There is growing recognition that cities, which already house more than half the world’s population, require increased policy and development attention. India’s policy response to the need for sustainable, resilient and low-carbon cities is the Smart City mission. According to the Indian Ministry of Urban Development, the mission promotes “cities that provide core infrastructure and give a decent quality of life to their citizens, a clean and sustainable environment and application of ‘Smart’ Solutions.”
In this conception of a Smart City as the driver of local economic growth, technology and “smart solutions” find repeated mention, while better planning and greenfield development, beyond current city boundaries, are expected to absorb a growing urban population.
The Smart City mission has a very narrow focus, which does not address the risks faced by a city with the size and development trajectory of Bangalore.
The Ministry of Urban Development’s, or MoUD’s, illustrative list of what constitutes Smart Cities has a mixed bag of infrastructure and governance elements (MoUD, 2015). These core elements span adequate basic services, efficient urban mobility, affordable housing, robust IT connectivity, health and education. Sustainable environment, good governance, safety and security of women and children, and citizen participation are thrown in for good measure. The strategy document admits that there are many interpretations for smart cities the world over and, even in India, their implementation and adoption will vary across states and local bodies. Smart solutions that sometimes overlap with these elements include e-governance for a score of basic services, waste management, water management, energy management and others (such as tele-medicine, tele-education, trade facilitation and skills development).
With an initial budget of INR 7000 crore ($US 1.05 billion) in 2014, 100 satellite towns of larger cities are meant to be developed as Smart Cities. Additionally, existing, mid-sized cities are to be developed under the programme. The initial allocation has been hiked by more than two and half times and several incentives have been provided to encourage foreign investment into the programme. The institutional mechanism for implementation is a special purpose vehicle, which would be run like a private company for the duration of implementation, and will have representation from all levels of government.
The one challenge that is featured on the MoUD website, which smart cities apparently face and should address, is how to involve smart people in the planning phase and how to garner city leadership to ensure programme success.
So what’s missing?
A gaping hole in the conception and components of a Smart City is exactly how a special purpose vehicle would enable these wide-ranging elements and solutions with the participation and support of affected communities. Would citizens be engaged when designing smart city solutions? Would participatory governance go beyond issuing death and birth certificates in response to e-requests? Would lakes and urban forestry be revived to provide critical ecosystem services as new infrastructure is instated? Would access to public spaces improve for the underprivileged in our society? Would the new smartness integrate with the history and heritage of many of India’s smaller cities?
Ostensibly not. The ministry has adopted an area-based approach, which means that strategies such as retrofitting, redevelopment, greenfield applications and pan-city endeavours will be applied to pre-determined geographical areas specified by urban local bodies. This spatial conception of cities lacks an understanding of cities as deeply connected social and ecological systems, which may not be conveniently divided into geographical areas. There is limited understanding of how city systems of food, water, energy and waste interact and overlap through resource flows and people movement. Cities’ resource and sink needs extend far into their surrounding regions, which is why a region-based approach is recommended when seeking sustainable solutions. In each document and every articulation of the mission, whether it is smart strategies or smart solutions, there is little evidence of which environmental or economic problems Indian cities need to address and what kind of future such strategies will take us towards. Issues of social cohesiveness, community engagement and cultural identity find no mention.
Pedestrians and commuters negotiate their different ways to work on a wintry December morning in North Bangalore. The road will only be paved after stormwater drains are laid by the city water board. Such road conditions are high risk for all categories of users, and this particular road has been inaccessible, to different degrees, for over a year and a half. Photo: Sumetee Pahwa
India Prime Minister Modi’s Smart City vision is an attempt to answer the national call for economic growth, employment creation, world-class cities, better living standards and municipal reform. However, it fails to take cognizance of the global challenges of climate change, poverty, inequality and unsustainable development. These challenges are no longer the purview of national departments, as they manifest in multiple forms within the cities of both the developed and developing world. And furthermore, should cities such as Bangalore, on a very fast growth trajectory, adopt a much broader and deeper vision than the one captured in a smart agenda?
An alternative framework for city development
The United Nations’ seventeen new global goals, called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), defined by 169 targets, have been formulated after a widely participatory consultation process hosted by the UN. SDGs, post the 2015 development agenda, call for commitment to universal goals and targets. As has been discussed at length on TNOC, for the first time, there is now an urban development goal: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
Let us consider how the urban SDGGoal 11 frames the developmental challenges faced by cities all over the world, and the propositions it puts forth in the form of dedicated urban targets. Goal 11 emphasizes equitable access to affordable housing, basic services, transport and public spaces for all urban citizens. Integrated planning and management in cities such that cultural and natural heritage are protected, links with national and regional development planning are strengthened, and buildings are designed for resilience, are all goals that find dedicated targets within the urban SDG. Several sustainability concerns are incorporated, including reduction of the ecological footprint of cities, inclusion and resource efficiency. Integrated policies that address climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as disaster risk management at all levels, are encouraged. Special focus is recommended for the needs of those in vulnerable situations: women, children, persons with disabilities and older persons.
In this conception of the urban agenda, and the subsequent articulation of a global goal into measurable targets, the need for building capacity in urban officials and enhancing their agency in city matters has been left out. Especially in the Indian context, we find that numerous governance challenges exist whereby cities and urban local bodies lack the skills, the resources and the authority to achieve many of the targets specified in Goal 11.
Challenges and risks faced by Bangalore across social, economic and environmental parameters
Bangalore is the fifth largest and one of the fastest growing metropolitan cities in India. The population of the city has grown by more than 40 percent between 2001 and 2011. This has obvious implications for the ability of the ecosystem to provide the range of resources required to support the exponential growth in city population, which is not always accompanied by expansion in city services and infrastructure. Bangalore faces an array of interlinked challenges such as air pollution, water scarcity, urban flooding, food insecurity, waste mismanagement and the loss of urban natural capital. As the principal city in Karnataka, attracting international and regional migrants, Bangalore has followed a development pathway marked by disappearing and dying lakes, numerous gated communities, and high levels of social and economic inequity.
The city faces numerous risks to its future development as its population and geographical expanse increase. Encroachment of lakes, natural flood plains and drainage channels due to uncontrolled urbanization has resulted in urban floods during extreme precipitation events (Poonacha et al., 2015). Public infrastructure, housing and transport networks in flood prone areas are exposed to numerous risks, as are marginalized households located in low-lying areas. Bangalore’s drainage system was designed for a smaller and less dense city, while at the same time, rainwater infiltration into the ground has decreased due to a rise in built up and paved areas.
Ironically, the city also faces reduced availability and regular access to quality of water supply. The city relies on Cauvery River, 100 kilometers away, for half of its water needs, and on extraction of ground water for the remaining half. The Karnataka State Climate Change Plan estimates that total rainfall could reduce by as much as 10-20 percent by 2050 in the region, deepening the water stress experienced by the city.
Fishing boats straddle Rachenahalli Lake, across from new residential developments. For years, lakes in Bangalore have performed livelihood support (fishing, agriculture) and ecological (species habitat, micro-climate control) and bio-remediation functions as part of Bangalore’s social ecological system. Lakes also functioned as water reservoirs for local residents until the Cauvery River became the primary source of drinking water for the city. Photo: Sumetee Pahwa
In a city of stark socio-infrastructural dichotomies, high rise air conditioned glass office complexes, private residential enclaves and ‘gated communities’ contrast with poorly, or under served, dense informal settlements and slums. A large number of migrants are drawn to the city in search of improved livelihood options. For first generation migrants, informal settlements or slums often provide an entry to the city. However, such settlements are often located in unauthorized areas, and therefore have limited access to safe water supply or sanitation networks (IIHS, 2014). In the absence of basic service provision, households rely on poor quality ground water and resort to open defecation, thereby increasing their exposure to health risks. Rising prices of essential commodities such as fuel, electricity and food also affect poor households’ ability to recover from health and economic impacts. Climate change is expected to contribute to these impacts through extreme rain events and heat island effect in the city, and a drying trend in northern parts of the state, which will reduce food productivity and induce further migration.
New migrants to most urban areas in India are dependent upon the marginal work available within the informal economy, characterized by very low wages and high job insecurity. First generation migrants often work as casual labourers in the construction industry, one of the lowest paying and least secure sectors (Krishna et al., 2015). The number of people employed in informal sectors is far greater than those in the formal sector (Mahadevia, 2008). Bangalore also has a high proportion of people who are illiterate, or are literate but have not completed primary school. This translates into a challenging situation whereby a large cohort of 20 to 29 year-olds are entering the workforce with very low levels of education and literacy (IIHS, 2014).
Smart or smarter?
In pursuing “smartness,” will Bangalore be able to address the challenges it has accumulated over thirty years of unsustainable urban growth? Would it, instead, be pursuing smartness if it were to adopt an integrated social ecological frame? If yes, what does it require to become a sustainable, smart, socially and ecologically integrated city?
Large and complex challenges of providing bulk infrastructure to service a rapidly expanding urban population and managing a morphing urban geography in the context of climate change will require a more nuanced approach, and much longer engagement with practitioners, city leaders and city residents. City development strategies need to be informed by a comprehension of cities as systems where citizens draw resources from their urban ecology via a network of transport, energy and communication infrastructure, and are exposed to locational, disaster and climate risks. At the same time, cities have been transforming over the years. Natural systems such as the lakes of Bangalore and the drainage channels that connected them and enabled their functionality as reservoir, habitat and cleanser, have been replaced by ill-designed drainage infrastructure that proves inadequate during extreme events.
The Smart City mission has a very narrow focus, which does not address the risks that a city of the size and on the development trajectory of Bangalore faces. The pursuit of smartness as defined by the Smart City Mission may help achieve better traffic management and extend IT services to underserved sections of society. However, if a large proportion of the society is not literate, or lacks basic services in their settlements, or faces employment insecurity, smarter solutions will be required to take citizens towards sustainable well-being.
A lone crow sits atop a well-mixed garbage and mud pile along Dasrahalli Road, where bulk infrastructure work is underway. Photo: Sumetee Pahwa
What is required is an understanding of how the city as a system is more than its parts—lakes are not islands to be isolated from a water network and expected to function as mere places of recreation; housing has to be more than affordable and enhance a community’s well-being through productive common spaces; widened roads don’t just hyper-connect the city center to an international airport, but also end up fragmenting markets and habitations on either side of them; a metro track may fast-track the daily commute of a few workers, but often at the cost of urban forestry which took more than a century to establish. The smart agenda attempts to separate water supply from waste and sanitation, health care from lake restoration, and energy supply from air pollution in order to roll out private contracts and somehow arrive at a smart city.
Bangalore is better off channeling the intelligence of its citizens towards community-led, locally embedded initiatives, in response to particular societal and environmental challenges. But for that to happen, a lot will need to change—both in the way that city governance institutions are designed, and in the way that city residents conceive their roles to be in current and future management of the city’s social and natural resources.
Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) (2014). Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) – Future Proofing Indian Cities, Final Urban Diagnostics for Bangalore.
Krishna, A., Sriram, M. S., & Prakash, P. (2014). Slum Types and Adaptation Strategies: Identifying Policy-Relevant Differences in Bangalore. Environment and Urbanization. 26, 568 – 585.
Mahadevia, D. (2008). Metropolitan Employment in India. Inside the Transforming Urban Asia: Policies, Processes and Public Actions, New Delhi: Concept, 56-93.
Poonacha P., Solomon D., Bendapudi R., Rahman A., Basu R., Badiger S (2015) The Regional to Sub-national Context. In: Revi, A., Amir Bazaz, Jagdish Krishnaswamy, Ramkumar Bendapudi, Marcella D’ Souza, Sumetee Pahwa Gajjar (eds.). Vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in semi-arid areas in India (pages 49-90). Working Paper, ASSAR PMU, South Africa.
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.
Barbara Deutsch, Washington All professionals contributing to sustainable design projects should have an understanding of the importance of ecology and its basic principles to achieve optimal results.
Paul Downton, Adelaide Cities need to be designed as ecosystems, yet architecture’s most influential culture heroes have betrayed open antagonism to nature.
Martha Fajardo, Bogota The habitat professions’ programs need to understand the basic principles and processes of city as a system.
Noboru Kawashima, Bogota Landscape Architecture is work of creating artificial nature. It is a man-made environment. But we cannot aim too low in landscape architecture just because it is not “real” nature.
Norbert Müeller, Erfurt Although there is a growing concern about sustainable urban design there are still major backlogs both in theory and in application.
Kaveh Samiei, Tehran There were some cultural and logical problems that emerge from misunderstandings about the relationship of humans and nature — core viewpoints that have traditional and modern roots of human dominance on nature and resources as materials for consumption!
Barbara Deutsch is the Executive Director of the Landscape Architecture Foundation, and has diverse experience from the for-profit and nonprofit sectors.
By definition landscape architects design for natural processes, natural resources, and people so a thorough understanding of ecological sciences is essential.
Now more than ever, clients and government agencies have specified interests in sustainability. All professionals contributing to sustainable design projects should have an understanding of the importance of ecology and its basic principles to achieve optimal results. An understanding of natural processes, such as the hydrologic cycle in an urban context, is also critical to designing, building and maintaining high-quality urban ecosystems.
Landscape architects understand the city as a system and are well-positioned to “translate” — or facilitate a greater understanding of ecology among a full design team by integrating and applying the sciences with the design process. Landscape architects should also have enough knowledge of ecology to “know what they don’t know,” and know when to engage a botanist, soil scientist, ecologist or other specialist.
Beyond designing for ecological processes, landscape architects and others must be prepared to communicate these concepts and goals to clients, agencies and municipalities: those who will commission or incentivize exemplar sustainable design projects. The Landscape Architecture Foundation is helping practitioners make the case for more sustainabledesign through its Landscape Performance Series, an online interactive set of resources to show value and provide tools for designers, agencies and advocates to evaluate performance and make the case for sustainable landscape solutions.
Urban Ecological Design was the central focus of my studies at the University of Washington’s Department of Landscape Architecture. Though ecology is not specified per se in the landscape architecture accreditation standards, natural systems, the principles of sustainability, and ecosystems are all key components of landscape architecture programs and central to students’ knowledge and values. Tools such as the Landscape Performance Series, as well as SITES, can augment the curriculum requirements to help practitioners both design for ecological function and understand and promote the ecological benefits of their work.
Writer, architect, urban evolutionary, founding convener of Urban Ecology Australia and a recognised ‘ecocity pioneer’. Paul has championed ecological cities for years but has become disenchanted with how such a beautiful concept can be perverted and misinterpreted – ‘Neom' anyone? Paul is nevertheless working on an artistic/publishing project with the working title ‘The Wild Cities’ coming soon to a crowd-funding site near you!
Ecology is about the relationship of organisms with each other and with their environment, so all those that design and manipulate the environment should have a minimum level of learning about the fundamentals of ecology. Buildings and cities are constructed ecosystems even if they’re not designed as such.
They need to be designed as such, yet architecture’s most influential culture heroes have betrayed open antagonism to nature. In 1925 arch-Modernist guru Le Corbusier praised cities as an assault on nature. In 1986 I heard an imperious Zaha Hadid confess hatred of nature in a conference keynote. For all his stylistic skills, like most of his profession Richard Gehry is unlikely to be remembered as a champion of green design.
Urban design and planning is about creating urban environments in which coherent relationships exist between its elements, yet I have seen city planners reduce that idea to an insistence that buildings share the same eaves heights in the name of ‘contextualism’. The destructive impact of our built environment is exacerbated by ignorance of how its impacts come about and that ignorance runs deep, especially in architecture and urban design. It is vital to regard the built environment in terms of process and place rather than objects in space and it makes no sense to place the care of living systems in the hands of people who don’t have a basic understanding of natural processes, yet in the world of design the power of the image trumps reality and facilitates a kind of environmental double-think in which the word ’sustainable’ is routinely applied to projects that are ecological nonsense.
All programs related to the built environment need to contain a minimal level of familiarity with the fundamentals and language of ecology to ensure such nonsense does not continue.
Martha Cecilia Fajardo, CEO of Grupo Verde, and her partner and husband Noboru Kawashima, have planned, designed and implemented sound and innovative landscape architecture and city planning projects that enhance the relationship between people, the landscape, and the environment.
The landscape the place we live in, is our most important life support. Population increase is pushing the limits of the land to a critical point of rupture. The complexities of the current issues, the impact of rapid urbanization; the management of resources; the after-effects of disasters, both natural and manmade. Soil is being made less fertile; water is drying up; trees are being felled; animals and people are being made less viable. Inequity and poverty thrive while the land is put into a state of alienation. Here lies the land of possibility; a biophysical territory to be nurtured with well-informed anticipation and evaluation; a transforming landscape approached thorough impact assessment, visionary planning and sensitive management.
Collaborative processes demand experienced professionals, teams and leaders that stand for for analysis, planning and/or design. Therefore, programs must require the application of landscape ecology and conservation biology principles to the strategic design of urban infrastructure; training for ways to structure and guide the flows of organisms, materials, and energy that pass through a city in ways that support the characteristic biodiversity of a region. Here the fundamentals of ecology embrace the integration of landscape issues: disturbance, fragmentation, landscape manipulation, fundamental ecological processes, composition and structure, and environmental influences.
Landscapes positively contribute to the complexities of the contemporary city, to a more equitable distribution of ecological and environmental resources, and to the creation of better futures across all regions of the world. Landscape architecture, as a very ancient discipline and practice, carries ecological knowledge of generation after generation and has demonstrated a significant capacity to react and to adapt.
The habitat professions’ programs need to understand the basic principles and processes of city as a system. Happily, landscape architecture and allied design disciplines and practices are nowadays developing better capacity to facilitate dynamic adaptive processes; contributing to a transition from a first to a second phase of ecological design.
LID — Low Impact Development: A Design Manual for Urban Areas introduces general audiences to Designing landscapes for urban storm water runoff—a primary source of watershed pollution. Credit: University of Arkansas Community Design Center’s images from ” Low Impact Development: a manual for urban areas (LID)” University of Arkansas Community Design Center, Fayetteville, AR Client: Arkansas Natural Resources Commission and the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency http://uacdc.uark.edu ASLA 2011 award of excellenceCredit: University of Arkansas Community Design Center’s images from ” Low Impact Development: a manual for urban areas (LID)” University of Arkansas Community Design Center, Fayetteville, AR Client: Arkansas Natural Resources Commission and the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency http://uacdc.uark.edu ASLA 2011 award of excellence
Our human lives are dependent on productions from natural resources: foods, energies, industrial goods, constructions and everything.
The natural resources are treated in cycles of extraction from the earth, transportation, processing, trading, consumption and going back to the earth. For example, foods: cultivation from the fertility of the earth, transportation to market and trading, cooking, eating and the organic materials go back to the earth. These cycles are very complicated and cross each other and with many other cycles such as energy cycles, industrial cycles, commercial cycles, social cycles, and so on.
Many times these cycles are not complete, at least in a short term, or are interrupted. There are environmental costs when the cycle is not closed, such as when there is no re-cycling and no sustainability in the use of renewable natural resources. For example, a sewage system is very good to sustain sanitary conditions in urban area, but the organic materials do not come back to the earth of cultivation, and so there is the interruption of the cycle.
It is estimated that the percentage of world urban population will rise up to 80% in 20 years. The difficulty is that urban areas are far from the places of extraction of natural resources: far from cultivation fields, far from waters of fishing industry, far from mining sites, far from oil wells, far from water power plants, and so on. So, the most of urban inhabitants, day by day, will have less chance to recognize how their lives are dependent on the natural resources and less chance to know the importance of establishing and sustaining cycles of renewable natural resources.
Landscape Architecture is work of creating artificial nature. It is a man-made environment. But we cannot aim too low in landscape architecture just because it is not “real” nature. You can see in a green area the living things growing, flowering, fruiting and dying. You can touch the soil in a garden. In this way you will feel in your daily life the importance of soil, and recognize our dependence on natural resources.
From the view-point of natural resources the duty of architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, and urban planning programs is to:
• Create urban environments that minimize the interruption of cycles of natural resources.
• Create urban environments so that inhabitants may recognize their inter-dependence on natural resources and the importance of sustainability of the cycles of natural resources.
In these senses, architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, and urban planning programs must require a certain minimum level — or more — of learning about the fundamentals of ecology.
Norbert Müller is vegetation ecologist and Professor in Landscape Management and Restoration Ecology at the University Applied Sciences Erfurt, Germany. His main fields in research and lecturing are conservation biology, urban biodiversity and sustainable design. Since 2008 he is president of URBIO (http://www.fh-erfurt.de/urbio).
The main challenges for life on earth for this century are urban population growth, climate change and loss of biodiversity. Urban landscapes are using 75% of the global resources, are producing 80% of the greenhouse gas emissions, and are main drivers of biodiversity loss. For the future it will be essential to reduce the urban ecological footprint and make our towns and cities more sustainable. The main responsible planning disciplines to meet these challenges are architecture, urban design, landscape architecture and urban planning.
Therefore it is important for professionals working in these disciplines to a have a certain minimum level of learning about the fundamentals of ecology. Today, many programs at schools and universities offer courses in ecology and their specifications — especially plant, vegetation, and animal ecology as well as climatology, hydrology and soil ecology. Also urban ecology, the ecological discipline which examines the interactions between the abiotic and biotic environment in urban areas, is more and more included in programs. Although there is a growing concern about sustainable urban design there are still major backlogs both in theory and in application — for example, even now we do not have standardized tools for designing sustainable urban green spaces. Therefore, future research and education must focus not only on fundamentals of ecology but also on design methods how to apply ecology for more sustainable urban design and planning.
A recent opened online survey by the network URBIO on knowledge gaps and research priorities for urban planners and urban stakeholders stated the following 5 questions as most important:
What are the ecosystem services offered by a particular landscape?
How can ecosystems in a given city mitigate the vulnerability of cities in time of climate change or after natural hazards?
What is the social and economic value of conserving biodiversity and ecosystems?
How can we integrate ecological design and tools into strategies for land use planning and management?
How to set up a strategic policy to integrate biodiversity in the city?
I want to invite all readers of this blog to participate at this online survey to find out further knowledge gaps in the understanding of cities and how design them more sustainable.
Applied disciplines such as architecture, landscape architecture and urban design, all are interdisciplinary fields that we categorize as environmental design disciplines. An architect works as a connector of different fields such as design, art, engineering, environment, psychology, and so on. Thus, yes! Architecture as one of the main disciplines of the built environment requires a minimum level of learning about ecology and environment. In fact, every construction imposes itself onto nature and alters the ecological systems and function; nature works as an integrated whole. On other hand, designing urban landscapes and ecological planning without considering the role of architectural design and building blocks is an abortive attempt! Although landscape architecture and urban design students may take courses in “Plant ecology” and “Urban ecology”, landscape architecture is a new field in Architecture and Urban Planning schools in Iran and students can enter this program only in graduate levels. “Climatic design” and “Human, nature and architecture” are the only courses that architecture students in Iran currently must take at the undergraduate level!
Therefore, three years ago I began to teach “Ecological architecture” in “ARCH V”, a final design studio for undergraduate architecture students at the University of Semnan, School of Architecture and Urban Planning. I found out that we have to introduce fundamentals of ecology and sustainability before entering key subjects of design; some students can’t understand why we require discussion of sustainable design! “Theoretical foundations of architecture” was a free content course in which teachers typically spoke about different and diverse subjects; later I decided to utilize this course for teaching “Fundamentals of ecology” and in following semesters students could apply their comprehension of ecology in designing ecological residential buildings. Probably I taught that course to architecture students for first time in Iran!
There were some cultural and logical problems too that emerge from misunderstandings about the relationship of humans and nature — core viewpoints that have traditional and modern roots of human dominance on nature and resources as materials for consumption! So without shifting minds, we can’t go ahead. After three times teaching these courses, many students, even some students in year two and three, became interested and curious in ecological and sustainability issues! Now, under my supervision, six students are studying ecological approaches to design through their final thesis. Also, in collaboration with my students, I’m working on new methods of learning ecological design by doing a comprehensive research project about architecture education with an emphasis on sustainable, ecological design; I hope we can disseminate the results in near future.
Several years ago, Helle Søholt, CEO of Gehl Architects, said that New York would be the most sustainable city in the world if only it fixed its streets. Million Trees NYC is one effort in that direction, as is the CitiBike bike share programme and its corresponding—if slowly-expanding and inconsistently enforced—infrastructure of protected bike lanes. But it is New York’s overall design of ‘complete streets’ that has probably been the most impactful on its sustainability profile. For years, much of Manhattan’s open space was indisputably dominated by the private car. Nowhere epitomized this better than Times Square, where pedestrians famously had to weave in and out of active vehicular rights-of-way to avoid total stoppage on the narrow sidewalks. Then, in 2009, New York decided to experiment with the pedestrianization of the area. The 2010 decision to make this permanent vaulted NYC into the vanguard of sustainable streets.
New York’s Times Square before (left) and after (right) the replacement of a number of vehicular lanes with a pedestrian plaza.
In 2015, with the plaza paved and old problems solved, new controversies are on the front page: unscrupulous hucksters and unclothed demonstrators (a return of some of the louche elements suppressed by the previous mayor, Michael Bloomberg). With the final touches of the repaved pedestrian plaza barely in place, the current Mayor (Bill de Blasio) is calling for the plaza to be removed and cars returned. A number of officials, including the City Council Speaker; the Borough President; the New York Times architecture critic; the head of the NGO, Transportation Alternatives; and others in the field of urbanism have essentially asked whether the Mayor is out of his mind. Nevertheless, de Blasio still appears to be acquiescing to the lone voice of his Police Commissioner that the redeveloped space is simply ungovernable.
Times Square’s pedestrian plaza and an unexpected encounter with Las Desnudas.
Whence the drastic change? Since the installation of the plazas the empirical evidence boasts reduced pedestrian injuries and vehicle collisions (ironically, one of the aims of the current Mayor’s impressive Vision Zero), increased pedestrian traffic and increased sales and commercial rents. With such success, why would he throw it all away? Assuming that his position is not entirely capricious, we might also ask whether there is something deeper at issue. During his election campaign, Mayor de Blasio faced a right-wing critique that his pro-equity platform would return New York to the ‘bad old days’ of crime-ridden subways, drug addict-filled parks, and prostitute-frequented streets, and despite his virtual dismantling of the dreadful stop-and-frisk policy, his choice of police commissioner Bratton (and Bratton’s continuance of draconian ‘broken windows’ policing) suggest that he is still fighting the nemesis of the ‘soft on crime’ liberal label.
The problem is, that fight is getting in the way of one of the most empirically successful sustainable streets initiatives in New York’s history. For many New Yorkers, the specter of its sudden removal is unimaginable. At the same time, several years ago, many of us would never have dreamed of (as transformational a change as) the pedestrianization of Times Square. But then again, going back even further—two or three —few probably imagined a crime-free Times Square (Disney notwithstanding). Yet that, too, happened.
Taken as a whole, the various changes in and around Times Square begin to suggest a chronic pattern of reactionary responses to some of the most visible crises of the time. A series of high-profile pedestrian deaths preceded Mayor de Blasio’s Vision Zero, which since 2014 has led to lower speed limits and redesigned sidewalk curbs, including in Times Square. New York’s loss of the title of top ‘world commerce center’ to London and loss to the state government on instituting ‘congestion pricing’ (which London had successfully premiered) preceded ex-Mayor Bloomberg’s 2010 efforts to pedestrianize Times Square. And a violent crime peak while ex-Mayor Giuliani was District Attorney preceded his mayoral run, following which he cracked down on illicit activity in Times Square in 1994. The question is, could New York even dream of managing all of these challenges simultaneously? As Richard Sennett wrote earlier this year, ‘the way forward lies in urbanists stepping out of our professional confines, drawing on other disciplines, no matter how amateurishly.’
Let’s head to psychology for a moment.
2. Is it about us?
Psychologists refer us to the ‘miracle question’. It is usually phrased as ‘what would a state of perfection look like?’ and it prompts the subject to envision an ideal state of improvement that is disconnected from the status quo and any intervening impediments. However—and somewhat ironically—few subjects are motivated to ask the question unless they are acutely aware that they are already doing very badly. Behavior change often starts at the bottom. Before a subject reaches the lowest point he or she may be in a ‘purgatory of indifference’, from within which it may be difficult to recognize dysfunction. Realizing that one is seriously off course from one’s life vision, there is motivation to rediscover an internal sense of purpose. This, in turn, may provide the incentive for maintaining those improvements over time; a virtuous cycle, if you will, but not an automatic one.
New York, like many cities, does have a wavering uncertainty about how to manage public space and balance spontaneity and control, an uncertainty into which Times Square’s hucksters and Desnudas may have tapped. But perhaps they have not tapped deeply enough to motivate the city to do more than tackle its symptoms as they flare up. As a result, a fear of returning to the ‘bad old days’ seems to have subsumed the recently—if shallowly—solved problems of pedestrian injury. It is also not uncommon for a sitting mayor to erase the legacy project of his predecessor (megalomania, if you like). But does the sudden push to eliminate the pedestrian plaza also reflect a collective, self-destructive tendency? Decades ago, Rem Koolhaas suggested that Manhattan, the ‘capital of perpetual crisis’, had always been obsessed with destroying and remaking itself, in a form of collective delirium, and that it revels in its resulting ‘culture of congestion’. Does it reflect amnesia about the city’s recent past of heightened pedestrian hazards? Paranoia about its far past of runaway crime? Or just hysteria about topless women (perfectly legal in New York City, by the way) in general?
Perhaps, like so many New Yorkers, Times Square needs a shrink—that is, a psychiatrist. Its symptoms suggest the need for a paradigm shift toward a culture of sharing public space that, as city leadership changes, can be sustained over time.
3. How can we sustain behavior change?
The general principles of behavior change—what motivates, how to maintain it over time—also apply to more complex group situations. The city is a sociospatial construct, co-created between people and place, each shaping the other. Indeed, culture and behavior concretize and coalesce in public space like nowhere else. Do behavior change principles also apply to Times Square and New York: its residents, their values, the leaders they elect to represent them, the policies those leaders institute to address their priorities, the police they appoint to enforce them, the influence of the police on the behavior of people, and so on?
We believe so, but with two main differences. First, where there is hierarchy, there is a gap between decision making and those experiencing its consequences; this requires a correspondingly strong communication strategy. And second, more people means more divergent priorities; this requires a strategy for balancing them. Group therapy can help. It transforms one’s peers into ‘mirrors’ that provide increased clarity about one’s own and others’ values and priorities. The mutual vulnerability this generates often increases the intent of the group to learn and improve, rather than protect and regress. And this dynamic is key to effectively addressing deeper issues rather than superficially treating the symptoms of group dysfunction: this is the cultural paradigm shift we seek.
Over time, however, behavior change is vulnerable to relapse. The conflicting priorities and short-term electoral cycles of cities only exacerbate this tendency. A maintenance plan can help, particularly where earlier motivation has disappeared. The technique of motivational interviewing, developed by clinical psychologists William Miller and Stephen Rollnick, gives some guidance on sustaining behavior change over the long term. It works by eliminating conflicting motivations that are inconsistent with the subject’s deeper values. Unless such ambivalence is resolved, behavioral relapse remains a serious risk. Motivational interviewing has five stages: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance.
As change is a process rather than an outcome, progression through the stages is not always linear. In that sense, periodic maintenance may be the most critical stage. How does it work? Psychologists cite three key factors. First, social support, which carries the decision maker through the detours of the change process. Second, public announcement of the plan to change, which encourages accountability. And third, the creation of an escape plan early in the change process, which preemptively anticipates threats and prompts appropriate coping strategies, improving its long-term prognosis.
4. Three cities’ change trajectories
Can behavior change interventions positively influence sustainable urban improvement? And can they bring attention to invisible solved problems as much as visibly unsolved ones, particularly in light of electoral cycles and short-term memory? How does the experience of other cities speak to this? Let’s have a look.
Curitiba
That the city of Curitiba features very high on last year’s inaugural The Competitiveness of Cities, published by the World Economic Forum, will not surprise anyone. Curitiba also ranks at the top of the Latin America Green City Index sponsored by Siemens. For many, the city’s name is synonymous with sustainability. Less talked about is the significant obstacles the city overcame and whether its formerly dire sustainability situation might have motivated its current ‘best in class’ status. Four decades ago, Curitiba’s exceptionally high population growth and declining landfill capacity yielded an unmanageable non-organic waste surplus. (In motivational interviewing terms, one might call this the city’s precontemplation stage.) This was most acute in the city’s burgeoning hillside favelas. Here, there were so few streets that garbage vehicles could barely penetrate the built fabric to clear its growing refuse piles, the runoff from which was contaminating adjacent water bodies. As vermin and disease spread, the city debated how to act. (This suggests the contemplation stage.)
Curitiba’s ‘Lixo Que Não E Lixo’ (Garbage That Is Not Garbage) programme in which informal collectors exchange sorted recyclables for local produce.
These rock-bottom conditions prompted the city to take action that ultimately led to a low-cost, world-leading waste management system. Its communication strategy was to educate children to be the agents of change who would encourage other residents to separate their garbage (reasonably tagged as the preparation stage). This Garbage Purchase program encouraged neighborhood associations to manage waste collection containers at the peripheries of hard-to-access favelas, with the incentive that each bag of sorted garbage yielded one bus ticket (clearly the action stage). There were early complications with this arrangement, but the city levered a new challenge—in the form of the 1991 cholera epidemic and its agricultural surplus—to strengthen and sustain its original improvement in the form of the Cambio Verde program, which matches sorted recyclables with local produce (arguably part of the maintenance stage, even if unorthodox). To date, Curitiba has a nearly 100 percent recycling rate.
Kitakyushu
Kitakyushu is another high performer, but one that actively touts its dramatic rise from environmental catastrophe several decades ago. In the 1960s, the city developed into one of the largest industrial cities in Japan. Lacking environmental safeguards, its adjacent Dokai Bay became so contaminated from industrial wastewater that it was soon referred to as the ‘Bay of Death’ after one study showed that even the bacteria normally endemic to saltwater bodies could not survive there (perhaps the precontemplation stage). The air fared no better. Skies were said to be filled with coal dust and ‘seven colours of smoke’ from red iron oxide particles, which alerted the public to the gravity of the situation (contemplation). Today, however, Kitakyushu bills itself as the ‘world capital of sustainable development.’
Kitakyushu’s surreal-looking Dokai Bay in the 1960s, when the city had become an industrial powerhouse but before environmental safeguards had been put in place.A contemporary view of Kitakyushu’s Dokai Bay.
How did they do it? First, the city prepared for large-scale change by capitalizing on many residents’ firsthand experience of the pollution to motivate and align interest groups to a common goal then communicated their purpose to increase public understanding and support (preparation, clearly). Then it acted by instituting voluntary pollution agreements with the private sector, setting stringent new pollution reduction targets, dredging the bay, creating pollution surveillance centres and building a model eco-town (most certainly action). Kitakyushu maintained momentum over the long term with a second phase plan focused on the new goal of reaching zero-emissions/zero-waste status through improvements in renewable energy and green space (maintenance, in a variation from Curitiba).
Copenhagen
Copenhagen residents assembled in the 1970s to demand the return of protected bike lanes.
Also at the very top of the European Green City Index, Copenhagen is a model for non-motorized transit in cities worldwide. But its trajectory is more circuitous. By the mid-20th century, urban cycling culture was widespread. But as incomes and car ownership rose in the 1960s, the city experienced a sharp modal shift toward driving (precontemplation). Traffic worsened and car parks mushroomed; even Copenhagen’s Strøget, now famous as a completely pedestrian street, was filled with cars. Change had occurred over a sufficiently quick period that the marked increase in street collisions and air pollution were perceptible. A number of protests catalyzed the eventual reintroduction of the balanced streets of Copenhagen’s pre-car era (contemplation moving into preparation).
Cycling in Copenhagen in the 2000s, after its resurgence in the 1970s.
Copenhagen took advantage of the oil crisis of the 1970s to introduce Car-Free Sundays (preparation moving into action). In the 1980s, however, the city made a number of proposals to bisect its periurban lakes with arterials connecting the city centre to its suburbs. This clear danger had the effect of motivating continuous pro-cycling advocacy over the next several decades, during which time a permanent network of pedestrianized streets and protected bike lanes grew (action). This change, which has been sustained through today, is in large part the result of reawakening consciousness of and pride in a historical culture of sustainable urban transport. And the cultural reversion has been instilled as a daily commuting practice by half of its residents, across all social strata (maintenance). Recently, the city has even assigned 50 police to ensure that ‘cycle karma’ (courteous cycling behavior) is maintained (further maintenance).
5. What do we need to do in New York?
Can we apply these cities’ successful experiences to Times Square? All three show that doing badly is an excellent initial motivator and can vault a city to the top of the pack. All three have managed to maintain behavior change over time in ways that at least roughly validate Miller and Rollnick’s motivational interviewing model. And all three now enjoy visibility at the top of several high-profile urban sustainability and performance indices. To secure continuous improvement over many short-term electoral cycles, these cities actively anticipated future threats and mined their cultural memory for retrievable opportunities. All of the above could help New York actively address its conflicting priorities and shift its public space culture.
New York comes in third in the Siemens North American Green Cities Index; first in the subcategories of land use and transport (undoubtedly reflecting its density and public and non-motorized transit infrastructure). Density and transport infrastructure require the appropriate complement of public space, such as Times Square, to function viably, but the rankings may constitute a negative incentive if these are seen as ‘mission accomplished’ and attention shifts elsewhere. Indeed, the renewed focus on ‘broken windows’ policing of public space suggests that the design priorities of the last administration have taken a back seat to the policing priorities of the administration before that. It is as if Times Square has zig-zagged through the stages of behavior change with three short-circuited cycles of preparation into action, each lacking the necessary contemplation and maintenance stages.
Times Square is not a failure of planning and design, or lacking in sustainability metrics, and certainly not suffering from an underequipped police force. On the contrary, it is a failure to address the deeper conflicts that public space embodies. New York may agree to disagree on the small stuff—what Sennett refers to as ‘difference and indifference’—but it must come to a broad agreement on big values, values such as justice and obscenity, which underlie ‘the right to the street’. Unless it does, the over-reactionary behavior will continue and the physical fabric of Times Square will likely suffer anti-human consequences.
If Times Square were to get a shrink, s/he would undoubtedly first say ‘the answers are within you’. Within whom, though? The public, the mayor, and the police force represent a promising first step. The paradigm shift we seek will require all of them to undergo a behavior shift; one that would benefit from a motivational interviewing intervention if it is to last. What would that look like?
The public
The general New York public is most responsible for actively cultivating the values and priorities (i.e. resolving the ambivalence) underlying public space culture. Too much of New York has lazily acquiesced to increased security at the price of decreased freedom (e.g. stop-and-frisk), in part because most of the public doesn’t see such policies as the Faustian bargain they are until they are directly targeted in the street. Vision Zero has directly benefited a majority of New Yorkers as well as tourists; however, those benefits may not be obvious to those who commute in private cars (nor even to pedestrians once they step into a cab). These members of the public may see the Times Square pedestrian plazas as little more than an obstruction, and though their attitude and behavior is out of sync with the majority of the city, they are still part of—and have an outsized impact on—daily urban function.
These issues might be handled best through better precontemplation and contemplation, which would help the public understand that change is necessary and then help it resolve its ambivalence toward core public space issues. What might the public contemplate? For starters, why do we consider a bare female nipple obscene, but not a toddler killed by an SUV that fails to yield to it on a crosswalk? How is it just for 25 percent of those using the street (from within a car) to occupy 75 percent of its area? Do we really want to arrest people for actions that merely shock our sensibilities (and have we considered how that might that backfire)? As Sennett puts it, are ‘isolation and segregation better than the risks entailed in interaction?’ ‘[C]ommunities have to decide […] [b]ut this is a decision which…should result after the experience of…exposure to difference rather than flight from contact.’ Such a process must also proactively deal with the person who is paranoid about crime, hysteric about nudity and narcissistic about parking his SUV in a protected bike lane.
The Mayor
Mayors are heavily incentivized by the prospect of being reelected by the public. This is not inherently bad, but their zeal to prove themselves strong leaders should not necessarily mean erasing the successes of their predecessors. Mayoral priority setting would benefit from a strengthened process of contemplation. Much of the Times Square pedestrian plaza’s benefits contribute directly to reducing the risk of pedestrian injury and death, which are overarching aims of Mayor de Blasio’s own signature effort, Vision Zero (which even revived and won a decades-old battle with New York State to reduce the speed limit throughout New York City from nearly 50 km/to 40 km/hr [30 to 25 mph]). But Vision Zero needs to lead a wider, long-term cultural shift, rather than simply establishing a new law and set of design precedents. If it does not, it may die an early death in the hands of de Blasio’s successor.
De Blasio would also do well to contemplate New York’s long term cultural legacy. From its genesis, the city was the cosmopolitan, tolerant ‘New Netherland’. The continued viability of Times Square as ‘crossroads of the world’ may depend on de Blasio exercising his moral force to explain these values to visitors, many of whom may be less open to encountering the unexpected—Desnudas, for example—in public space. (Bloomberg, his predecessor, once dismissed criticism of a mosque being built near ground zero by saying ‘whether you like a mosque or don’t…you don’t have to go […] within four blocks of the World Trade Center…there’s [also] porno places…I mean it’s a vibrant community, it’s New York.’ Or, as Sennett puts it, ‘[c]osmopolitanism is stimulation by the presence of others but not identification with them.’) If cities anywhere have any hope of accommodating heterogeneous groups of people, then Times Square needs to continue transcribing the ideals contained in New York’s DNA.
The police
Rather than the Mayor, though, it is the police that regularly interact with the public. Though the NYPD advertises ‘courtesy, professionalism, respect’ as its motto, how many members of the police force share those values? Officer Frascatore’s recent body-slamming of James Blake—one of a long string of abuses that have gone unpunished by Bratton—suggests that the advertisement seeks to compensate for the very attributes the NYPD lacks. Though the police remain exempt from city residence requirements, they must still have respect for the values of those actually living here. Some form of group therapy might help them overcome their defensive posturing and to listen to what security and quality of life really mean for the resident public. But Police Commissioner Bratton and his force cannot be part of the change process until they start enforcing laws as they are: key aspects of Vision Zero, such as the right-of-way law, are still widely unenforced, while legal acts, such as toplessness, continue to be punished.
Bratton continues to argue that ‘broken windows’ policing preempts more serious crime down the line, but action without contemplation or preparation is rarely effective in the long term. Making something unpleasant illegal does not make it disappear, much less address its deeper causes. The NYPD also needs to reconsider the justice in catching all guilty at the price of harming many innocent and end its quota system, which incentivizes arrests. Though this may be difficult in a post-9/11 era, the appalling policing situation to which it has led in this country is another ‘rock bottom’ opportunity for 180-degree behavior change. To start with, the NYPD would benefit from contemplation of the values behind proposals by the City Council to decriminalize certain low-level public space offenses—such as drinking alcohol and riding a bicycle on the sidewalk—which they currently oppose. Finally, adequate preparation would help them enforce these progressive new laws once they are adopted.
Times Square must allow for the possibility of appropriation by an unintended use or it will never evolve as public space must. ‘It is possible to contrive places and spaces which allow for the gradual evolution and opening up of rituals of behavior, so that people experience both form and change.’ Opening up the rituals of behavior will not be easy (and it certainly won’t happen within cars), but until we do, the Times Square pedestrian plaza may not have sufficient cultural support to ultimately stick. And until the average New Yorker regards cars hitting pedestrians as (preventable) collisions rather than (unavoidable) accidents, Vision Zero may also be vulnerable.
Fixing Times Square’s underlying dysfunctions might appear to be daunting. But why can’t we handle them? Other cities have handled much more (and with smaller budgets). Why shouldn’t the public space of Times Square serve as a catalyst for solving multiple systemic dysfunctions? After all, Lefebvre wisely reminded us that all social relations are merely hypothetical until they are spatialized. It is not a question of whether New York can tackle its biggest issues through public space: it is an imperative that it must.
To truly learn the lessons from shutting down the Poletti power plant, we must confront environmental injustice and replace isolation with community. Among other things, that means electing politicians committed to social justice.
In 2013, the New York Power Authority razed the Charles Poletti Power Plant in Astoria, NY. In doing so, Power Authority removed what local elected official Michael Gianaris had characterized as a “symbol[] of pollution that haunted [the] neighborhood”. The characterization was an apt one. The Poletti Plant had for years been the single-biggest polluter in New York City. In 2000, the Poletti plant alone spewed 263,376 tons of pollutants into the airshed—more air emissions than the rest of the city combined. Not surprisingly, the surrounding community was part of New York City’s asthma alley: a band of elevated asthma rates that stretches from the Bronx through Queens. The plant posed a particular risk to the thousands of children in Astoria’s three major public housing projects, including Astoria Houses—largest public housing project in the United States. One local leader claimed that, as a result of the pollution, birds would not nest in Astoria. The story of shutting down the Poletti is a tale worth telling, and a potential template for successful environmental justice advocacy.
Beginning operation in 1977, the 885 megawatt facility was named for New York’s 46th Governor Charles Poletti. If there is anything in a name, the Poletti facility had an auspicious one. Charles Poletti graduated from Harvard Law School, served on the New York State Supreme Court, and been elected New York’s Lieutenant Governor alongside Governor Herbert H. Lehman. Poletti had the distinction of being the first Italian-American governor in the United States (albeit serving only 29 days to complete Lehman’s term after Lehman joined the World War II effort). During World War II, Lieutenant-Colonel Poletti was in charge of restoring essential public services in occupied Italy. After the war, New York Governor Averell Harrimann appointed Poletti to the New York State Power Authority. So, when the Astoria generating facility was named in his honor, it had a lot to live up to. Sadly, the facility was far less impressive than its namesake. Indeed, by the time Charles Poletti died in 2002, New York Power Authority was mired in litigation with angry neighbors bent on shutting the dirty, polluting facility.
The Poletti plant served the state and local government; generating electricity to run schools, public hospitals, government offices and New York’s extensive subway and electric commuter train system. However, the toll it imposed on the surrounding community of Astoria was immense. The Poletti Plant ranked among the dirtiest plants in the United States.
In 2002, the year NYPA agreed to shutter the facility, the Poletti emitted more than 78,000 pounds of sulfuric acid, and that was a 78% decrease from 1998 when the plant emitted more than 358,000 pounds of pollutants.
That year, the Poletti also released 38 tons of small particulates (PM2.5), 44 tons of larger particulates (PM10) 1311 tons of sufur dioxide, 78 tons of volatile organic compounds, and over 2000 tons of nitrous oxides.
Despite this immense pollution load, New York Power Authority proposed to add a new 500 MW facility alongside the Poletti plant. Astoria was already home to 60% of New York City’s generating capacity and the local community objected to an additional polluting facility in their neighborhood. Their legal strategy was innovative, involving a coalition between Natural Resouces Defense Council, a national environmental group, New York Public Interest Research Group, a New York environmental group, and a community NGO called the Coalition Helping Organize a Kleaner Environment (CHOKE). Joining with local politicians, and public housing leaders, the coalition intervened in the administrative permitting process and challenged the issuance of a “certificate of environmental compatibility and public need”—a legal prerequisite for the new facility. The coalition argued that the community was already overburdened, and that the additional particulate pollution from the new, albeit cleaner facility would jeopardize public health and environmental safety.
While that proceeding was ongoing, another environmental justice group was attacking New York Power Authority from a different angle. In 2001, the Power Authority announced plans to install eleven additional natural gas turbine units around New York City. This plan was nominally in response to the rolling blackouts that California had suffered that summer (which were later revealed to have been caused by Enron’s market manipulations, not an actual shortage of generating capacity). Each of the proposed new units could generate 44 MW of power, and the majority of the units were to be placed in pairs at multiple sites around New York City. Thus, the paired units could together generate 88MW of power. Under New York Law at the time, any facility capable of generating 80 MW or more was deemed a “major generating facility”, a label that triggered a host of public hearings and certification requirements (called an Article X application). However, the Power Authority obtained an exception by promising that each pair would be configured to generate only 79.9 MW of electricity—just below the 80 MW threshold.
The Power Authority then concluded that there would be no negative environmental impacts from this project, and that the cumulative impacts of the proposed eleven turbines would be insignificant.
UPROSE, an environmental justice group, sued, alleging that NYPA failed to adequately consider the environmental impacts of the plan. Although UPROSE lost at the trial level, the appellate court overturned the decision, and found that there were potential environmental impacts sufficient to require an environmental impact statement. In particular, the court required NYPA to assess the impacts from PM2.5—small particulate pollution that can cause or worsen respiratory and cardiovascular disease.
The anti-Poletti coalition used the UPROSE decision to its advantage, persuading regulators to order a hearing on particulate matter associated with the Astoria facility. This administrative ruling gave the coalition leverage that they used to strike a deal. In exchange for a withdrawal of coalition objections to the new 50 MW plant, the Power Authority committed to a six to eight year timetable for shutting down the dirty Poletti Plant, converting to the cleanest fuel available, investing in the community, and reducing the Poletti’s operation during the interim. So, the dirtiest plant in New York City was replaced with a facility reputed to be “one of America’s cleanest”. Perhaps learning from poor Poletti’s tarnished name, the replacement facility was simply called Astoria I.
In the years since Poletti shut down, the air quality in Astoria has improved markedly. Particulate pollutants have plummeted.
Asthma hospitalizations are down well below the average for New York City.
American Lung Association. Source: http://www.stateoftheair.org/2015/states/new-york/queens.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/Source: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/data/2015chp-qn01.pdf
A cleaner environment has taken a toll on the community in a different way. Gentrification is rife, with property values increasing 75% in the years since the Poletti Plant was shuttered. Long-time residents are beginning to find themselves priced out of the neighborhood they fought to improve.
The saga for shutting down Poletti served as inspiration for Bina’s Plant, Book 2 of the Environmental Justice Chronicles soon to be released by the Center for Urban Environmental Reform.
Cover from the forthcoming Environmental Justice Chronicles, by La Greca and Bratspies.
I wish I had a brick from the Poletti. I would display it in my office as both a celebration and a reminder. Environmental justice victories are rare enough that they need to be savored, but it is vital that the benefits of those victories redound to all citizens, and that those who achieve those victories are not pushed out of their neighborhoods.
So what lessons does shutting down the Poletti offer for other similar campaigns? First, collaboration is key—local groups must lead the way, but they need resources and support from state-wide and national groups. Second, it helps when local politicians are fully on board. With the campaign to shut Poletti, elected officials joined the lawsuits, and used the platform of their office to advocate for environmental protection.
That sounds so simple. Yet, too often, institutionalized racism is a barrier to achieving the kind of cooperation that was so successful in the Poletti campaign. De facto segregation and racialized voting can leave poor and minority communities isolated in their battle against pollution in their neighborhoods. Air quality in those communities can stagnate or even decrease, even as rest of the city improves. For example, even though New York City now has the cleanest air since monitoring began, asthma rates are still unacceptably high in parts of the Bronx and Manhattan, with black and Latino/a children hardest hit.
Child asthma in Harlem, compared the rest of New York. Source: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/data/2015chp-mn11.pdfChild asthma in Mott Haven and Melrose, The Bronx, compared the rest of New York. Source: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/data/2015chp-mn11.pdf
We can and must do better. To truly learn the lessons from shutting down the Poletti, we must confront environmental injustice and replace isolation with community. Among other things, that means electing politicians committed to social justice. National environmental groups must also do their part to confront their past disengagement with issues environmental justice. Fortunately, this kind of rethinking is already starting to happen.
The fractal idea revisited in an attempt to make the concept clearer on a day-to-day, more visceral basis.
In my first blog for TNOC I outlined my concept of an ‘urban fractal’ and noted my fascination with the idea that “one might be able to identify patterns in urban systems that could provide a systematic model for developing cities that can always and simultaneously incorporate the essential characteristics of ecologically sustainable urbanism—and that this might be applicable across the spectrum from eco-village to metropolis.” I described an urban fractal as “a network that contains the essential characteristics of the larger network of the city” and that “Each fractal will possess nodes, or centres, and patterns of connectivity that define its structure and organisation, and it will exhibit characteristics of community associated with living processes.”
The ‘essential characteristics’ of ecologically sustainable urbanism most certainly have to do with physical structures and infrastructures that deliver energy and water efficiency, low-to-no waste regimes, clean air and biophysically healthy environments but those are relatively easy to describe. The hard bits are to do with the requirement that each fractal “will exhibit characteristics of community associated with living processes”. It’s hard because communities and living processes are messy, squishy, fluid, tricky to define and full of people who may have their own ideas about how to make their community.
For some time I’ve been wanting to flesh out the idea of urban fractals so that non-specialists might find it more readily understandable and to reinforce the message that this concept is not about making arcane geometric patterns but is about the patterns that manifest in the tapestry of activities and relationships that make up daily life. It’s personal and it’s political.
Urban fractals can be described in terms of acceptable metrics and there are superb analyses of the fractal nature of city form and development (notably by Salat et al and Batty and Longley) but these invariably discuss the workings of urban life in formalistic terms and, of necessity, resort to jargon. I don’t think most citizens affected by these things would make much sense of the language that professionals employ to discuss them. Too often, planning processes tend away from reification and towards generalities and abstraction and unintended alienation. As both an urban theorist and a real person, I have to admit that this preoccupies me. It preoccupies me because when one’s rhetoric is all about community engagement, and claims that an urban fractal is “a particular type of cultural fractal”, I think it should be accessible to non-specialists and, well, ‘ordinary’ citizens.
A place called Semaphore
This blog is thus an attempt to describe some of the ‘essential characteristics’ of urban fractals in a way that non-specialist might find acceptable and accessible. Based on my own experience of the neighbourhood I’ve lived in for the past three years, it describes parts of the urban fractal idea using the example of a place called Semaphore, in South Australia. It is part photo-essay but the images are not generic, they are specific to a particular place. The same could be done for any neighbourhood as a way to find its fractal threads.
There are any number of characteristics that might be used to define an urban fractal but to try and keep the list reasonably manageable I propose the following:
For these to become attributes of an ecocity or ecopolis, each characteristic has to be adjusted accordingly:
It’s the only town in the world named after a flag-waving communications system . Write a letter addressed simply to Semaphore, and there is no other destination it could be headed to (although whether modern, machine-based postal sorting systems can handle that level of simplicity is a moot point). On a reserve close to the foreshore, Semaphore boasts one of the world’s remaining 60 or so timeballs, still standing, still signalling the need to synchronise our chronometers if we want to find our longitude at sea without GPS.
Until it’s occupied, a town, village or city is not alive. Though its buildings, streets and squares may resonate with the marks of human manufacture it remains as dead as an archaeological dig, its timeball frozen until its empty vessels are filled with people doing all the messy, amazing things that people do to bring urban structures to life. Technology doesn’t make cities. People make cities. All the technology in the world can’t guarantee that things will perform as planned, act as advised or deliver as prescribed. The most advanced aircraft in the world can still be flown into a mountain.
Invisible people
I keep coming back to the realisation that the things that make all the difference, the things that make it all work, don’t show up in plans at all. The blueprints for our cities don’t show people. The professionals involved in the making of our built environment rarely embrace the engagement of the wider community in their planning processes. A lot of architects prefer that their buildings are photographed without people in the shots.
Then there are all the non-human species that help make up the populations of our cities and towns. For the most part they are ignored or regarded as a nuisance or even an enemy. Yes, I know that there are now a lot more design professionals who understand that trees and landscaping deserve more important consideration in their plans than that of merely providing decorative finishes to streetscapes or making generic green space, but I’m not convinced that they are yet in the ascendant—proof to the contrary remains elusive. And there is so much more to non-human occupation of our urban systems than that.
Very few of the human population of a city are ever asked directly about their needs and demands; some take advantage of electoral processes and other ways to influence decision-makers but true plebiscites are rare. The non-human population has no voice or representation at all apart from departments of the environment and sundry under-funded activists. In the absence of Dr Dolittle, who can present a voice for the animals? We have to make do with environmental campaigners and ecologists! The insights and information provided by them needs to be built into design and development programs for our cities and urban systems; think in terms of creating design guidelines for non-human species. No ecocity urban fractal can be complete without them. This blog only begins to hint at the wealth of life that can be found in an unassuming non-ecocity urban fractal—imagine what might be there if we were shaping our neighbourhoods with non-human species given equal weight to us.
Urban fractals are about describing society and its relationship with the environment. Thus they are inevitably about society, culture, politics and, to my own surprise, an acknowledgement of the importance of the people who are the social glue, the people who are cultural catalysts and make us laugh and cry and think, and the much maligned people who stir the pot of politics.
Although it has a strong sense of identity, Semaphore has no autonomy as a political entity. It has been subsumed as a suburb within the City of Port Adelaide Enfield, which is a relatively recent creation that incorporates previously separate council areas and has boundaries which reflect political expediency rather than any sense of place. As Jayne Engle and Nik Luka remind us: “Cities must be seen holistically as containing overlapping and nested neighborhoods.” Neighbourhoods are getting noticed. In Amsterdam, as the city’s compact centre begins to suffer from too much pedestrian traffic (in Australian car-centric cities we can only dream of such a thing) neighbourhoods are being rediscovered as a funky new tourist destinations. This reinforces the idea that the liveliness of cities is not only found in their centres but is part of their whole fabric, manifest in the local communities of neighbourhoods. We’ve known how to make neighbourhoods intuitively for generations, now there’s increasing interest in figuring out what defines and makes a neighbourhood work – and refining the concept of the urban fractal is part of that quest.
Community by numbers?
How do you make community? You can’t really prescribe it, even if products like the Green Star – Communities rating tool developed by the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA) do an excellent job of melding business and environmental concerns with developer interests in a way that incorporates ‘stakeholder engagement’. Developed “in close collaboration with the market, including all three tiers of government, public and private sector developers, professional services providers, academia, product manufacturers and suppliers and other industry groups” the tool will assuredly help create better developments than might otherwise occur. But a cynic might argue that it is also a product of how curiously neutered political life is at the civic level. It is more about cautious market research than it is about stirring the body politic to new heights of creativity and imagination. It is nicely ordered stuff. But surely, there’s more to real life than that?
Of course, there’s probably an algorithm for it all, but if we are going to rely on any kind of professionally distanced or centralised systems to identify the patterns that inform the algorithms that shape the spaces that house the neighbourhood then we abdicate the imperatives of real community that cause people to talk to each other and explore the myriad possibilities of relationships and actions that are nascent in human society. Community, like a sense of place, is an emergent property of place, circumstance and behaviour and a computer algorithm or rating tool can’t force it into existence. Sub-cultures and communities of interest, be they chambers of commerce or knitting circles, are the grit that can catalyse the production of neighbourhood pearls. Almost any situation involving some level of conflict or difficulty can catalyse the coming together of people that begins community, and so can spontaneous mutual aid, where people cooperate to help each other out because each person benefits in some way from that cooperation. It doesn’t have to be dramatic—“The people who live along the beachside street walk each others dogs, have street parties and collect their neighbours’ bins”—and whether it’s based on self-interest or altruism really doesn’t matter if the result is “We’ve become friends and it makes it easier because everyone looks out for each other” (‘Friends sharing and caring on Arthur St’ p.3 Portside Messenger 25 March 2015 ).
Neighbourhoods are increasingly recognised as a key reasons in selecting a home
The community that I know, the fractal that supports me, is one with a main street that has almost every shop and service that Chérie and I need on a daily basis. The butcher, the barber, the newsagent, the multi-cultural cafés, the post office, the small, friendly supermarkets, the pub, the pharmacies, the takeaway Chinese joint, the record store that still sells real records, all get a visit on a regular basis; the local service station, the dry cleaner where they remodel clothes, the shoe shop, the optometrist, the physiotherapist, banks, they’re all within easy walking distance; and when the grandchildren come around there’s a playground, the foreshore and the beach. And there’s much more, including churches, schools, dentists, a sweet shop (candy store), pet and garden store, sports grounds, meeting halls, and a community garden. And there’s the legendary RSL (Returned Servicemen’s League) club with cheap curries, live music and a remarkable history.
My neighbour brought me gluten-free muffins morning as I wrote this essay.
This is but a sample of what this neighbourhood can provide. Properly speaking, it is a small town. It has a strong sense of neighbourhood. It’s the sort of place where informal discounts are common, pay tomorrow that’s OK is acceptable, where an expectation of honesty is the default condition. It’s a place where people still seem to trust each other. Even the troubled and damaged citizens living on welfare are treated like the human beings they are, rather than statistics or worse. And all the time there is a strong connection with nature, with the ever-changing sea always visible right down the end of the main street. This place is alive.
How does one design for this to happen? Is it possible?
Stuart Gifford’s streetscape drawings
Someone else’s perception of this urban fractal will be different. There will be shared dots in the picture but connected to form a slightly different pattern. The network of connections is very unlikely be the same for any two Semaphorians but the effect of completeness and general daily experience will be very similar. The range of possible patterns of connection is enormous (I’d love a statistician work out a few figures because quoting numbers always lends an air of authority to this sort of thing – offers anyone?) and this is part of what underpins the perception of rich diversity in a well-used place. And isn’t that true of ecosystems generally? The larger the number of potential destinations, the more potential there is for forming different connections and the richer and more diverse are the observable patterns of behaviour.
The energy of a place like Semaphore comes from people who live and work there and maintain the luxuries and necessities of daily life. The future of a place like Semaphore is determined, in part, by its history, and the course of history is disrupted by people who have dreams or despair of how it might turn out. Ordinary people are rarely ordinary. The Semaphore Workers’ Club was the home of Australia’s strongest Communist Party for many years (and arguably still is). Under the cloak of normalcy, visions stir. Operator of tills, cookers, kitchen sinks and the iconic small business of Sarah’s Sister’s Sustainable Café, Semaphorian Stuart Gifford is one who constantly tears that cloak in response to such stirrings. His drawings of the main street of Semaphore capture something of its diversity and richness of place. The industrial past of Port Adelaide is barely a mile away from Semaphore and is, in some ways, its Siamese twin. Knowing this, Stuart’s drawings of how the Port could transform into an ecological city give more than a few clues as to how Semaphore itself might be trained to develop into the kind of place that might survive this era of catastrophic climate change.
The streetscape sketches are by Stuart Gifford from a few years ago. Some of the names have shifted or changed but I think that the general effect and sense of the diversity of the place comes through beautifully. Drawing by Stuart Gifford, used with permission.
Musings on design guidelines for non-human species
When we design and build environments for particular human purposes—a school perhaps, or a sports facility—we draw on the expertise of people we are familiar with and their requirements in order to write an appropriate brief. The same should apply when we want to build in a way that actively supports, rather than merely tolerates, the needs of other species. The equation is a simple one, the basis of straightforward programming:
IF we want A, THEN we have to have B
IF we want X, THEN we need Y.
There are examples: the specification of particular species of flora to attract particular species of fauna to assist in maintaining biodiversity.
Non-human species do sometimes get consideration in urban planning and management; in this case the City of Port Adelaide Enfield seeks help in trying to protect coastal biodiversity.
The hard thing is to find a way to give the other species priority. From their point of view, there is precious little evidence to date that we have done anything other than seek to eradicate or diminish the environment on which they (and ultimately, we) depend. A major cultural shift is needed and it needs to be a shift that does not rely on monetised values of nature for its legitimacy. The market is slippery and unfair and gives very high value to things and processes that create massive environmental (and social) damage. In the perverse world of the market, whether free, controlled or clandestine, the last tigers, elephants—you name it—are being killed because they are so valuable in monetised terms. As the number of dodos diminished, they were valued ever more highly by the market. The cultural shift has to be one that recognises the intrinsic value of other species, not their price in the market place.
Humans adopt their own priorities as they continually change the environment for all species and ecosystems
In the same way that everyone is a distinct individual, every community is unique. It is special within itself, but like every living system on the planet it dies or thrives in response to objective conditions and the level of nurture it can obtain from its environment. As our species has grown ever more invasive and manipulative, so those objective conditions have become increasingly dependent on human behaviour. Unknowingly, or with intent, we play god. That play takes place on the world stage and threatens the viability of the global biosphere, and it takes place in living rooms and backyards whenever we make a choice about how we obtain our energy, water and daily bread. And however individual those choices may seem, we are inescapably social creatures so they are always the result of feelings shared and exchanged, the communing of minds and the dance of personalities.
We know from experience that the world is susceptible to our collective action and that action is grounded in community. It is there, for good or ill, that we make things happen. Semaphore may not be an ecological city, but like many small communities around the world, within its fractal essence, it bears the seeds that could grow one. But for those seeds to grow, there needs to be some effective planning at the neighbourhood scale.
Long-distance seasonal visitors, like this Pacific Gull, make Semaphore their home and meld with the edges of its ecology
“Neighborhood plans should contain a practical utopian vision for the neighborhood within the larger city, which is translated into medium-term policies and programs but also actions that can be taken on a short-term timeframe”, write Jayne Engle & Nik Luka. This doesn’t really exist in Semaphore. The closest it gets is local government planning and that happens at a level of scale which is outside that of the Semaphore fractal. There have been local business organisations that had some impact on creating events (the Semaphore Street Fair still runs annually) and there have been some attempts by small groups of interested locals to organise events to bring together and catalyse neighbourhood energy, notably through the auspices of Stuart Gifford’s café, but there is no effective organisation that can claim to be undertaking planning for the neighbourhood based on any kind of vision of what Semaphore might become. In this, Semaphore is not unusual, but to gird our loins for the battle with climate change and ecological instability that’s now rising on the horizon like a tsunami, every neighbourhood urban fractal needs to be planning for itself, working out how to turn its social energy into an effective force for positive change so that the patterns that make daily life functional, fun or fulfilling can continue.
Rising seas are an uncomfortable fact and will have to be factored into any serious plans for the future
In the long term, to continue this thought experiment further—if Semaphore were to evolve into an ecocity urban fractal it would need to exhibit the characteristics of a fully-featured ecopolis [see my first blog and the box] in order to possess the resilience and autonomy required for surviving climate change and the 7 metres of sea level rise that would transform it into an island.
As our walk enters Europe, we see the small things that signal lackluster economic growth and a sense of helplessness and hopelessness in many small villages, towns and cities.
It has been raining all afternoon in Megali Sterna, a village in the north of Greece, and, from the empty and closed café we have been sitting in for hours, it looks like the rain will continue into the evening.
We scan the neighborhood for a dry place to pitch our tent, a daily part of our Asia-to-Europe walk.
No one is around to ask for help; it’s a summer afternoon, and people are resting in their homes. The rain encourages them to stay inside.
We find an old school, abandoned for years, it seems. The walls and roof are intact, but shattered glass from the long-forgotten windows is splayed all over the floor, classroom doors are missing, toilet bowls have been yanked out of bathrooms and dripping rain water falls into puddles pooled in the hallways. We use a few tree branches to sweep away the dust in a small corner that will be our home for the night, the only option we have today. We stare at the red graffiti scribbled on white walls and names of kids etched into the left-behind chalkboards.
Map of our walk so far: Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina
A short while later, a boy about 12-years-old sporting a hooded sweatshirt strolls through the school hallway. We hear the rap music from his phone before we see him. He glances into the classroom where we are camping. I wave. He nods.
A few minutes later, two teenage girls pass through the same hallway. We hear them chatting before they reach the classroom. We wave and say hello in Greek. They return the greeting, and keep strolling through the school. We hear them giggle as their footsteps fade on the dirty concrete floor.
Tent old school (white walls with red graffiti). We camped in this old school in Megali Sterna, Greece to escape the all-day rain storm. Local teenagers pass through its dilapidated halls and rooms because the few park benches were wet, and there was nowhere else to go.
It doesn’t take long before another group of pre-teens and teens finds us. There are few young people in this village, and word has spread that tourists are sleeping in the old school.
A group of five young women from 10 to 17 years old enter the classroom. The boy with the sweatshirt and his friend will join the group a bit later.
“Are you okay? Do you need anything?” asks one of the older teens in excellent English.
“Thank you for asking. Yes, we are fine. It’s been raining all day, and this was the only dry place we could find to sleep in tonight. Is it okay that we sleep here?” I say, half-asking and half-telling. Our tent is already up, and unless the police come and tell us to leave, we know we’re here until tomorrow’s first light.
“It’s okay that you stay here. It will rain during the night,” she says. “The rain has made all the park benches wet, so we hang out in the school.”
The school, which was used by their parents and grandparents, has been closed for years, her whole life, at least, she tells us. The village children are bused to schools in other towns, but the ruined building we are all gathered in still serves a purpose, a sad one at that.
“It’s better to hang out here than to stay inside our houses all day,” another young lady says, shrugging her shoulders at the normalcy of being in this run-down place. “There’s nowhere else for us to go.”
This “nowhere else to go and nothing else to do” concept follows us through our last stretch of Turkey, into Greece and deep into the Balkans. It shows up as abandoned buildings used by children and young people who have no parks to play in or when their parks are not well maintained. It also shows up in adult circles in the form of bars, cafes, and betting places where men stay for hours sipping their beverage of choice and hope lady luck puts a bit of extra cash in their pockets.
The “regular” tourist passing through these regions by car or bus may never notice these things. It seems like a normal thing that people sip coffee or rakija, ouzo, or other distilled liquors some part of the day. It is waved off as part of the country’s culture. And the falling apart facades fade into the wide landscape where wheat fields have been cut and rolls of hay are waiting for a tractor to haul them into a farmhouse.
To us, walkers who have traveled about 13,000 kilometers by foot over more than 2.5 years at a snail’s pace of three kilometers an hour, the increasingly noticeable presence of these overlooked village, town and city aspects take on a different meaning. They are signs of depressed economies, and resonate with a sense of helplessness and hopelessness.
Where the kids go
While many of the places we walk through have manicured gardens, playgrounds where kids can climb and jump, and nice parks and cafes to sit in, there are many other places that catch us off guard.
In the mid-size town of Burrell, Albania, for instance, we take a rest on the steps of what by all counts looks to be an abandoned apartment building, something built in the 1960s when square functionality was the design trend among architects. Its better days are far behind it, and the chipped paint, broken glass and gray lobby vestibule make us think the building has been out of use for years, maybe decades.
But, then we hear it. The sound of young people talking, and the echo of billiard balls colliding. They are confusing sounds in the context of decay.
Some of the children, most of them about 10-12 years old, find us and, with bright-eyed curiosity, quiz us about our walking journey. When they run out questions, they tell us they are going back inside to play.
We walk off as the crack of a new game of billiards begins.
A few weeks later, in Podhum, Bosnia and Herzegovina, memories of our night in the old Greek school return.
Dark picture with window of light caption: In Podhum, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the walls of the basement of a still-functioning school are riddled with bullet holes, which we believed may have been from the war in the early 1990s. Despite its eerie feel, young people seem to be comfortable here. The graffitied names of boys and girls scribbled on all the walls, the chip packages and energy drink cans strewn about and the pile of cigarettes butts give us the impression of teens who want to hide their smoking habit from their parents, and have few other hangout options.
Pouring rain forces us to stay in a dry but creepy auditorium, the small basement room of a school that seems to still be in use and where classes may start in the coming days. The gate door barely hangs on its hinges. Some of the heart symbol graffiti about who loves who dates back to the mid-1980s, and we speculate that the bullet shells lodged into the walls are reminders of the war that swept through the former Yugoslavian countries in the 1990s.
The room is littered with water bottles, soda and energy drink cans, and potato chip packages. The pile of cigarette butts in one corner make us think young people come here to hide their smoking habits from their parents, or, like the young people in the Greek village we met, they have nowhere else to go, especially on cold and rainy nights in this rural, hilly area. A distant thought clouds over: could this place be a stopover point for refugees and migrants escaping from Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Africa? It’s a very real possibility as parts of our European walk parallels theirs.
The number of abandoned buildings we see during this leg of our journey these last several months raises bigger questions. What’s really going on here in this part of the world is one of the things we keep asking ourselves.
Where the men go
Sometimes the answer is right in front of us, sitting at one of the many bars and cafes we can’t help but run into.
Very frequently, the bars and cafes we have passed from Çanakkale, Turkey to Bihac, Bosnia and Herzegovina are filled with an intergenerational mix of men. The old men are usually farmers or pensioners living on a budget; the young men typically in their 20s are mostly unemployed. They all drink the same thing: Coffee, beer, and raki/rakija (the name and spelling of this hard liquor changes as we move through each country, but it’s always present).
“I lived in Germany for a while, and made a lot of money. But, I was sent back here, and now I have nothing. No savings, no job, nothing,” an Albanian 20-something-year-old tells us during another rainy afternoon when we are trapped inside a smoky bar where Latin American Spanish music is the choice beat from their YouTube TV connection. “What am I going to do? There’s no work in this country. I come here (to this bar) every day. I’m here all day. These guys are like my family.”
We glance around the room and have mixed feelings about these men. The resignation about their lot in life is evident on their faces. But, we are not ones who dole out pity.
“Why don’t you create work? There must be something that can create a better economic situation here,” I say, almost pleading.
The young man tells us what many others tell us in every country we walk through: The government doesn’t work; the politicians are corrupt, and people don’t have any chance to make money. He says the only job he may get is cutting trees deep in the forest, and that’s not appealing work. He wants to go back to Germany and get a job translating Albanian, German and English, but he needs certificates he can’t afford unless he takes the work as a lumberjack.
It is a cycle that feeds the helpless and hopelessness bubbling just below the surface, and shadows the easy-going conversations we have in places where hospitality to visitors is a underlining principle.
The increasing number of sport betting places, usually attached to the bar and cafes where men hang out, doesn’t help matters.
Sidewalk and signs of betting places caption: There are no shortages of places to bet throughout Turkey, Greece and most of the Balkan countries we have passed. They are often attached to the cafès where men go to drink Turkish-style coffee, beer and the local version of rakija, raki, ouzo or other distilled liquors; in many places, they are located a few doors down from money transfer shops, where family members living abroad send money to relatives back home.
“Ninety-nine percent of the men watching this match have money on the game,” observes our host in Bitola, one of Macedonia’s few cities, swirling his finger around 360 degrees pointing to the World Cup soccer match being broadcasted on every television in every café and restaurant along the main pedestrian street. “Everyone says they have no money. But there is always money for coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, and a bet on the game.”
Our host in Thessaloniki, a big Greek city off of our walking route that we visited for a few days, mentions something similar.
In Greece, a country that was hard hit in the last recession and whose people are struggling with European Union imposed economic austerity measures and high unemployment rates, betting places recently became legal, and they are popping up everywhere, our host explains. Often during our walk, we notice a handful of betting places just a few meters away from each other on the same street, and sometimes they are near money transfer shops where people receive cash from relatives living and working abroad.
“It’s another way to prey on the poor. People earn little money, and they think if they win a few Euros, that will help them out of their hole. But, they never win,” he says, shaking his head at the illogical behavior capitalism fuels.
This is the push and pull we feel as we walk.
When we have the good fortune to find people who speak enough English and are willing to have more thoughtful conversations with us about their lives and dreams, they tell us what they want. They want a bigger house, a car (or another better, higher-end car), another television, nicer clothes, and, yes, better education and life opportunities for their children, who they hope will make enough money to take care of them when they are old. The story is the same almost everywhere we go, from Asia to Europe.
But, who really has access and resources to turn this wishful thinking into reality? How viable is this line of thinking in the near-term? And further into the future.
Will the children who listen to rap music or play billiards in destroyed buildings be the ones to turn their local economies around? Will the young guy who hangs his hope on getting out of wherever he lives and earning paycheck in another country come back and build something the generations after him will benefit from? Will governments create initiatives to help their people living both in cities and rural areas do more than survive?
We walk on mulling over these questions and inventing philosophical possibilities for the people we meet along the way.
Signs of depressed urban and rural economies blur our vision. It’s a long road ahead for all of us, for the people we meet who want something more than they have and for us the walkers who have learned to live with less. One step at a time often feels too slow for such a big undertaking.
A lot of recent discussion around urban planning, resilience, and sustainable cities has included ideas about community engagement. How do we get the public more engaged in urban planning in ways that are effective — that honors good design, evidence-based science and community desires? Having decided that community engagement is a good idea doesn’t make it easy. My friend and colleague PK Das of Mumbai has been involved in a lot of public engagement around the expansion of open spaces, and he said something insightful. One the one hand, plopping a big plan with an elaborate drawing down in front of an audience is not exactly engagement — in fact, it can easily be a buzz kill. On the other hand, when I asked Das what for him was the biggest difficulty, he responded: “As a professional, it is resisting the temptation to try an control the proceedings; I need to relax and be a participant.”
So there it is. How can we meld expert opinion (plus facts and science) and non-expert opinion (just as valid, but different) in a way that honors and includes both?
I am very excited about engagement exercises that use simulation models as tools to get people talking not just about their opinions, but about the consequences of their opinions. Incorporating simulation models explicitly into community dialogues is an approach to this. That is, individuals or groups can sit down with a computer simulator of, say, how green infrastructure performs in storm water capture. The people can arrange green roofs, or parks, or street trees on the landscape and the model calculates for them how much storm water has been captured using their design. The science and expert knowledge are built into the inner workings of the simulator (the “black box”). Individuals can try out their designs and social ideas using the model as context, and have the model give some feedback about the how their ideas would work on the ground. Their ideas are taken out of the realm of unverified opinion and placed in a context in which their function, output, and outcomes can be compared. You might still prefer one type of design to another, but its performance could now be part of the decision mix.
Mannahatta 2409
A fantastic new example of such a simulator is now available in a testing phase (“Beta”) version. It is called Mannahatta2409 and is an outgrowth of Wildlife Conservation Society ecologist Eric Sanderson’s work to reconstruct what Manhattan island looked like in the year 1609, the year the Dutch arrived. Mannahatta2409 is forward looking. You can take any section of today’s Manhattan and redesign it, putting it parks, bike lanes, green roofs, streetcar lines, wind arrays, landfills, bigger buildings…almost anything. You can specify the consumption behavior of the residents in your simulation: average New Yorker, average American, “Eco-hipster”, etc.
Want to retreat from the shore and install barrier beaches along the periphery? OK. Want to compare street trees to parks in their storm water capture? Get to it. Want to fill Central Park with solar panels? Sure — great for carbon footprint, bad for biodiversity (don’t worry, eliminating Central Park as a public space means you won’t be Mayor of New York for long).
You redesign Manhattan, block by block, to your specifications and then the “black box” of the simulator calculates a variety of key sustainability statistics, such as energy use, carbon, water flow, biodiversity, human population size, etc. You can register at the website and make your own designs (or “Visions”) or just check out others (there is a library of them). Warning: there is a bit of a learning curve, but investing some time, with patience, is fascinating and greatly rewarding. The creators have plans to continue improving it, including things like learning “competitions” to find to best and most productive design ideas.
For example, Eric Sanderson created a Vision of the 14th Street corridor in lower Manhattan (the northern boundary of Greenwich Village). Using a combination of parks, trees, street cars, and bioswales, Sanderson redesigned the yellow zone in the image above to have higher population density and yet to require dramatically less energy. Sure, it’s a hypothetical exercise, but one that has enormous potential to demonstrate what is possible when we rethink how cities are put together.
Eric did this Vision on his own, but imagine gathering groups of neighbors to discuss neighborhood redesign. Or using it with students as an education tool (as the Manahatta team hope to do). Or…you get it, the potential applications are vast.
Select “Existing Visions” and a popup presents a list of Visions that have already been created.
Scroll to the right (with the right arrow); find and click on “Terra Nova 14th Street”, a redesign of the east to west length of 14 Street in lower Manhattan
A box appears in the upper left; click on the little “i” button to see some information about the Vision.
Click on “Environmental Performance” and then “Show Details” to see how the design (the orange bar in the histogram) performs compared to the current design of the street in 2010 (brown bar), and the how the place was in the year 1609 (green bar).
Notice that this design has more people (higher density buildings) but emits dramatically less carbon and flushes zero storm water. Beware: no automobiles!
A group of engineers and storm water experts including Franco Montalto have produced a focused tool for storm water planning called Lidra (the site is still under construction). The thematic scope is more proscribed than Mannahatta2409, but it is geographically unlimited. Like Mannahatta2409, Lidra is a black box. However, Lidra focuses on models of storm water capture by various types of green infrastructure such as street trees, bioswales, green roofs, etc.
As a participatory planning tool, the idea is this. A neighborhood group convenes after having installed an infrastructure map of their area in Lidra. The group then can discuss how their want to design their neighborhood from a green infrastructure (GI) perspective, placing the various types of GI down in space: a green roof here, a bioswale there. The model then calculates and outputs the total storm water capture potential of the design and how much it would cost to build and maintain.
Does one person in your area want to invest everything in green roofs, while another thinks street trees are the answer? The model can help place the consequences of these alternatives in context (at least from a storm water perspective), making their relative outcomes easier to see, digest, and decide upon. Sure, there would still be decisions to make that are outside the scope of Lidra — aesthetics, access, equitability, and so on — but the model helps take at least some of the guesswork out of the process.
Participatory planning is difficult enough. Why not strive for apples to apples comparisons whenever possible? Simulation models such as Lidra have enormous potential to help.
All models are wrong — some are useful
There is a famous adage about models: “All models are wrong; some of them are useful.” The designers of Mannahatta2409 and Lidra have created tools that model various key elements of sustainable cities, and which allow you (or groups) to test drive designs and see how they perform, to compare them. They’re not perfect — they are not meant to be, they are for focusing on elements of a system — and it isn’t exactly “real life”, but as any thoughtfully and comprehensively created models do, they provide tools to think, compare, and come to a better understanding of how sustainable cities might be put together. They can take a little of guesswork and unvarnished opinion out of the important but difficult work of participatory planning.
These specific simulators are amazing accomplishments. And, I think approaches like this are a key element to the future of thoughtful and productive public engagement in urban planning.
What will it take to get more tools like this into participatory planning? I believe it will be key to get scientists and planners talking actively with each other about exactly what is needed as outputs of participatory planning events. I often hear people wonder how scientists and practitioners can work together. Working side by side to build participatory planning tools with foundations in science and data has enormous potential.
How has Singapore created itself as a “city in a garden”? I’m from Manila, and have recently returned from a week-long educational trip hosted by the Young South East Asian Leadership Initiative (YSEALI). The workshop was entitled Urban Planning and Smart Growth. It brought together sixty young leaders across the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to learn from Singapore, and from each other.
The idea that resonated with me the most was the urban planning initiative to transform Singapore from a “garden in a city” to a “city in a garden”.
This experience was eye-opening. As a young planner living in a metropolitan area that favors a built-up environment, I always viewed green spaces as isolated areas for beautification, or as something held aside until a developer decides to use for more profit. Singapore showed me that my everyday normal could be so much more.
Let me tell you how this experience lifted my hopes for Manila, and why young planners from the Southeast Asian Region could do the same for their cities
The entirety of Singapore’s City in a Garden at the Urban Redevelopment Authority. Photo: Ragene Palma
The week was filled with lectures in the morning, and field trips in the afternoon. Module after module, session after session, we exchanged perspectives and information from every country. We talked about livable cities, addressing topics such as transport issues, industrial growth, housing, and community engagement. We studied each component from an urban planning perspective. We took photo after photo of gardens, green spaces and waterways. We marveled at how a river could be so clean, and how it could ferry us so fast; at the gardens that grew on roof-tops, on building facades, and in every nook and corner the Singaporean urban planners could find. Through the lens of a camera, we attempted to capture the form of the entire city-state.
Metropolitan areas across the ASEAN region all share the struggles of urbanization. Workshop participants talked about congestion, the lack of sidewalks, the kinds of public housing our governments offered to our citizens. We compared our cities with each other, asking who had the worst traffic. Metro Manila’s commute time, in my experience, takes three hours to travel twenty kilometres. (It is not a distinction to be proud of.) Singapore’s worst traffic, on the other hand, was only a short ten-minute delay at the extravagant Orchard Road. Vientiane, Chiang Mai, Ha Noi—we all experience these problems. As urban planners we are all still learning. Among us all, was the same desire to bring our newly discovered knowledge from Singapore back to our home countries.
Over the course of the week, I collected a litany of “aha” moments that captured my imagination—from intangible heritage preservation to controlled climates and recycled energy. However, the idea that resonated with me the most was the urban planning initiative established to increase the livability and sustainability of Singapore, and transform it from a “garden in a city” to a “city in a garden”.
Urban planners from advanced countries may scoff at my delight in something as basic as planned green space. Garden cities, the idea of a utopian city in which people live in harmony with nature, and on which the vision of Singapore was based, have been around since Ebenezer Howard proposed the model in the late 1800s. Singapore adopted its own original Garden City initiative in 1963. But for someone from a developing country which equates progress with more cement and zero-down payment car purchases, seeing the actual implementation of a concept that we’ve only studied is striking.
When asked in an interview about my favourite aspect of the workshop, my response was “All the greens. I want to bring all these greens back home.”
Nature is respected and well integrated into daily life. Photo: Ragene Palma
Every single day, I suffocate in the city of Makati. There are trees, but only because they are part of a privatized landscape. There are parks, and I am thankful for these open spaces, but they are only a temporary relief from the congestion and car emissions of the city. The two-minute relief of crossing a hundred-meter-long park ends all too quickly in a traffic jam. Sadly, these problems are the norm for developing cities.
On this, my first visit to Singapore, the lessons about landscape design began right outside the airport, with the sight of avenues lined with shrubs and flowers. I was overwhelmed with emotion, with inspiration, and mixed incredulity. On the first day of tours, it pained me to see how the “future” I envisioned for our local planning in Metro Manila already exists, far beyond what I imagined it could be. Singaporean planners are already talking about building sky cities and pushing beyond their present innovations. It is difficult to envision such advances in urban planning when the eradication of poverty is one of the biggest concerns among many of the ASEAN representatives. I kept telling myself, “This is how we should be doing it.” I kept telling my lungs, breathe here, while you can.
The second day of tours inspired me to strategize on how I could teach local planners across our 7,000 islands about the greenery strategies of Singapore. Could we actually require our estate developers by law to put biowalls on our building designs? How could we successfully maintain plant life when temperatures in the Philippine islands sometimes hit 50°C? So many of these thoughts played on my mind.
An example of a garden on a facade. It is as if the buildings sprout leaves. Photo: Ragene Palma
By the third day touring Singapore, I could not believe the things my eyes were seeing. It was as though it was all too perfect and beautiful to be true. It was almost inconceivable to me that these urban environments are Singapore’s reality. However, for the young representatives from the ASEAN region recreating the amazing urban environments we discovered in Singapore in our home nations would be difficult given the weight and challenges of the city planning burdens we have at home.
So, what can developing countries and congested cities take away from the success that is Singapore?
The natural environment and the built-up environment are not a dichotomy.
They can co-exist, and they can be integrated.
Whenever I do land-use workshops with local planners, the map is filled with red and yellow areas. These are the commercial and residential zones. Green areas are isolated, and meticulously measured, on the chance that they will someday be developed into future malls, or more condominiums.
Additionally, green areas are zoned. Parks are given little attention and thought with regard to design. The colonial plaza is typically designated as public space. The church, the government center, and any open areas that remain from the three hundred years under Spanish rule serve as public space today. Ask a Filipino where the public space is, and he will direct you to the plaza.
The innovation of Singapore reinventing itself as a city in a garden challenged not only the concept of green zones, but also the idea of exclusive-use zones in its entirety. Inclusion was the key strategy. By bringing diverse races together in one building, infusing leaves with windows and walls, putting the workplace and schools within biking or elevator distance, communities thrived.
In the same way, gardens were not just included in the city as green spots. Gardens were integrated, both horizontally and vertically, in every zone. By reimagining all potential space as green space, and integrating greenery into all zones the trend of planners wedging small gardens into the city was reversed. Now it appears as if the city is placed within a huge garden.
Plants thrive on the built up environment. Photo: Ragene PalmaMalls, homes, workplaces, and greenery everywhere you look. Photo: Ragene Palma
“It’s not about aesthetics, it’s about valuing life.” – Damian Tang
From the perspective of planners, architects, and developers, green spaces are included in the urban landscape because they are pleasing to the eye. Open green spaces increase land value, bring in more money, and serve as an asset, upon which we can capitalize. This limited perspective is a potential problem.
Planners recognize that incorporating green space is both pleasing and ideal, but why this is so has to do with more than just the economic benefits. In Singapore, they found the value of green space to strongly improve the quality of life of their residents. Parks, nature reserves, waterfronts, and even the presence of fish in water bodies played a role in transforming polluted slums to thriving, innovative communities. The role that green space played was so prominent in the lives of the people, that their target today is to have at least 90 percent of their households be within 400 meters of a park by 2030 (from Sustainable Singapore Blueprint, 2015). The proximity of nature to one’s life has such high value.
A river can be the source of life for the people; the Singapore River was transformed from a polluted state to one of the most iconic attractions in Asia. Photo: Ragene Palma
We can see the lesson of valuing life in how much we value our rivers and estuaries. Waterbodies in developing countries’ urban centers are polluted, foul-smelling and dangerous. When we can use water bodies for transport and tourism and be proud of their history and condition, we transform them from our personal, domestic garbage cans into a natural resource to be valued and respected.
This is the same mistake we make when we constantly excavate and build without provisions for land management and future developments. It is the same mistake when we cut down trees for infrastructure and do not replace them with new trees. It is the same mistake that we care not about emissions and the heat we bring to our air, which has reduced our wildlife populations. We have driven living things away from their natural habitat. Unfortunately, we do not value life.
We are a part of nature, so why treat nature differently? Separately? Why do we evaluate it in terms of money instead of in terms of having an inherent value that benefits life?
Urban and environmental planning is about improving the quality of life, and yet, our efforts for development undermine that very objective. To create livable, sustainable, healthy cities, we must elevate the the importance of green space to the level of other planning concerns and seamlessly integrate green spaces into our plans.
When we value life we feel a connection with living things around us. An example is this pigeon management initiative along a heritage street. Photo: Ragene Palma
Piling on the livable layers
In the very dense hearts of cities, we have to learn how life can be brought in to revitalize the urban environment. In Singapore, they increased vegetation from 36 percent in 1986 to an impressive 47 percent in 2007. Even with this success, they continue to question how to maintain it. Some of Singapore’s green design strategies include:
(1) Understanding the ecosystem and habitats where cities thrive.
(2) Add layers that make the city livable. Examples of layers that incorporate space and improve livability are nature reserves, parks (coastal, riverine, heritage), and pocket parks. Other layers include urban greens, such as vertical biowalls and green rooftops.
Green strategies in revitalizing an area can also feature Kevin Lynch’s elements of a city: streetscapes, corridors, and edges all echo how vegetation can define an area and imprint memories on people’s minds. Most importantly, a city has to be planned with social touchpoints, where citizens can interact with nature—vegetation, water bodies, and animals.
Taking the cue
There is this massive responsibility that falls upon a young planner’s shoulders in bringing these ideals to life in an already congested metropolis.
I asked a young Singaporean planner how a developing country could improve its urban centers. How could we possibly transform cities and address so many problems? She replied: “Start small”. It doesn’t have to be a flashy masterplan, it doesn’t have to be too grand.
Philippine urban planners can start by creating a baseline of green spaces in cities; by reviewing land use plans and finding areas to incorporate mixed uses, by standing up to irresponsible conversion, by campaigning for more livable environments, and by putting the value of life before anything else.
Nature parks are within walking distance from all communtieis. Even socio-economic support infrastructure like this walkway provide breathing spaces. Photo: Ragene Palma
In Silent Spring, the book that launched a global environmental movement, author Rachel Carson said, “The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings”. This is a good reminder to young planners. All the more, because of the challenges we face in the developing ASEAN cities. Hopefully, in my lifetime, I’ll be able to say I helped improve the livability of Metro Manila by creating more green spaces. Hopefully someday, I’ll be able to write about the beauty and livability of my home, thanks to the lessons learned in Singapore with the rest of our neighboring countries.
Roadside trees are not merely roadside trees. Roadside trees are living condominiums, packed with other organisms. They are functioning communities, complete with food chains, predators and prey, nutrient capture, nutrient cycling and recycling, and an organisational hierarchy. They extend their influence vertically upwards, horizontally and downwards. They are ecosystems in their own right.
Roadside trees in Singapore.
Naturalists who have access to the riches of the true forest tend to be rather dismissive of the tree community along roadsides. It is a community that is obviously impoverished, consisting of a few hardy, widespread species that are not threatened, and do not need conservation assistance. Yet where would we be without those roadside trees? Biologically, a lot poorer. One of the extraordinary features of Singapore, for a visitor from other cities in the region, is the sound of Hill Mynas and Racket-tailed Drongos in suburban gardens; the sight of Honey Buzzards in trees along the main shopping street of the business district; or roosts of Long-tailed Parakeets close by one of the busy railway stations. The Mynas and the Parakeets are birds of the primary lowland rain forest, where they live in the tree canopy. Elsewhere in the region they have often been trapped out by the caged bird trade, or have simply found the vegetation within cities impossible to use as habitat. In Singapore, these birds find plenty of tall trees and they really don’t care that much what happens on the ground beneath them, whether it involves a pedestrian walkway or a group of joggers. What they need is the fruits in the canopy, and in Singapore, what they need is what they get.
In the rain forest, of course, everyone knows about complexity, hierarchies, interactions, communities and guilds. But the same is also true of the trees planted out in the urban environment, except that they have received less attention from community ecologists.
Bringing the trees to our roadsides
In the good old days of traditional biology teaching, final year students taking their ‘spot’ quiz at the National University of Singapore would inevitably be faced with one small, featureless, orange-green organism. Some years it would be presented by the examiner as a dry powder, sometimes as a liquid sludge, or occasionally attached to its natural substrate on tree bark. This is Trentepohlia, a genus of 36 species of chlorophyte algae. It grows on the bark of many roadside trees in Singapore as an orange scurf, and on the trunks and foliage of trees in the rain forest. It is also one of the algae known to form symbiotic associations with fungi, i.e., lichens. As species of algae and species of fungi combine to form further species of lichens, this becomes an interesting case in which the total diversity is greater than the sum of its parts.
In Singapore there are roughly 2.9 million roadside trees, planted by the National Parks Board and the town councils and tracked and managed individually along the nation’s 6,000 kilometers of roads. In a tiny city state, a high density of roads is inevitable, and the road surfaces together with the planted road reserves and central dividers make up about 12 percent of all land.
These managed trees are made up of some 600 species; this means that planted tree alpha diversity (simply, the absolute number of species present) is not far off the tree diversity of the rain forest in our nature reserves, where there are roughly 2,145 native plant species, of which roughly 700 are trees. In the rain forest, of course, everyone knows about complexity, hierarchies, interactions, communities and guilds. But the same is also true of the trees planted out in the urban environment, except that they have received less attention from community ecologists.
Trees as fundamental building blocks
Singapore has been pursuing the idea of a garden city since 1965, a concept that has now been tweaked to become “A City in a Garden.” Until the 1970s, tree species were chosen mostly for providing shade. Another layer of consideration was added from 1979 onwards, with species chosen for the colour of their flowers and variety of foliage. To these have been added considerations of maintenance, suitability for birds and butterflies, avoidance of unsightliness or risk (for example, slippery fruits falling on public walkways), and structure. Roadside plantings no longer consist only of trees, but include shrubs, palms, subcanopy trees and emergent trees to make a complex 3-D green environment. This extends upwards (to rooftop and vertical greenery), inwards (to indoor planting, with examples in Changi Airport and in offices in the central business district), and downwards (for example, beneath flyovers).
At one time cleanliness and neatness were prized, manicured vegetation was the order of the day, and that meant epiphytes – plants growing on other plants – were unwelcome. That situation began to change with the deliberate strapping onto branches of selected ferns, notably Birds-nest Ferns, Asplenium nidus. With that step, it was no longer normal practice to discourage epiphytes, and other species began to proliferate simply because they were undisturbed. The high rainfall in Singapore (around 2,400 millimeters per annum) and typically high humidity helped these species to thrive.
Pigeon Orchid.
Another major internal management change was the orchid conservation plan of the National Parks Board that has reintroduced thousands of native orchids onto trees. Whether they are self-propagating clones or not, orchids around the city tend to flower in synchrony: the Pigeon Orchid, Dendrobium crumenatum, is a classic case in which mass flowering occurs nine days after a critical low temperature night. Bulbophyllum vaginatum is another gregarious flowering orchid whose blossoms can light up the boughs of an entire row of trees.
The trees that epiphytes inhabit have been termed “phorophytes” (plant-bearers), and their inhabitants include epiphytes, hemi-epiphytes, climbers and epiphylls. But this is only the beginning of complexity. Within the trees are wood-borers and creatures living beneath the bark. Spotted Wood Owls use the Birds-nest Ferns as nesting sites (these ferns are truly named); ants form colonies amongst the ferns’ spongy root-mass and forage throughout the tree while tending aphids and scale insects. Within the tree, a cavity provides a niche for fungi, nematodes, bats, beetles and small centipedes, woodlice, termites, ants and colonies of bees and wasps. In the leaves of the tree are leaf-miners, in the shoots are viruses causing ‘witches broom,’ and on the twigs are galls.
Below ground, mycorrhizal associations between tree roots and fungi are hidden until a rainy spell encourages a mass appearance of mushrooms beneath the tree. Might a first estimate be one species of fungus per species of tree? Mulching of trees might introduce fungi other than the mycorrhizae.
Then we have the pollinators and nectar feeders – birds, bees, butterflies and bats. Fruits are being eaten and dispersed by a range of vertebrates. Inside figs, fig wasps are completing their frantic lives. Even before they have dropped from the tree, fermentation of overripe fruits has been initiated by bacteria and additional fungi. Above a flowering Alstonia tree, a swarm of tiny flying invertebrates attracts a feeding flock of swiftlets. The swiftlets and the nesting owls have specialised internal and external parasites, some of them unique. The termites parading up and down the trunk are bringing in yet more organisms, and carry their own specialised intestinal flora that helps break down cellulose. The levels of diversity go on and on.
Bulbophyllum vaginatum, a flowering orchid.
Such a diversity of life dependent on trees has been known and studied everywhere that trees grow – but usually not on roadside trees in cities. In Washington state, west of the Cascade Mountains, Richard Pederson (1991) (of the US Forest Service) found that 39 species of birds and 14 species of mammals depend on tree cavities for their survival. East of the Cascades, 39 bird species and 23 mammal species depend on these ‘snags.’ Pederson (1991) and Bottorff (2005), of Washington State University, found that in total, more than 100 species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians need snags for nesting, roosting, shelter, denning and feeding (45 species alone forage for food in such trees). In North America, hollow snags and large knotholes are used by many species of mammals, such as squirrels, martens, porcupine and raccoons.
Zack, George and Laudenslayer (2002) compared the density of snags, snags formed into cavities, and cavity-nesting bird use at two sites in northern California – one site with large trees and large snags because of protection from logging, and the other where a century of logging had left few large trees and snags. Total snags were three times more numerous in the protected forest, and use of cavities by nesting birds was 15 times greater (2002). Clearly, roadside trees, whether in North America or in Singapore, cannot be allowed to grow in so unregulated a way that snags and cavities reach a maximum. Public safety is a major driver of roadside tree management. Yet the diversity in Singapore proves that even regularly pruned and managed trees can support a high number of epiphytes, and that these are the foundation of a complex plant and animal community.
The diversity of trees, with differing shapes and bark textures, helps to support high diversity of epiphytes. In a geometric progression, the epiphytes then provide multiple niches within living and decaying tissue, roots and leaves, for the huge range of fungi, insects, birds, butterflies, and other organisms in the city. If the community is fractured by the removal of epiphytes, many other organisms suffer. Once epiphytes are tolerated or, even better, encouraged, the community flourishes.
What are the epiphytes?
In a recent study, student Ng Qi Qi (2015) from the National University of Singapore surveyed more than 12,000 trees of 306 species and found 81 species of epiphytes growing on them. The top 17 species of epiphytes (in the broadest sense) were:
Some of the biggest epiphytic surprises in Singapore are examples of plants that really shouldn’t be epiphytes at all. Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) and banana (Musa esculenta) have been seen growing where they were never designed to be, probably distributed by birds or civets. Dragon fruits (Hylocereus undatus and H. polyrhizus) are also a visual surprise.
The roadside tree in Singapore most often bearing at least one species of epiphyte is Albizia saman, followed by Tabebuia rosea and Pterocarpus indicus. Phorophyte species with reticulate or longitudinally fissured bark have a higher proportion of trees with at least one epiphyte found on them. Rough bark seems to be more favourable for supporting the formation of epiphyte communities; intuitively, irregularities in bark provide niches for seeds to lodge, for roots to penetrate, and for nutrients and moisture to gather. The three species of trees mentioned can therefore be seen as keystone species in supporting a roadside epiphyte community: not only the presence of trees, but the selection of suitable trees is important.
It is common to find many different species of epiphytes on a single tree species, and even on a single individual tree. However, Zotz and Heitz (2001) have suggested that, unlike in other plant communities, challenges such as interspecific competition and herbivory do not seem to be an issue for epiphytes. This means that the epiphyte community, including that on roadside trees, functions in somewhat different ways from the biological community within forest. It is therefore of intrinsic scientific interest. Some factors that influence the structure of epiphyte communities include the size of the supporting tree, its bark type, and water availability. In the Americas, Gentry and Dobson (1987) found that wet forest had an epiphyte diversity 500 times greater than that of dry forest. They compared this with the diversity of herbs and lianas, which were only twice as diverse in wet forest as they were in dry forest (where the epiphytes were mostly orchids and bromeliads). The epiphyte community on roadside trees should be of interest and concern because of the relative exposure of roadside trees to open, drying conditions as well as vehicle emissions and urban heat island effects.
Root fungi.
Concerns for the future
Singapore, like other countries in Southeast Asia, is vulnerable to the prolonged droughts initiated by El Niño years. These place huge stress on epiphytes and the living communities they support. In the same Singapore study mentioned above, Ng Qi Qi found that during the February 2014 drought, Vittaria ensiformis was the species most vulnerable to death by drought, followed by the poorly adapted climbing herbs Passiflora suberosa and Paederia foetida (study year). Orchids have adaptations to resist drought, such as pseudobulbs and large root masses: the two large orchids Grammatophyllum speciosum and Cymbidium finlaysonianum came through the 2014 drought successfully.
Morphology and water stress adaptations are likely to be the reasons behind the different extirpation rates of these plants during drought (Ng 2015), while the type of tree they were growing on did not seem to have much effect. The size of the supporting tree also did not seem to have an impact on the survival rate of epiphytes during drought, except for one of the mistletoes.
Nevertheless, microclimate will continue to be a concern, and 3-D planting in place of serried ranks of military roadside trees is likely to be a factor in maintaining humidity and buffering drying winds. Pruning, removal of risky branches, and repairs to wind-created snags as a result of branch snapping, will all have to be considered.
Now, back to the students’ infamous Trentepohlia. For any student who bothered to talk to seniors, this was actually a shoo-in question. But perhaps students should not have taken the identification too literally. A study of lichens and green algae on bark of trees within two tiny patches of Singapore’s rain forests (Neustupa and Skaloud, 2010) has revealed at least 57 species, not one of which was in the genus Trentepohlia! Most of them could not be identified beyond the level of genus. In all likelihood, there are plenty more algae and lichens out there to be identified. And this is not just an abstruse and pointless exercise. Trentepohlia odorata is one of the commonest algae growing on the external walls of buildings in Singapore, responsible for significant costs in building maintenance and redecoration.
To repeat the message with which we started: roadside trees are living condominiums, packed with other organisms. They are functioning ecosystems, with food chains, predators and prey, nutrient capture, nutrient cycling and recycling, and an organisational hierarchy. Where would we be without those roadside trees? Biologically, we would be a lot poorer.
Bottorff, J. 2005. Snags, coarse woody debris, and wildlife. Snohomish Co. Extension Service, Washington State University. http://snohomish.wsu.edu/forestry/documents/SNAGS.pdf
Gentry, A.H. and Dodson, C.H. 1987. Diversity and biogeography of Neotropical vascular epiphytes. Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 74: 205–233.
Neustupa, J. and Skaloud, P. 2010. Diversity of subaerial algae and cyanobacteria growing on bark and wood in the lowland tropical forests of Singapore. Plant Ecology and Evolution, 143: 51–62.
Ng, Q.Q. 2015. Effects of drought on vascular plant epiphytes in Singapore. Thesis, B.Env.Sci., Dept. of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore.
Pederson, Richard J. 1991. Managing Small Woodlands for Cavity Nesting Birds. USDA Forest Service, Pacific NW Region. 6 pages. http://www.woodlandfishandwildlife.org/
Zack, S., George, T.L. and Laudenslayer, Jr., W.F. 2002. Are there snags in the system? Comparing cavity use among nesting birds in “snag-rich” and “snag-poor” Eastside pine forests. USDA Forest Service Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-181. Pp. 179–191.
Zotz, G. and Hietz, P. 2001. The physiological ecology of vascular epiphytes: current knowledge, open questions. Journal of Experimental Botany, 52: 2067–2078
By examining how wildlife responds to their urban ambient environment, can we develop a better understanding of how to create cities that are healthier for people too?”
Urbanization not only changes the landscape structure due to land cover change, fragmentation of natural habitats, and creation of artificial habitats, it also changes the physical patterns of the environment: temperature, wind currents, rain patterns, light levels, or noise levels. For example, urbanization increases average temperature by between 3°C and 5°C, in comparison to nearby rural or natural areas, because of the lack of green areas and the excess of concrete and sealed structures that capture and keep the heat during the day. This phenomenon, the difference in temperature among adjacent areas or urban and non-urban, is called the heat island effect.
Urbanization also increases light levels at night, potentially changing the natural rhythm of activity of animals, such as periods of sleep and wakefulness. Higher light levels are also a cause of poor sleep quality among people in cities. Wind currents and rain patterns change more in cities with tall buildings. Tall buildings serve as barriers against the wind close to the ground, but increase the wind speeds at the building’s top; producing surface wind currents that are slow in some areas and fast in others, and higher winds moving outside the city area push out the rains, too.
Figure 1. House Wren (Troglodytes aedon) male singing inside a house garage in San José city, Costa Rica. This species inhabit from forest edges to urban gardens and parks. Photo: Mauricio Calderon/fotonaturaleza.net.
And cities are noisy places due to automobile motors, industrial motors, and people. The majority of these sounds occur at low frequencies below 5,000 Hz (humans hear between 200 and 20,000 Hz), and affect the sound communication of animals that produce vocalization below 5,000 Hz such as: insects (e.g., crickets), amphibians (e.g., frogs and toads), birds (e.g., robins, wrens, pigeons, sparrows, or owls), and mammals (e.g., squirrels, monkeys, and wolves). If this noise level means we must talk louder when conversing with a friend on the street or by cell phone, we need to be concerned with how the noise pollution levels we are produce affect the animals that inhabit or survive in or around urban environments. Some species can adapt and survive the effects of noise pollution, however others will probably be extinct from cities because they cannot communicate effectively, although they have the right habitats to survive.
All of these ways in which cities alter the environment also affect how people and animals behave. Here I just want to address the effect of noise on animals’ sound communication, including examples of how noise produces changes in the behavior of animals and changes to the characteristics of songs that they produce either spontaneously or over time. It is important to understand how animals adapt or avoid those noise levels, because it could give us information on how we are changing the noise environment in the cities and if those changes might affect us too.
The study of the noise pollution on animal communication gained much attention in 2003 when Hans Slabbekoorn and Margriet Peet published their investigation titled “Birds sing at a higher pitch in urban noise” in the journal Nature. They showed that Great Tits (Parus major) that inhabit urban areas sing songs with higher minimum frequency and the value of this frequency increased when noise levels increased. In terms of a human voice, this is analogous to a city dweller with a deep voice (e.g., bass, baritone, or alto range) speaking with a higher voice (e.g., tenor or soprano) to be heard over the increased city noise levels, because deep voices are less effective in communicating with other people. This pattern of singing at higher song frequencies also occurs in different species such as crickets, toads, and several bird species; in cities around the world and even in aquatics environments where boat motors are abundant. This effect of singing at higher frequencies could be problematic in animal communication, particularly for animals that cannot increase the minimum frequency of the songs, rendering them unable to communicate with other individuals of their species and reducing the probability of reproducing or defending their territories.
One response to avoiding the effect of noise pollution without changing the frequency is to increase the song volume (song energy amplitude), this phenomenon is called the Lombard effect, and anyone that has been to a concert, party, or meeting with music played at high volume does this to communicate with those around us. As we know from experience, to speak at a higher volume than normal for an extended period of time produces fatigue and reduces the quality of our voice. Animals experience similar fatigue when they sing at a higher volume in cities in order to communicate. For animals to compensate for the excess fatigue they must eat more to recuperate their energy, and decrease the amount of daytime singing, as compared to places with lower noise pollution.
Noise pollution also affects animals’ behavior in ways not necessary related with singing characteristics. For example, vigilance behaviors increase because animals are not able to detect predator presence due to ambient noise interference. Increased vigilance behaviors also decreases time available for feeding, reducing the energy intake, affecting the wellness of the animals, and reducing the reproductive success and survival because of lower energy levels and higher stress levels. Animals also change their singing activity associated with noise pollution. They shift the singing activity to hours where noise pollution is lower, for example before or after traffic peaks, or more volume on weekdays than on weekends. Additionally, other diurnal animals sing at night to communicate and avoid the daytime noise pollution. All of these changes probably also affect success of communication because singing at unusual time periods may affect the transmission of the sounds from the sender to the receiver due to wind currents or turbulence that increase the song degradation at closer distances. Singing at night may also reveal the position of the singer to predators increasing the probability of predation.
Figure 2. Sonogram (visual representation of a sound) of a House Wren (Troglodytes aedon) song. The song at the left is the song at low pollution noise levels and at the right is the same song at high levels of noise pollution. The difference in the minimum frequency between both songs is the distance between the red line and the bottom of the song in the right song.
As we see here, noise pollution affects the song characteristics (frequency and energy) of animals inside cities, reducing the probability of communicating effectively with other individuals of the species. Additionally, noise pollution also affects the animal behavior reducing the time invested in feeding or producing song at unusual time periods. As humans living in cities, we are also affected by noise pollutions but our understanding how this affects us is limited to medical diagnosis of sick people. However, if we can develop a relationship between animals’ response to noise pollution and the occurrence of human sickness associated with higher levels of noise pollution, we can suggest corrective measures to reduce the noise pollution and positively affect both animals and humans that inhabit cities.
Furthermore, to know how animals are changing their songs to survive in or around cities could give us a better understanding of the capacities that animals have to modify their songs (this phenomenon is called plasticity, and we as human use it constantly to imitate other voices or to speak in a loud room), that in the end may result in changes of songs throughout time.
I have been allowed to look into reality, into its sacred nature. I have been reminded that it is not something hidden. We have mostly forgotten that. But on that evening, I can see that the sacred nature of reality is the most visible thing.
[*]I’m on my way home from an errand one early June evening. As I walk, I look down on the granite-slabbed sidewalk. At its margin, a row of slender catsears raise their yellow heads towards the fading sky. They look a bit like skinny dandelions (who they are related to), as though they were a dried-out version of their juicy cousins, decorating the arid summer of Berlin.
As I am trodding down the sidewalk, my mind wanders back to last autumn. The catsears had long transformed their blossoms into little globes of hairy parachutes, and the wind had blown them away one by one, each carrying a tiny seed into an unknown destiny.
I remember the dry autumn leaves curled on the granite slabs. A single butterfly sat there in the fallen foliage. From above, his folded wings appeared black. They looked like the wilting leaves, with their slightly irregular outline, a blackness into which my gaze sunk.
That autumn day, I almost hadn’t noticed the butterfly. I’d almost stepped on it. He was easy to miss in his resting position among the foliage. Touching him, I noticed that he was still alive. I picked him up, and he slowly opened his wings. And there it was, the purple, orange, white, and blue, forming four eye-like dots, all the glory of a peacock butterfly’s wings.
Peacock butterfly on the sidewalk, 2022 Photo: Andreas Weber
I put him behind a stone, knowing that he would die here because he hadn’t yet found a frost-free space to overwinter and was already too weak to fly. When I put him down, he flapped his wings another time. Again, I caught sight of the splendor opening among the withering and dying as if it was not of this world.
I nod to the catsears as I resume my walk home. There are no butterflies around them.
In the evening, I walk to the woods, into the Grunewald Forest close to the city center. I feel that the catsears have transmitted a calling, that the shadow image of that dying butterfly tells me to go and find life. To go and sit with life.
Grunewald forest, Berlin (close to S-Bahn station Heerstraße), 2023 Photo: Andreas Weber
I walk through the scattered trees, soaked in the milky light of a mid-summer evening. The dog is eager to get here, too. I’ve followed her across the arterial road and the railroad bridges. I have dropped my work, even though the knowledge that I still have a lot on my to-do list is making my neck a bit tense.
The dog wanders in the direction of the old oak, the tree of life in that section of the forest, determined, sniffing and scenting left and right, unperturbed by thoughts. I follow.
At this hour there are hardly any bird voices. I hear the muffled scolding of a thrush behind the trees. Somewhere from a hollow tree, the chicks of titmice call for food. The air is motionless. It holds the last traces of the sweet perfume of blossoming black cherries.
The oak stands there waiting for us, as it has patiently waited for everything for five hundred years. It reaches with its arms into the late evening light, as though it pulled it down to the earth, and distributed it among the beings. The air is reddish, a softly embracing substance in which we all move together.
On the way back, I spot a large insect in the distance. The animal is flying circles around a weathered tree stump next to the sandy path. I walk faster. Something special is taking place here. My heart is pounding.
As I get closer, I hear the buzzing. Its rising and falling pitch reminds me of the low notes of a viola. From a few meters away, I see semi-transparent wings drawing brownish streaks in the air. Stag beetle, it flashes through my mind. But no. The shape of the flying creature is too long. Maybe a large ichneumon wasp? What is this?
I move closer. Whatever it is, I am encountering a huge insect, here, in this unspectacular forest, whose ground is so plowed through by wild boars that hardly anything grows below the trees. A huge, unknown insect in the apricot-colored light of the summer sunset. It seems that the creature has manifested out of it, somehow has crystallized from the sun falling obliquely through the branches.
The animal flies in circles around the tree stump. Then it bumps against the wood with a whirring sound and falls on its back in the sand. I hear the soft underwings rustle. When the insect rises again, I recognize the species. I am very close now, not more than two feet away. It is a gigantic longhorn beetle, Ergates faber, one of the biggest European insects. The nervous animal is easily as long as my little finger. A creature like from the tropics. But the animal is native to Central Europe. Indeed, it was once common here.
The beetle now runs ponderously over the sandy ground. He follows the edge of the tree stump in a circle. His body is of a deep lacquer brown. He moves frantically, the clubbed antennae vibrating, the abdomen pulsating. Then he pauses, jerkily unfolds the two leathery top wings, pulls out the membranous hind wings from beneath, and takes off whirring.
He flies two awkward circles around the not quite knee-high stump with an increasing and decreasing hum, collides again with the wood, crashes, rustling, humming. Scrambles to his feet. Runs around. I hear the sand softly crunching under the steps of his tiny claws. Then he pumps again, unfolds his wings, buzzes away, circles through the trees, curves back, circles around the stump again, carried by his wings of finely pleated, delicately veined, brownish-transparent silk.
While I let myself sink into the admiration of this magnificent being, a trace of anxiety sneaks into my feeling and starts to grow. What is going on here? Why does the animal fly so frantically around the dead wood, crawl up and down so manically, seem so aimless in its frenzy? It does not look like healthy behaviour. The joyful surprise of my encounter gives way to concern.
Has the longhorn beetle been poisoned? Has he become disoriented and psychotic, the consequences of modern pesticides that spread uncontrollably even outside the fields? Have I met the last Ergates in the Grunewald Forest? A creature whose presence makes my heart beat up to my throat, and yet which has already been consigned to death? Has this meeting the same quality as last autumn, when I found the dying peacock butterfly?
Only then do I see the other. The second longhorn beetle sits in a hollow of the sandy path next to the stump, motionless, the head bent down. At the end of the abdomen, an elongated spur protrudes from under the closed wing covers. It gently vibrates, an advancing appendix of stretching yellow skin. I touch the animal lightly with my fingertip. The insect retracts the abdominal process. I don’t understand what is happening here, until all at once a light dawns on me: Of course, the female!
And at this moment the male is already on top of her. At first his head points in the wrong direction, then he turns in a flash and presses his abdomen onto the appendage protruding from her rear end, clasping her body with his segmented legs. The beetle has made it. I see two Ergates mating. I can’t believe my luck.
Now I know why I had to walk through the forest this evening, spend such a long time among the trees, on foot, in spite of all the time pressure. All worries have disappeared from my brain. They have been replaced by happiness, by the happiness of a speechless presence.
It is a happiness that cannot be expressed in words because it does not belong to me alone. Rather, I am entering into a bliss that already exists ― the bliss of this couple who make love under the silk rustle of chitinous skins.
The bliss that surrounds me is even more than the happiness of the two longicorn beetles alone, their eagerness to finally unite. It is the happiness of the world to prove fruitful in an experience that manifests as touch, bump, buzz, whirr, as a liquid commotion in the flicker of the summer evening. It is a happiness of the world into which I dive like into a moving ocean, where delight manifests itself in the thousand figures of multiform water.
My heart continues beating hard for a long time after I have left the two beetles and walk home. I so intensely hope that the female Ergates will be allowed to lay her eggs undisturbed, that the larvae will be allowed to hatch, that they will be able to transform into fresh adult beetles in a couple of years after they have patiently been munching the soft wood of their wooden housings. My heart is beating with joy and fear and wonder.
I have been allowed to look into reality, into its sacred nature. I have been reminded that it is not something hidden. We have mostly forgotten that. But on that evening, I can see that the sacred nature of reality is the most visible thing. It is manifest in every chitinous scale, every crackling tarsus, every grinding mandible, every grain of sand, every particle with which the space fills in the desire for touch. The sacred nature is life, and it is death — and because it is death, we want to forget it, we allow the insects of our earth to disappear.
When I am back close to my place, walking on the granite-slabbed sidewalk, another memory comes back to my mind.
I suddenly remember that later last autumn I found a second peacock butterfly. It lay dead on the sidewalk. His inner wing was half unfolded, looking at me with one single eye. I looked back into the white of its iris, which was framed by a trace of the most intense blue, an unearthly, celestial blue. It was Perugino’s blue from the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
In Perugino’s painting in the famous church, we can see Christ handing over to Peter the key to the kingdom of heaven. I remember that on this autumn day, in a Berlin neighbourhood, a few withered leaves lay scattered beside the dead butterfly.
His eye in its impeccable Sistine blue was looking upwards to the pale sky while his body was imperceptibly fading away, already nothing but a piece of wilted summer foliage, a fruit, overripe, and long fallen.
“Yet these you may eat among all the winged insects which walk on all fours: those which have above their feet jointed legs with which to jump on the earth.”
—Leviticus 11:21
Masaka
On a recent trip to the town of Masaka, Uganda, I met a number of women who have taken up cricket farming to supplement their family diets and generate extra income. “It has improved the health of our children… it’s not very tiresome… but you get a lot of money from it”, explained Damali Mayito, a full-time school teacher and mother of three. She unbolted her garage doors, which swung open to reveal towers of plastic boxes chirping from within: was this the sound of a simple solution to a suite of complex social and ecological problems?
Damali Mayito. Photo: Russell Galt
Everyone’s at it
The nutritional benefits of entomophagy are well-documented: edible insects offer a low-fat protein source packed full of vitamins, minerals, and fibre. Globally, around 2 billion people regularly eat insects, primarily in the developing world.
The most experimental cultures—those most likely to adopt unfamiliar culinary practices, such as entomophagy—flourish in cities.
Almost everyone else does so unintentionally—from pasta to peanut butter, virtually all processed foods contain traces of the interlopers. At least 470 insect species are eaten in Africa. These include locusts, grasshoppers, crickets, shield bugs, ants, bees, beetles, termites, and caterpillars.
Grasshoppers in a Ugandan market. Photo: Russell Galt
Entomoculture trumps wild-harvesting
Entomophagy may be as old as humankind, but the practice of farming insects for human consumption is a relatively new phenomenon. Only a few countries, mainly in Asia, have established thriving entomoculture sectors. In Thailand, there are over 20,000 registered entomoculture enterprises, while in the USA and Canada, several dozen entoculture startups are now finding their feet. Compared to the wild-harvesting of insects, entomoculture offers four key advantages:
Farmed insects
Wild-harvested insects
Availability
Year round supply.
Usually only seasonally abundant.
Quality
Ability to control the quality of insect feed.
Wild populations may have fed unscrupulously on crops soaked in pesticide. Fearing toxic bioaccumulation, Malian villagers are known to discourage children from harvesting wild grasshoppers.
Ecological impact
Minimal interference with natural ecosystems.
Wild-harvesting may lead to population declines in target species (e.g. mopane worms) and accrue significant by-catch, especially when indiscriminate electric light traps are used.
Safety
Generally non-hazardous.
Wild-harvesting techniques can be dangerous. Foragers may be at risk of attack by wild animals, while makeshift electric light traps are notorious for causing electrocution and blindness..
Crickets for cities
Over the last few years, the Dutch-funded Flying Food Project has trained hundreds of East African women to produce “nutritious crickets for delicious food security”. They rear common house crickets (Acheta domestica), which are ideal for farming, especially in urban settings.
Under good conditions, crickets reach maturity after just 35 days and then reproduce rapidly: each female lays up to 2600 eggs in its 90 day lifespan.
Owing to their high feed-conversion ratio, crickets require as little as one-twelfth the feed of cattle and very little water.
They are unfussy eaters: vegetal food waste otherwise destined for the bin will suffice, as will garden foliage or chicken feed.
On a fresh weight basis, crickets comprise up to 25 percent protein—rivalling beef, pork, lamb, chicken, and seafood.
They are extremely space efficient and can be farmed in boxes, piled vertically.
They require minimal management—a couple of hours’ labour per week is all that is required to manage thousands of crickets.
They are safe to farm: crickets do not bite, nor do they seem to pass zoonotic diseases to people. There’s no such thing as mad cricket disease!
Many of these advantages lend themselves well to cities, where busy, cash-strapped people with poor diets and limited physical space abound. It is in cities where people are hardest-pressed to recycle their food waste and, arguably, it is in cities where people are most acutely aware of the need to reduce ecological footprints and reclaim food sovereignty. More importantly, it is in cities, where the most daring, open-minded, and experimental cultures flourish: those most likely to challenge societal norms and adopt new culinary practices.
Grasshopper trap in western Uganda. Photo: Russell GaltCricket farm in a garage. Photo: Russell Galt
Start your own cricket farm
Do you want to hop on the bandwagon and grow your own easy-peasy, eco-friendly superfood? Entomoculture is simple. Follow these 5 basic steps, which I jotted down in Uganda.
Lay the groundwork
Find a large plastic box with a lid and cut out some holes to form air vents. Glue fine mesh over the vents. Place some empty cardboard egg boxes and a shallow dish of water into the plastic box.
Find your founders
It is possible to purchase crickets online from pet stores or, if you have time, to capture them from the wild. To minimise inbreeding, it is recommended you start with 20 crickets—at least 1 male for every 5 females. The females can be distinguished by their long ovipositors and the males by their rough backs. Put the crickets inside the plastic box and feed them on vegetable matter or chicken meal. For best results, an ambient temperature of 23 to 30 degrees Celsius should be maintained. The initial batch of crickets should be used for breeding only as they are unlikely to have been reared for human consumption.
Let them love and lay
Place a small tray of clean moist topsoil into the plastic box with the crickets. Spray water onto the soil everyday to maintain moisture levels. Eventually little white eggs should appear in the topsoil. Remove the egg-laden tray from the plastic box and place it in a separate plastic box of similar dimensions. The eggs should hatch after 10 days. Note that separation from adults is essential to prevent cannibalism.
Reap a harvest
The 2nd generation of crickets should be reared in the same manner as their parents. They should reach full size after 1 or 2 months depending on the optimality of conditions. It is at this point, before reaching sexual maturity, that they should be harvested. Spare plenty of females for breeding, at least five for every male. Those spared should reach sexual maturity a few weeks later. A clear indicator of sexual maturity is when they grow wings and begin chirping.
Salivate and savour
The harvested crickets should be boiled for a few minutes to kill any bacteria lurking on their exoskeletons. They can then be fried, roasted, or dried and ground into a fine powder. The latter option is popular as the powder can be easily stored and subtly added to baked goods, porridge or health-shakes. The Internet is awash with imaginative cricket recipes!
While in Uganda, my colleague, Steven Bland and I shot a short film capturing our experiences. Let us know what you think: Are you ready to embrace entomophagy?
Kelemu, S., Niassy, S., Torto, B., Fiaboe, K., Affognon, H., Tonnang, H., Maniania, N.K. and Ekesi, P., 2015. African edible insects for food and feed: inventory, diversity, commonalities and contribution to food security. Insects as Food and Feed, 1(2): 103-119
Van Huis, A., 2003. Insects as food in Sub-Saharan Africa. Insect Science and its Application 23: 163-185
Van Huis, A., Van Itterbeeck, J., Klunder, H., Mertens, E., Halloran, A., Muir, G. and Vantomme, P., 2013. Edible insects: future prospects for food and feed security. FAO Forestry Paper 171. FAO, Rome, Italy.
I admit it, I’m obsessed with a small created wetland in NW Portland’s Pearl District. When it comes to urban greenspaces size is often overrated, meaning even a small created 200 x 200 foot faux wetlands can be both biologically and socially meaningful in intensely development urban neighborhoods. Tanner Springs is one of those sites.
In my last piece, Biodiversity Planning: Finally Getting It Right In the Portland-Vancouver Metro Region, I described The Intertwine Alliance’s newly released Regional Conservation Strategy and Biodiversity Guide for the Greater Portland-Vancouver Region that will allow our region to prioritize areas of high conservation value across the 3,000 square mile urban-rural continuum. These products are a vast improvement over past efforts to map fish and wildlife habitat and areas of special ecological concern. One of the most important features of the new mapping was its five meter pixel resolution that is intended to assist park and natural area planners and restoration ecologists to prioritize their work at every scale, from the 3,000-square mile landscape to individual neighborhoods and the streetscape.
The Intertwine RegionPowell Butte Nature Park. Photo: Mike Houck.
On the acquisition side, we have passed two bond measures totaling $363 million with which our regional government, Metro, and local park providers have added thousands of acres of natural areas to the public land base. Most of those acquisitions, however, have been sites of several hundred to more than 1,000 acres. Another significant recent success was the recent passage of the region’s first ever natural areas management and restoration levy, a $50 million five year funding source that will provide Metro with funds to manage is 16,000 acres of natural areas.
While these accomplishments contribute mightily to the region’s efforts to protect biodiversity across the regional landscape, what of the small, interstitial greenspaces, the left over bits of nature that play an oversized role in providing access to nature in the everyday lives of urban dwellers? They have historically been overlooked, undervalued, and viewed as throw away habitats, discarded in the name of “compact urban form.” If we hope to create livable and lovable cities where urbanites have access to nature where they live, work and play our next big challenge is protecting, restoring and, where necessary, designing and creating, small but ecologically and socially significant patches of urban greenspace. Without diminishing the importance of large “anchor” habitats in maintaining biodiversity, the scraps and threads of urban greenspaces that provide connectivity throughout the city and into the surrounding rural landscape are equally important. Size matters alright…at every scale, from the streetscape to large regionally significant nature preserves.
Osprey with fish. Photo: Mike Houck
What these small pieces, embedded in the urban matrix, lack in biodiversity they often matter most vis a vis their proximity to the majority of urban residents and ensuring people have access to nature—often in more dramatic ways than a wilderness experience. This is especially true in park and nature deficient neighborhoods. One expects to see an osprey land a fish in the Columbia or Willamette River in Portland.
But, when an osprey snags a koi ten feet away from a shallow pond or a great blue heron walks through a created wetland in one of the city’s densest neighborhoods it’s a transformational experience for a five-year old. It’s possible to design such experiences into the urban landscape, in even the smallest parks and natural areas.
Heron at Tanner Spring. Photo: Michael AbbateChild with Great Blue Heron at Tanner Springs. Photo: Mark Wheaton
Creating wild in the city: Portland’s park triptych
A triptych is a work of art that is divided into three sections, or three carved panels which are hinged together and can be folded shut or displayed open. Something composed or presented in three parts or sections; three canvases forming one image.
With the recent dedication of The Fieldspark a new work of art, a park triptych, was unveiled in Portland’s Pearl District.
The Fields Park. Photo: Mike HouckThe Pearl District. Photo: Mike Houck
The Fields, an expansive greensward, is the third in a series of parks in one of Portland’s densest neighborhoods, The Pearl District. The other two parks, the hardscaped water park at Jamison Square and the faux wetlands and spring of Tanner Springs Nature Park were dedicated in 2002 and 2005 respectively. Each park represents a unique urban design serving widely divergent, but complementary functions.
Jamison Square. Photo: Mike HouckTanner Springs from the Sitka. Photo: Mike Houck
In June 1999, Peter Walker & Partners landscape architects provided Portland Parks and Recreation concepts for three new parks that have become critical to the success of what has been a dramatic transformation of an industrial and manufacturing center and transportation hub of rail yards to a new high density, mixed use neighborhood with multi-family residences, offices, and commercial development. What I admire most about these parks is that their designs reflect the philosophy espoused by landscape architect John Charles Olmsted in his 1903 master plan for Portland, which called for the creation of a comprehensive, interconnected park system.
Olmsted’s plan and mapIpe wood boardwalk. Photo: Mike Houck
Olmsted developed a park typology, from urban squares that would function as public gathering places to large scenic reservations like Forest Park. Walker’s vision for the Pearl District included three parks that would serve specific functions and be knitted together with an ipe wood boardwalk.
Jamison Square Park, the first to be developed, was named to honor William Jamison, art gallery owner and early advocate for the Pearl District. The park’s main feature is a fountain with a shallow wading pool that ebbs and flows throughout the day. On a regular basis water flows between and over a rock wall, filling a shallow basin. What was conceived of as a neighborhood park has, in fact, become a regional attraction. On a hot summer day there may be several hundred children and their parents playing in the water or lounging under the birch trees.
Jamison Square Entrance. Photo: Mike Houck
The Fields, a large grassy ellipse three blocks north of Jamison Square, was designed for kite flying, throwing Frisbees, sunbathing, and other informal recreation. The park features an off-lease dog area, rain garden, and children’s play area.
The Fields. Photo: Mike Houck
Tanner Springs Park
A couple years ago I was driving north, adjacent to Tanner Springs Park, when a black and white blur flashed across my windshield. I looked to my right and a woman stood, mouth agape. She’d clearly seen the same thing I had. As I jumped out of my car an Osprey arose from the park’s shallow pond, a koi clutched in its talons.
Osprey in Tanner Springs Park. Photo: Mike Houck
It carried its prey to the roof of a nearby condominium and consumed the tiny koi after which it returned to its nest on the nearby Willamette River. I asked the woman whether this was unusual and she replied no, that it had become fairly common since someone in the surrounding condos had, illegally, started dumping koi in the pond. She provided me with a photo of the osprey which I immediately sent to Herbert Dreiseitl at Atelier Dreiseitl in Germany and Mike Faha, at Portland’s GreenWorks landscape architects who collaborated on Tanner Springs design to inform them that they had just been paid the highest praise for their design work. Great blue herons, too, visit Tanner Springs Park, attracted by koi. Great Blue Herons also frequent the nearby Chinese Garden in old town Portland.
Chinese Gardens in Portland’s Old Town. Photo: Mike Houck
What was once a stream, a natural wetland, and lake system in the Willamette River floodplain is now a native plant-dominated one-square block nature park. What’s amazing about this small urban greenspaces is the wildlife it has attracted into the newly created Pearl District. The original plan for the park was to daylight Tanner Creek. That turned out to be impractical, given the stream now flows more than twenty feet below the park. The Dreiseitl/GreenWorks design was developed from several charettes that were conducted in 2003 that revealed the public’s desire to have a water feature and access to nature in the city.
Dreiseitl Plan for Tanner Springs Nature Park. Image: Atelier DreiseitlVisitors with Great Blue Heron, Tanner Springs Park. Photo: Mike HouckGreat Blue Heron and its reflection in Tanner Springs. Photo: Mike HouckMother and daughter at Tanner Springs. Photo: Mike HouckCamas, Tanner Springs Park. Photo: Mike HouckRailroad Track art wall, Tanner Springs. Photo: Mike Houck
An “artwall” runs along the east edge of the park consisting of 368 railroad tracks set on end with almost one-hundred blue “Bulls Eye” fused glass which was produced by a Portland glass art company. Each of the rectangular glass panels has images of dragonflies, and other aquatic invertebrates native to local wetlands. The images were hand-painted by Herbert Dreiseitl directly onto the glass panel, which was then fused and melted and inset into the tracks. One of Dreisitl’s panels is dedicated to the “lost wetlands” the park is intended to evoke. The New York Times ran a piece on Tanner Springs, describing it as “a sort of cross between an Italian piazza and a weedy urban wetland with lots of benches perched besides gently running streams.” Tanner Springs also provides a quiet, contemplative space for tenant in the nearby Sitka Apartments, an affordable housing project that sits catty-corner to the park.
Aquatic Insect art. Photo: Mike HouckIn Remembrance of Lost Wetland. Photo: Mike HouckThe Sitka from Tanner Springs Park. Photo: Mike Houck
Heron Pointe Wetlands
While Tanner Springs represents an example of created nature, a second small wetland is a case study in the preservation and restoration of a less than one-acre wetland on the west banks of the Willamette River. In 1984 the Heron Pointe condominium development proposal would have filled the postage stamp wetland.
Heron Pointe Wetlands. Photo: Mike HouckHeron Pointe Wetlands view downstream. Photo: Mike Houck
The argument used to request the wetland fill was one all too often invoked when developers seek wetland fill permits—the site was so small that it had little ecological value and that nearby Ross Island complex was more significant. After a protracted fight the wetland was retained as an amenity to the adjacent condominiums.
Ross Island. Photo: Mike Houck
Today, not only has the wetland been restored in a cooperative effort with the home owners association and city’s Bureau of Environmental Services and Park Bureau, but it is one of very few refugia for Chinook salmon and steelhead trout, both of which are now listed as Threatened under the Endangered Species Act. While it’s true that, compared with nearby 350-acre Ross Island complex the wetland is comparatively unimportant from a region’s biodiversity perspective, it serves as one of only two sites for the local neighborhood.
In the end, small seemingly unimportant areas like Heron Pointe are treasured by local residents not for their contribution to the city’s biodiversity, but because they bring wildlife to their very doorstep. We installed an interpretive sign twenty years ago which we situated next to the Willamette Greenway Trail that sees hundreds of people daily on their commute or walking and cycling the greenway on weekend outings.
Heron Pointe Interpretive Sign. Photo: Mike HouckAnna’s Hummingbird female on nest. Photo: Mike Houck.Downy woodpecker. Photo: Mike HouckWhite crowned sparrow at Heron Pointe. Photo: Mike Houck
Nothing represents the neighborhood’s attachment to this small scrap of wetland more than the tiny bronze beaver that was installed by a local resident in memory of her husband who succumbed to Alzheimer’s. More often than not passersby leave a little memento with the beaver, sometimes a beaver-chewed stick others a more whimsical gift of flowers or other memorabilia. The beaver’s head is worn smooth from the many pats on the head it receives from walkers on the adjacent Willamette River Greenway path.
The skin of the city shifts. Waves of residents come and go; meanings vanish. The longer I live here, the more I feel like I am a creature of many phantom limbs. Hungry, I walk to Jimmy’s hoping for fish and a chair to eat it in, but it is gone. In its place, a bodega expanded into a head shop and a pharmacy. It’s not the worst offense, these changing storefronts. But the churn at the whim of capital is a storm that rages and threatens the living parts of the City, the small human bits.
Rapacious development is churning and devouring neighborhoods. Gathering places are first on the chopping block.
A century of disinvestment and municipal neglect add up to slow motion carpet-bombing. Buildings deteriorate until their removal seems inevitable, and whole communities are replaced with a “new” urbanism. Profit-driven construction, in the wake of orchestrated disinvestment and a legacy of public and private neglect, transforms New York City; neighborhoods once full of social clubs, artists’ spaces, churches, and dances halls become rows of shells for private luxury living. These “investments” leave an eerie emptiness in their wake; there are simply fewer people in the new neighborhoods.
Mural Memorial + Completed Spire alteration, July 2016. Photo credit: Paula Z. SegalSilent Barn 2016. Photo credit: Paula Z. SegalCumbia Postcard, 2013. Photo credit: Paula Z. Segal, 2016
In January 2013, the organization I run, 596 Acres, became one of the first “stewdio” tenants at the then-newly-reopened Silent Barn in Bushwick, Brooklyn, an artist-created-and-run cooperative space. 596 Acres took over a portion of a former car mechanic’s garage, broom-swept, oil stains still on the floor. The Silent Barn had signed a 10-year lease on a live-work space that suggested some kind of permanence, or at least some kind of duration. 2022 seemed an awfully long time away.
Around the corner from our new “office” stood a majestic church with a 190-foot copper steeple, St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, opened in 1892. The building had hosted a congregation for over a century, and a community garden for several decades, and in the more recent past had become the site of parties, artist studios, and, briefly, an indoor velodrome for bicycle races.
The steeple was how everyone told direction in that corner of Brooklyn; it reached dozens of feet above the elevated subway tracks and winked its ever-greener green. A few blocks in each direction, three distinct street grids turn away from each other, relics of the independence of the six towns that became Kings County in New York State and then the City of Brooklyn, which later became one of the five boroughs of New York City. A compass marker here has helped orient residents for over a century.
But the church and its spire have never been formally designated a “landmark,” despite numerous requests for the NYC Landmarks Commission to evaluate the building for a designation under the NYC Landmarks law. These include one made to the local City Council Member and a team of Architecture History students from Columbia University in 2010, but all were ignored by the agency or cast aside with the simple response that the building itself was in too precarious a condition to designate.
Silent Barn. Photo credit: Paula Z. Segal, 2016
Rapacious development was already churning and devouring New York City’s outer borough neighborhoods. Gathering places are first on the chopping block.
The week we moved to the Silent Barn, the sale of the former church building across the street to Cayuga Capital Management, a private for-profit developer planning a market-rate condo conversion, had just been completed. Architects seeking approval of their plans showed drawings that left the pointy spire intact and described apartments with stained glass windows in its upper reaches. The developers, in their marketing materials, wrote:
The whole thing was becoming 99 expensive rental apartments.
The Church was designed by Cooper Union-educated architect Theobald Engelhardt a generation after the village of Bushwick was incorporated into the new City (!) of Brooklyn. Mr. Engelhardt located his own architecture office around the corner from the Church site on Broadway while the spire went up. It was in a building he also designed on what was then Brooklyn’s Wall Street, across the street from a German singing society hall the construction of which was paid for by its members, and which he also designed.
One hundred years later, the intricate architecture—created to foster social inclusion, artistic production, and a life of collective endeavor—is rapidly transforming into private residences rented and sold for ever-higher prices on the unregulated market. The singing hall is now the Opera House Lofts and many private developers are buying up churches and converting them to residences for those who can afford their lofty ceilings and bespoke window frames.
Bushwick. Photo credit: Paula Z. Segal, 2016Engelhardt office, July 2016, Broadway side. Photo credit: Paula Z. Segal
Formal NYC Landmark designation is primarily reserved for architectural artifacts, disconnected from their cultural context or their social import. A landmark designation for a piece of the built environment, with its mercurial meanings bestowed by changing local demographics over many decades, is extremely unlikely, though in 2015, in an unprecedented move, the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission designated Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village.
That Commission report begins, “The Stonewall Inn, the starting point of the Stonewall Rebellion, is one of the most important sites associated with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender history in New York City and the nation.” It continues for many pages, describing how the Stonewall Inn operated (“the owners made regular payoffs to the Greenwich Village’s Sixth Police Precinct”) and contextualizing the role of this meeting place in its historic moment (“New York police could arrest anyone wearing less than three items of clothing that were deemed ‘appropriate’ to their sex, and the State Liquor Authority made it illegal for a bar to serve someone who was known to be gay.”). As the New York Timesreported, several speakers at the designation hearing pointed out that the buildings that house Stonewall are not architecturally distinguished and “would not earn landmark status on aesthetic grounds.” Yet the designation will protect the physical buildings that house the Inn from future alterations.
This may be a new path to protecting places that matter to our communities for their mattering, but it’s coming late, after one hundred years of redlining, the cut-backs in municipal services of the 1970s and 1980s, “urban renewal,” blight designations and bulldozers. The economic history of our city’s neighborhoods has ripened many for replacement, has forced families and communities to move away from places they loved because the disinvestment turned septic, turned into danger and reduced life expectancies. People who could took their children away to live in more orderly and invested places, stopped attending church, stopped paying fees to the singing club, eventually stopped coming back when their neighbors did the same.
Cumbia front view, 2013. Photo credit: Paula Z. SegalCorner of Bushwick Avenue and Melrose: 2016, 2013, as memorialized. Photo credit Paula Z. Segal.
In 2013, I knew that the architects’ promotional materials were just advertising and nothing in their renderings was enforceable.
Predicting then that the church would not survive its conversion in any cognizable form, Daniel Eizirik, an artist in residence at 596 Acres, and I conceived of a mural: If You Love the Music, Spare the Drummer (a cumbia for Stanwix Street). In it, Daniel captured the world we saw that upside down winter, a tiny corner of a larger world that we knew was vanishing, a tattoo on brick inked to mark a moment.
In it are the fish place, a Spanish-speaking fashion boutique, chain link fences surrounding city-owned land, a flat fix/auto glass joint attached to the gas station. The map is not the territory, and the portrait is not the person, but in some places, under seismic shifts in demographics and geographics, the map and the portrait are our last fixed points.
I won’t call it graffiti, this practice of making memory by inscribing place onto itself. Our memorial, like the Landmarks Commission’s designation of Stonewall, is not based on architectural distinction, though the building was certainly distinguished; it is the only landmark designation that Mr. Engelhardt’s majestic spire will ever get. The painted version has already outlasted the 190-foot cooper one, which was placed into a dumpster and sold for scrap over the winter. The apartments are nearly ready, and the spire itself has been capped, an echo of itself and of Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, another nineteenth-century German church with its steeple now lopped off, a memorial to forces of this century and their transformation of urban centers.
Auto Glass/ Flat Fix, 2013 & as memorialized. Photo credit: Paula Z. Segal.Auto Glass, 2016. Photo credit: Paula Z. SegalFence, 2013 & as memorialized. Photo credit: Paula Z. Segal626 Bushwick, 2016. Photo credit: Paula Z. SegalPhoto credit: Paula Z. Segal
Paula Segal and Daniel Eizirik
Brooklyn and Porto Allegre, Brasil
“Because then it becomes a beautiful self-driven machine. Nature driving people driving nature. Where the word is spread and the pride is shared and spread and it spills over (in the community). Everyone wants to feel proud of something that is on their doorstep“. —Kelvin Cochrane, baker and community-activist,
Bottom Road Sanctuary, Cape Town
This piece sets out to explore whether small-scale civic-led gardening schemes are just feel good stuff or whether they make a contribution to the functioning ecology of our cities.
The simple act of digging your fingers into the soil, pushing a seedling into the ground, nurturing it and watching it grow is a sacred, visceral and beautiful process, which opens the door to a greater respect and sense of awe for nature’s mysteries and treasures. There is no doubt that social gardening initiatives, aside from playing a pivotal role in creating the human connections that help reinforce a sense of community, help to generate biophilia and a greater reverence for and connectedness with nature in cities. These sorts of initiatives assist in integrating urban ecosystems as part of the daily experience of citizens, subsequently aiding in creating a new inclusive way, as opposed to a purely scientific way, of speaking about and carrying out conservation objectives that can include and be understood by the everyday citizen.
Bottom Road Sanctuary was previously a derelict wasteland of rubble and is now a magnificent indigenous garden constructed by the local residents and open to the general public. Photo: Georgina Avlonitis
The urban ecology literature presents several cases of the importance of the social dimension of these kinds of engagements promoting and supporting sustainable environmental projects and awareness, encouraging social cohesion, and fostering local ecological knowledge. A colleague of ours who works for the Biodiversity Management Branch at the City of Cape Town once noted how humbled and delighted she always is to stumble on pockets of people doing innovative, environmentally-relevant gardening projects in their neighbourhoods. She also noted that these were the best places where urban conservation managers might intervene, where value could be readily added with information on appropriate indigenous plant species or offers of support in kind or through labour, as the energy and enthusiasm of an already-mobilized community is an exciting thing.
However, some conservation managers dismiss small urban patches and civic indigenous gardening projects as nothing more than points of social cohesion and activity on the basis that make no meaningful contribution to greater ecological functioning in the city. We disagree.
Princeess Vlei
The social value of urban gardens is not news. What is less understood, and what drove us into this particular field of enquiry—this research formed part of a Masters dissertation conducted in 2010 by Georgina Avlonitis—was what the ecological spin-offs of small-scale community endeavors in our cities are. Are these just feel-good hotspots or do these small-scale civic projects actually make an ecological contribution of sorts and what are the likely biodiversity outcomes?
We set out to explore this question by picking a spread of sites to examine ecological outcomes along what we saw as a gradient of engagement and an ecological continuum (ranging from relatively degraded sites, to those that have a high conservation status). Our sites included two civic-led indigenous gardening projects, a vacant lot, and two local nature reserves (one of which is a tiny patch of land conserved by default in the middle of one of Cape Town’s oldest horse race tracks). The two civic-led garden projects are the Bottom Road Sanctuary project and the Princess Vlei garden. Bottom Road Sanctuary is a household neighbourhood project which saw the transformation of a wasteland in a low-to-middle income community. Neighbours, inspired by what they saw over the wall in the first garden, which was catalyzed by community-activist Kelvin Cochrane, decided to physically remove the walls separating their front yards to eventually create (in a little over 10 years) what now stands as a magnificent open-access and indigenous community garden on their doorsteps.
The Rondevlei Nature Reserve presents one of the very few sites for the conservation of Sand Plain Fynbos. Photo: Georgina Avlonitis
The second community garden project is in the same neighborhood, but is a school gardening project on what was previously a wasteland adjacent to the Princess Vlei. This project is younger, being only about six years old, but has a much larger public participation component. Both these projects, while driven by the community, were supported with plants and guidance from the local nature reserve, Rondevlei. The factors driving these gardening projects were informed by a sense of community activism relevant to the post-apartheid urban form, relating to notions of indigeneity, ownership, the ‘good and just city’, and beautification. Our nature reserves were the Kenilworth Racecourse and Rondevlei Nature Reserve. The vacant lot was simply a large empty lot that had no evidence, or any local history, of ever having been developed.
The vacant lot was dominated by an ephemeral layer of annual grass. One rare and endangered species found here reminds us of both the heavy toll of urbanization where fragmentation sees the attrition of biodiversity , but also hints at the opportunity still present in these fragments of land where communities could be nurtured back to a state of ecological functionality. Photo: Georgina Avlonitis
We confined our sites to one original vegetation type, the Cape Flats Sand Fynbos, deemed Cape Town’s most ‘unlucky’ vegetation type as more than 80% has already been transformed and only 1% is statutorily conserved. We measured richness and functional richness among insects and plants (on the basis of the understanding of the causal link between diversity and function) in a series of plots at each site.
Our key findings, drawing on five 9m2 plots at each site, show a consistent pattern of similar plant cover, functional type diversity, and species richness between the conservation sites and the Bottom Road garden (see the Table at the bottom). The Princess Vlei project lags somewhat, but as a younger project much a kin to the Bottom Road project this is likely to be on a similar trajectory. The Vacant lot has lower plant cover, functional richness and species richness. The Princess Vlei project and the Vacant Lot have some similarities in cover and functional richness, but the Princess Vlei site has far greater species richness and greater perennial cover. The Vacant Lot has the greatest richness and cover of invasive alien plant species.
While we acknowledge that it is difficult to identify causal mechanisms in ecology at the best of times and that the urban context is even more complex where ecologies are produced and modified through social, economic, political and cultural processes, some clear trends are evident. What we see is that total neglect, represented by the vacant lot, results in poor species richness and associated ecological functionality outcomes. Without intervention our vacant lots rapidly deteriorate to the ubiquitous urban patch dominated by a relative monoculture of grass and weedy annual species. The presence of high annual cover suggests a seasonally vulnerable site that will have limited cover in the hot dry summer months rendering it open to erosion. The presence of one rare indigenous species on our vacant lot suggests potential; some remnant gems are waiting to be nurtured back to functioning communities.
Kenilworth Racecourse
Without intervention however, these extant species present nothing more than extinction debt, waiting to slip away into obscurity the same way other indigenous counterparts on this vacant lot must have quietly disappeared years ago. This vacant lot reminds us of the heavy toll of urbanization on our indigenous flora and stands in stark contrast to the outcomes of the civic-led indigenous gardening projects where the role of informed activism presents astoundingly different outcomes.
The two gardening projects show a sound trajectory towards sites that have plant richness and functionality similar to the two conservation sites. A correspondence analysis exploring species composition and cover in space show just the trajectory we anticipated with the vacant lot an isolated outlier, and the two gardening projects ‘pulling towards’ the conservation areas, with the older and more established Bottom Road garden lining up more closely with the conservation areas than the younger Princess Vlei garden. There are sampling issues around plot and plant size and associated age, but generally what is evident is that concerned and informed social engagement can see the construction of healthy patches of indigenous garden akin to adjacent conservation areas. In every instance the need to monitor and manage invasive alien plant species is evident. This is a common urban problem that requires relentless attention.
The Princess Vlei garden has been constructed by local school children. Photo: Georgina Avlonitis
Consideration of the insect morpho-species richness at each site presents a potentially less clear picture. The Princess Vlei site has the greatest volumes of insects, followed by Kenilworth Racecourse (see the Table). Aside from these two sites the numbers of insects trapped are very low. The Vacant Lot, while low in actual numbers, has a surprising richness in functional diversity. It is possible the results are confounded by the competitive role of actual flowers resulting in lower insect trapping rates in the more diverse and densely vegetated conservation areas. This could also account for the high trapping rate at Princess Vlei which is less well vegetated as a more recently initiated project. The vacant lot presents relatively high morpho-species richness, and this can be attributed to the abundance of annual flowering species where there would be no floral support at this site outside of the spring flowering season. While perhaps less compelling when compared to each other, when considered together in the broader context of the urban setting, and in keeping with previous studies, these vegetated patches contribute to the matrix in providing a diversity and functional diversity of insect morpho-species. The loss of pollinators as an outcome of urban fragmentation is well documented. In the Cape it is believed as much as 83% of our flora is insect pollinated. Without the simultaneous return of pollinators any patch of indigenous vegetation ultimately faces extinction.
Bar graph representing the total number of insect morpho-species, collected from pan trapping
There are some conservation managers who would argue that this kind of endeavor, without ever being self-sustaining without fire or spontaneous propagation (certainly for those fire-driven species prevalent in the Cape Flora), can never be counted as a true contribution to conservation across the city.
We feel they are wrong. Surely any effort that provides even small patches of indigenous vegetation with appropriate biodiversity elements and functional richness to the broader matrix of indigenous species across the city and fosters social engagement with nature makes a contribution to the conservation mandate of the city? So while these patches may not achieve what a large-scale conservation endeavour would in terms of sustainability they do have elements of ecological functionality that make a worthy contribution, akin to Timon McPhearson and Victoria Marshall’s notion of the relevance of the micro-urban.
Here we see how socially-informed goals meet those of biodiversity conservation to produce excellent social and ecological outcomes. Local school children have learnt about indigenous plants and experienced the joy of planting, residents have access to a biodiversity-rich public space akin to the City’s Botanical Garden, the gaps in the urban matrix are filling up with plants that can share pollinators and pollen with adjacent conservation areas, and populations of threatened species have been expanded. Our work supports the view that these pockets of civic-engagement present a key opportunity to both restore nature and build respect and an infectious sense of community pride for what is growing ‘on their doorsteps’ with bothsocial and ecological gains.
Pippin Anderson, a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, is an African urban ecologist who enjoys the untidiness of cities where society and nature must thrive together.
FULL BIO
“For whom do all the flowers blossom in the spring?”
—A phrase of Zen word in springtime
These days, especially in summertime, we have heavy rain in Japan. Stormwater usually goes into concrete drains and flows into rivers. Most of the land in urban areas in our country is covered with asphalt or concrete, and the water flows into rivers very quickly. This is one of the reasons for flooding in urban areas. In response, we have started to plan and design rain gardens.
Traditional ways of designing are sometimes suited for endemic species.
I usually plan and design large-scale landscapes such as city parks, forested parks, around rivers, and so on. In this essay, I would like to think about small rain gardens. It is good for such rain gardens to be designed with both function and beauty in mind. Since I was first asked to design a Japanese garden, I started to learn “Sado”, a traditional tea ceremony, and have been doing it for 15 years because it is deeply concerned with creating a traditional Japanese garden. “Sado” is based on Zen culture; we learn not only about how to make tea, but also about native plants and flowers, calligraphy, pottery, and sometimes food. So, I tried to design a small rain garden based on Japanese traditional gardens.
Part of the rain garden in March 2016. Photo: Keitaro Ito
An opportunity
When I moved to an old house near the sea in September 2013, I found that a roof drain had broken and the water flowed under my old house. That was not good for the house, so I fixed it, changing the flow out to a small space outside. However, it was not so beautiful to see the water coming out from the drainpipe to the small space. The small space was totally covered by weeds.
The space with weeds (some exotic species) in 2013. Photo: Keitaro Ito
First stage
In autumn 2013, I took the weeds out (except for the native species) and dug up the soil to around 50 cm deep. Lots of stones and roots came out. I carried them away and brought small stones in, putting them in for drainage in a 20 cm. deep layer. Then, I covered them with sandy soil at 10 cm deep, covering this layer with the soil that used to be there.
Dug up the soil. Photo: Keitaro ItoFilled up the stones for drainage and covered by sand and stones. Photo: Keitaro ItoPlanted regional plants and flowers bit by bit. Photo: Keitaro Ito
When the stormwater came
After completion of the garden, we had heavy rain that fell at a rate of around 60mm/hour in the summertime of 2015. The water was absorbed into our garden, and we had no overflow, which shows me that the function of the rain garden is enough to cope with stormwater at this scale. It will be interesting to collect the rainfall data and water balance.
Under the storm water. Photo: Keitaro Ito
Vegetation and biodiversity
I covered the garden with white stones and mosses, including:
Cameria japonica
Ardisia japonica
Ophiopogon japonicas
Acer palmatum
Miscanthus sinensis
Farfugium japonicum
Actinidia arguta
Equisetum hyemale
Tricyrtis affinis Makino
The white stones align with the water flow. I included plants and flowers that could be used for the tea ceremony. The vegetation has been changing from spring 2014 to spring 2016 bit by bit, and some small creatures came here, like bees, Plestiodon japonicus (Japanese skink), and so on. Does this mean we could find an ecological network even in this small garden?
Nature and people
An interesting aspect of Japanese traditional gardens is the plant species they include. People use endemic species for the gardens. I haven’t seen tulips in Japanese gardens. Why? The gardens try to incorporate original nature, like stones as a mountain, water as a sea and so on. People who build small gardens are trying to find the beauty of nature, and they seem to be learning nature from gardens. Although gardens are changing various ways in this country, if we think about biodiversity and local ecology, the traditional garden is sometimes a good example for me. For instance, bees come to native flowers to take their nutrients and to pollinate, meaning an interaction between insect and local plants is occurring. Traditional ways of designing are sometimes suited for endemic species.
After two years (spring, 2016). Photo: Keitaro Ito
Future issues
This is a small example of a rain garden; however, if we create this kind of small (or, if you have a big garden, that would also be good!) rain garden for each house, so that people understand the importance of it, things will change. Maintenance of the garden is one of the ways of learning Buddhism for monks; I learned lots of interesting things from the process of creating this small garden. The garden histories and backgrounds of the associated cultures are different in each country, and I think the way of creating the garden is not only functions but also dependent on each climate, vegetation, religion and so on. We can plan and design functional landscapes, but if we think more about nature and cultures, the garden will become a more interesting place.
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.
Helga Fassbinder, AmsterdamA needed smart city filter: Do smart city measures contribute to a more socially fair good life, without externalising associated costs, spatially and socially?
Gary Grant, LondonAn adequate tranche of smart city investment should be spent on monitoring the environment, so that designers, planners, and managers can invest money to save money, restore nature, and make our cities more resilient to climate change.
Pratik Mishra, LondonSmart city policies in India could have much value, but are also very much part of India’s post-developmental neoliberal turn in politics that portends either indifference or active harm for the urban poor.
Seema Mundoli, BangaloreTransforming into smart cities that are aesthetically pleasing to a few, while ignoring the role of nature in cities for survival of the many urban poor is a further setback to the development of equitable cities.
Harini Nagendra, BangaloreTransforming into smart cities that are aesthetically pleasing to a few, while ignoring the role of nature in cities for survival of the many urban poor is a further setback to the development of equitable cities.
Vishal Narain, GurugramWhen we talk of a smart city, what (and whom) do we exclude and include, on what basis, and for which benefits?[
Eric Sanderson, New YorkWhat we truly need to improve the nature of cities are smart and wise people and institutions, who consciously and deliberately use data and information to create natural cities.
Bernhard Scharf, ViennaThe smart city community needs intensive exchange and mutual learning to find the best solutions to integrate human needs in urban planning, comprehensively and efficiently.
Huda Shaka, DubaiThe first step in creating a smart city is to set holistic, measurable objectives that address the needs and aspirations of its residents.
Shaleen Singhal, New DelhiSmart city efforts will be futile if the current challenges of inequality, poverty, and unsustainable consumption are not addressed.
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.
The “smart city” is still more of an aspiration than a reality, but many cities have initiated programs and projects. The projects themselves tend to lean toward technological outcomes such as energy efficiency, traffic and pedestrian flows, and so on. The public, to the extent that it is aware of the smart city at all, probably imagines the same.
But if our goal is for better cities—cities that are better for both people and nature—what can smart cities do for us? How can the technology of smart cities be specifically directed toward the creation of ecologically sophisticated cities that serve human well-being? Can the benefits they provide be distributed justly and equitably, for everyone and not just a few? Can the services they provide be about more than just technology?
How might we create cities that are not only smart, but wise?
We asked out panel: Smart cities are coming. It is important that they be as much about nature, health, and well-being as traffic flows, crime detection, and evermore efficient provision of utilities. How will this be done?
Helga Fassbinder is an urban planner, political scientist, writer, professor emeritus of the University of Technology Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and University of Technology Hamburg, Germany. She lives in Amsterdam and Vienna.
Fifteen years ago, she developed the concept of 'Biotope City - the City as Nature', and started the Foundation Biotope City, which is exploring new urban aesthetics and ethics. The Foundation has produced the BIOTOPE CITY JOURNAL since 2006. Meanwhile the first 'Biotope City' is being built in Vienna. www.biotope-city.net
A needed smart city filter: Do smart city measures contribute to a more socially fair good life, without externalising associated costs, spatially and socially?
Smart city as a social-ecological challenge
The term “smart city” is used by actors of the cities—political decision-makers, planners, administrations, companies, housing associations, etc.—in the mood for very different programs and objectives. One gets the impression that “smart” is a label which is often used only to “sell” any upcoming investment/measure, as it calls up the image of technological innovation and progress even if, in reality, the technological innovation is only marginal or its effects are questionable.
First of all, it’s about giving the concept of the smart city a definition.
We may agree that we live in times of global ecological crises, going further: in times of socio-ecological crises. By this I mean that we live in times of a multi-faceted crisis, which in many countries cause or at least intensify a social crisis by reaching or even exceeding the limits of ecological resilience. Thus, one can speak of a global social-ecological crisis. Migration flows and wars give expression to this.
That means as a consequence: if the renewal and transformation of our cities into smart cities is to have a forward-looking positive impact, then they must contribute to solving or at least mitigating these multiple socio-ecological crises rather than to exacerbate global negative ecological and social effects.
To further clarify the definition of “smart city” let’s add the following attributes: sustainable, resource efficient, ecological, nature friendly, and socially acceptable.
But what do these attributes imply in the concrete? This raises the question: How far are we going with sustainability and resource-saving, etc.?
I propose to add, as a sort of “filter” for “smart city” measures in the above sense, by asking the following questions:
Do these measures contribute to a more socially fair good life, without externalising associated costs, spatially and socially?
Are the smart city measures contributing to a global social-ecological transformation?
Our current Western-style life is largely based on the spatial and social externalisation of the costs of its production: costs of production in so-called low-wage countries, exploitation of natural resources in such countries, export of our waste to such countries etc. This means that our good life is based on the misery of humans and the extermination of nature (mineral resources, biodiversity, water, nature’s ability to regenerate in general, etc.) in these countries.
For this fact the German political scientists Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen have coined the term “imperial mood of living”. A few months ago, they published a book on this subject, subtitled “The Exploitation of Man and Nature in Global Capitalism” (1) The publication has received great attention and recognition and has come on the bestseller list of the magazine “Der Spiegel”.
This great response is pleasing because it shows that many people are aware that their lifestyle is leading to overexploitation of nature and people in a global dimension. Reflecting this, they may also be aware that this “imperial mood of living” in the long run will destroy the very basis of their own well-being: it accelerates climate change worldwide, it is destroying the basis of life of more and more people in these countries and depletes natural resources (e.g., rare earths) at a speed that makes their replacement by technological innovations very questionable.
What does that mean for the concept of the smart city? What does that mean for us, who are involved as experts in the planning and implementation of so-called “smart” measures?
First of all, any measure planned under the “smart city” label should be reviewed not only for its impact on climate and nature at the regional and national level, but it should also be checked as rigorously as possible with regard to the possible global externalisation of effects and costs.
Just a few examples:
This criteria brings into question many small measures currently being touted as “smart”. For instance when small human activities, easily carried out by hand, (e.g., to switch on a light) are unnecessarily are replaced by electronic triggers, and thus now require the consumption of, among other things, rare earths.
Even the conversion of individual vehicles to electric cars, a change now propagated in many countries, and touted as sustainable, comes into question. The decision to convert to electric cars results not only the premature replacement of fossil fuel-powered cars (and thus a destruction of value), justified with gains in energy efficiency and reduced carbon emissions, but it also neglects to account for the resource consumption and carbon emissions made by the production of these new electric cars. It also does not take into account the consumption of raw materials for electric batteries, materials which perhaps do not even exist in sufficient quantities for the scale needed. What is the balance sheet?
In addition, the switch to electric vehicles also requires a new, large-scale infrastructure of charging stations, also associated with an increased consumption of resources, and rare earths.
I do not argue against electric cars in general. But for improving the flow of individual traffic, the more sustainable alternative, instead of subsidising each new electric car, is certainly to give priority to the development of the public transport network, and, for urban traffic and transport, to promote and support the use of human-powered forms of transport, such as bicycles, with safe bicycle lanes and safe parking.
On the opposite side, there are other “smart” measures which certainly do not or hardly have any negative externalised effects. This includes, for example, the comprehensive greening of buildings, urban farming, and urban gardening. These measures contribute to the strengthening of native biodiversity, they reduce summer temperatures, delay the outflow of water during prolonged heavy rain, and can support small-scale corporate structures in gardening and agriculture, with no or minimal externalisation of effects and costs.
Conclusion:
The critical review of any as “smart” planned measure concerning their global spatial and social impacts, could lead, in the end, to a checklist of the social and ecological gains and deficits of “smart measures”. Such a checklist could help planners, critical public, and decision-makers to decide whether or not to carry out what one has in mind and, with regard to minimizing the effects of externalisation of costs, could help us look for better or best alternatives.
Such a checklist would contribute to an efficient social-ecological transformation that could modify and reduce the “imperial mood of life” by transforming our cities.
Notes:
Brand, Ulrich/Wissen, Markus (2017): The Imperial Mode of Living. In: Spash, Clive (ed.): Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics: Nature and Society. London: Routledge, 152-161.
Brand, Ulrich/Wissen, Markus (2017): Social-Ecological Transformation. In: Noel Castree, Michael Goodchild, Weidong Liu, Audrey Kobayashi, Richard Marston, Douglas Richardson
Görg, Christoph/Brand, Ulrich (lead authors)/Haberl, Helmut/Hummel, Diana/Jahn, Thomas/Liehr, Stefan (2017): Challenges for Social-Ecological Transformations: Contributions from Social and Political Ecology. In: Sustainability 9(7), 1045; doi:10.3390/su9071045
SMART CITY ALS SOZIAL-ÖKONOMISCHE HERAUSFORDERUNG
Die Bezeichnung ‘smart city’ wird von den Akteuren der Städte – politischen Entscheidungsträgern, Verwaltung, Unternehmen, Wohnungsbaugesellschaften e.a. – für höchst unterschiedliche Programme und Zielsetzungen gebraucht. Man gewinnt den Eindruck, dass es sich um ein Label handelt, mit dem vielfach lediglich jeweils anstehende Investitionen/Massnahmen ‘verkauft’ werden sollen, da es das Bild der technologischen Neuerung auch dann aufruft, wenn die technologische Neuerung nur marginal oder selbst in ihren Effekten fragwürdig ist.
Es geht also erst einmal darum, dem Begriff der smart city eine Definition zu geben.
Wir sind uns vielleicht darüber einig, dass wir in Zeiten globaler ökologischer Krisen leben, noch weiter gehend: in Zeiten sozial-ökologischer Krisen. Damit ist gemeint, wir leben in Zeiten einer multiblen Krise, die durch das Erreichen der Grenzen der ökologischen Belastbarkeit in vielen Ländern eine soziale Krise hervorruft oder zumindest verstärkt. Somit kann man von einer globalen sozial-ökologischen Krise sprechen. Migrationgsströme und Kriege geben davon Ausdruck.
Wenn also der Umbau und die Erneuerung unserer Städte zu ‘smart cities’ einen in die Zukunft weisenden positiven Sinn haben soll, dann müssten sie beitragen zur Lösung oder zumindest zur Milderung dieser vielfältigen sozial-ökologischen Krisen, anstatt sie in ihren globalen Effekten noch weiter zu verschärfen.
Fügen wir also zur näheren Bestimmung der Definition von ‘smart city’ die folgenden Attribute hinzu: nachhaltig, ressourcenschonend, ökologisch, Natur schonend, sozial verträglich. Aber was implizieren diese Attribute dann im Konkreten? Hier erhebt sich die Frage: Wie weit geht die Reichweite von ‘nachhaltig’, ressourcenschonend etc. ?
Ich schlage vor, gewissermassen als eine Art von ‘Filter’ für ‘smart-city’-Massnahmen im obigen Sinne die folgende Frage hinzuzufügen: Tragen diese Massnahmen bei zu einem sozial gerechteren guten Leben, ohne damit verbundene Kosten räumlich und sozial zu externalisieren?
Tragen die Massnahmen bei zu einer globalen sozial-ökologischen Transformation?
Unser heutiges, von westlichen Standards geprägtes Leben ist in hohem Masse basiert auf der räumlichen und sozialen Externalisierung von Kosten seiner Herstellung: Kosten der Produktion in sog. Billiglohn-Ländern, Ausbeutung der natürlichen Ressourcen in solchen Ländern, Export unserer Abfälle in solche Länder. Das heisst: unser gutes Leben ist auf dem Elend von Menschen und der Vernichtung von Natur (Bodenschätze, Biodiversität, Regenerationsfähigkeit der Natur) in diesen Ländern begründet.
Die deutschen Ökonomen Ulrich Brand und Markus Wissen haben dafür den Begriff der ‘imperialen Lebensweise’ geprägt. Sie haben vor einigen Monaten ein Buch zu diesem Thema publiziert, das den Untertitel trägt ‘Zur Ausbeutung von Mensch und Natur im globalen Kapitalismus’. Die Publikation hat grosse Aufmerksamkeit und Anerkennung gefunden und ist auf die Bestseller-Liste des Magazins ‘der SPIEGEL’ gekommen.
Diese grosse Resonanz ist erfreulich, denn sie zeigt, dass doch vielen Menschen bewusst ist, dass mit ihrer Lebensweise Raubbau getrieben wird an Natur und Menschen in einer globalen Dimension. Es wird ihnen in der Reflexion dessen vielleicht auch bewusst, dass diese ihre ‘imperiale Lebensweise’ à la longue auch die Basis ihres eigenen Wohllebens zerstören wird: Sie beschleunigt den Klimawandel weltweit, sie entreisst immer mehr Menschen in diesem Ländern ihre Existenzgrundlage und erschöpft natürliche Ressourcen (zB seltene Erden) in einem Tempo, dass deren Ersatz durch technologische Neuerungen sehr fraglich ist.
Was heisst das nun für das Konzept der ‘Smart City’? Was heisst das für uns, die wir als Fachleute eingebunden sind in Planung und Durchführung von sog. ‘smarten’ Massnahmen?
Als erstes: Jede Massnahme, die unter dem Label ‘smart city’ geplant wird, sollte nicht nur unter der Frage ihrer Auswirkung auf das Klima und den regionalen und nationalen Naturhaushalt überprüft werden, sondern ebenso streng im Hinblick auf mögliche globale Externalisierung von Effekten und Kosten überprüft werden.
Nur einige Beispiele:
Damit werden bereits viele kleine Massnahmen fragwürdig, die als ‘smart’ angepriesen werden, z.B. überall dort, wo unnötigerweise kleine menschliche Handgriffe durch elektronische Steuerung (und damit dem Verbrauch von u.a. seltenen Erden) ersetzt werden. Auch der nun in vielen Ländern propagierte Umstieg des Individual-Verkehrs auf Elektroautos, der als nachhaltig angepriesen wird, wäre noch zu hinterfragen: Er zieht nicht nur den vorzeitigen Ersatz von fossil angetriebenen Autos (und damit eine Wertezerstörung nach sich), wobei dem energetischen und CO2-Gewinn der Ressourcenverbrauch und CO2-Ausstoss bei der Produktion der neuen Elektroautos gegenüber steht, ganz abgesehen von den für Elektrobatterien notwendigen Rohstoffen, die es in diesem Ausmass wohl garnicht in ausreichend gibt. Was ist die Bilanz? Zudem: Es bedarf auch einer grossflächigen neuen Infrastruktur mit Ladestellen, auch dieses ist mit einem gesteigerten Verbrauch von Ressourcen, u.a. den seltenen Erden, verbunden.
Die nachhaltigere Alternative, um den Verkehrsflow zu verbessern, ist wohl, dem Ausbau des Netzes von öffentlichem Verkehr Vorrang zu geben, und für den Nahverkehr den Gebrauch von Verkehrsmitteln mit ‘Menschenantrieb’, sprich Fahrrädern, mit sicheren Fahrradwegen und Unterstellplätzen zu unterstützen.
Andere ‘smarte’ Massnahmen hingegen haben deutlich keine oder kaum negative externalisierte Effekte. Dazu gehört die umfassende Begrünung von Gebäuden und Urban Farming. Sie tragen zur Stärkung der einheimischen Biodiversität bei, senken sommerliche Temperaturen, verzögern den Abfluss von Wasser bei langdauernden Starkregen und können kleinteilige Unternehmensstrukturen in Gärtnerei und Landwirtschaft unterstützen, mit keiner oder nur minimaler Externalisierung von Effekten und Kosten.
Fazit:
Die kritische Prüfung jeder als ‘smart’ geplanten Massnahme hinsichtlich ihrer globalen räumlichen und sozialen Effekte könnte zu einer Liste führen, anhand der PlanerInnen, eine kritische Öffentlichkeit und EntscheidungsträgerInnen entscheiden können, ob diese Massnahme zu verantworten ist.
Eine solche Liste wäre ein Beitrag zu einer effizienten sozial-ökologischen Transformation, die im Umbau unserer Städte den imperialen Charakter unserer Lebensweise modifizieren und verringern könnte.
Fussnoten:
Brand, Ulrich/Wissen, Markus (2017): The Imperial Mode of Living. In: Spash, Clive (ed.): Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics: Nature and Society. London: Routledge, 152-161.
Brand, Ulrich/Wissen, Markus (2017): Social-Ecological Transformation. In: Noel Castree, Michael Goodchild, Weidong Liu, Audrey Kobayashi, Richard Marston, Douglas Richardson
Görg, Christoph/Brand, Ulrich (lead authors)/Haberl, Helmut/Hummel, Diana/Jahn, Thomas/Liehr, Stefan (2017): Challenges for Social-Ecological Transformations: Contributions from Social and Political Ecology. In: Sustainability9(7), 1045; doi:10.3390/su9071045
Gary Grant is a Chartered Environmentalist, Fellow of the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, Fellow of the Leeds Sustainability Institute, and Thesis Supervisor at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, University College London. He is Director of the Green Infrastructure Consultancy (http://greeninfrastructureconsultancy.com/).
An adequate tranche of smart city investment should be spent on monitoring the environment, so that designers, planners, and managers can invest money to save money, restore nature, and make our cities more resilient to climate change.
Our knowledge of cities is limited. Millions of us take in the sights, but we don’t necessarily understand what we see and how it works. We take the built environment for granted and rarely take the time to analyse it or make plans to improve it. Help is needed from all-seeing and quick-thinking sensors and computer networks. We don’t have a full picture of the biodiversity that occurs in cities. There are maps which show the location and extent of habitats and various green spaces. Trees, especially street trees, are usually catalogued (take for example Singapore’s heritage trees). Knowledge of wild vegetation in cities is incomplete. Urban naturalists record birds in most cities, with specialists looking at particular species, like the swift for example, but investigations of invertebrates are uncommon. The first task for the smart city is to use cameras and sensors, working with artificial intelligence, to complete the mapping and cataloguing of natural features within our cities. This will include soils, watercourses and waterbodies, habitats (both on the ground and on buildings), as well as species. Sound, for example, is being used to identify and map wildlife. An interesting example of this is the monitoring of bat activity in real time in London’s Olympic Park. The description and cataloguing of urban nature need to be completed, so that we can see where it is missing, where it can be enhanced, and where management should be focussed, to restore nature for its own sake and for the well-being of citizens. Smart city technology can be harnessed for this purpose. It will make monitoring more affordable and more effective.
Nature affects and is affected by its physical setting. Surprisingly little is known about the various and changing microclimates in our cities. The phenomenon now known as the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHIE) was first described more than 200 years ago, however, ask city planners about how much of a problem the UHIE is in a particular precinct, chances are they will not know. The permeability of surface cover, evapotranspiration rates, and surface temperatures are inter-related, and these parameters can be measured using infra-red photography. An excess of sealed surfaces can lead to problems with surface water flooding and combined sewer overflows which pollute watercourses. Cameras and digital thermal sensors can be networked in order to monitor the whole city, looking for hot spots, where green infrastructure can be created to fix these problems.
Air quality and water quality are monitored, usually to the minimum standard required by legislation in any jurisdiction. New York City, for example, monitors air quality at 150 stations. Water quality tends to be measured in selected watercourses at particular times in the year or in response to incidents. It is well established that vegetation intercepts and absorbs air pollution, and that soil cleans water, however little is known about how particular combinations of soil and vegetation in urban settings provide these ecosystem services. As the costs of sensors that measure pollutants fall, it should be possible to monitor entire urban areas, to understand where the most serious problems are occurring and how natural features are affected and are reducing the impacts of pollution on citizens. More detailed and wider scale monitoring will reveal more about how polluted cities are but will also help city planners to prioritise expenditure and target interventions and continuing management.
We are told that there will be significant investments in smart city initiatives. 1.2 trillion dollars by 2022 according to one estimate. Without a concerted effort from those of us interested in nature, it is possible that almost all of this investment will be centred on measuring the flows of energy within wires and water within pipes, on smoothing traffic flows, detecting crime, and servicing businesses and government. This is all well and good for the most part. However, an adequate tranche of that investment should be spent on monitoring the environment, so that designers, planners, and managers can invest money to save money, restore nature and make our cities more resilient to climate change. We need to be shielded by more water, soil, and vegetation and this must be added in a smart way, which will require smart city techniques and technologies.
Pratik Mishra is a PhD Student in Human Geography. His work pursues the urban’s ecological hinterland to find more than just the sheer quantity of resources or waste that the urban expends in its metabolism, and rather the villages and the lives that get entangled in these resource flows. He hopes that these stories will help us understand better the relations between the core and periphery of Indian cities.
The dangers of anti-poor smartness in Indian cities
Smart city policies in India could have much value, but are also very much part of India’s post-developmental neoliberal turn in politics that portends either indifference or active harm for the urban poor.
To be honest, I was disappointed when I found out that “smart cities” existed already as a buzzword in urban governance outside of India. When our Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015 announced the Smart Cities programme to develop 100 cities in India through better core infrastructures, more information technology solutions in governance, and cleaner, greener surroundings, I beleived he would be the one to bring this term into vogue and give it shape. He is known for inventing new terms and conflating one thing to another (This is not a criticism). Recently in celebrating the progress in Ease of Doing Business rankings, he stated that this jump in ranking also represented a growth in “ease of living” for citizens. Why wouldn’t he just use the existing Human Development Index which ranks India 131 out of 188 countries and target attention at improving there? (This is a criticism).
The Smart City programme in India is one-of-its-kind in terms of not laying down standards for “smartness” a priori. The idea was to look at the projects and ideas urban bodies would propose in their bids and then create standards tailor-made for those projects. Even that ambition was set aside as the Ministry set aside benchmark standards instead relying on a fuzzier liveability index to just rank smart cities that were already smart. To me, this attitude of fuzziness is welcome.
It’s very clear that the smart cities, which are designed as retrofitted, renewed, or greenfield satellites to existing cities, are there to attract investments. Traffic flows, crime detection and efficient utilities are the means to this, objectives biased towards certain classes of citizens. In talking about nature, health and well-being, my argument is on how smart cities could be more pro-poor without suggesting the policy be any more welfarist (in the redistributive sense, as I only wish it would be). Such policies are not new in India; very much part of its post-developmental neoliberal turn in politics portends either indifference or active harm for the urban poor. David Harvey speaks of the “spatial fix” where socio-spatial arrangements like infrastructures are reconfigured in limited geographies to reflect the imperatives of capital. Capital perpetually seeks spatial fixes that would address its crises and contradictions through geographic expansion and commodification of hitherto underdeveloped resources. Using Harvey’s analogy, smart cities provide yet another syringe for capital’s addiction to expanding its frontier across space. Niall Brenner’s writing on the rescaling of state space allows us to articulate how smart cities represent uneven legal regimes and infrastructures typical of an entrepreneurial approach to urban governance rather than a welfarist-one.
These discourses obviously deal a bad hand to the urban poor. However, within these neoliberally-oriented regimes, the academic wisdom that urban researchers repeatedly stumble upon is that the policy and practice most meaningful to the poor is often located in the interstitial and residual spaces of policy. This insight is the veritable mother lode that keeps producing high-quality academic research bringing out different versions of the poor’s complex and entangled negotiations with the state. Political society (Chatterjee), insurgent citizenship (Holston), quiet encroachment of the ordinary (Bayat), occupancy urbanism (Benjamin), etc. all state that the poor, so often unfairly finding themselves on the wrong side of legality, find flexible arrangements, negotiations with street bureaucrats and political patronage relations useful. Subverting policy serves a greater good. Obviously, the rich exploit fuzziness and commit illegalities even more ruthlessly but that is not something to get into now.
Finally, just from my fieldwork which looks at drinking and wastewater canals that service the metabolism of Gurugram city, I present a sort-of-related example. The canals chart their way across many villages as they bring water to the city or take sewage away. They are assumed to be largely inert flows with transmission loss only on account of evaporation for drinking canals, and irrigation is allowed for wastewater canals though not regulated. These flows are anything but inert though, as through seepage, irrigation and theft, they radically impact the lives and livelihoods of farmers and residents in peri-urban villages. In the absence of any laid down rules or water user associations, farmers utilize wastewater from the sewage canals drawing on local historical norms of cooperation to regulate sharing and minimize conflicts. Seepage from the drinking water canals alters the groundwater table in nearby fields, reducing productivity on low-lying adjacent lands but also creating opportunity structures for farmers farther away who benefit from the groundwater. Interestingly, farmers pumping out water helps the canal structure as it reduces pressure from the high water table. A lot of unregulated activity takes place in the backwaters of policy which is simultaneously often arbitrary and unjust but also regulative and beneficial. The smart city approach of strongly attacking transmission losses, surveying water use and imposing top-down regulations, entrusting unaccountable parastatal institutions instead of local government with responsibility is just the prescription for doing more harm than good here.
A Smart Cities Readiness Guide produced by an industry body describes a smart city as “one that knows about itself and makes itself more known to its populace”. I don’t think smart cities would necessarily produce the right kinds of knowledge in their statistics. If the harder institutional, democratic changes won’t be invested in, I hope spatial fixes like smart cities partially fail so it may allow constituency-level negotiations, flexible arrangements and limited surveillance, all of which have enabled the urban poor to exercise their democratic agency. A technocratic operationalization of smart city principles devoid of adequate human interfaces and contextual decision-making (even if such practices often appear to be corrupt) would only further limit the spaces of economic and cultural operation for those already immiserated by urban life.
Vishal Narain is Professor, Public Policy and Governance, at the Management Development Institute Gurugram, India. His academic interests are in the inter-disciplinary analyses of public policy processes and institutions, water governance, peri-urban issues and vulnerability and adaptation to environmental change.
When we talk of a smart city, what (and whom) do we exclude and include, on what basis, and for which benefits?
Smart cities are coming indeed, but how can they be wise and sustainable? I think this requires challenging some of our commonly held views and notions. First, I find it disorienting that in this age and time, we still talk of a “city”, as if it is some well-defined entity, marked out in space and time. Implicitly, the definition of a city assumes some spatial or administrative unit marked out or posited against a boundary. Typically, we think of a city as the opposite of what is not a city; for instance, and typically of what is “rural”. In the emerging context of the Global South, the urban-rural dichotomy is fast disappearing. We need to reimagine what a city is. Focusing on the city narrowly may mean compromising the integrity of ecosystems that support it, or from which the city draws its resources.
So, when we talk of a smart city, what (and whom) do we exclude and include, and on what basis? Is this the city core, the jurisdiction boundary, or also the peripheries whose resources are guzzled by the growing city? I live in Gurugram, and my residential gated colony is right next to a village settlement area, on whose (former) agricultural land my house is built. Is that village also “city”? The institute where I work, Management Development Institute, shares a boundary wall with a village called Sukhrali, which is now under the Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon. Just as I leave the main gate of the institute, I see rural folk sitting on cots and playing cards while smoking the hookah. (Hookah is a communal pipe. Village folk collectively smoke tobacco, taking turns.) Among them are former farmers, real estate agents, potters, craftsmen, and transport operators. Is my institute located in a city or a village?
In this age and time, when rural-urban boundaries are blurring in the Global South, programmes targeting “rural” or “urban” areas mean little. I would go for “smart watersheds”, or “smart urban agglomerates”, or “smart aquifers”. We need planning entities and approaches that recognize rural-urban relationships, flows of goods and services between rural and urban areas, dynamic and ever-evolving, or the relationships between social and ecological systems.
Having said that, if smart cities are conceptualized the way that they are right now, how can they be safe and sustainable? Where is the role for technology and infrastructure?
Urban farming is a new trend catching on in modern cities. Using the biodegradable wastes of our homes to grow our own vegetables is catching on. This helps in many ways; the domestic kitchen waste is used, it helps us move towards a circular economy. We consume vegetables whose source we know, and we recognize that they are not contaminated by chemical fertilizers and pesticides. There is a great potential for technology (e.g., through Facebook) to connect people who do this, popularize kitchen gardens and inspire those who would want to be inspired. Technology can help us reduce our ecological footprint and move towards a circular economy.
If we widen the notion of the city to include the surrounds and peripheries that feed it, it may make us see the smart city in a new light. This will then translate into improving rural internet connectivity and strengthening initiatives that foster the use of technologies in rural areas to improve access to information and lower transaction costs; for instance, in the Indian context, such initiatives as e-choupals (which uses information technology to provide information to farmers about market prices). It may mean improving rural-urban connectivity (and not just widening highways and building new expressways). This will improve rural communities’ access to modern health care and education and enable better marketing of perishable produce. It will ensure the safety of rural women and widen their access to urban markets.
We should also use modern technology to generate knowledge on and create greater awareness of the extent and impact of the degradation of natural resources like water bodies that smart cities consume, the loss of forest cover, the increase in built-up area and reduction of groundwater recharge. Expanding infrastructure means creating “more of” something. More for some people usually means less for others; violating the norms of intra-generational equity.
Eric Sanderson is a Senior Conservation Ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City.
What we truly need to improve the nature of cities are smart and wise people and institutions, who consciously and deliberately use data and information to create natural cities.
Like many Americans of a certain generation, I spent a portion of my misspent youth hunched around a table playing Dungeons & Dragons. One of the things I liked best about D&D is that at the beginning of each game, we would roll three dice to give our characters a set of defining attributes: strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity, and charisma. I thought it was brilliant that the designers of the game recognized the difference between intelligence and wisdom, which is sorely lacking in most of the 21st century world, and in particular, in the discussions around smart cities. Intelligence, smartness, information is the capacity to know facts about our cities. Wisdom, motivation, justness, is the capacity to act positively and bravely on that information to make the city better. We have many examples of intelligent people who do unwise things; we may know some of those rare people who are wise without being unusually intelligent, but what we truly need to improve the nature of cities are smart and wise people and institutions, who consciously and deliberately use data and information to create natural cities.
A natural city by definition fits seamlessly into its environment, much as forests, grasslands, and waters do; it gives as much as it takes; and it lasts for a long time.
In New York City, my colleagues and I have been trying to generate the smart, wise, natural city that we believe is essential to the future. One part of that is having a shared set of goals for the nature of the city, as Bram Gunther and I wrote about previously here. Nature in our view (and the view of over 40 other institutions) should be seen as fundamental to the functioning of the city as public safety, or education, or health. In New York we have police and fire departments to keep us safe, and departments of education and health to help us be smart and healthy, but the management of nature is scattered across agencies (NYC Parks Department, NYC Department of Environmental Protection, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, National Park Service, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, etc.), with no clear lines of responsibility that link back to a shared set of goals for the city as an integral and wise whole.
We have also been working hard to give New Yorkers tools to generate and share ideas about the city of the future. As I wrote about here, Visionmaker.nyc is a free online tool for ecological democracy. Anyone with an internet connection can zoom to a neighborhood of interest, see the ecosystems of that part of the city now as well as the historical, pre-development landscape, then reimagine the neighborhood they would like to see in the future. Those scenarios of a future can take into account climate change and/or play around with lifestyles through integrated toolsets. Each change generates a call to a set of models that give comparative and quantitative metrics about the water cycle, carbon flows, biodiversity patterns, and population density, where the user’s vision is evaluated next to that present-day neighborhood and the area as a natural landscape.
Finally, as this brief gloss on Visionmaker suggests, we have found it incredibly useful to contrast New York today with its pre-development, “wild” state, via the Mannahatta and Welikia Projects. Historical ecology provides unique perspectives that speak to wisdom even more than intelligence. Urban historical ecology reminds us that our cities have not always had their current form, despite their monumentality. The past gives us insights into the way nature shapes the land and waters where our cities are built. If the sea level rose 120 meters, as it has in New York City over the last 20,000 years, should we be shocked that it may rise another meter over the next century? Most importantly though, historical ecology inspires. Nature is beautiful and fascinating and robust in ways that speak volumes to our overcrowded and over-busy time. Sometimes one can glimpse that beauty today, in the rustle of leaves in a city park or in the motion of salt marsh grasses as the tides come in, but to realize the former vastness of this landscape and the productivity of its indigenous ecosystems is to open our hearts to the potential of the future and sting us with visions of what has been lost.
Born in Salzburg, I found my way to the University of Natural Resources & Life Sciences Vienna to study landscape planning and architecture. My master thesis already dealt with ecological and economical solutions for turf areas, so called flowering turf. 2006 I started my scientific work at the Institute of Soil Bioengineering and Landscape Construction. The focus from then on was the development of technical solutions to allow the broad application of green infrastructure in the context of urban challenges. In 2014 I co-founded the Green4cities company to close the gap between research and planning praxis. Today I am senior scientist at BOKU and CTO of the G4C company. More details here.
The smart city community needs intensive exchange and mutual learning to find the best solutions to integrate human needs in urban planning, comprehensively and efficiently.
What is a smart city? Is it a buzzword? Sometimes this impression is created, especially when you look at various real estate projects that are advertised as “smart” because of an info screen at the entrance hall, etc. while being absolutely conventional otherwise.
Is there a clear definition what a smart city is? In the field of research “smart cities” are understood as highly diverse. Most smart city research projects focus on a set of topics relevant to the scientists involved, such as the internet of things, social sciences or new mobility concepts, green infrastructure, etc. Apart from the thematic diversity, there is a common interface to all projects: they address the needs of people today and in the future. What we can observe is a significant change of perspective in how we plan and develop our cities: a human-centered planning approach going beyond the scope of traditional planning. No longer do people have to adapt to the city. It’s the other way around. The city has to deliver what people need.
That means that urban planning and design changes dramatically. Many people, especially investors but also experts, are afraid of the change towards smart cities. They try to keep their routine and patterns. While change is perhaps the only constant there is.
So how can we proceed on this path and create smart cities? I think we have to change attitudes, traditions, patterns, and routines. But most of all the following two aspects:
More resources and time for planning processes
The planning of new urban districts or retrofitting built city areas is highly complex. Thanks to modern technologies such as building information modeling (BIM), etc. the planning is extremely efficient and allows planners to address many aspects in a short time; and almost the same time (and money) for planning as many decades ago, when things were not as complex. Developers and municipalities expect that the planning experts comply with the given time frame and regulatory framework. As a result, we see planning experts struggle to balance the scope of services, time and money, trying to achieve the best results with the available resources.
The role of planning processes, especially concerning smart cities, needs to be much more appreciated. We need to be aware of the fact, that the cities we build today will remain—thanks to high European technical standards—for many, many decades, very likely until 2100 or beyond. At that time different climatic framework conditions, urban density and age-composition of the society will be a given. A smart city needs to account for all of these changes, today. Therefore, the planning process needs to be interdisciplinary including civic participation, allowing for work on interfaces and synergies with fewer budget and time restraints. Planners have to point out their importance in such complex planning processes to define the quality of projects and security of the investment for a very long time. Researchers estimate that, regarding an average planning project, the planners budget accounts for only 3 percent of the total lifetime cost of buildings, while defining the 97 percent of lifetime cost significantly!
Understanding the city as nature
More than 70 percent of Europeans live in a city today. Every weekend people tend to “visit” a piece of nature, a park, a forest, a mountain. Why? There is no regulation or obligation to do so. As proven in many health studies nature experience helps to recreate and relax, improving health, concentration and so forth. Obviously, citizens’ lack of nature experience in their direct vicinities, the urban fabric, leaves them with great desire and demand for nature.
In the history of city development nature has been perceived as a source of danger, out of control and order. As a consequence, cities somehow banned nature or kept it “clean” and under control in pots or parks. “We need to stop war against nature”, claimed Gary Grant at the European Union Green Infrastructure Conference 2017 in Budapest. Ecosystem services reduce urban heat island effects, flash flooding, air pollutants, noise, and increase the attractiveness of the urban fabric, creating healthy and appropriate habitat conditions for people. Nature has to be understood as an essential part of forward-looking and smart cities, as partner and ally to overcome many aspects of urban deficiencies.
Smart cities are coming. There is no doubt about that. There are some remarkable projects realized in Europe, but the process is ongoing and still experimental in a way. The smart city community needs intensive exchange and mutual learning to find the best solutions to integrate human needs in urban planning comprehensively and efficiently.
Huda's experience and training combine urban planning, sustainable development and public health. She is a chartered town planner (MRTPI) and a chartered environmentalist (CEnv) with over 15 years' experience focused on visionary master plans and city plans across the Arabian Gulf. She is passionate about influencing Arab cities towards sustainable development.
The first step in creating a smart city is to set holistic, measurable objectives that address the needs and aspirations of its residents.
While smart cities may be coming, many of the concepts, technologies, and partnerships that will make them happen are already here today. Some see commercial and property development opportunities in this new world, others see data and privacy risks. A third group is emerging who are advocating for utilizing smart technology to offer entire communities (not just paying clients) healthier, better-connected environments and wider economic opportunities. Ultimately, smart cities focused on nature, health and well-being will also need traffic flow, crime, and utilities data. The difference lies in the ownership, access to, and usage of the data to serve a higher purpose.
As an example, traffic flow data can be used to achieve both smoother vehicular traffic and safer planned pedestrian crossing conditions (location and signal timing) for improved health. As long as the wider community does not have access to this data or an understanding of how it is used, there is a risk that it will be used to maximize benefit for private interests.
To address this issue, a number of factors must be considered. The first step is to set holistic, measurable objectives for a city which address the needs and aspirations of its residents. Next is determining the type of data needed to manage and assess a city’s performance against the objectives. It is often at this step that government departments and officials stumble, as they focus on measuring and reporting what is easily measurable as opposed to what is important to be measured. For example, a public transport department may measure the total distance covered by bus trips, as opposed to the percentage of residents served by buses or the number of car trips avoided. Clearly the latter two indicators are more complex; however, they provide a much better basis for decision making as they link more directly to quality of life from a social and environmental perspective. It is likely that complex indicators may require more creative ways of measurement, including qualitative user satisfaction surveys, cooperation across government entities, participation by the private sector, and engagement with the community. This is all achievable in our age of smart cities.
Finally, there is the process of sharing this information and analysis with all city residents and users, in an accessible way—both from a technology and language perspective, amongst other factors. This a good test of the type of data being collected. Are the data telling community members what they want to know about their built and natural environment? Does it empowering them to make more informed decisions? Or are the data mostly being used to demonstrate that a government is “smart” or that a particular technology is a good investment?
The digital justice principles (access, participation, common ownership, healthy communities) provide insights into what a world of people and nature focused smart cities could look like. It is a city where data are collected and shared for the benefit of all. This is partly about what data are collected but mostly about who has access to the data and technology, and what benefit they bring to communities.
Dr. Shaleen Singhal is a Professor at TERI School of Advanced Studies with 21 years of research and academic experience working on sustainable urban development issues in India and UK. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK and a Visiting Fulbright Fellow for Yale University, US.
Smart city efforts will be futile if the current challenges of inequality, poverty, and unsustainable consumption are not addressed.
A new and enhanced comprehension of smart cities is elemental particularly in the context of cities in emerging economies that display a greater degree of complexities and barriers. Effectiveness needs to take over efficiency! Traditional indicators on outputs relating to investment and infrastructure creation require a shift towards outcomes relating to the quality of life of the city’s inhabitants including the vulnerable population of urban poor. While smartness may ascertain a city’s capacity to mobilize advance technologies including information and communication technology (ICT) in establishing sentient cities with futuristic infrastructure, it should also influence change in a city’s reach and delivery of quality services. To benefit current and future billions that are and will be living in emergent cities, leapfrogging and breakthrough in thinking, strategy, action, and evaluation are needed that must go beyond change as usual. An effective way to realise this is by engaging with young minds and to create a new cadre of professionals with systemic thinking and with an appreciation of the sustainability dimension of urban development. Institutions with a conventional outlook have demonstrated a limited capacity to adapt towards the need for upfront integration of sustainability into all tracks of city development. Globally, this is an apt time for such integration particularly by resurgent cities that are in the process of redevelopment. It is critical for cities to create synergies among smart city strategies, redevelopment strategies, and strategies for resilience to comprehensively enhance competitiveness with enduring sustainability.
For cities in emerging economies such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS), and others, smart city led technological advancements need to fortify redevelopment strategies such as retrofitting of ageing building stock and upgradation of infrastructure for resource efficiency and low carbon development. Such advancements shall also promote a shift from greenfield to brownfield investments while dealing with inherent socioeconomic and environmental challenges of inner cities. Any smart city aligned progressions can be truly effective if they also augment a city’s resilience with the ability to absorb, recover and prepare for future economic, environmental and physical, social and institutional shocks.
It is evident that agile cities such as from the BRICS region are growing in terms of population and gross domestic product (GDP), emerging as important destinations for investments, adopting innovations relating to technology, research and development, and becoming economically competitive. However, these cities also witness numerous challenges such as rising income inequality, growing slum populations, unsustainable consumption patterns, increasing pollution levels, and resource scarcity. Any changes towards being a smart city will be futile without measurable contributions in addressing such challenges and positively influencing the human development index (HDI) alongside economic competitiveness. Real opportunity should not be lost or limited to just intensifying the debate on what and how smart cities should be! Moreover, it should also not just be an unwritten strategy to bail out or prop up the real estate sector! It is imperative that the smart city transformation process adopts a shift in focus from tangible assets, actions and rankings towards important intangible dimensions that are critical to enhancing living standards. Positive changes in dimensions such as but not limited to—culture and heritage sensitive urban management, scalable exemplars of rich governance, and innovative financing mechanisms such as through leveraging a city’s assets, are critical. Others dimensions, such as efficient green infrastructure and unbuilt environment, behavioral change for sustainable consumption and production practices, strategies for inclusiveness, sustainable redevelopment and resilience, connectivity, imageability, and happiness quotient of inhabitants are a few expected outcomes from smartening a city movement.
Conceptual graph for smart and sustainable cities (adapted from Singhal, S. 2018 (in press). Competitiveness of cities in new and emerging economies: case of India. In Urban competitiveness: cities in a global context, Edited by Sobrino, J., El Colegio de Mexico.)
As we advance on a pathway of upgrading our select cities to smart ones, examples of a few inevitable questions are—how far has the city progressed on HDIs? Has social capital of the city increased? Has the city achieved significant improvement in access and quality of services such as education, health, security, and key environmental services? How self-reliant has the rural catchment become? Is the city footprint decreasing while increasing productivity? How in command are the local institutions to further propel the city’s smartness? How happy are citizens from the outcomes? Are outcomes further harnessing cultural uniqueness of the city, its people, assets and resources? This is evidently, a case for rephrasing smart cities as “smart sustainable cities”! This pathway should raise the significance and impact of intangible dimensions as complementary to tangible outputs for smart and sustainable cities in emerging economies.
Seema Mundoli is an Assistant Professor at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. Her recent co-authored books (with Harini Nagendra) include, “Cities and Canopies: Trees in Indian Cities” (Penguin India, 2019), "Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India's Cities" (Penguin India, 2023) and the illustrated children’s book “So Many Leaves” (Pratham Books, 2020).
Transforming into smart cities that are aesthetically pleasing to a few, while ignoring the role of nature in cities for survival of the many urban poor is a further setback to the development of equitable cities.
Spring is in the air—for us, urban residents in the Global South, these are said to be times of plenty. Cities in India, for example, are believed to be the engines propelling economic development and employment generation. There is hardly any product that cannot be bought or service that cannot be accessed in the Indian urban market. If there is a scarcity, it seems to be of thought: thought in planning and vision for our cities. India recently launched an ambitious Smart City Mission that envisages the development of 100 smart cities across the country. Information and communication technology, and high-quality infrastructure are the pillars on which smart cities are to be developed. However, the role of nature in the smart city project to improve the quality of life of urban residents is severely limited in conception. The role of urban nature is envisioned only for the development of open spaces for recreational purposes—and a brief mention of addressing urban heat effects. This, at a time when India is reeling under a host of environmental problems.
As has now become a regular occurrence, New Delhi (India’s capital city), was blanketed with smog in the winter of 2017. Air pollution levels reached hazardous levels that warranted the closure of schools for several days. The “solutions” included short term technical fixes such as deploying water cannons to combat pollution. At the same time, a sizeable chunk of funds was allocated under the smart city project to—yes, you guessed it—to build multi-level automated parking! This beggars belief, since private vehicles contribute considerably to the pollution in the city. The smart city proposal for New Delhi makes no mention of efforts to disincentivize private transport, or increase green cover that can help mitigate air pollution, and urban heat islands.
Nature in cities of the Global South has a very important role to play in supporting livelihood and subsistence needs of urban residents, especially the impoverished. However, the budgetary focus of smart cities on ecological spaces—be it lakes, riverfronts or urban greenery—seems to be on landscaping to promote recreational use. Inequity in urban India is already high, and natural spaces in cities are essential for the resilience of urban marginalised groups who depend on a range of raw materials such as food, fuelwood, fodder, and water that they access for free. While an amount of Rs 70,000 million (approximately 1.1 billion USD) is allocated for riverfront projects and open spaces in 58 cities, there is no mention of incorporating the local needs of communities who have traditionally accessed these spaces. Transforming into smart cities that are aesthetically pleasing to a few, while ignoring the role of nature in cities for survival of the many urban poor is a further setback to the development of equitable cities.
Then there is the wave of recent urban disasters—disasters that could have been averted if we paid attention to the ecological base on which cities are built. Urban floods damaged several cities across India, because of haphazard construction that destroyed the original hydrological landscape of the city. Yet smart city projects are planned without identifying and incorporating environmental risks of disaster. Chennai experienced unprecedented rainfall in December 2015. The situation was exacerbated by large-scale construction on wetlands, and the disruption of a well-working natural drainage system, the resultant flooding caused tremendous loss of life and property. However, the smart city budget for Chennai allocates an inadequate sum of Rs 200 million (approx. 315,000 USD) for disaster management to combat flood and tsunamis.
Clearly, the vision for smart cities is in stark contrast to the reality of urban living. The very basic needs of residents met by nature that contribute to their quality of life: such as clean air for all, natural resources on which many survive, and a safe environment against disasters, are ignored, while technology and infrastructure quick-fixes are being promoted. The House of Stark’s motto “winter is coming” in the fantasy book series Game of Thrones are words of caution about difficult times that lay ahead. We would well be warned about the implications of pushing for data and tech fixes for smart cities while ignoring the less glamorous, every day, irreplaceable role of nature in contributing to the health and well-being of urban residents.
Harini Nagendra is a Professor of Sustainability at Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India. She uses social and ecological approaches to examine the factors shaping the sustainability of forests and cities in the south Asian context. Her books include “Cities and Canopies: Trees of Indian Cities” and "Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India's Cities" (Penguin India, 2023) (with Seema Mundoli), and “The Bangalore Detectives Club” historical mystery series set in 1920s colonial India.
A future in which our lives are surrounded by and intertwined with ecological infrastructure systems offers an antidote or balance to the future in which our lives are constantly monitored and informed by digital technologies.
Vision A—The Smart City: The city is an intricate network of digital communications, computations, and connections. Data are being collected everywhere, at all times, and feed into computing systems that work to coordinate functions like power availability and traffic to optimize efficiency in real time. Autonomous vehicles navigate the streets with a quite electric hum, sensing and avoiding each other and pedestrians. Drones and unmanned delivery bots navigate the air and sidewalks. Individuals are plugged in to an ocean of information via mobile devices, but also they are the ocean, as these devices and ubiquitous cameras track patterns of movement and activity, desires and attention. This city is smart, connected, efficient, safe, responsive, and many would say, resilient. It can detect and repair possible localized disruptions in service, conserve precious resources, inform and meet the needs of its citizens quickly and effortlessly.
Connected Smart City. Image: Jack Moreh
Vision B—The Ecological City: The city is an intricate network of living systems interacting with one another, with built structures, and flows of water, materials, organisms, and information. Urban landscapes, roofs, walls, streetscapes and other outdoor and indoor spaces are seen as opportunities to for nature to provide flood control and stormwater management, wastewater treatment, food production, waste recycling, microclimate moderation, access to nature and recreation, and support biologically diverse ecosystems. Plants grow everywhere, softening the harshness of the urban environment. The urban forest draws carbon from the atmosphere and stores it as wood. Urban waterways flow through the city, supporting aquatic and riparian ecosystems that allow human residents to interact with wildness every day.
These alternative visions are not necessarily mutually exclusive, of course, but in my experience they are rarely combined in the same conversation or planning process. That is, among those who spend their time envisioning and working toward future cities, most are working with either one vision or the other. My question is, what does daily life look like in a future city under each of these paradigms?
Ecological City, one of many imaginative designs by this Paris architect. Image: Vincent Callibaut
As we see already, digital technology is increasingly integrated into our daily lives and into the ways in which we receive and consume both products and services. I was thinking about this as I read an article in a recent issue of Planning Magazine, in which an ambitious smart city project in Toronto experienced significant backlash over privacy concerns. The big data that runs smart cities is fed by us, as individuals, by using our phones or even by walking down the street. Cities are about connections. As Bettencourt and West point out in their studies of scaling complex phenomena, the variables that are a function of people coming into contact with one another, such as creative innovation, economic activity, etc. scale superlinearly with city size: As city size increases, these connectivity-dependent phenomena are disproportionately enhanced. (So are less-desirable connectivity-dependent phenomena, such as crime and infectious disease.)
Similarly, we have the Smart City dilemma: as cities become more and more “wired”, tremendous amounts of data are generated that can be used for positive purposes, like more efficient and responsive infrastructure and services, but the risk of privacy loss is also increased. Furthermore, much of the work of running the city—the provision of services, operations, communications and so forth—is done by computers and robots. So, what do people doin this city?
An article in The Atlantic in the summer of 2015 explored the implications of a “world without work”. It explored the possibilities of leisure, creative work and craftsmanship, and post-wage contingency work. Predictions about the future of work in an automated age vary from dystopian to utopian but it seems clear that the general trend embodied by the Smart City movement is a continuation of the trend that has its roots in the ancient, tool-making, animal-domesticating past of our species itself—to free us from the arduous tasks associated with meeting our basic needs so we can do other things. The Smart City envisions this at the level of the city itself.
If we embrace the ecological city approach, it will, like the digital technologies, weave its fine, often-invisible threads into the fabric of our daily lives at home, at work, and in the public spaces of our cities. Living systems are part of the infrastructure of the built environment and daily life is essentially lived in a complex, multi-storied garden. The garden is planted and tended, the species chosen for their particular characteristics, from removal of metals in wastewater to aesthetics. In other parts of the garden, nature will simply be invited to come in and self-organize. Because it is composed of living things, the city-garden will experience dynamics and disturbances, from chemical stressors to pest and disease infestations.
To a great extent, we hope the garden will have the capacity to self-organize and self-regulate, but I anticipate there being a significant role for people in tending, managing, and maintaining these green infrastructure systems. For example, in a conversation with an architect about their experience in rehabilitating a building to be a Living Building, he mentioned the need for a building manager—someone who pays attention to the composting toilets, the water harvesting system, and the overall chemical balance of the various interacting systems. I had a parallel conversation with a horticulturist in planning for a demonstration/research landscape revitalization project we are undertaking—the landscape needs a steward, someone who is familiar with the plant communities, soils, scientific equipment, irrigation system, etc. This is a person and who visits regularly to observe what is happening and if an action needs to be taken they know what to do or who to talk to.
Work in the ecological city involves spending time paying attention to how things are working around us. If buildings or groups of buildings (districts) incorporate living systems such as green roofs or walls, stormwater bioretention ponds (rain gardens), and eco-machines for wastewater treatment, these systems require regular attention from someone who is familiar with that particular system. Ecological systems are complex dynamic systems. While they may be designed, that is, assembled to perform a particular set of functions, each is a unique assemblage of interacting species within a particular chemical and physical environment. While someone trained in working with ecologically designed systems may be able to visit one and offer some insight, only someone intimately familiar with that particular system will be able to recognize behavior of the system that is not within normal parameters, or the effects of specific additions or manipulations. This kind of work involves building relationships. Even in individual residences of an ecological city, there will be some tending to be done; as today we maintain our homes by fixing breakages or leaks, for example, in the future we may need to water and monitor the living elements of our homes. Everyone in the ecological city is a gardener with intimate ecological knowledge of the complex systems that support daily life.
So, it appears that while the smart city reduces work, the ecological city creates work. However, the kind of work created by the ecological city is the kind of work that city-dwellers are strongly attracted to, as we see in the tremendous popularity of urban gardening and greening in cities around the world. This is work that puts those who feel disempowered by city life in a position to reclaim their individual agency to be self-sufficient, to provide for themselves, and to have a relationship with non-human nature. The smart city, on the other hand, removes what little need currently exists for us to attend to our environments—it is not the responsibility of individuals to pay attention to the workings of the infrastructure around us, nor are we empowered to take action. Instead, our digital environments tend to ourneeds and desires, perhaps before we are even aware of them.
I think that a future in which our lives are surrounded by and intertwined with ecological infrastructure systems offers an antidote or balance to the future in which our lives are constantly monitored and informed by digital technologies. The internet is full of articles about the negative impacts of devices on our relationships and our mental and physical health, while it is also full of articles on the positive impacts of access to greenspace and natural systems on our relationships and mental and physical health. We are looking at future cities that are increasingly technologically complex, but there are two possible forms of that technology: the digital, big data variety and the ecological variety. Perhaps these are inherently complementary paradigms.
Barth, B. (2019). Smart cities or surveillance cities? Planning, March issue.
Bettencourt, L., Lobo, J., Helbing, D., Kuhnert, C. & West, G. (2007). Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities. PNAS104(17): 7301-7306.
Thompson, D. (2015). A world without work. The Atlantic, July/August issue.
Mainstreaming mutual aid as a result of the pandemic and compounding crises broadens how we understand the limitations of social infrastructure; these sites are crucial, and they deserve increased investment in the near term as we continue to organize for better options.
Social infrastructure and so-called “third spaces” (the non-work, non-home gathering spaces ― either public or private ― like parks, libraries, houses of worship, and coffee shops where people spend time) are a crucial part of the lifeblood of civic life, particularly in cities. These are spaces where people come together, form relationships, and are in forced proximity with others, regardless of whether or not they come from the same geographic and demographic communities. Much has been written about the importance of these spaces and their unique role in building social resilience and supporting community organizing, particularly after a disaster or disturbance. Examples from past crises, such as Superstorm Sandy in New York City, illustrate how public parks, houses of worship, and community centers can become hubs for donations and distributions of essential supplies. In the quieter times between extreme events, these spaces are activated by civic groups that encourage civic engagement and build greater trust and community cohesion. The unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for social distancing shifted the role of social infrastructure in disaster response organizing in multiple ways ― both in how it was activated and how it was framed ideologically. Understanding the benefits and challenges of social infrastructure in 2024 requires looking at its uses and conceptualizations in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the civic organizing that emerged.
In March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world, government-enforced lockdowns and pleas for social distancing altered our relationships to space and place. Office workers shifted to remote work options and spent more time than ever in their private homes. In large cities where space was limited, many people with financial means bought houses in suburban and rural areas in order to get access to more space. Public parks were initially left empty and then later overwhelmed with visitors as public knowledge about virus transmission trickled out, and many added creative social distance indicators to try to keep people safe.
Social distancing in parks Photo: Noam Galai/Getty Images
As city dwellers grappled with their new, often smaller, geographies of home, many were also waking up to the extreme disparities in how the pandemic was impacting people based on racial identity, age, and disability status. The “twinned crises” of COVID-19 and ongoing racialized police brutality came to a head in the summer of 2020, and emergent civic groups were a driving force in the response.
Early in the pandemic when many civic groups were pivoting to COVID response and emergent mutual aid groups were forming in droves, online organizing was the only option to keep everyone safe. This offered flexibility for people to participate on their own time, but many organizers and volunteers soon felt the limitations of online spaces acutely. Organizers who had previously relied on physical spaces to gather in person and collect tangible donations adapted quickly to shift to online networks, but missed the home-base of a physical space (Landau et al., 2021). Online organizing events in the early days of the pandemic were primarily held on Zoom. While this allowed people to participate from the safety of their homes, internet access and comfort with technology blocked participation for many, particularly older community members. In-person connections, especially those happening in outdoor settings, allowed members of new civic groups to meet and form connections in person but were still primarily advertised in online spaces and social media. In interviews with mutual aid groups, organizers and participants shared that it could be harder to create deep relationships without in-person, face-to-face interactions. Terra Incognita, a research project from NYU and New_ Public, mapped the “digital spaces” created during the pandemic in New York City and explored the creation and curation of online public spaces including educational programming through public libraries, virtual synagogue services, online exercise classes, and mutual aid organizing. In the organizing example, they found the online space was not sufficient for community building. “For the Brooklyn mutual aid groups, although they formed online, it was difficult to gain access to them without making direct in-person connections, such as volunteering at a neighborhood food pantry. Publicness was in this sense mediated by access online and offline” (p. 41).
As time went on and the COVID-19 vaccine rolled out, gathering in person, including the option to meet indoors during colder months, brought a new layer of community building. Pre-existing civic groups and post-COVID mutual aid groups utilized local churches, community centers, parks, local bars, and community gardens, as meeting and event locations. My own mutual aid group, Crown Heights Mutual Aid (CHMA), formed an essential relationship with a local pastor and his wife, who offered their space for meetings and community parties that included grocery giveaways, a free store, a hot meal, and music to keep the mood lively and social. These events built bridges between long-term residents of Crown Heights, many of them older people of color, and the younger, whiter, group of new residents who started CHMA.
While many civic groups use spaces like churches, parks, and libraries in a similar way, the framing and language around social infrastructure and public space matters. The surge of local mutual aid groups that formed following the pandemic brought anarchist political thinking closer into the mainstream with their critique of the state and emphasis on abolition and networks of solidarity over traditional state and market solutions such as incarceration and charity. Anarchist mutual aid responses offer an alternative conceptualization of social infrastructure and public space, one that views public spaces as having the potential to be emancipatory when they are sites of deliberative democracy ― spaces where various publics of different classes and backgrounds can interact and create governing structures outside of traditional hierarchies. Using this framework, though, sites of social infrastructure run the risk of being reduced to a source of social capital, which can be co-opted by the state to encourage community participation in their own agendas as they defund care for public spaces (Firth, 2022). Thus, these spaces are constantly in a battle between those who want to expand the autonomy of public space through actions like protests and parties, and those who want to restrict it with increased surveillance and hostile design interventions that prevent people from comfortably gathering or sleeping (Springer, 2016). Public spaces are often privatized by neoliberal policies that restrict access and use, and the anarchist response of “creating or seizing them from below” (Firth, 2022, p.140) understands the exercise of reclaiming the commons as its own form of mutual aid. In practice, this can look like anything from organizing mass occupations of privatized public spaces (as in the Occupy Wall Street movement), to setting up neighborhood food services in the local park, which CHMA has recently started doing on a regular basis.
Source: Crown Heights Mutual Aid
Mutual aid is often framed as existing outside of traditional aid structures, both state and private. The use of publicly funded spaces by mutual aid groups illustrates the blurriness of the line between state and non-state, but as Dean Spade says, “Being an anarchist does not mean avoiding engaging with the governments we live under” (Spade, 2023). Social infrastructure is not only a tool for current mutual aid organizing, it is a springboard for imagining a more equitable world. Mutual aid infrastructures include public spaces where people can meet to organize or negotiate conflict with some anonymity. But they need to go beyond that as well, as Dean Spade points out:
We need new skills to depart from a system for solving conflict based on a centralized authority that determines who is good and bad. We want to build a decentralized approach to solving conflicts focused on recognizing that everyone is worthy of care and that no one is disposable. What if we all had more skills to solve problems in our communities? Endemic problems like child sexual abuse or sexual assault, gender-based violence—those harms are not going to be solved by a central authority, particularly since the authorities are primary sources of that violence… And so I do think it is infrastructure. It is particularly about building complex, flexible, responsive, decentralized infrastructure. (Spade, 2023)
Thinking broadly about social infrastructure can make room for the skills that community members rely on when they support one another or intervene in a conflict. Community-based interventions that rely on relationships of mutual trust are more effective than carceral systems of punishment, and these relationships, as well as opportunities for new people to gain skills and grow trust, are social infrastructure as well.
The mainstreaming of mutual aid as a result of the pandemic and compounding crises broadens how we understand the limitations of social infrastructure; these sites are crucial, and they deserve increased investment in the near term as we continue to organize for better options. But they are limited without a growing investment in social safety and a loosening of the restrictions that keep them from being free spaces. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches us, abolition is not about absence but about presence ― presence of mutual support, shared resources, and communities of care. Taking these lessons, and the framework of an “infrastructure of mutual aid” (McKane et al., 2023), can offer us a way forward to thinking about social infrastructure as transformative infrastructure in the post-pandemic age of compounding crises.
Campbell, L. K., Svendsen, E., Johnson, M., & Landau, L. (2021). Activating urban environments as social infrastructure through civic stewardship. Urban Geography, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2021.1920129
Firth, R. (2022). Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action. (1st ed.). Pluto Press.
Landau, L. F., Campbell, L. K., Svendsen, E. S., & Johnson, M. L. (2021). Building Adaptive Capacity Through Civic Environmental Stewardship: Responding to COVID-19 Alongside Compounding and Concurrent Crises. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 3, 705178. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2021.705178
McKane, R. G., Greiner, P. T., & Pellow, D. (2023) Mutual Aid as a Praxis for Critical Environmental Justice: Lessons from W.E.B. Du Bois, Critical Theoretical Perspectives, and Mobilising Collective Care in Disasters. Antipode, n/a(n/a). https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12986
Nature is being lost all around us. It is alarming in its implications for both livability and sustainability. How can we better connect to nature in a distracted digital world? Although it may not be intuitive, these are also promising times because of all the digital tools and technology we now have at our disposal, and the hope they hold to connect us in meaningful ways to the nature around us. Whether technology will make a difference and help to ignite conservation actions or support for conservation, remains to be seen, but there is evidence that these digital connections help to change our point of view in some important ways. Can these digital interactions—while obviously not substitutions for time spent watching, listening to, and enjoying nature “in real life”—add an important element of enjoyment and meaning, especially for urbanites who may be far removed from nature?
Through digital connections, we are extending our innate curiosity and softening our hearts to vultures and sharks, and many other species.
In January of 2016, I had the pleasure of attending the USAID Environmental Officers Workshop, a meeting that brought environmental staff from posts all over the world. On one day, the organizers showed a short video, in Spanish—a public service announcement that described an innovative effort to use GPS-tagged vultures to find illegal trash dumps in Lima, Peru. It was a fascinating story and sent me on the search to find out how this initiative came about and what its impact has been.
The story partly intrigued me because of a longstanding affection I’ve had for vultures, mostly Turkey Vultures, which I got know when I was a glider pilot in my youth. We used to watch them spiralling and aimed our sailplanes in their direction in hopes of catching the thermals they intuitively knew were there. Not many other people, I discovered, had much affection for Turkey Vultures, and of course many them ugly; some see these “nature’s-cleaner-uppers” as downright revolting. For me, they have remained most majestic creatures, creatures that have perfected the art of soaring with nary a movement of wings. Their effortless ability to stay afloat, and their graceful movements, have been nothing less than miraculous to me, and an endless source of wonder and joy to watch.
Many of the details of the story of the Lima vultures (American Black Vultures, Coragypsatratus) I learned from Lawrence Rubey, the USAID official in Lima who helped to initiate this unique program. In partnership with ornithologists at the University of San Marcos and the Lima Natural History Museum, the idea was to use GPS-tagged vultures to raise awareness about environmental issues, especially the problem of clandestine garbage dumps, a major problem in Lima. Their team eventually tagged 10 vultures, and they can be tracked in real time online. One can visit their website and watch the blinking icons of vultures to locate their current positions and where they have traveled and visited. Two of the vultures were, for a time, outfitted with Go-Pro cameras, which generated some impressive footage of what it might be like to be a soaring vulture. Each of the vultures was given a distinctive name—there were Grifo and Elpis, and Captain Higgin (the vultures were grouped into three teams, each with a captain!). The vultures have indeed been used to identify garbage dumps, leading to the next step, the organizing of community-based cleanups.
An American Black Vulture (Coragyps atratus) in Lima.
Lima’s Black Vultures contribute to waste reduction.
A recent collaboration between ornithologists at the University of San Marcos, the Lima Natural History Museum, and USAID allows scientists to track individual vultures to illegal dumping sites.
The initiative was seen as a way to educate about the broader issues of climate change and the environment. USAID and the Peruvian Ministry of the Environment viewed learning about garbage through the creative lens of vultures as a broader “gateway” to environmental awareness and local action.
Remarkably, the vultures seem to have captured the imagination of many in Lima, and the story has become as much about how the initiative has changed the ways the public sees this oft-maligned species as about pollution. Rubey tells me there have been some 4 million social media interactions—including Facebook, Twitter, and video views. Most telling has been the ways in which human hearts seem to have softened for these vultures. The whole idea, Rubey told me in a recent phone conversation, “was to draw people into the website through social media and then leverage that into community action.” This has certainly happened, leading to a number of neighborhood-based garbage cleanup events.
The campaign does seem to have improved the local view of vultures, Rubey tells me, from what was a negative view. “But you read through on Facebook and Twitter and you look at the comments and people are saying “how cute, how sweet,” because each of the vultures has a persona and a name and would ‘make’ its own posts. The response that came back was very, very positive about them as individuals, and people have favorites…” The initiative has personalized the vultures in a way that makes it hard to feel disgusted by them.
Exchanging tweets with a Great White Shark
Similar digital connections are being made in the marine realm, and to similar effect. The nonprofit Ocearch, for instance, has been tagging sharks and providing real-time information online about their whereabouts. These tagged sharks include a great white shark named Mary Lee, who has a Twitter account that now has more than 100,000 followers. Mary Lee (it was recently discovered that the real author of her tweets is a reporter for the Raleigh News and Observer) tweets and her followers tweet her back, sending a variety of personal messages, from wishing her a happy Mother’s Day, to encouraging her to return soon to their state or region. Along the way, followers appear to be learning about the shark—there are images, there is information about weight and distance traveled, and, in the end, perhaps there is a sense of something familiar: a digital friendship that helps to overcome the remoteness, the strong sense of “otherness,” that a creature such as a great white shark engenders.
I spoke recently to Ocearch founder Chris Fischer, who discussed the ways in which his shark tagging has helped people to overcome the perhaps understandable disconnect (or aversion) that they feel towards sharks. Fischer and his Ocearch crew have tagged some 300 sharks, including about 80 great whites (Mary Lee is named after Chris’s mom). The tagging trips are usually collaborations with marine scientists, including from Woods Hole and the Mote Marine lab. Fischer points to the value of this more public-inclusive mode of science, and notes the many biological insights the trips and the tagging have generated.
Beachgoers in Cape Cod attempt to save a 14-foot Great White Shark. Digital campaigns to raise awareness about species have helped soften the reputations of historically maligned species, such as the Great White.
Fischer argues that most of the fear of sharks stems from a fear of the unknown. “The only time we heard about a shark was when something bad happened and now we’re talking about, ‘Could Mary Lee be pregnant? Where is she giving birth? Where is the mating site?’” Facts, curiosity, and wonder replace fear. The secret to these successes seems to involve engaging the public—getting their attention and interesting them in caring about these creatures.
“And we’re having thousands of ongoing conversations throughout every day of the year,” says Fischer, “instead of just the odd shark attack story really driving how people feel. We’re replacing this fear of the unknown with the first facts and information that people can see and be a part of. That’s allowed us to engage them in not only solving the problem of where they’re [the sharks] mating, giving birth, and migrating, but also to help them then understand why sharks are important.”
Including the public in science gives provides people with different avenues for contact and connection “by allowing people to find their way into the project, whether it’s communicating with the shark on Twitter or tracking a shark on the tracker and then Tweeting or Facebooking a scientist with a question, and connecting all these dots for people in real time, in the now,” Fisher says. The Ocearch Facebook page now has more than 440,000 likes, so its content and photos are clearly being seen.
These modern digital tools are also proving to be helpful in the classroom, where elementary school students are following sharks in real time, learning about their biology, writing in journals about these subjects, and generally replacing fear with fascination. Fischer tells me they have been working with a dozen schools to integrate a K-12 educational curriculum focused on the sharks, and to use this information in teaching other subjects, from math to physics.
To understand the impact of this programming, take, for example, the case of the first grade class at the Highlands Elementary School in New Jersey, which has been keeping track of Mary Lee. They have made a 16-foot paper replica of her that adorns the front wall of their classroom. According to their teacher, Colleen Acerra, these students—who write about Mary Lee in their journals—are quite fond of the Great White Shark, ”They love her,” said Acerra, who was quoted in the Asbury Park Press. “They love tracking her. They love learning all about her and they’re wondering if she’s pregnant…Some people think she’s pregnant and some people think she’s just following the tuna run up and down the coast.”
Fischer sees real change happening in the way sharks are being perceived, pointing to a recent episode in which Cape Cod beachgoers worked frantically to save a 14-foot great white shark. The image of people digging in the sand, passing buckets of water, pulling together a rope in an effort to get the shark back to open water is impressive to see, although it ended up being futile (you can watch the video here) While the behavior of people in Cape Cod may not be the direct result of Mary Lee tweets, these social media connections are likely quite helpful to sharks.
Such efforts can lead to real and significant scientific insights, and can result in more effective management and protection. The GTOPP—Global Tagging of Pelagic Predators—has also tagged and tracking marine organisms, including sharks. Barbara Block, of Stanford, has been a leading force behind this effort, tagging sharks as well as Bluefin tuna, elephant seals, and California sea lions, among other species. Some species, such as the Pacific Bluefin tuna, are doing poorly, with populations estimated at only about 5 percent of what they had been before extensive commercial fishing. How to protect and manage this species is a real challenge, which motivated Block and her colleagues to organize a recent Bluefin Futures Symposium held at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Tracking has led to an understanding of where essential feeding grounds are located, including the area off the northwest coast of the U.S., where nutrient uplifting happens every spring. Block has called this area our “Blue Serengeti” (in a compelling illustration of the power of language to help us connect with and understand the importance of this essential piece of seascape). Can tracking this species ignite a level of engagement with and concern for tuna, and perhaps create the political space and cover for the tough management and conservation decisions necessary to ensure that Pacific Bluefin tuna doesn’t, as Block says, “go the way of the cod”? It is hard to know, but the new ways that technology may allow us to “wire the ocean” through a network of WiFi buoys and wave gliders are promising.
There are many other creative ways, of course, that our modern digital technologies can foster nature connections. Our iPhones and tablets provide almost unlimited opportunities to record the natural world around us and to effortlessly share these images, observations, and experiences with friends and family. We are able prod, induce, and incite with our Twitter posts, and Twitter and social media campaigns have proven to be effective methods for encouraging more nature-full lives.
The Wildlife Trusts in the U.K., offer one recent example of this power to motivate in the form of a social media campaign encouraging participants to engage in “random acts of wildness,” at least one per day for a whole month. Through the nationwide 30 Days Wild challenge, some 25,000 participants signed up to participate, including thousands of students. Some 2,000 schools around the U.K. participated. Participants in the challenge received an info packet via email with ideas for engaging in wild acts, stickers, and a wall chart for tracking progress over the month. Participants were encouraged to take photos of these acts of wildness and to tweet them using the hashtag #30DaysWild, as well as to post them to Instagram and Facebook. From bug hunts to food foraging, to mapping the wildlife in one’s neighborhood, citizens expressed their wildness in many different ways; people wrote many blog posts (and even received awards for the best blogs), snapped photos, and recorded videos. The challenge was a huge success—20 days into the month of June, there had already been more than 1 million “random acts of wildness.”
In these ways, we are beginning to shift from seeing social media, and the emerging digital tools and technologies through which we navigate it, not only or primarily as distractions, but also as tools for nature reconnection. While we are still collectively learning how to harness the power of the digital realm, these examples provide at least some positive counter-story, demonstrating that the same tools by which we are stitching together a global human commons might also be useful in helping to craft an even more inclusive global commons of life. These tools, from Twitter to Facebook, offer benefits of immediacy and, for many, sheer fun.
Anything we can do to overcome the cognitive and emotional gulf that exists between humans and the many other species we share the world with is helpful. We live in a world where ubiquitous technology, including iPhones and handheld devices of various kinds, offers the opportunity to instantly learn about and connect with nature. This technology provides the chance to see and experience nature and to follow it in real time—both nearby (the black vultures above, the great white shark just offshore), and far away (the Bluefin tuna swimming in the middle of the Pacific ocean). These connections are fleeting, and the digital bonds feel cursory and shallow. But through them, we are extending our innate curiosity and softening our hearts to vultures and sharks, and many other species—which suggests that we are laying some foundations for the development of a deeper sense of understanding and caring.
Beginning operation in 1977, the 885 megawatt facility was named for New York’s 46th Governor Charles Poletti. If there is anything in a name, the Poletti facility had an auspicious one. Charles Poletti graduated from Harvard Law School, served on the New York State Supreme Court, and been elected New York’s Lieutenant Governor alongside Governor Herbert H. Lehman. Poletti had the distinction of being the first Italian-American governor in the United States (albeit serving 
In my 
I am very excited about engagement exercises that use simulation models as tools to get people talking not just about their opinions, but about the consequences of their opinions. Incorporating simulation models explicitly into community dialogues is an approach to this. That is, individuals or groups can sit down with a computer simulator of, say, how green infrastructure performs in storm water capture. The people can arrange green roofs, or parks, or street trees on the landscape and the model calculates for them how much storm water has been captured using their design. The science and expert knowledge are built into the inner workings of the simulator (the “black box”). Individuals can try out their designs and social ideas using the model as context, and have the model give some feedback about the how their ideas would work on the ground. Their ideas are taken out of the realm of unverified opinion and placed in a context in which their function, output, and outcomes can be compared. You might still prefer one type of design to another, but its performance could now be part of the decision mix.
You redesign Manhattan, block by block, to your specifications and then the “black box” of the simulator calculates a variety of key sustainability statistics, such as energy use, carbon, water flow, biodiversity, human population size, etc. You can register at the website and make your own designs (or “Visions”) or just check out others (there is a library of them). Warning: there is a bit of a learning curve, but investing some time, with patience, is fascinating and greatly rewarding. The creators have plans to continue improving it, including things like learning “competitions” to find to best and most productive design ideas.
Does one person in your area want to invest everything in green roofs, while another thinks street trees are the answer? The model can help place the consequences of these alternatives in context (at least from a storm water perspective), making their relative outcomes easier to see, digest, and decide upon. Sure, there would still be decisions to make that are outside the scope of Lidra — aesthetics, access, equitability, and so on — but the model helps take at least some of the guesswork out of the process.
All models are wrong — some are useful
There are some conservation managers who would argue that this kind of endeavor, without ever being self-sustaining without fire or spontaneous propagation (certainly for those fire-driven species prevalent in the Cape Flora), can never be counted as a true contribution to conservation across the city.
But if our goal is for better cities—cities that are better for both people and nature—what can smart cities do for us? How can the technology of smart cities be specifically directed toward the creation of ecologically sophisticated cities that serve human well-being? Can the benefits they provide be distributed justly and equitably, for everyone and not just a few? Can the services they provide be about more than just technology?
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