensive pathways to that transition are often based in nature. The urban ecosystem will not look like a “natural” one, because we have created a completely different kind of environment in cities. But it can be much more of a functional ecosystem than it is now if we change our perception to see the opportunities that exist in the problems that plague cities today.

The city must become more self-sufficient and less dependent on distant resources and imports. This means that all of the space and materiality of the city itself must become “complexified”, that is, multifunctional, dynamic, adaptive, and organic. Surrounding and distant lands and ecosystems must serve more as backup resilience.

Multifunctional and organic systems must be allowed to change, grow, and adapt. This means a certain level of uncertainty over time, calling for flexibility and redundancy in production and supply systems. Our economy currently operates on an expectation of reliable supply and perfect product consistency. This is the biggest challenge to “scaling up” that we encounter in Nature-based Solutions. I confess I don’t have a good answer for this one, except to say that when we are all more ecologically-empowered citizens of urban ecosystems, we gain the ability and agency to adapt to dynamism in those ecosystems because we are no longer distanced from them.

Sarah Hinners
Salt Lake City

On The Nature of Cities

Rediscovering Eco-cities—Is this Possible in the Era of Globalization?

23 December 2013Essay, Place & Design, Science & ToolsAsia, Ecocities, Ecological footprint, SustainabilityHaripriya Gundimeda

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Another revolution the “ecological revolution” is required to go back and live in co-existence with nature.

Recently I have been to Auroville, an experimental universal township in Tamilnadu and Puduchhery of southern India. This was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa known as “The Mother”. Auroville came to be known as a global village, as the prime motive behind this project is to demonstrate that people all over the world can live together in harmony. The project has received the endorsement from the Government of India as well as UNESCO. This village can accommodate a population of around 50,000 in the future. What struck me is the design.

The village area has been divided into three concentric zones. The inner most is the core is the peace area. The area also has a lake to serve as a ground water recharge area. An adjoining circular area is divided into residential zones comprising 189 hectares, a zone for green industries comprising 109 hectares, an international zone (74 hectares) for a living demonstration of human unity, and a cultural zone (93 hectares) for research and other activities. The outer ring is the green belt, at present comprising 405 hectares, which has been successfully transformed from a wasteland into a green ecosystem. This zone has organic farms, dairies, orchards, etc., is also meant to be a barrier against urban encroachment, and finally meant to offset the human footprint. The village also extensively uses solar energy and has designed the buildings in such a way that they consume less energy.

Auroville is categorised as eco-city or sustainable city. Several examples of eco-cities exist in the world. Before the word eco-cities became fashionable in the modern era, India had several such historical examples.

Auroville is remarkably similar to what Kautilya has suggested way back in the fourth century BC on how a town or city should be planned. Kautilya is regarded as the father of political science. First and foremost, unlike the emphasis on GDP, the productive capital, Kautilya clearly recognised the role of forests, water bodies, and mountains etc as frontiers and collective wealth. The arthashastra recognised that waste (pollution) must be disposed in a proper way so as not to affect the environment. Arthashashtra suggests that the city be divided into four concentric circles. The main city is located at the centre and should have perennial source of water. Surrounding this central city are the villages located amidst the mixed land use — pastures, agriculture. Forests for recreation and economic benefits formed the outskirts of the settlement. The forest based industries are suggested to be located adjacent to the forests and settlement area. The forests in wilderness formed the outermost concentric circle and these have to be protected. These forests were occupied by tribes with traditional knowledge and enjoyed de facto rights on the forests.

Thus, the importance of cities living in harmony with nature has been emphasised. The ancient Indian science Vastu shastra is entirely devoted to the science of architecture. Vastu shastra is a treatise on architectural planning, construction and design and emphasizes the right selection of the site given the nature of slope, colour, strength of soil and the direction of the plot. Vastu emphasizes optimal utilization of five elements: earth, water, fire, wind and cosmic space for harmonious living. The key contention is that when we build something we are interacting with the positive and negative forces of nature and it is vital to have a net positive energy flow (called bio flow or Prana).

Depending on the shape of the plot and its size, several plans called Vastu Purusha Mandalas divided into four concentric zones were suggested. The innermost zone is called Brahmastana, which is the place for total awareness. The next three circles in order represent Daiva (enlightenment), Manushya (consciousness) and Paisacha (grossness) respectively. The Brahmastana is always occupied by a temple or a palace, and the construction is suggested in the second and third zones. The ancient Indian cities of Pataliputra and Takshasila were constructed based on Vaastu principles. The modern Indian cities of Jaipur and Chandigarh and the temple cities of Tirupati and Madurai also follow Vastu principles.

So the history repeats itself. Now we have reinvented the same old philosophy of living in harmony with nature through the name of eco-cities or sustainable cities.

What are the key attributes of eco-cities? These cities are designed as follows:

1) Require minimal input from the rest of the world

2) Transfers minimal externalities to the rest of the world

3) They produce their own food, water and energy

4) Rely on using local material and on the natural flow

5) Have more wilderness and open spaces

6) Use natural solutions for stabilising micro-climates and use renewable energy sources.

7) Ideally they are smaller in size requiring less transportation of goods and services

8) Eliminate all carbon waste

Transforming the existing mega cities into eco-cities may be difficult. However, building new eco-cities is quite possible. If we are successful in building the eco-cities, it is possible to make positive economic, social environmental and ecological impacts.

In this era of high population pressure is it possible to have zero carbon and ecological footprint? There are several cities in the world which are named as “eco-cities”. But do we have some certification process to validate the claims?

The reason why it is important to have this process set up is due to the ambiguity of the term “eco-city”. We live in the era of globalization, which involves goods travelling long distances. The trade happens due to comparative advantage. That is, if a product X costs less in country A than country B due to some natural endowments, it makes sense for countries to trade due to comparative advantage.

Now, if an eco-city limits its production and imports goods from outside the city zone, to whom should we assign the carbon and ecological foot print ? For example, a resident living in eco-city would like to consume apples, Kiwis or Oranges, but which are not grown nearby. He has to import apples, which involves some externalities. To whom should these emissions be attributed to? This may be same for the other materials which are not available locally say rice, wheat, vegetables, etc., or material required for building the eco-city. A resident in an eco-city may have to use textiles or leather goods which are highly polluting. To whom should this pollution be attributed? Are we also assuming that living in eco-city also means changing the consumption patterns?

In fact this is the situation in today’s era of globalization. We cannot think of ourselves as living in a Robinson Crusoe economy — a closed economy with no trade. We need to clarify the ambiguities surrounding the measurement of footprints associated with eco-cities.

Having few eco-cities might not make a very big difference to the world, as they still have to depend on the external world for things other than food, water and energy. However, this is nevertheless a positive change. But if we have several such cities connected with each other, it is probably possible to minimize their carbon foot print and ecological foot print.

Just imaging and designing an eco-city is not sufficient. We also need to change our mindset and attitude. This might require an “ecological revolution” to go back and live in co-existence with nature.

Haripriya Gundimeda
Mumbai

On The Nature of Cities

Rediscovering Wildness—and Finding the “Wild Man”—in Alaska’s Urban Center

18 September 2012Art & Awareness, EssayArt, Awareness, Experiencing Nature, Value, What is urban nature?Bill Sherwonit

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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I have been getting quite the education on “The Nature of Cities” these past few months, while taking in the perspectives of academics, ecologists, naturalists, architects and urban designers, educators, and conservationists (some contributors wearing several hats). I have been impressed—and at times overwhelmed—by the scope of research, activism, and community programs dedicated to urban nature and our species’ connection to it.

And our place within it.

I had no idea how much work (and play) is going on around the globe, tied to the study and enjoyment of cities’ wild nature. And I suspect that’s true for many others who’ve participated in this blogsite’s commentaries and conversations. Here I will bring the perspective of a nature writer, essayist, and naturalist, who has spent the past couple of decades getting to know, and writing about, his adopted homeland. Like Bob Sallinger (“Souvlaki Coyote and Other Tales of Urban Wildlife”), I strongly believe in the power of story and the necessity of telling stories that recognize, even emphasize, the wild nature of our cities. Here, then, is part of my story.

Though I grew up along the edges of rural Connecticut, I have spent nearly all of my adult life in urban settings: first Lewiston, Maine and Tucson, Arizona (both in the USA, and where I attended college and graduate school, respectively); then the Los Angeles megalopolis, where I somehow survived six years despite never feeling at home; and finally, since 1982, Anchorage, Alaska, the 49th state’s urban center.

Schooled in the geosciences (I got an MS from the University of Arizona), I changed careers in my late twenties and became a journalist, which in turn led me eventually into my current life as a freelance nature writer and activist for both wildlands and wildlife (I explore that evolution in Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness). It was only after I’d begun to seriously observe and write about Anchorage’s “wild side” in the 1990s that I began to more fully appreciate—and examine—the delights, mysteries, and importance of urban nature. I have written about my adopted hometown’s wild riches in essays and two books (Changing Paths and Living with Wildness) and will use my initial TNOC posting to share some of what I’ve noticed and learned about Anchorage’s wild nature, which has relevance to other discussions presented on this site.

downtown anchorage — Downtown Anchorage, Alaska. Photo by Bill Sherwonit.

A city of nearly 300,000 people, Alaska’s largest community is rarely lauded for its wild nature or frontier aesthetics. Many rural Alaskans consider Anchorage to be a northern incarnation of Lower 48 excesses. They derisively call the city Los Anchorage, a not-so-subtle comparison to Southern California’s smog-enshrouded, freeway infested, urban-sprawl megalopolis (this description perhaps revealing some of my own prejudices about L.A.). Other Alaskans, including some residents, ridicule Anchorage as Anywhere USA and claim its only saving grace to be its close proximity to “the real Alaska.”

Outsiders—anyone living beyond the state’s borders—have also gotten in their digs. John McPhee took perhaps the most famous swipes at Anchorage in his best seller Coming Into the Country: “Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders. It is virtually unrelated to its environment. It has come in on the wind, an American spore. A large cookie cutter brought down on El Paso could lift something like Anchorage into the air.”

Ouch.

anchorage downtown skyline 1 — Anchorage skyline. Photo by Bill Sherwonit.

The truth stings: Anchorage largely deserved McPhee’s late 1970s jabs. It still merits them and, to some degree, those of rural Alaska critics. Poor municipal planning has led to haphazard development and some mighty ugly architecture. Sections of the city are an appalling mix of malls, fast-food restaurants, boxy discount stores, massive parking lots, and ever-expanding service stations and quick stops. Even now, when the city is in the midst of rewriting its land-use laws to make Anchorage a more livable city, with a higher quality of life, there’s substantial pushback from businesses, development interests, and some politicians (including our mayor), whose credo seems to be “develop, develop, develop,” with little regard for how that development is done. Too many of the country’s mega-chains have heard our politicians’ declaration that Anchorage is “open for business,” turning sections of the city into versions of Miracle Mile. And those of us who care about Anchorage’s wilder aspects are constantly battling efforts that would diminish trails, greenbelts, and parks.

coastal trail dogwalkers — “Coastal Trail” in Anchorage, part of the city’s extensive trail system. Photo by Bill Sherwonit.

Yet for all this laying down of asphalt and mushrooming of boxlike buildings, pockets of wetlands, woodlands, and other wild areas remain scattered throughout our municipality. You just have to know where to look. And to be honest, those areas aren’t hard to find; Anchorage has some wonderfully large parks and a world-class trail system.

Those natural areas sustain a wide diversity of wildlife and native plants: the bowl is seasonal home to some 230

kincaid park single track trailB — Kincaid Park single track trail, Anchorage. Photo by Bill Sherwonit.

species of birds, five types of Pacific salmon, and 48 different mammals.

Anchorage’s patchwork of greenbelts and forested municipal parks is threaded together by a network of bike trails and walking paths. From Anchorage’s much-beloved Coastal Trail, bicyclists, joggers, and walkers can occasionally spot pods of ghostly white beluga whales, chasing fish through the inlet’s murky waters. Along that trail and others, people may also meet moose, lynx, great-horned owls, black bears, and even the occasionally grizzly. Beyond the Coastal Trail is a state wildlife refuge, a place of surprising wildness and solitude on the city’s western flanks, with sedge flats and mudflats and ponds inhabited in spring and summer by all manner of songbirds, shorebirds and waterfowl, from savannah sparrows to Arctic terns and Sandhill cranes.

Also threading through the bowl are several creeks, which connect hills to lowlands to saltwater. Some are filled in, paved over, or polluted before they reach the inlet, but others

Lesser Sandhill Crane Family — Lesser Sandhill cranes in the Anchorage Coastal Wildlife Refuge. Photo by Susan R. Serna.

are large and pure enough to have natural or rebuilt salmon runs. In Anchorage’s most industrialized section, anglers pull 40-pound king salmon from Ship Creek. The bowl is also rich in lakes and bogs, which serve as important avian nesting grounds. Anchorage, in fact, is the largest U.S. city to support nesting populations of loons. And wolf packs roam the city’s eastern edges, sometimes sneaking into homeowners’ yards to kill domestic fowl or dogs.

anchorage coastal refuge 1 — Anchorage Coastal Wildlife Refuge stretches for 16 miles south from Anchorage. Photo by Bill Sherwonit.

anch_coastal_boundary — The boundary of the Anchorage Wildlife Refuge, just south of Anchorage.

Though I’ve resided here since 1982, only since the early nineties have I truly delighted in Anchorage’s greener, wilder side. In part that reflects a gradual shift in desires and priorities: once a newspaper sports reporter tied to newsroom desks and indoor arenas, I’ve metamorphosed into a nature writer who chooses woodland trails and alpine meadows over noisy, sweaty gyms. I now prefer watching birds and bears and spiders to TV sports. And I’ve re-learned the value of paying close attention to my home grounds, something I did as a boy, but somehow forgot in my early adulthood.

I believe my boyhood adventures in The Woods behind my family’s Connecticut home and along the margins of a nearby neighborhood swamp helped establish a deep love and joy for wild nature that, while dampened or misplaced for a while in my late adolescence and early adulthood, would be resurrected after I’d settled in Anchorage. This touches on themes made popular in recent years by Richard Louv (Last Child in the Woods, The Nature Principle), David Sobel (Beyond Ecophobia, Childhood and Nature), and others. And it points to a critical aspect of this “Nature of Cities” movement: the absolutely urgent need for increased connections between children and nature in our cities, especially given the abundant—and growing—evidence that childhood experiences have a huge influence on how we relate to the “natural world” as adults.

Another reason for my new perspective: relocation to the hills on Anchorage’s eastern edge in October 1993. That move, as much as anything, clarified what my friend William calls the “power of place.” From 1982 through 1988, I had lived the mobile life of a renter. Then I became a first-time homeowner. But like my earlier rentals, that cul-de-sac property failed to draw me into the local landscape. Needing solitude or a renewal of spirit, I would invariably go “out there,” to the wildlands beyond Anchorage.

But once settled on the Hillside, that wasn’t necessarily so. I continued to love my forest and mountain walks in Anchorage’s neighboring “backyard wilderness,” Chugach State Park and I certainly relished my longer journeys deep into Alaska’s more remote backcountry. Yet I also began to find joy, surprise, connection, and, yes, even solitude on Anchorage’s Hillside, an area of town that mixes modern suburban neighborhoods with older homesteads on the wooded foothills of the Chugach Mountains.

Hilltop Moose — A moose shares an Anchorage street with human pedestrians and vehicles. Photo by Susan R. Serna.

Everything wild seemed closer on the Hillside: the clouds, the mountains, the animals, the weather. It became easier, somehow, to slip outside at night and star gaze, stand in the eerie light of a full moon, or look for northern lights. Easier to go walking and exploring. Winter comes earlier and stays longer. There’s more snow. More wildlife. More frequent and stronger gales. Born along Alaska’s Gulf Coast, high winds called chinooks come roaring out of the southeast and through the Chugach Mountains, then tumble down the Hillside as warm, dry, turbulent air, in gusts of 50 to 100 mph.

In my new home, all manner of things began to grab my attention in new ways: the chinooks; the pleasing rush of springtime creek water; the winter commutes of ravens, which fly daily between their nighttime roosts in the Chugach Mountains and the scavenging-rich environs of mid- and downtown Anchorage; the spruce bark beetle and its infestation of local forests. Nothing, however, grabbed me as deeply as the neighborhood’s black-capped chickadees, whose bright presence drew me into bird feeding and watching and along the way transformed my world, showed me some of what I had been missing. In a way, they become my teachers.

In the spirit of telling “urban animal stories,” I’ll briefly describe here how chickadees helped deepen my awareness (there’s a more detailed account in Living with Wildness).

My enchantment began on a Saturday morning in 1993, shortly before solstice. Lolling in bed, I glanced outside. And there before me, several black-capped chickadees flitted about a backyard spruce. Inspired by their presence, I placed a bird feeder where it could be easily observed from the dining and living rooms. My first-ever feeder wasn’t much to look at: an old, slightly bent baking pan covered with sunflower seeds.

Nothing happened that first day. But Sunday the chickadees returned. Seated at my dining room table, I watched with delight as a black cap landed on the tray, grabbed a seed, and zoomed to a nearby tree. Then in flashed another. And a third. For each the routine was the same: dart in, look around, peck at the tray, grab a seed, look around some more, and dart back out. Nervous little creatures, full of bright energy, they somehow penetrated the toughened shell of this former sports reporter and touched my heart. I laughed at their antics and felt an all-too-rare childlike fascination.

Steller's Jay cp — Stellers jay. Photo by Susan R. Serna.

The chickadees were soon joined by several other songbirds. What started as mere curiosity blossomed over the next few months into a consuming passion. I found myself roaming bookstores in search of birding guides, spontaneously exchanging bird descriptions with a stranger, and purchasing fifty-pound bags of seeds. All of this seemed very strange to a fortysomething guy who had never been intrigued by birds (except for the occasional charismatic raptor) and had previously judged bird watchers to be rather odd sorts. I didn’t know what it meant, except that a door had opened. And I passed through.

Now wherever I am—city, woods, mountains—I invariably notice songbirds and their assorted voices. They’re everywhere, it seems. How did I miss them before? And I wonder what else beckons, that I haven’t yet noticed.

I have since moved from the Hillside back to Anchorage’s lowlands, in a residential neighborhood near the city’s western, coastal border. There’s still plenty of wild nature in my new environs, manifested in moose and fox, merlin and goshawk, chickadee and waxwing, spruce and birch, on and on. The opportunities to encounter wildness and learn more about my homeland are endless. But I can’t emphasize enough that this recognition began with some specific experiences—for instance moving to the Hillside, inviting chickadees to my feeder—that opened my senses to the wild world that surrounds us, wherever we live. Even though I’d been trained (as both scientist and journalist) to notice details, it seems I didn’t naturally tune into, or relish, the city’s wilds, until some aspect of it grabbed my attention in a way that I couldn’t ignore. This is something that I—we—need to remember as we work to increase the awareness of the general public to our cities’ wild side.

• • •

In recent years I’ve come to believe strongly that this sense of connection, this love for wild nature, is a crucial part of our humanity, even in the twenty-first century. It’s alive in us when we’re born, no matter where that is. The question, then, is how do we nurture our wildness, rather than subdue and tame it?

GGOwlcc — Great grey owl. Photo by Susan R. Serna.

In The Abstract Wild, Jack Turner argues that “in many inner cities here in the United States and in the developing world people no longer have a concept of wild nature based on personal experience.” (Many others have made similar observations, including on this blogsite.) I agree wholeheartedly with that. But I also believe it is possible to have “raw visceral contact with wild nature” wherever we live, if we take the time, make the effort, and leave ourselves open to wonder and mystery. Then the challenge becomes: how do we reinforce and encourage this wild awareness in each other, in our children? I don’t have any easy answers. But my life in this far north metropolis and my own discoveries of Anchorage’s wild nature (some of which I’ve shared here) has offered hints of what’s possible.

At first glance, my choice to settle in Anchorage may seem a strange one for someone who claims to be so passionate about the natural world. But in living along the city’s eastern and western edges, I’ve gotten the best of both worlds, natural and man-made (though of course the two are connected). I love the amenities that come with living in an urban center, with its coffee shops and restaurants, movie theaters and Performing Arts Center, universities and libraries and sports programs. Here I’ve found intersecting circles of writers and outdoors enthusiasts and earth- and peace-loving activists. Yet I also have easy access to parks, trails, greenbelts, a coastal refuge, and a nearby mountain range, the Chugach, whose remotest valleys and peaks are seldom visited. And I reside in a landscape also inhabited by chinook and coho, goshawk and owl, coyote and lynx. But again I must emphasize that I only came to this awareness, and appreciation, over time, thanks in large part to teachers who grabbed my attention, chickadees (and bears and frogs) among them.

Living in Anchorage, I’m now constantly reminded that wildness is all around us, all the time, even in the city. It’s just that most of us humans don’t notice the “wild side” of our busy urban lives (some, it’s true, are simply trying to survive their urban lifestyles, which leaves little, if any, opportunities for wild connections), just as I largely didn’t for my first decade of living in Alaska’s urban center. Of course, in many a metropolis you have to look hard to find even hints of the wild behind the elaborate layers of human construct that shield us from the rest of nature. Anchorage’s juxtaposition of malls and moose, brewhouses and bears, or libraries and loons makes it easier to notice urban wildness here than in cities like L.A. or Tucson or even Lewiston, Maine, all places that I’ve lived. This city, more than any other, has opened my eyes and enlarged my awareness of wild nature in a way that even the wilderness couldn’t.

It’s also been here that I’ve come to better understand—through personal experience, research and readings, and shared stories with other friends and colleagues—that we humans do indeed carry wildness within us. We are animals, after all. And though many of our natural instincts are “tamed”—or suppressed—as we grow up, we carry deep within us a wild nature that’s expressed not only in our need to eat, drink, sleep, and procreate, but also in our emotions, dreams, spontaneity, hunting instincts (expressed in a variety of ways), our draw to the outdoors, and the deep aliveness and sense of wonder we sometimes feel when making an unexpected connection with the larger, wilder world we inhabit.

I’ve written about this inner nature in an essay, “In Search of the Wild Man,” included in Living with Wildness. As I discuss in that essay, this inner wild man, or wild woman, or wild child, is an important part of who we are. And it is nourished by connecting with what David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous) has called more-than-human nature. This—need I say it?—is a good thing, and essential to a deeper, more respectful, and more joyful relationship with our original and primary home, the Earth, and the other inhabitants with whom we share this planet.

All of this can happen, must happen, in our cities.

A few final thoughts, pulled from my essay, “In Search of the Wild Man”:

Only by getting to know wild nature will we learn to embrace and cherish and preserve it, both within ourselves and as manifested in myriad other forms, in the larger, more-than-human world. Such a full embrace is possible, no matter how frightening, because at some deep level, we and all “the others” are part of a larger—and what some would call a sacred—oneness. All of the world’s mystical traditions teach this. Even Christianity maintains that we are all part of the creation: people and trees and hills and butterflies and bacteria. And though it doesn’t normally use words like “sacred” or “holy,” science confirms it too.

Bald Eagle — Bald eagle on the outskirts of town. Photo by Susan R. Serna.

The good news is that wildness reaches everywhere, from the far wilderness to the innermost pockets of our biggest cities. We can each choose where, in what form, and in what way we get to know the wild. But we must make some effort, if we care at all about healing ourselves, healing the world, keeping things whole. In touching the Wild Man or Wild Woman, we learn to better love the world. And in loving the world, we embrace our own richly wild essence. As I’ve discovered in my own life, it’s not necessarily an easy thing for us modern Homo sapiens to understand or practice. But like Gary Snyder says in The Practice of the Wild, “I for one, will keep working for wildness day by day,” in whatever small way I’m able.

And, I might add here, that I will do so wherever I reside, even—or perhaps especially—in the city.

Bill Sherwonit
Anchorage, Alaska
USA

Reflecting on Two Years Walking in Asia

6 January 2018Bangkok to Barcelona on foot, EssayAsia, Awareness, Biophilia, Communities, Development, Health, Livability, Parks, Planning, Pollution, Value, What is urban nature?Jennifer Baljko

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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

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

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

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

For more in the Bangkok to Barcelona series, click here.

Beyond the walls of the palace-turned-museum, I can hear the tram, and imagine the locals and foreigners weaving around each other on one of Istanbul’s busy commercial streets.

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

Yes, I’m a tree hugger now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walking views in Dhaka. Photo: J. Baljko

Marks of the city limits. Photo: J. Baljko

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

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

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

When we find them, we latch on to them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Baljko
Bangkok to Barcelona on Foot

On The Nature of Cities

Reflections on “Laudato Si, On Care For Our Common Home”

10 November 2015Art & Awareness, Essay, People & Communities, Place & DesignBiodiversity, Biophilia, Communities, Conservation, Design, Development, Faith, Participation/Democracy, Planning, Policy, Pollution, SustainabilityMike Houck

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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Pope Francis, City Planner

After reading Pope Francis’ Laudato Si, On Care For Our Common Home, I was moved to select references I felt relevant to efforts in Portland to integrate nature into the city and weave nature into the fabric of our urban and urbanizing neighborhoods. I sent a copy to David Maddox, who asked if I would consider adapting those excerpts into a blog for The Nature of Cities. What follows is my effort to do so. The entire text of “On Care for our Common Home” can be found here, in eight languages. It makes for good reading for anyone interested in the nature of cities.

“There is a need to protect those common areas, visual landmarks and urban landscapes which increase our sense of belonging, of rootedness, of ‘feeling at home’ within a city which includes us and brings us together.”—Pope Francis

I was only half-joking when testifying at a recent Portland city council session when I said we could have saved a lot of time and energy in writing our updated comprehensive plan, climate action plan and climate preparation strategies had we received an early draft of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si, On Care For Our Common Home. I was struck by the many parallels, both conceptual and textual, between the Encyclical and our efforts to better integrate nature into the urban context, our responses regarding mitigation and adaptation to climate change, and our efforts to create an ecologically healthy, equitable and resilient city.

2b Charlie Hales Photo Mike Houck DSC_1434 — Charlie Hales, Mayor of Portland. Photo: Mike Houck

Quite coincidentally to my reading of the Encyclical, it so happened that our mayor, Charlie Hales, had just received an invitation to attend a papal audience on Climate Change and human trafficking. Hales received his invitation on the strength of the city’s climate action plan, on its reputation for excellence in urban planning, and on President Obama’s 2014 naming of Portland as one of 16 national Climate Action Champions for Leadership on Climate Change. Sixty mayors from around the world were invited to Rome on the heels of a climate change gathering in Vancouver, British Columbia, to address modern slavery and climate change. The papal meeting was sponsored by the pontifical academies of sciences and social sciences.

The leaders were asked to share their city’s best practices, to sign a declaration recognizing that climate change and extreme poverty are influenced by human activity, and to pledge to make their cities “socially inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.”

So, what do Francis’ writings have to do with “the nature of cities,” ecological and social? A lot. For example, he laments the lack of greenspace under the heading “City Planning,” writing:

“Many cities are huge, inefficient structures, excessively wasteful of energy and water. Neighbourhoods, even those recently built, are congested, chaotic and lacking in sufficient green space. We were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass and metal, and deprived of physical contact with nature.”

5 Tanner Springs from The Sitka Photo Mike Houck DSC_0248 — Tanner Spring Nature Park in the heart of the Pearl District in NW Portland as seen from the Sitka Apartments, a low income housing in one of Portland’s densest neighborhoods. Equity of access to nature, even in the city’s downtown core, is fundamental to creating an equitable and ecologically sustainable city. Photo Mike Houck

4 Burnt Bridge Creek Vancouver celebration Photo Mike Houck — Burnt Bridge Creek Vancouver dedication. Photo: Mike Houck

Within the context of city planning, Francis takes on the privatization of public space and inequitable access to parks and greenspaces, pointing out that wealthy, “ecological” gated communities have the lion’s share of urban parks and greenspaces, while “hidden,” poor neighborhoods—inhabited by what he describes as the “disposable members of society”—have little or no public space.

3 John Charles Olmsted @ Olmsted Archives — John Charles Olmsted, adopted son of Frederick Law Olmsted. The Olmsted firm’s rationale for parks was deeply bedded in social equity and democratizing effect of parks.

Francis makes the same arguments that many in our community have made for decades with regard to special landscapes and the Olmstedian precept that parks are catalysts for increased social cohesion.

He writes:

“There is also a need to protect those common areas, visual landmarks and urban landscapes which increase our sense of belonging, of rootedness, of ‘feeling at home’ within a city which includes us and brings us together…Interventions which affect the urban or rural landscape should take into account how various elements combine to form a whole which is perceived by its inhabitants as a coherent and meaningful framework for their lives. Others will then no longer be seen as strangers, but as part of a ‘we’ which all of us are working to create. For this same reason, in both urban and rural settings, it is helpful to set aside some places which can be preserved and protected from constant changes brought by human intervention.”

6 Portland Streetcar ACCESSIBILITY-717083 — Portland Streetcar, providing equity of access to city transit systems.

Housing and transit

He also delves into planning issues unrelated to “nature in the city,” but which are consequential to equity in urban development. He identifies lack of housing as “a grave problem in many parts of the world, both in rural areas and in large cities…”

Regarding transit, he writes:

“The quality of life in cities has much to do with systems of transport, which are often a source of much suffering for those who use them. Many cars…circulate in cities, causing traffic congestion, raising the level of pollution, and consuming enormous quantities of non-renewable energy. This makes it necessary to build more roads and parking areas which spoil the urban landscape. Many specialists agree on the need to give priority to public transportation. Yet some measures needed will not prove easily acceptable to society unless substantial improvements are made in the systems themselves, which in many cities force people to put up with undignified conditions due to crowding, inconvenience, infrequent service and lack of safety.”

7 Peregrine Falcon Photo Mike Houck DSC_0240 — Peregrine Falcon. Photo: Mike Houck

The papal case for biodiversity and intrinsic value of nature

What struck me most about the Encyclical is the depth of scientifically-based discourse around biodiversity and the intrinsic value of nature. the fact that he received received a “chemical technician’s” degree and worked in a food-related laboratory cannot, alone, account for the depth of his arguments for the need to protect biodiversity, both for our own health and for the inherent value of the Earth’s biome.

In this regard, Francis, and with what is clearly remarkable stable of research assistants, writes of the importance of non-charismatic microfauna, recognizing the importance of species that are seldom, if ever, mentioned in urban planning contexts:

“It may well disturb us to learn of the extinction of mammals or birds, since they are more visible. But the good functioning of ecosystems also requires fungi, algae, worms, insects, reptiles and an innumerable variety of microorganisms. Some less numerous species, although generally unseen, nonetheless play a critical role in maintaining the equilibrium of a particular place.”

Regarding the intrinsic value of nature, the Encyclical says:

“It is not enough, however, to think of different species merely as potential ‘resources’ to be exploited, while overlooking the fact that they have value in themselves.

Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost for ever. The great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity. Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence, nor convey their message to us. We have no such right.

We take these systems into account not only to determine how best to use them, but also because they have an intrinsic value independent of their usefulness. Each organism, as a creature of God, is good and admirable in itself; the same is true of the harmonious ensemble of organisms existing in a defined space and functioning as a system.”

Environmental impact analysis, biodiversity hot spots and biological corridors

The breadth of the encyclical’s reach with regard to fundamental ecological principles goes far beyond what most urban planners include in their planning regime, including environmental impact analysis:

“In assessing the environmental impact of any project, concern is usually shown for its effects on soil, water and air, yet few careful studies are made of its impact on biodiversity…”

Beyond simply addressing the importance of biodiversity, the encyclical specifies the important of biodiversity “hot spots”:

“In the protection of biodiversity, specialists insist on the need for particular attention to be shown to areas richer both in the number of species and in endemic, rare or less protected species. Certain places need greater protection because of their immense importance for the global ecosystem…”

The city of Portland vowed to not limit its response to the listing of Chinook salmon and Steelhead trout to avoid "take" under the Endangered Species Act, but to enact policies and acdtions to recover the species. Westmoreland Park in Southeast Portland before restoration. Image courtesy, Portland Bureau of Environmental Services. — The city of Portland vowed to not limit its response to the listing of Chinook salmon and Steelhead trout to avoid “take” under the Endangered Species Act, but to enact policies and acdtions to recover the species. Westmoreland Park in Southeast Portland before restoration. Image courtesy, Portland Bureau of Environmental Services.

Crystal Spring Creek post restoration. Image courtesy, Portland Bureau of Environmental Services. During dedication of the restoration project in 2014 Chinook salmon were observed spawning in Crystal Springs Creek. Water temperatures in the creek provide cold water refugia for salmonids returning to their spawing grounds, in the face of elevated temperatures in the Willamette River.

Cost-benefit analysis

Pope Francis frequently excoriates “the market” as a contributor to human misery and environmental degradation. Therefore, it’s no surprise that he takes on market failures with regard to ecosystems and human health and well-being. He writes:

“Caring for ecosystems demands far-sightedness, since no one looking for quick and easy profit is truly interested in their preservation. But the cost of the damage caused by such selfish lack of concern is much greater than the economic benefits to be obtained…We can be silent witnesses to terrible injustices if we think that we can obtain significant benefits by making the rest of humanity, present and future, pay the extremely high costs of environmental deterioration.

It should always be kept in mind that ‘environmental protection cannot be assured solely on the basis of financial calculations of costs and benefits. The environment is one of those goods that cannot be adequately safeguarded or promoted by market forces.’ …Where profits alone count, there can be no thinking about the rhythms of nature, its phases of decay and regeneration, or the complexity of ecosystems which may be gravely upset by human intervention. Moreover, biodiversity is considered at most a deposit of economic resources available for exploitation, with no serious thought for the real value of things, their significance for persons and cultures, or the concerns and needs of the poor.”

Precautionary Principle

Francis also invokes the precautionary principle in writing:

“The Rio Declaration of 1992 states that ‘where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a pretext for postponing cost-effective measures which prevent environmental degradation…If objective information suggests that serious and irreversible damage may result, a project should be halted or modified, even in the absence of indisputable proof. Here the burden of proof is effectively reversed, since in such cases objective and conclusive demonstrations will have to be brought forward to demonstrate that the proposed activity will not cause serious harm to the environment or to those who inhabit it.”

Equity

Finally, as many contributors to The Nature of Cities have argued, and as is the case with planning efforts in Portland and many other U.S. cities, addressing climate change and city building in general must incorporate concern for equity, in all its dimensions and outcomes. This includes what I would term “interspecies equity” as it relates to the intrinsic value of nature (without regard to nature’s value to us) and to intergenerational equity as articulated in the Encyclical:

“The notion of the common good also extends to future generations…We can no longer speak of sustainable development apart from intergenerational solidarity. The environment is on loan to each generation, which must then hand it on to the next.”

Francis also addresses equity with regard to basic access to essential urban services such as affordable housing, clean air and water, and access to parks and nature.

* * *

I have referenced only a few excerpts from the Encyclical that I believe relate directly and indirectly to topics commonly discussed in the forum of The Nature of Cities. I encourage you to read the entire Encyclical, which abounds with additional insights into creating more ecologically sustainable, just and resilient cities that protect, restore and manage the natural systems that constitute our cities’ natural green infrastructure.

Mike Houck
Portland

On The Nature of Cities

Reflections on Cities, Seasons and Bioregions

18 June 2012Art & Awareness, EssayBiodiversity, Experiencing Nature, Invasive Species, TreesStephanie Pincetl

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This winter I had occasion to spend a few days in the city of Albuquerque, where it was cold, dry and brown. Winter in the Southwestern United States. Trees along the Rio Grande were bare; not too many trees elsewhere. Taking the taxi back home from the Los Angeles International Airport, fondly known as LAX, was almost a sensory overload, greenness everywhere in this Mediterranean climate: in median strips, in freeway interchanges, in cracks in sidewalks, along streets and in yards, feral weeds and selected plants. What irrigation and a benign climate can sustain is truly a wonder. Los Angeles has about 562 different tree species in the county, arguably one of the most biodiverse forests in the world, but virtually totally human created.

Such non-native tree diversity raises issues about what belongs, what doesn’t, and whether cities – almost entirely anthropogenic systems, including their urban vegetation – can be analyzed using conventional ecological science. I raise this as conventional ecosystem science has built in assumptions about processes that are derived from studying systems that evolved over a very long time. Are these assumptions adequate for anthropogenic ecosystems that are new? I don’t know, but surely worth some examination.

LAVeg — Los Angeles vegetation from around the world. Photo from “City of Los Angeles: Urban Forest Program Annual Report” (2004)

It is quite astonishing to drive around in L.A. and see what people have planted from around the world, from Australia, Latin America, Europe, Asia and North America. This riot of tree species, juxtaposed through human inspiration, raises provocative questions about concepts of biodiversity, conservation biology, and urban ecology. Is biodiversity a positive value in itself? If so, Los Angeles ranks very high on that index! Or is it indigenous biodiversity? In which case L.A. is far from the scrubby chaparral ecosystems and swamps that characterized its low lands, and the intermittent oak and black walnut forests of its alluvial fans. In this region, summer would be our equivalent of winter in the northern latitudes: plants shut down to survive rainless summers. Trees hug alluvial fans with accessible ground water, or the intermittent riparian corridors where water may have receded under ground. People chose to alter this native vegetation and landscape in the early Spanish colonial period, to introduce ceremonial and food bearing vegetation. As Anglo settlers came with their visions of Italy and Europe, with curiosity about plants in other parts of the world like Australia, Southern California was an excellent laboratory to experiment with new cultivars. Immigrants from east of the 100th meridian brought norms of landscaping, including lawns. Over a century and a half, the indigenous landscape was transformed to a lush, varied, and arguably seductive (but entirely new) set of plants and assemblages.

In LA, seasons be damned, lush green has been normalized as the quotidian landscape of the region. This is the new normal for Angelenos, and changing to something else will be difficult. It will be difficult because it takes time for expectations about normality to shift, and it will be difficult because there will have to be agreement about what the something else should be. Urban landscapes reflect history, culture and preferences – within the context of climate and geographical location. They are often far distant from the native ecosystems. Thus it is entirely legitimate to ask what kind of ecology is an urban one, as in cities, humans have came in, eradicated nearly all the native vegetation, transformed the soils and topography, and plunked a bunch of plants from around the world together because they liked them. Do these plant assemblages function in the same way as plant assemblages that evolved over millennia? Can the same tools be used to examine them?

Finally, there is the interesting development of ecosystem valuation. For cities this means developing metrics of the value of trees in cities for their carbon sequestration capacity, storm water mitigation, shading value to reduce the urban heat island and air pollution mitigation potential. For cities in the southwest – where there were no forests to begin with, and with urban trees from elsewhere – it will be important to balance these uncertain values with water requirements by trees. Again, the question of ecosystem science comes into play as much of the quantification of tree attributes in cities is based on average calculations of benefits from across the country. It all seems rather cobbled together in an effort to ensure that trees are planted in cities, rather than on careful examination of trees in situ. For I would argue, how well trees do in cities all depends – on soils, air pollution, watering regimes, pruning regimes, location and mostly on humans. Including the human element in urban ecology, still remains the frontier of research.

There is a temptation to naturalize urban systems, including their urban vegetation, but in the case of L.A. (and perhaps other cities too), perhaps we flip this on its head and humanize vegetation, asking why this type of planting, and how humans may impact its success. In the American Southwest, water is the key, and humans manage that asset. It will be a matter of choice whether the trees make it, versus lawns, or other values. Seasons will impact that choice only to the extent that summers become hotter and drier, or winters wetter and more violent. And that will depend on how the climate evolves, again a by-product of human decisions.

Regaining Paradise Lost: Global Investments, Mega-Projects, and Seeds of Local Resistance to Polluted Floods in Belém

12 December 2018Essay, People & Communities, Place & Design, Science & ToolsAmazon, Communities, Participation/Democracy, Planning, Policy, Pollution, Resilience, South America, Sustainability, Water, Wetlands/Rivers/StreamsJosé Alexandre de Jesus Costa

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Where once Henry Walter Bates saw a vibrant and lush paradise, the very water Bates once leisurely enjoyed in his favorite spot in Belém is now overrun with sewage and disease. But the fight for a better city is not over…not if grassroots mobilization has anything to say about it.

People have lived in and around the Una Hydrographic Basin for as long as the city of Belém itself. Belém is the largest urban center in the Amazon River Delta, with a population that exceeds 2 million people in its metropolitan region. Beginning at Guajará Bay, the Una Basin comprises about 60 percent of Belém’s urban space and 30 percent of its population. This territory includes twenty districts and over four hundred million people. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) deemed the Macro-drainage Project that took place between the 1980s and early 2000s in the Una Basin (Una Project), the “largest urban reform of its time in Latin America” (Costa 2013). This was happening at the same time that global consensus was broadening and beginning to see the Brazilian Amazon as more than just the host of the world’s largest tropical rainforest but also the site of major urban centers that have actually increased close to 300 percent in population size over the past 40 years. Yet a better understanding of Amazonian cities remains necessary, to which we contribute in this essay.

More than a century before this, though, Belém and the Una Basin were already world renowned for the region’s natural beauty. In the late 19^thcentury, the famous English naturalist Henry Walter Bates used to walk through the várzea forests of the Una Basin and sail through the streams that connected the Guajará Bay to the vicinity of what was then downtown Belém. Bates described the Una Basin as his “favorite spot” and a “paradise for naturalists” (Bates 1944:83)—which is a good illustration of the historical perception of the Amazon region as “God’s Paradise” (Brondízio 2016). The contemporary urban imagery tells a distinct story, however. The status of paradise has changed as the Una Basin endured the impacts of what Belém’s policy-makers envisioned as modernization from the mid-20^thcentury onward. In the mindset of the political leadership of this period, for macro-drainage projects to be considered modern when building basic sanitation and water treatment systems, the constructors used to rectify and concrete part of the streams connected to the Guajará Bay, which likely affected the permeable capacity of the soil. This standard was applied, for example, to the Docks region, a commercial hub at the time (see Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1. View from 28 de Setembro Street at docks region in 1929-1930. Images: Federal University of Pará Architecture Department Virtual Laboratory blog, available here.

Figure 2. Channelized stream at Visconde de Souza Franco Avenue, dock region in the 1970s. Scan from the newspaper “O Liberal” in 1972. Available here.

Although development programs change over time and across landscapes, parallels exist between the Una Project, blueprints designed for the Amazonian forest, and the construction pictured in Figure 1 almost a century earlier. In the name of progress, modernity, and ultimately development, both nationally and internationally funded urbanization projects attracted a massive influx of migrants to Belém. With this influx of migrants, the banks of the Una River and its tributaries became dotted with various factories producing paper, vegetable oil, screws, packaging, and soap. Industrialization unfolded in tandem with the growing population density, resulting in increasing environmental degradation of the Una Basin.

It didn’t help matters that the old myth that Amazonian waters can absorb pollution, which rather seemed to be an assurance for people and reinforced cultural assumptions that the waters were by nature regenerative despite growing mistreatment of the environment. This myth was a powerful one—and arguably it still affects the region today (Brondízio 2016). It is not uncommon to find old residents in the Una Basin who recall the catastrophic image of fish floating on the surface of the Una River and other streams. It was, however, only the beginning of dealing with issues caused by the water. The strategy of concreting and rectifying the channel system to drain water was replicated in the Una Basin, albeit with minimal success in managing waste and hydrological resources (see, for example, the confluence of two canals in Figure 3).

Figure 3: The confluence of the Galo and 3 de Maio Channels. Photo: Vitor M. Dias, 2017.

The environmental damage to the rivers and the marginalization of impoverished Amazonians are complementary aspects in terms of water and land use of urban space in Belém. Informal settlements have either replaced or surrounded the factories and large constructions that occupied the banks and tributaries of the Una Basin. Over fifty percent of the individuals living in Belém reside in these settlements officially named as “subnormal agglomerations”, which are mostly located around lowland areas and close to the water. The lack of basic sanitation that affects about 90% of Belém’s population, combined with even just one season of heavy rainfall, easily exposes these disadvantaged neighborhoods and over half million people to the risk of flooding and the hazards associated with it (Mansur et al. 2016). In the end, while the “clean” water may wash away part of the sanitary waste, the contaminated water may also invade people’s homes in recurrent and often unpredictable flooding events. This situation happens every year, for example, in the location depicted in Figure 3, which is a longstanding front of fight and resistance for the better management of the channel system of the Una Basin. (Compare Figures 4 and 5.)

Figure 4: Galo Canal overflowing in 2005. Photo: Archives of the Front of the Aggrieved Residents of the Una Basin.

After years of mobilization, in 2013, local citizens managed to obtain a report from the Commission for the Defense of Human and Consumer Rights of the State House of Representatives (ALEPA—Assembléia Legislativa do Estado do Pará in Portuguese; see Comissão de Representação da Bacia do Una, 2013). The state legislators participating in this Commission investigated and confirmed that the Stations for Sewage Treatment (ETE, Estação de Tratamento de Esgoto in Portuguese) planned for the area had not been built (Pará 2006: 21).

Figure 5: Galo Canal overflowing in 2018. Photo: Archives of the Front of the Aggrieved Residents of the Una Basin.

Consequently, the sanitary waste continued to be discharged, without any treatment, into the channels of the Una Basin and then released at Guajará Bay afterward. In a new context and era, we can confirm Eduardo Brondízio’s assessment, published at The Nature of Cities, that the myth of Amazonian waters being capable of absorbing and diluting all kinds of waste persists, insofar as it has been used to bolster governmental arguments for not dealing with the problem of sanitary sewage in cities like Belém (Brondízio, 2016).

Building and reshaping the “Gray Hell”: The mix of gray(ish) concrete, green but harmful vegetation, and brown-muddy water

The context outlined so far seems to describe a metropolis where public investment in basic sanitation has been absent. Unfortunately, this is not the case, especially when referring to the Una Basin. The Una Project cost, after all, over 300 million U.S. dollars. The IDB and the local government allocated these funds to improve roads, water, sewage, and drainage, transforming the urban landscape and the livelihood of its inhabitants.

On the books, the Una Project presents outstanding numbers regarding its accomplishments. A report by the Sewage Company of Pará (COSANPA, Companhia de Saneamento do Pará in Portuguese) lists that the Una Project built 25,731 individual septic tanks, 91 collective cesspits, 307 kilometers of sewerage network, 2,164 inspection wells, 3,887 cleaning terminals, and a drying bed of septic tanks (Pará 2006:11). In reality, however, the Una Project actually created a mosaic of gray, concreted canals, green weeds plaguing the spots without maintenance, and brown-muddy water that invades many houses in the region, shaping distinct experiences relating to sanitation and water among the residents.

Simply put, when asphalt arrived and floods ceased in some areas, many other areas remained without paved roads, sewage treatment, and still experienced flooding events. This meant that the population was forced to adapt to these mixed results accordingly.

Figure 6. Sanitation public works of the Una Project in the early 2000s. Photo: Personal archives of Dona Lourdes, Una Basin resident and former community leadership.

Figure 7: Pipes close to the roof on a Una Basin residence in 2017. Photo: Vitor M. Dias.

For example, the two most significant shortcomings of the Una Project were that it excluded entire areas within the Una Basin from the construction. Also, the Una Project left several areas without micro-drainage structure that should have been built in parallel to the channel system. Controversy remains about the reasons for this exclusion.

This micro-drainage structure should include paving and surface drainage at the street level, as well as curbs, sluice gates, and manholes to handle the water coming from households and the rain. Vila Freitas, which is located on the banks of the Galo Channel, has long experienced flooding due to the absence of micro-drainage (see Figures 8 and 9).

Figure 8: Community Água Cristal, an excluded area from the Una Project in 2014. Photo: Pedro P. Soares.

Figure 9. Vila Freitas in 2018. Photo: Archives of the Front of the Aggrieved Residents of the Una Basin.

The adherence to the system of urban governance established to implement the Una Project has resulted in varying degrees of success. That is, some progress has been made, but at the expense of having excluded more than half of the more than 100,000 families residing in the Una Basin from reaping the benefits of these infrastructure developments. It further highlights how crucial it is to work from a planning perspective that understands the interconnectedness of social and spatial distribution of infrastructure, such as in the case of macro- and micro-drainage issues. This is what we have found to be the case in the Una Project of development, the limitations that stemmed from it, and the persistent segregation of Belém (Brondízio 2016).

Indeed, complications with this project continued even after it arguably came to an end. When the Una Project was officially closed and the disbursement contract with IDB was terminated, the Municipal Government of Belém received lots of different types of equipment—machinery, and vehicles from the State Government estimated at R$ 21,977,619.75 (Pará 2005)—which exceeded 52 million USD circa 2005, corresponding roughly to 66 million USD in 2018. The IDB facilitated the purchase of this proper apparatus for the maintenance of the Una Basin channel system to ensure the sustainability of a project of this magnitude. As an institutional innovation for the time, there was an interest of the financing organization in establishing a sustainable governance system of the Una Basin.

Linking global to local interests, representatives from the IDB and various governmental agencies cooperatively drafted and proposed the manual of operations for the maintenance plan of the Una Basin. Yet, it is not known for certain the whereabouts of some items of this equipment, compromising the already insufficient capacity to maintain the existing macro-drainage structure. Such factors ultimately motivated the resignation of then Secretary of Sanitation, Luiz Otávio Mota Pereira, amid a rupture with the mayor. Much later, in 2013, the City Council of Belém launched an official investigation to determine what happened to the equipment, machinery, and vehicles of the Una Basin maintenance plan. The results of this investigation remain inconclusive nonetheless (Belém 2015).

Toward the mobilization of legal actors by FMPBU: Urban problems as a matter of environmental and social justice

The abbreviation FMPBU stands for Front of the Aggrieved Residents of the Una Basin (Frente dos Moradores Prejudicados da Bacia do Una in Portuguese). It was created in 2011, when aggrieved citizens circulated a communiqué denouncing the conditions of the Una Basin to the participants of a public demonstration carried out by the Brazilian Bar Association. Fearing retaliation from local authorities, members of FMPBU did not feel safe to list their names in that document, which highlighted the obstacles to mobilization in the young, still-fragile democracy in Brazil.

In 2013, FMPBU consolidated itself as an urban, grassroots movement during the demonstrations of what became known in Brazil as the “Journeys of June” (Jornadas de Junho in Portuguese). The protests occurred in several Brazilian cities and addressed several matters from both federal and local level political agendas. In Belém, urban infrastructure was a key point raised within this context. FMPBU members thus attempted to take advantage of the atmosphere of political and cultural effervescence by distributing that same communiqué document from 2011. Simply put, pamphleting was another way FMBU had devised to hold public officials accountable for the growing problems and raise awareness among Belém’s inhabitants of flooding being a public policy issue besides being an environmental phenomenon. After all, the media and political discourses often converge when using environmental rhetoric and blaming the population for clogging the canals with garbage as fundamental causes of flooding, overlooking infrastructural problems. Most importantly, the document called attention to the recent role taken by legal actors as mediators of the Una Basin case.

The aggrieved citizens, to be sure, were not satisfied with how political forces were managing the polluted waters flooding people’s homes. They continued to mobilize, concentrating their efforts on Belém’s legal arena next. After successive complaints, in 2008, the State Prosecutor’s Office finally filed an environmental class action suit—Brazil’s Ação Civil Pública. The defendants of this lawsuit were the State of Pará, the Municipality of Belém, and COSANPA, which are responsible for maintaining and finalizing the constructions of the Una Project.

Despite this step forward, the class action suit progressed slowly, with the presiding judge only beginning to take significant steps to move the case forward in 2013 after pressure from the National Council of Justice—nearly five years after the suit was filed. An additional setback was that when it came time to negotiate the contents of a legal agreement between the parties of the lawsuit. The state prosecutors, defendants, and the judge discussed the terms of and plans for this agreement without the inputs from grassroots movements’ leaders or any of the individual citizens affected by the floods within the Una Basin. Rather, while those players were meeting in the room where the judicial hearing was taking place, members of the movement and other citizens were awaiting their fate outside.

Figure 10: Members of social movements and individual residents of the Una Basin waiting outside the room where the judicial hearing was taking place on September 26 of 2013. “Em audiência”, in red, means “hearing taking place”. Photo: Front of the Aggrieved Residents of the Una Basin blog. Available here.

After 2013, the steps needing to be taken in compliance with the agreement above were suspended. The municipality claims that it has negotiated resources with the IDB to comply with the terms agreed upon in court, but obtaining these resources raises uncertainty as to whether this is a matter of more money or better governance to ensure the maintenance of the Una channel system. Former managers of Project Una have already stated that this amount is not enough to do the necessary revitalization process, not to mention the pending issues that have yet to be built. Moreover, once the funding from IDB is disbursed, residents of the Una Basin are concerned that these resources might be allocated to finish other macro-drainage projects in the city, e.g., the Estrada Nova Basin, and not to improve the situation of the Una Basin.

Through the length of the legal battle, the social uprisings, and political clashes, the Una Basin continues to endure consecutive years of flooding after its so-called completion. The environmental degradation and loss of quality of life for residence, in turn, raise doubt about the capacity to implement and enforce new urban policies in the Brazilian Amazon. Additionally, the management of the water and sewage system in Belém, in general, and the Una Basin, in particular, remains precarious with the population facing unpredictable and frequent flooding events. Let us not forget the role the Inter-American Development Bank played in this. The results of the Una Project question whether such international forces by a multilateral bank are capable of spurring best management practices aimed at sustainability or if this model can ever really improve the path-dependent systems that run these cities and continue to perpetuate inequalities. Belém thus reveals a complex political ecology of flooding with an interconnected mosaic of players and institutions at various levels of governance from both global and local scales, all of which have been called into and have shown limited capacity of action.

Where once Henry Walter Bates saw and wrote of a vibrant and lush paradise (see Figure 11), the very water Bates once leisurely enjoyed in his favorite spot in the city is now overrun with sewage and disease. What remains today is a complex social-ecological landscape, where flooded and eroded urban landscapes strain the quality of life and livelihood of impoverished and increasingly stratified social classes. To conclude, we hasten to say that this does not mean that the fight for a better city is over; well, at least if it depends on grassroots mobilization. Ten years after Una’s class action suit was filed, the state prosecutors called for a public hearing to discuss the pending issues of the Una Project. This hearing is going to take place in December 2018, and yet again, it is a direct result of persistent mobilization by the members of FMPBU.

Figure 11. Una Basin delta region in the 19th century: Henry Walter Bates’ paradise. Photo: VASQUEZ, P. Mestres da fotografia no Brasil: Coleção Gilberto Ferrez. Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 1995.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Eduardo Brondízio for his comments on early drafts of this essay and the support of the Center for the Analysis of Social-Ecological Landscapes (CASEL) at Indiana University-Bloomington. We are also indebted to the members of FMPBU, the Assisting Program to Urban Reform and the Research Program on Urban Policy and Social Movements in the Globalized Amazon of the Graduate Program of the Faculty of Social Service at the Federal University of Pará (PARU and GPPUMA at UFPA). Special thanks to Andressa V. Mansur for her insights on this topic and her friendship that brought the authors of this essay together.

José Alexandre de Jesus Costa, Vitor Martins Dias, and Pedro Paulo de Miranda Araújo Soares
Belém, Bloomington, and Belém

* The authors have been listed in alphabetical order based on last name. They have equally contributed to the essay.

On The Nature of Cities

Resources

Bates, Henry Walter. O naturalista no Rio Amazonas. São Paulo: Brasiliana, 1944.

Belém. Câmara Municipal. Relatório Final da Comissão Palramentar de Inquérito com o objetivo de investigar indícios de irregularidades na transferência, para empresas da iniciativa privada, de veículos e equipamentos doados pelo Governo do Estado do Pará ao Município de Belém. Diário Oficial da Câmara, Belém, 15, 16, 17, 18 e 19 dez. 2014

Brondízio, Eduardo S. The Elephant in the Room: Amazonian Cities Deserve More Attention in Climate Change and Sustainability Discussions. The Nature of Cities, 2016. Available on: https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2016/02/02/the-elephant-in-the-room-amazonian-cities-deserve-more-attention-in-climate-change-and-sustainability-discussions/. Accessed on 08/02/2018.

Comissão de Representação da Bacia do Una. Assembleia Legislativa do Pará. Relatório Final. Belém, 2013.

Costa, Marco Aurélio, Isadora Tami Lemos (Orgs.). 40 Anos de Regiões Metropolitanas no Brasil, IPEA, 2013.

FMPBU. O que é a Frente dos Moradores Prejudicados da Bacia do Una? Frente dos Moradores Prejudicados da Bacia do Una, 2013. Disponível em http://frentebaciadouna.blogspot.com/2013/. Accessed on 08/02/2018.

IBGE, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). 2011. Censo Demográfico 2010 – Aglomerados Subnormais: Informações Territoriais. Censo Demográfico Rio de Janeiro, available at: http://bit.ly/2mhWy4g.

Mansur, Andressa V., Eduardo S. Brondízio, Samapriya Roy, Scott Hetrick, Nathan D. Vogt, and Alice Newton. An Assessment of Urban Vulnerability in the Amazon Delta and Estuary: A Multi-Criterion Index of Flood Exposure, Socio-Economic Conditions and Infrastructure. Sustainability Science 11(4): 625-643, 2016.

Pará (Estado). Companhia de Saneamento do Estado do Pará. Ata de reunião para transferência de equipamentos para a Prefeitura Muncipal de Belém, conforme previsto na cláusula 6.05 dos contratos de empréstimo nº 649/OC-BR e nº 869/SF-BR firmados entre o Estado do Pará, mutuário final e o BID – Banco Interamericano de Desenvolvimento, órgão financiador,realizada em 02 de janeiro de 2005. p. 01-05.

dos Santos, Flávio Augusto Altieri, and Edson José Paulino da Rocha. Alagamento e Inundação em Áreas Urbanas. Estudo de Caso: Cidade de Belém. Revista GeoAmazônia 2(1): 33-55, 2014.

Vasquez, Pedro. Mestres da fotografia no Brasil: Coleção Gilberto Ferrez. Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 1995.

About the Writer:
Vitor Martins Dias

Ph.D. Student in Sociology at Indiana University-Bloomington. Affiliated Researcher at the Center for the Analysis of Social-Ecological Landscapes (CASEL, Indiana University-Bloomington), and Research Fellow at the Milt and Judi Stewart Center on the Global Legal Profession (Indiana University Maurer School of Law

About the Writer:
Pedro Paulo de Miranda Araújo Soares

PNPD/CAPES Scholar and Visiting Professor at Federal University of Pará (UFPA, Brazil). Member of the Assisting Program to Urban Reform (PARU) and the Research Program on Urban Policy and Social Movements in the Globalized Amazon (GPPUMA) of the Graduate Program in Social Work at the Federal University of Pará (PPGSS-UFPA).

Regional Parks Connect People to Nature Close to Home

24 January 2018Essay, People & Communities, Place & DesignAwareness, Biodiversity, Biophilia, Communities, Conservation, Development, Economics, Ecosystem services, Experiencing Nature, Governance, Health, Landscape, Livability, Parks, Participation/Democracy, Planning, Stewardship, Value, What is urban nature?Lynn Wilson

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

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Regional park systems can play a vital role in bringing nature to people by creating green spaces where people can escape the daily urban grind, even if for only a few minutes or hours.

Connecting to nature where you live

Regional parks and park systems are a perfect response to the modern conundrum of creating dense urban fabrics where people can become increasingly isolated from nature. The scale of a regional park system means that it can encompass all or a large part of a metropolitan area, thereby enabling the selection of park lands that can transcend individual municipal boundaries and provide larger-scale regional benefits to urban dwellers. This is important because it means that regional-scale protected areas can encompass larger wild lands that are important for conservation purposes while still providing close-by public access opportunities.

It is almost astonishing that in the larger world of parks and protected areas management, regional park systems are not better recognized. Perhaps this reflects a preoccupation among some protected area circles about the relevance and contribution of international, national, or territorial level park systems in meeting ambitious commitments for protection of terrestrial and marine ecosystems, and in responding to climate change, biodiversity protection, landscape connectivity, invasive species, and historical/cultural recognition and inclusion. The voices engaged in these discussions are most often representatives of higher-level park systems. The result being that contributions of lower-level park and protected area systems are strikingly overlooked when it comes to accounting for the positive social, cultural, economic, and environmental outcomes that all levels of park systems provide.

A significant percentage of global parks and protected areas are embedded within local, community, and regional level park systems. These systems provide immense value and benefits to people and the environment. Leaving them out of higher-level considerations translates into an undercount when calculating the positive global impact of parks and protected areas to a burgeoning human population and diminishing natural environment.

Figure 1. Ambury Regional Park, Auckland, New Zealand. Photo by Chris Gin, Flickr.

In December 2016, I guest edited a special issue of the George Wright Forum with a focus on regional park systems. This was a first for the George Wright Forum, which historically has highlighted the contributions of national and international parks and protected areas. This issue was also important because it signals a growing recognition of the value of sub-national park systems as key partners in global efforts to protect enough land to help offset growing social and environmental strains the world over. In the case of regional park systems, the focus is on providing adequate green space close to where most people live, which increasingly is in large urban areas.

Figure 2. Coyote Hills Regional Park, Fremont, California, USA. Photo: Mohnishkodnani, Flickr.

As noted, regional parks are usually associated with urban areas. Thus, they are close by to the people who use them. Unlike national or territorial parks, whose locations and governance systems can seem remote and disconnected from their constituents, regional parks systems are right where people live, creating a direct connection between politicians, tax dollars, agencies, and the public. Regional parks are representative of, and accountable to, the people who use them most—the feedback loop among all parties is immediate and responsive. This creates a huge advantage to regional park systems because the people who directly fund the parks directly benefit from the parks, creating a sense of ownership and local pride in a well-developed and well-used park system.

Figure 3. Beachcomber Regional Park, Parkesville, British Columbia, Canada. Photo: Alan Sandercock, Flickr.

That being said, regional park systems are not all the same. A wide variety of models have been used to create and administer regional park systems. The articles in the December 2016 George Wright Forum issue explore some of these forms, which include single systems, collaborative systems, and systems that defy any typical definition of a regional park system. This flexibility is perhaps a key ingredient of the success of regional park systems—for while they are united by a relative geographic scale and focus, they are responsive and adaptive to local conditions and opportunities. There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to regional park systems.

Figure 4. Lohas Park, Hong Kong. Photo: November-13, Flickr.

Regional park systems are found around the world. Virtually every large metropolitan area has some form of regional park system. The rise of regional park systems goes hand in hand with the rise of cities and the growing concern over urban sustainability and quality of life. Urban sustainability and quality of life can be partially addressed by embedding green infrastructure throughout a metropolitan area. It can be arguably stated that there is no great city in the world without a correspondingly great green infrastructure network. This can be seen in cities such as Boulder, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle in the United States; Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto, Victoria, Vancouver, and Winnipeg in Canada; Berlin, London, and Oslo in Europe; Wellington and Auckland in New Zealand; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Cape Town, South Africa; and Hong Kong in China, among many other global cities. All these cities have in common a regional-scale approach to their parks and protected areas systems.

Regional parks provide many values that are particularly relevant to metropolitan areas, including socio-cultural, economic, and environmental. Examples of social values include the benefits of close contact with nature to reduce stress, aid in healing, increase cognitive skills, and contribute to individual and community health and wellness. There is ample evidence to support the idea that people need close and regular contact with nature for emotional and psychological well-being. Perhaps best popularized by Harvard University professor, E.O. Wilson in the Biophilia Hypothesis (1993, pg. 31), is the idea that humans are “hard wired” to need connection with nature and other forms of life. Cities and urban areas are well-positioned to provide this connection by thoroughly integrating nature into the metropolitan environment. Cultural values can be celebrated through regional parks, where parks protect and reflect important cultural identities that are place- and history-based. In this sense, regional parks can help to transcend socioeconomic and identity politics by providing meaningful and relevant public spaces where diverse members of society can feel at home. Well-maintained and situated green spaces can increase community cohesiveness by promoting interaction among neighbors in safe and accessible public environments.

Figure 5. Greenwich Park #1, London, England. Photo: Alan Stanton, Flickr.

It has been repeatedly shown that parks and green spaces can raise surrounding property values, thereby contributing to urban economic prosperity (Catrakilis, 2015). The existence value of green space next to residential, commercial, and institutional properties is viewed positively and dwellings adjacent to parks and green space command higher prices, which in turn increases property taxes which helps to offset the cost of maintaining parks. Examples of increased property values can be found adjacent to any of the world’s great urban parks, such as Central Park in New York City or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Parks and green spaces contribute to spin off businesses, such as recreation and fitness providers, hotels, restaurants, and tourism. Signature parks, such as San Diego’s Balboa Park, and Portland’s Forest Park, are good examples of metropolitan area parks that have become major tourist destinations.

Figure 6. Balboa Park, San Diego, California, USA. Photo: Anthony Dolce, Flickr.

Regional parks contribute to environmental sustainability in large part through securing “natural capital” or “nature’s services”—or the suite of environmental benefits that nature provides for free. In urban areas, these benefits have tangible value. For instance, the establishment of greenbelts and protected forests, agricultural lands, wetlands, and other green spaces around cities such as Toronto and Ottawa has helped to protect essential ecosystem services like water filtration and wildlife habitat (2010, p. 9). In Vancouver, Canada, a natural capital valuation study determined that protection of forests, watersheds, wetlands, and grasslands provided a natural capital benefit of $5.4 billion a year (2010, p. 9).

Figure 7. White Tank Mountain Regional Park, Phoenix, Arizona, USA. Photo: Broderick Delaney, Flickr.

These benefits can be secured by establishing robust regional park systems, where the benefits of nature protection can clearly outweigh the values through conversion into other uses. Regional parks and protected areas facilitate connectivity conservation, where core “wild” areas are linked by urban green infrastructure to support maintenance of biological diversity and species migration, and by helping to decrease habitat fragmentation, degradation, and loss. In sum, regional park systems provide immeasurable tangible and intangible benefits to urban areas across all dimensions.

Regional park systems: unique reflections of nature, people, and place

Clearly, regional parks are important contributors to human health and well-being, as well as to environmental and economic sustainability. The five contributing articles to the December 2016 George Wright Forum focused on different aspects of the values and benefits of regional park systems. They also illustrate a range of governance types and funding models which highlights just how flexible and adaptable this form of park system is. The unifying factor among them all is their geographic scope and urban focus.

The series of articles began with a contribution from Robert Doyle, General Manager of the East Bay Regional District (Regional District). The Regional District is situated in the densely populated San Francisco Bay Area, home to more than 2.8 million people. Established in 1934, the Regional District is one of the oldest regional park districts in the United States. Its beginnings are closely intertwined with the National Park Service, part of whose mandate was to foster the development of state and local parks, and to the progressive thinking and intellectual rigor of graduates coming out of U.C. Berkeley. For instance, in 1930, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Ansel Hall produced a seminal report which provided a blueprint for the early park system which is still relevant today.

Figure 8. Roberts Regional Park, Oakland, California, USA. Photo: Swedg, Flickr.

Currently, the Regional District manages over 121,030 acres in 73 parks in Alameda and Contra Costa counties, including over 1,250 miles of trails. With over 25 million visits each year, the Regional District receives more visitors than Yosemite, Monterey Peninsula, and Napa Valley combined. The Regional District faces significant challenges in uncertain times, including population growth and changing demographics, planning for climate change, responding to user conflicts, and maintaining aging infrastructure. The Regional District responds to these challenges through a variety of means including a focus on community engagement and youth outreach. The Regional District is also a major player in protecting wildlands and habitats for endangered species through land acquisition and partnering with state and federal wildlife agencies. The Regional District is heavily involved with preparing for climate change and sea level rise, helping to protect millions of people who are vulnerable to its effects. The Regional District is now a national role model; its success is based on over 80 years of working to protect regional landscapes and connecting people to those lands where they live.

Figure 9. Oxbow Regional Park, Portland, Oregon, USA. Photo: Metro News, Flickr.

Another very successful regionally based park system was explored in the article by Mike Houck, Director of the Urban Greenspaces Institute, and co-founder of the Intertwine Alliance. Mike is a frequent contributor to The Nature of Cities, and also sits on TNOC’s Board of Directors. Mike’s article traced the incremental evolution of greens pace, park, trail, and natural resources planning in the Portland, Oregon-Vancouver, Washington metropolitan region over the past 35 years. Mike stated that in the early days he was told by local land use planners that there was “no place for nature in the city.” However, thinking along this line has shifted to the point where now urban nature advocates have embraced a 21^st-century corollary to Thoreau’s aphorism that “in livable cities is preservation of the wild.”

This thinking has laid the groundwork for the development of a remarkable regionally-based parks and protected areas system, which is another national role model for sustainable urban development. Mike pointed out, even though the state of Oregon requires an Urban Growth Boundary for every city in the state (which has helped to reduce urban sprawl and protect the working landscape outside of urban growth areas), it has meant the loss of natural areas inside of the Urban Growth Boundary.

Fortunately, many conservation and civic organizations have retooled their efforts to protect and restore nature in the Portland and Vancouver metropolitan area. This has resulted in over 17,000 acres protected regionally and an increase in local parks. Mike provided a series of lessons learned during the development of the regional park system, including the importance of picking a good role model (they picked the East Bay Regional Park District), building relationships, engaging the federal government, thinking big, listening to outside experts, and selecting an icon as conservation catalyst. Mike ends his article by discussing the development of The Intertwine Alliance as the next step in ensuring that earlier successes are not ephemeral or “one-offs,” but coordinated around a common agenda. The Intertwine Alliance has been hugely successful in realizing its founders’ vision of creating a world-class system of parks, trails, and natural areas for people to access nature where they live, work, and play.

Figure 10. Ontario Greenbelt, Pickering, Ontario, Canada. Photo: Ken Nash, Flickr.

A much different regionally-based park system was discussed by Burkhard Mausberg, the former CEO of the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation and the Greenbelt Fund in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Burkhard talked about the success of Ontario, Canada’s Greenbelt, a 2-million-acre swath of green space and farmland encircling the greater Toronto urban area. According to Burkhard, the Greenbelt turned 12 years old in 2017, and it is now the world’s largest peri-urban protected area. Burkhard wrote that the creation of the Greenbelt was the result of growing frustration with land use planning in the Greater Toronto Area. The public recognized the negative impacts of poor development and the loss of green space and farmland, and in 2005 the provincial Greenbelt Act and Plan was passed with much fanfare. Today, the Greenbelt stands as an outstanding example of far-sighted regional planning and its power to shape the landscape for generations to come. Burkhard detailed the many benefits of the Greenbelt, including as an economic powerhouse for the region through its 161,000 jobs in farming, tourism, and recreation.

While not a typical regional park system, the Greenbelt protects more than 70 species at risk, hundreds of rivers and streams, thousands of forested acres, and outstanding biological diversity just miles from Canada’s most populated urban area. Some of the other benefits of the Greenbelt include its contribution to protecting ecological services, estimated to be worth a conservative $3.2 billion a year, or $1,600 per acre.

Figure 11. Ontario Greenbelt, Kelso, Ontario, Canada. Photo: Christoph Ulanski, Flickr.

The Greenbelt also features the largest network of hiking trails in Canada, including the world-famous 725-kilometer-long Bruce Trail, which follows the Niagara Escarpment across cities, towns, farmland and conservation areas. Plans for the Greenbelt include growing it by more than 1.5 million acres; a good start towards realizing this vision was made in May 2017 with the protection of 21 major urban river valleys and associated coastal wetlands across the Greater Toronto Area. The Greenbelt stands alone as a shining example of the power of regional landscape protection that is flexible and responsive in providing value to people where they live.

A fourth article was written by Harry Klinkhamer, a park interpreter and historian who worked in the forest preserves of Chicago Wilderness for many years. Harry traced the evolution of park planning and development in the Chicago metropolitan area since the 1830s. His article provides an in-depth glimpse into the complexities and thinking behind the creation of one of the world’s greatest regionally-based parks and protected areas system. The genesis of Chicago Wilderness can be traced back to the city’s founding in the 1830s when the idea of a “city in a garden” was born. As Harry points out, Chicago has been home to “rather progressive and unconventional approaches to parks and wilderness for well over 100 years.”

Figure 12. Timber Lake Forest Preserve, West Chicago, Illinois, USA. Photo: Wendy Piersall, Flickr.

Today, the Chicago urban area does not have one overarching regional park system, but rather its park space is managed by hundreds of park districts, many county forest preserve districts, the state and federal governments, and Chicago Wilderness. Harry outlined a fascinating history of the development of this complex parks and protected areas network. More recently, in 1996, a group of individuals from 34 different agencies met to help define urban wilderness and develop a comprehensive plan to preserve, restore, and educate the public about nature. A common theme was the realization that ecosystems know no political boundaries and it would take a committed coalition to improve biodiversity and the natural landscape of the Chicago region. Out of this conversation, Chicago Wilderness was formed, whose purpose was to “sustain, restore, and expand our remnant natural communities.” Today, Chicago Wilderness is a model for other major urban areas to emulate. Its members include local, state, and federal agencies; business sector partners; non-profit organizations; and research institutions. This unique partnership works because the community sees Chicago as essentially a nature reserve of over 370,000 acres intimately integrated into a large urban area home to millions of people.

Figure 13. Nature and the City, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Photo: Monika Thorpe, Flickr.

The final article in the series was written by Dr. Mike Walton, Senior Manager of Regional Parks in the Capital Regional District (CRD), Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Mike wrote about the importance of regional parks to urban populations due to their proximity and accessibility. Regional Parks, according to Mike, provide important opportunities for urban dwellers to visit nearby wilderness areas, which are also home to a great diversity of plant and animal species. Mike described the CRD regional parks system, noting that the 31 regional parks and three regional trails protect about 13,000 hectares of land that are home to three large carnivore species: black bear, wolf, and cougar. Including the region’s protected watershed, the CRD owns and protects almost 14 percent of the regional land base. When all levels of protected areas in the region are included, almost 20 percent of the land base is protected. This is a significant achievement, and this percentage is expected to increase over the next number of years through CRD Regional Parks’ land acquisition fund.

Figure 14. East Sooke Regional Park, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Photo: Mary Sanseverino.

Mike notes that unlike the U.S. and Canadian national park systems, the CRD regional parks system is experiencing sustained visitation growth. At least some of this increase in visitation can be attributed to increasingly urban, multicultural, and ethnically diverse populations. However, he remarked that these populations might think differently about near urban wilderness and its importance. Some may be hesitant to visit landscapes that are home to large carnivores, which puts a renewed emphasis on providing a broad range of experiences to attract non-traditional park visitors.

Mike also talks about the role of regional parks as a bridging organization between local and state/provincial/federal protected area systems. In this sense, park interpreters and social scientists can provide essential information gathering and dissemination services to better serve park visitors and park agencies. Mike discusses the important role of regional park systems in helping to achieve global commitments for the conservation of nature, and in linking together fragmented landscapes into interconnected matrixes. Finally, Mike posits that the location of regional parks as backyards to millions of city dwellers represent that nexus where people can reconcile their beliefs about wilderness to benefit non-human species for generations to come.

The beauty of regional parks

Recognition of the value and benefits of regionally-based park systems is growing. The benefits span ecological, spiritual, emotional, physiological, psychological, economic, cultural, and sociological realms. As more and more people crowd into urban areas, the need for regular contact with nature has never been greater. Increasingly, progressive land use planners, politicians, civic leaders, academics, ecologists, conservationists, urbanists, and others are working on ways to make cities sustainable and great places to live, work, and play. This assimilation of thought and practice has never been as necessary as when it comes to fully integrating the built and unbuilt environment within metropolitan areas.

Figure 15. Central Park, New York City, USA. Photo: Mathieu, Flickr

Humans need regular, sustained, joyful, nourishing, daily contact with nature, and where better to provide that contact than where most people spend most their lives—in urban areas. Regional park systems can play a vital role in bringing nature to people by creating green spaces where people can escape the daily urban grind, even if for only a few minutes or hours.

There are many outstanding examples of cities around the world who are taking up this challenge and creating more inviting, sustainable, humane spaces that benefit both people and the environment through the development of regional park systems. As the articles in the December 2016 issue of the George Wright Forum highlight, the adaptability and responsiveness of regional park systems to local circumstances and constituents is a key to their success, and one reason why they are becoming increasingly important and relevant to city living. Perhaps the aim for all great cities should be to create “Urbs in Solitudinem” or “Cities in Wilderness” as the title of Harry Klinkhamer’s article posits. Regional parks are certainly key to achieving this grand and beautiful vision.

Figure 16. Botanical Gardens, Singapore—the Garden City. Photo: Stephen McGrath, Flickr.

Lynn Wilson
Vancouver

On The Nature of Cities

Notes

The George Wright Society, founded over 35 years ago, is dedicated to building the knowledge needed to protect, manage, and understand parks, protected areas and cultural sites around the globe (https://www.georgewrightsociety.org/).
The George Wright Forum issue referenced in this essay is Volume 33, #3, 2016. It can be accessed in its entirety at http://www.georgewright.org/forum_issues.

References

Catrakilis, N. (2015). Literature Survey: Green Space and Property Values. Urban Economics, Duke University. Accessed January 15, 2018 at: https://sites.duke.edu/urbaneconomics/?p=1441.

Kellert, S.R. (ed.) (1993). The Biophilia Hypothesis. Island Press. ISBN 1-55963-147-3.

Wilson, S.J. (2010). Natural Capital in BCs Lower Mainland: Valuing the Benefits from Nature. Davis Suzuki Foundation, Vancouver, Canada.

About the Writer: Erika Svendsen

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About the Writer: David Maddox

Introduction

Pippin Anderson, Cape Town

Gloria Aponte, Medellín

Ana Luisa Artesi, Buenos Aires

Xuemei Bai, Canberra

Stephan Barthel, Stockholm

Jane Battersby, Cape Town

Adrian Benepe, New York

Genie Birch, Philadelphia & New York

Timothy Bonebrake, Hong Kong

Eduardo Brondizio, Bloomington

Steve Brown, Sydney

Lena Chan, Singapore

Lindsay Campbell, New York

Lorenzo Chelleri, L’Aquila

Katrine Claassens, Cape Town

Bharat Dahiya, Bangkok

P.K. Das, Mumbai

Samarth Das, Mumbai

Marcelo de Souza, Rio de Janeiro

Anna Dietzsch, São Paulo

Paul Downton, Melbourne

Katerina Elias, São Paulo

Thomas Elmqvist, Stockholm

Jayne Engle, Montreal

Ana Faggi, Buenos Aires

Martha Fajardo, Bogota

Emilio Fantin, Bologna

Ben Feldman, Los Angeles

Sheila Foster, New York

Niki Frantzeskaki, Rotterdam

David Goode, Bath

Divya Gopal, Berlin

Andrew Grant, Bath

Bram Gunther, New York

Jon Halfon, New York

Fadi Hamdan, Beirut

Zoé Hamstead, Buffalo

Mathieu Hélie, Montreal

Tom Henfrey, Bristol

Cecilia Herzog, Rio de Janeiro

Mark Hostetler, Gainesville

Mike Houck, Portland

Todd Lester, São Paulo

Nina-Marie Lister, Toronto

Shuaib Lwasa, Kampala

Patrick Lydon, Seoul

Yvonne Lynch, Melbourne

Ian MacGregor-Fors, Xalapa

Mahim Maher, Karachi

Jala Makhzoumi, Beirut

François Mancebo, Paris

E.J. McAdams, New York

Rob McDonald, Washington

Brian McGrath, Newark

Timon McPhearson, New York

Hitesh Mehta, Miami

Patrice Milillo, Los Angeles

Mary Miss, New York

Franco Montalto, Philadelphia

Polly Moseley, Liverpool

Harini Nagendra, Bangalore

Kate Orff, New York

Susan Parnell, Cape Town

Raquel Peñalosa, Montreal

Steward Pickett, Poughkeepsie

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Christine Platt, Durban

About the Writer:
Erika Svendsen

About the Writer:
Laura Landau

About the Writer:
Michelle Johnson

About the Writer:
Sophie Plitt

About the Writer:
Heather Rumble

About the Writer:
Mark Goddard

About the Writer:
Fabio Angeoletto

About the Writer:
Silvio Caputo

About the Writer:
Stuart Connop

About the Writer:
Caroline Nash

About the Writer:
Braulio Romeiro

About the Writer:
David Maddox

About the Writer:
David Maddox