Social Practice Artwork: A Restaurant and Garden Serving up Connections to Urban Nature

16 September 2015Art & Awareness, Essay, FRIEC, People & Communities, StoriesAgriculture, Art, Awareness, Biophilia, Gardens, ValuePatrick M. Lydon

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

1 Comment
Join our conversation

Can an urban garden help us remember what it means to be human?

Three months ago, we opened a slightly audacious restaurant and garden in a working-class suburb of Osaka, Japan with the intent of connecting people more deeply with food and nature in their neighborhood. Experimental and temporary in nature, the project was approached not as a business or social enterprise, but as what might be called a “social practice” artwork.

A parking lot does not make life worth living, nor does an apartment tower.

When this restaurant opened for dinner, we seated guests and took their orders as most any restaurant would. Then we kindly let them know that their dinner would be ready to eat in six weeks, explaining that we would first have to grow it in the garden down the street.

realtimefood-00 — Final Straw co-director Suhee Kang serves wild herb tea to guets at the opening of our REALtimeFOOD restaurant. Image: Patrick Lydon, Final Straw

The project was called “REALtimeFOOD: the world’s slowest restaurant” (http://www.finalstraw.org/our-worlds-slowest-restaurant-serves-dinner-finally/) and although we were met with a few seriously raised eyebrows, most of the participants left that first night with smiles on their faces, almost all of them returning six weeks later to eat what they had ordered.

When the dinner finally arrived six weeks later, guests were treated to a rice dish made by friend and macrobiotic chef Kaori Tsuji, topped with greens, radish, and a spicy mixture of eggplant, onion, cucumer, and herbs from the garden, similar to Korean ‘bibmbap’, if you are familiar with it.

My personal favorite, though, was the dessert, a cool tomato jelly with whipped soy cream, garnished with mint. Surprisingly refreshing and delicious.

realtimefood-01 — Our chef Kaori Tsuji serves desert to REALtimeFOOD customers in Osaka, after the six week wait. Image: Patrick Lydon, FinalStraw

So what was the point of making customers wait six weeks? And how did it help cultivate relationships between people and urban nature?

Cultivating compassion and relationships

Outside of the restaurant, most of the action happened during the weeks in between the ordering and serving of the food.

To grow the food, we built a garden in an unused dirt lot. This wasn’t a typical organic urban garden, however. It was based on the principal that our design and actions would be rooted in two key concepts 1) connection between people and nature and 2) compassion for all of nature. Whenever we had to make a decision about the direction, we referred back to this principal, asking ourselves: does it cultivate connection with nature, and does it build compassion for nature?

realtimefood-02 — Final Straw co-director Suhee Kang works in the herb garden. Image: Patrick Lydon, FinalStraw

For those not familiar with how connection and compassion relate to a garden, this particular kind of garden takes its aim from the ‘natural farming’ tradition in Japan. No tilling, no weeding, no killing bugs, no externally produced fertilizers. Similar in action to permaculture or agroecological practices–which a recent U.N. study believes might be our only way to sustainably feed a growing population – natural farmers see themselves as equals with plants and the rest of the natural world. This relationship, and the compassion which comes from it, are the primary informants for every action in their farms.

realtimefood-03 — Natural farmer Kristyn Leach at Namu Farm in the San Francisco Bay Area during an interview for our documentary film. Image: Patrick Lydon, FinalStraw

This is important for us, especially in urban social settings where compassion is sorely needed, yet often difficult to teach and apply. The kind of compassion learned by an individual on a natural farm will travel with them into their lives outside the farm or garden. It permeates their relationships with other people (our social relationships begin mending themselves), with other living things (human relationships to animals and plants become stronger), and even with the built structures of the city (leading to the city being cared for by its inhabitants).

Not only, then, is urban natural farming an ecologically regenerative practice, but the positive social effects are immense as well.

Working with art in the garden

One great difficulty is how to impart such an impossibly idealistic sounding mindset to the urban dweller, how to build and disseminate a deep and complex educational framework across the broad and diverse demographic range found in major urban centers.

In reality, we often make it sound more complex than it is.

What we have found in practice is that although the framework—and a sincere understanding and dedication to that framework—is required, there is not so much difficult ‘instruction’ as one might think. The process of developing such a mindset is largely one of giving people the place and permission to find this mindset of compassion and connection for themselves.

realtimefood-04 — Kaori and Yasu taking part in one of our nature art workshops, using soil and plants as paint. Image: Suhee Kang, FinalStraw

In our little Osaka garden, tucked between half-century-old homes, warehouses, and small factories, we helped individuals cultivate relationships between themselves and the plants and living things in the soil. With these relationships in mind, they grew food and created artworks using natural materials, always with a base of connection and compassion in their actions.

Art making is a key for us here too, not only because it uses and reinforces myriad connections to the environment at its very root, but because it gives participants a personally expressive output and a record of their relationship with the soil, the plants, and the other natural living or growing things in their city.

realtimefood-05 — Patrick’s workshop on painting with soil in the garden. Image: Suhee Kang, FinalStraw

By example, during one such “soil art” workshop, we began with exploring how there are millions of living things in each square inch of soil and how all of these living things work together to provide a nurturing home for other life to grow. Together with the participants, we then asked these living beings with a sincere respect—again, the instructor’s understanding, attitude, and sincerity is an absolute requirement here—to lend us their color and texture, so that we might share their beauty through our artwork.

At this point, paintbrushes were dipped directly into the moist soil, and some deeply expressive and meaningful artworks emerged.

Along with the artworks came new perspectives from participants. A visitor from Tokyo told us that she always had a fondness for flowers and for how beautiful they are…but that it was a kind of common or easy beauty to appreciate. “Now for the first time in my life” she said “I can finally see how amazingly beautiful the soil is, too.”

realtimefood-06 — Mayu records soil and flower color samples during one of our garden workshops. Image: Suhee Kang, FinalStraw

Another participant, an undergraduate design student from Thailand, decided to change his thesis project after seeing how strongly nature could help direct his design. One also noticed, of her own accord, how the colors that the plants produce changed radically based on her intentions and how she approached using the plant. She demonstrated by gently and gracefully rubbing a white flower on paper, producing a beautiful ocean blue hue, and then again, more violently rubbing the same petal and watching as the hue started out blue and then quickly turned brown while the other stayed blue.

realtimefood-07 — A workshop participant named Put creates a composition using color directly from flowers and plants. Image: Suhee Kang, FinalStraw

These kinds of discoveries and reactions weren’t prompted or dictated by us, but found by the individual participants as they more deeply connected with the garden itself. Nor are they uncommon reactions.

It seems that simply giving people the ‘permission’ to work with respect with nature, and to cultivate meaningful relationships, can offer such an amazing release for them. All of a sudden, their connectedness, acceptance, and creative mindsets blossom in ways they would each have thought were radical or impossible before.

realtimefood-08 — Participants in Suhee’s flower workshop examine the works created by them and the children. Image: Suhee Kang, FinalStraw

We were lucky to have participants from the age of 5 to the age of 70, and most all of them had relatively little trouble flipping this mental switch to engage their surroundings in deeper ways.

Aiming for the long term

The REALtimeFOOD project was a hub for compassion, creativity, and well being for locals and visitors from around Japan and internationally. It was a project that we think created a positive ripple of compassion and well being in the small neighborhood of Kitakagaya and beyond.

That’s all warm and fuzzy.

The other reality is that this was a short-term project funded by the grant-making arm of a real estate firm that owns most of the land in this ailing neighborhood.

We know the reality of this situation is that the story typically ends in higher property values, higher rents, higher incomes, gentrification, and the removal of the creative class and the gardens which are on land that is suddenly far too ‘valuable’ for agriculture and silly creative deep ecology projects and the millions of tiny creatures in a square inch of soil.

The question is always, how do we make it economically viable? And ends with discussions along the lines of: how does a parking lot compare with an active community garden in terms of economic value?

It doesn’t, of course, and the first answer of those working in this space is generally something like “we need to get it through our thick heads that such projects offer value far beyond the economic. There’s social and ecological value too, and we must measure it!”

Let’s not stop the conversation here, though. The result of urban ecological features and programs which bring depth, relationships, and relevance to these natural features, offers value far beyond any social or ecological valuations that we can calculate and graph.

The value of a useless hole in the ground

What is the value when an office worker stops his stride and takes a deep breath while admiring a garden on his way home from work? What is the value when a gardener shares flowers with a local restaurant every week to brighten up the tables, or when a child stops by a garden to enthusiastically dig holes in the soil—even if they are not needed—with a smile so big it’s as if it’s the most joyful thing he’s ever done?

Not only do these values elude economic justification, they can not even be properly calculated with any type of measurement or categorization we might come up with, economic or not; yet, they are absolutely the kinds of values that make life true, beautiful, and good.

realtimefood-09 — Our chef Kaori Tsuji helps one of our young neighbors, Qenji, dig holes without destroying too much of the garden. Iimage: Patrick Lydon, FinalStraw

The end result of an active urban garden is not a number, whether that number is reduction in crime or a point rise in the quality of life index. The end result is the re-connection of human beings with an immeasurable, intangible, essential part of what makes life worth living.

A parking lot does not make life worth living, nor does an apartment tower.

Does a relationship with the natural world make life worth living? Of course, a relationship with nature is life in no uncertain terms. Our personal understanding of this relationship is a part of being human which has been omnipresent in our species for millions of years not just for the nearly invisible space on our historical timeline occupied by the industrial age.

realtimefood-10 — Patrick leads a workshop on ‘feeling’ nature with some of the project’s local team members. Image: Suhee Kang, FinalStraw

With respect to human and nature relationships, a few understandings about our current social attitude towards nature have come out of these workshops, including that:

Our connection to nature is a part of life that our culture has either lost or seriously devalued, and ironically much of this devaluation has recently come through our earnest efforts to put a value on it in the first place!
Our efforts to value nature are clear signs that we have no idea what the value of nature is.
Our rejection of a compassionate relationship with nature as an invaluable and integral part of life hurts us humans as much as it hurts the rest of our natural world.
Our mental and physical disconnection from nature hurts all of earth’s beings, socially and ecologically, without discrimination.

Establishing a new value system

It is important that active community gardens, and natural spaces in general, should be seen as long-term public services because they offer a foundation for social and ecological well-being which is necessary for strong, happy, and economically productive communities. Establishing such a mentality might sound impossible given today’s political and business climate, yet the secret is that we know it is not nearly as impossible as most people think.

realtimefood-11 — Talking with an office worker who stopped by to let us know how much he appreciated the new use of the empty lot … and that he was looking forward to dinner! Iimage: Suhee Kang, FinalStraw

Even though our relationship with nature has been devalued and brushed away by most city dwellers, the surprising results of our own efforts to reignite this relationship indicate that human beings are quite easily able to connect with nature on some more meaningful level. We just need a little help.

From our perspective of doing REALtimeFOOD and other similar projects, the requirements are maddeningly simple.

We need to provide:

Ample opportunities (places) to connect with nature – these needn’t be big, but they must contain growing things that are easily accessible, where people are allowed to touch and interact with them, not just look at them from behind a wall

A bit of guidance and social permission – through a combination of sincerely led workshops, signage, and public education, guiding people to use their own capacity for connection and creativity and letting them know that yes, it’s okay to hug that tree, it’s okay to talk to that plant, it’s okay to say thank you to the soil.

Once we try it, we remember quite easily. We remember our part in the world. We remember the power of compassion and connection.

When we re-connect with nature—in the most remote mountains or in the most dense city—we can remember, in no uncertain terms, what it is to be human.

If we truly see ourselves as a part of nature, then the value of this understanding must be seen as a core value of life itself, and a value that no other interest, political, economic, or social, should be allowed to trump, and for which I would step out on a limb to say, the bulk of our human efforts at this point for our species and this planet must be given to fully and freely.

Plus, the tomato jelly is just amazing. Honest.

Patrick Lydon
San Jose & Seoul

On The Nature of Cities

Social-Ecological Urbanism and the Life of Baltic Cities

4 January 2016Essay, Europe, Place & Design, Science & ToolsDesign, Ecocities, Justice, Livability, Resilience, Sustainability, Tools, What is urban nature?Stephan Barthel

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

1 Comment
Join our conversation

Jane Jacobs critiqued modernist city planning in the now classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). This book is now inspiring an urban renaissance. Jacobs proposed that a city must be understood as a system of organized complexity—in other words, as an ecosystem—and that any intervention in the urban fabric with a lack of such understanding is bound to result in unexpected surprises. Trained in zoology, Jacobs viewed the city much like a coral reef, where co-evolutionary dynamics between the coral organisms (the people) and the coral reef (the built environment) result in the emergence of a socio-spatial logic that can support various kind of functions and opportunities for people.

First line of urban scholarship based on ecological thought

Blueprint planning based on ideals such as Le Corbusier’s “The Shining City,” or Sir Ebenezer Howard’s “The Garden City,” Jacobs argued, is likely to fail since it lacks the critical understanding of the city as a complex socio-spatial system. Spatial morphology thinking (Hillier and Hanson, 1984) provided a precision and an analytical depth to the insights of Jane Jacobs. Density, accessibility and diversity are outlined as the main features of spatial capital for people in cities (Marcus, 2010), which are akin to insights in ecosystem ecology, where species diversity, species abundance and ecological connectivity are critical features.

Social-ecological urbanism is a scientific upgrading of landscape urbanism concepts.

I call this ecosystem-based understanding of the city the “first line of thinking,” since it has quite a historical lineage. It comes originally from the Chicago School of urban scholars that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s (Wirth, 1938), which was inspired by the thinking in systems ecology at that time (Clements, 1916). This first line of thinking coincided with major innovations in transportation technology. Chicago had just become an important hub in the U.S. railroad network in the 1850s, enabling transportation of natural resources for urban consumption over great distances. Harvey (1990) has shown how industrial-era technological innovation catered to the first wave of space–time compression, which refers to those socioeconomic processes that accelerate the pace of time and reduce the significance of distance. Those socioeconomic processes included technological innovations (telephones, telegraph), cheap and efficient travel (steam rail and boats), and the global economy’s opening of new markets, thereby speeding up production cycles and reducing the turnover time of capital (Harvey 1990).

During that historically transformative era, the first line of ecological urban thinking emerged; it focused on human-technology relations in the search for an understanding of the city as an organism, or as a ‘living artifice,’ that would enable humanity to take off into a bright, humanistic future. Jane Jacobs based her thinking on this first line of thought, but enhanced it considerably by incorporating a much more advanced understanding of complexity. She also departed from an inductive understanding of a spatial scale in cites, choosing a scale that instead makes sense based on how people perceive their daily lives.

2016 is the 100th anniversary of Jane Jacob’s birth, yet her work continues to hold promise for finding solutions to many current sustainability challenges. For instance, it provides cognitive tools for analyzing the spatial logic that lies behind the production of socioeconomic inequalities in cities (Legeby, 2013), as well as design solutions to reduce the number of car trips, to increase walkability and to enhance energy efficiency in cities.

Jacobs’ work does not, however, adequately address complex social-ecological systems relations of urban sustainability. Many global environmental challenges have emerged since Jane Jacobs wrote her classic book. It is safe to argue that most urban populations, at least in the Global North, are more cognitively distant from their life support systems—such as agriculture—than they were in 1961. Urbanization is now in a second wave of space–time compression driven by the Internet, jet travel, and the global economy (Harvey, 1990). The accelerating pace at which urban life proceeds and the decreasing importance of geographic barriers and distances are qualitatively different in terms of their intensity and scope compared to the 1960s (Sassen, 1991). Space–time compression is an outcome of a surplus of fossil fuel energy of diminishing returns (Tainter, 2011), which enables cities to sequester natural resources and ecosystem services from the farthest reaches of the planet (Deutsch et al., 2013; Seto et al., 2012).

Urban thought’s second line

A second line of thought that is also based on systems ecology emerged in the 1990s, with the concepts of ecological footprints (Rees 1992), extended versions of urban metabolism (Newman, 1999) and urban ecosystem services (Bolund and Hunhammar 1998). This line offers an important alternative perspective, since it assumes that humans are part of an intricate and complex web of life that goes far beyond the borders of any city. In just a few decades, this social-ecological lens has been used to argue that cities must offer better stewardship of ecosystems inside and outside their borders (Krasny and Tidball 2012; Enqvist et al., 2014) and must improve the capacity to cognitively reconnect city inhabitants with the biosphere (Andersson et al., 2014). Scholars of this kind of thinking also came to argue for the missing role that urban ecosystems, such as urban agricultures or wetlands, hold as technologies for building urban resilience towards extreme external disturbances (McPhearson et al., 2015; Barthel et al., 2015; Lewis 2015). The world’s ecosystems are gradually being eroded, with a subsequent loss of both ecosystem services and social-ecological resilience (Berkes et al. 2003), not only due to rapid urbanization per se, but also due to other global drivers such as climate change, population growth and tele-connected consumption behaviors (Seto et al., 2012), which ultimately will be shaped by environmental attitudes among city people (Grimm et al., 2008).

In 1961, the plethora of benefits that ecosystems in cities provided for human well-being in cities were simply not known (McPhearson et al., 2015; Haase et al., 2014). While Jacobs’ thinking is based on ecosystem logic, it does not see the benefits humans obtain by sensory interaction with other species and with diverse ecosystems. She viewed urban life to be an essentialist reality separated from such social-ecological relations, and from their role in shaping learning, meaning-making and cognitive dimensions in humans (Bendt et al., 2013; Colding and Barthel, 2013). For instance, Jacobs saw urban form as a cognitive artifact, where physical space also interacts with the way we think and feel, but she did not adequately address the role that nature environments in cities play in the development of attitudes, health and cognitive performance (Hartig et al., 2014; Bratman et al., 2015). For instance, Giusti et al. (2014) showed that pre-school children that experience nature environments in their daily routines develop significantly stronger environmental attitudes than those that do not. Nevertheless the socio-spatial dimensions of the work of Jane Jacobs cannot be underestimated in urban scholarship.

Social-ecological urbanism: aligning the two lines of thought

There is a need to align these two lines of thinking, because even if both build on our understanding of complex ecosystems, they are actually producing different urban systemic pictures, and they solve different kinds of challenges in urban sustainability.

Few, if any, attempts have been made to link urban social-ecological systems thinking with Jane Jacobs’ understanding of the city as an ecosystem. But in 2009, these two lines of thought met during the creation of a vision for a new campus area in Stockholm. This campus is called Albano.

The Albano site is situated just north of the inner city of Stockholm on formerly industrial land and has long been the subject of conflict and controversy. In 2009, the old industrial area was used primarily for temporary parking and as a storage area. However, this strategic location right at the edge of the dense inner city fabric, in between two of the major urban development areas and at the intersection of the three major universities in Stockholm, made it interesting from an urban morphology perspective. The Albano site is also located within the limits of the world’s first national urban park, Stockholm National City Park, protected by law since 1995. This double strategic perspective makes the site not only the subject of extraordinary development potential, but also a strategic link in Stockholm’s landscape ecology. This urban park is protected as a national interest with high levels of biodiversity and cultural value. The park is huge; the area is 27 square kilometers, including vast and diverse areas of meadows, forests, lakes and streams. It is also associated with a motivated network of civic associations that played a pivotal role in obtaining the protective laws for the park (Barthel et al., 2005; Ernstson et al. 2008).

The design work of this campus area came about in collaboration between researchers at the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Royal School of Architecture in Stockholm, and with practicing architects (Barthel et al., 2013). Civil society organizations and other stakeholders took part in the participatory design processes as well. In 2010, colleagues and I presented an alternative vision for the site to the city planning office, to local politicians, and to the university leadership. The vision won support from all those actors. It was carried all the way into a detailed plan, which was co-designed with the city architect in Stockholm. Further investigations, reports and alterations were undertaken until 2012, when the City Council of Stockholm approved this detailed plan. The construction work of Albano started in November 2015.

It includes 100,000 square meters of buildings, including apartments for students and researchers. It attempts to support ecological connectivity in the wider landscape, as well as social and spatial accessibility to the street network of the urban fabric. Our designs accommodated local conditions for energy production and approached the greening of buildings with vegetation selected in relation to the surrounding landscape. We designed new habitats to support such landscape ecological processes of species migration, pollination and seed-dispersal. The design also involved development of institutional designs related to urban green commons (Colding and Barthel 2013), by which local civil society organizations, students and scholars can become managers and stewards of habitats and green spaces in the area (from wetland ponds to allotment gardens).

The project is expected to make a positive contribution towards a low-carbon economy. Designs focus on social-ecological resilience (such as adaptations to climate change) and mitigation measures to reduce carbon consumption for Stockholm’s Albano Campus. For instance, the integrated campus development plans will include better mobility solutions between the city and the campus and within campus (walking, bicycling and public transport), and also includes novel energy solutions that will be continuously updated parallel to technological innovations. The climate adaptation designs include carbon absorbing design elements (nature-based solutions) that simultaneously support the generation of local ecosystem services.

In the design process, one unexpected effect was a theoretical merging of social-ecological urban systems thinking with urban morphology thinking inspired by Jane Jacobs, which gave birth to what we now call Social-Ecological Urbanism (Barthel et al. 2013; Marcus and Colding 2014).

The combination of these two thought lines provides a cognitive step towards the city’s aim to generate an ecosystem-based urban transformation, where cities are seen as embedded in the biosphere, and where social-ecological relations on the micro-scale are considered alongside spatial features for combating social segregation and for creating walkability and safety. From a discourse point of view, Social-Ecological Urbanism can be seen as a second generation following the dominance of the smart growth paradigm, since it deals not only with designs for mitigation of carbon emissions, but also with adaptation measures to enhance adaptive capacities in relation to emerging surprises. It does so by searching for synergies between ecological and sociospatial systems, where resilience is used as the systems’ capacity to absorb shocks, utilize them, reorganize and continue to develop without losing fundamental functions. In this sense, social-ecological urbanism can be viewed as a scientific upgrading of landscape urbanism concepts.

Insights about the design process behind this work include the importance of: (1) respectful interdisciplinary working conditions, including exchanging knowledge and terminology in productive ways; (2) translation of scientific knowledge into physical, institutional and discursive artifacts that both ‘protect’ and communicate the ideas; and (3) respect for how to navigate within the power landscape in which urban planning and design is embedded.

This design process will be used as an example of ‘best practices’ in the building of a science-practice network in the Baltic region that can lay a foundation platform for learning, innovation and friendship. Albano acts as a foundation for the EU-project called LIVE BALTIC CAMPUS – Campus Areas as Labs for Participative Urban Design.

Live_Baltic_Campus_map — Cities and Universities around the Baltic Sea in the project LIVE BALTIC CAMPUS – Campus Areas as Labs for Participative Urban Design.

Other collaborations that have emerged directly from this project include several collaborations with non-academic actors within the Stockholm region, as well as a partnership with Urban Mistra Futures at Chalmers in Gothenburg. We hope that aligning these two different lines of thought under the framework of Social-Ecological Urbanism brings novel innovations with interesting repercussions for the international debate on sustainable urban development. We also hope the Albano Campus, as a persistent artifact example, may inspire architects to join the broader quest of sustaining the web of life of which we are all a part.

Stephan Barthel
Stockholm

On The Nature of Cities

Literature

Andersson, E., Barthel, S., Borgström, S., et al. (2014). Reconnecting Cities to the Biosphere: Stewardship of Green Infrastructure and Urban Ecosystem Services. AMBIO. 43: 445-453.

Barthel, S. Parker, J. Ernstson, H. (2015). Food and Green Space in Cities: A Resilience Lens on Gardens and Urban Environmental Movements. Urban Studies. 52(7), 1321-1338.

Barthel, S. and Isendahl, C. (2013). Urban Gardens, Agricultures and Waters: Sources of Resilience for Long-Term Food Security in Cities. Ecological Economics. 86, 224-234.

Barthel, S., Colding, J., Ernstson, H., Erixon, H., Grahn, S., Kärsten, C., Marcus, L., Torsvall, J. (2013). Principles of Social-Ecological Urbanism – Case Study: Albano Campus, Stockholm. TRITA-ARK Forskningspublikationer 2013:3, Stockholm. ISBN 978-91-7501-878-2.

Barthel S., Colding J., Elmqvist T., Folke C. (2005). History and Local Management of a Biodiversity-rich, Urban, Cultural Landscape. Ecology and Society. 105(2), 10.

Bendt, P. Barthel, S. and Colding, J. (2013). Civic greening and environmental learning in public-access community gardens in Berlin. Landscape and Urban Planning. 109: 18– 30.

Berkes, F., J. Colding, and C. Folke. 2003. Navigating social-ecological systems: Building resilience for complexity and change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

Bolund, P., and S. Hunhammar. (1999). Ecosystem services in urban areas. Ecological Economics. 29:293–302.

Bratman, G. N., et al. (2015). The benefits of nature experience: Improved affect and cognition. Landscape and Urban Planning. 138: 41–50

Clements, F.E. (1916). Plant succession: an analysis of the development of vegetation. Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication No. 242. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC.

Colding, J. and Barthel, S. (2013). The potential of ‘Urban Green Commons’ in the resilience building of cities. Ecological Economics. 86: 156–166.

Deutsch, L., Dyball, R., Steffen, W. (2013). Feeding cities: food security and ecosystem support in an urbanizing world, in: Elmqvist, T., et al. (Eds.), Urbanization, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: Challenges and Opportunities: A Global Assessment. Springer, Dordrecht.

Enqvist, J., Tengö, M., Bodin, Ö. (2014). Citizen networks in the Garden City: Protecting urban ecosystems in rapid urbanization. Landscape and Urban Planning. 130, 24-35.

Ernstson, H., S. Sörlin, and T. Elmqvist. (2008). Social movements and ecosystem services—The role of social network structure in protecting and managing urban green areas in Stockholm. Ecology and Society. 13: 39.

Giusti, M., Barthel, S., Marcus, L. (2014). Nature Routines and Affinity with the Biosphere: A Case Study of Preschool Children in Stockholm. Children, Youth and Environments. 24(3): 16-42.

Grimm, N. B., Faeth, S. H., Golubiewski, N. E., et al. (2008). Global change and the ecology of cities. Science. 319, 756–760.

Haase, D., Frantzekaki, N., Elmqvist, T. (2014). Ecosystem Services in urban landscapes: practical applications and governance implications. AMBIO. 43, 407-412.

Hartig, T., et al. (2014). Nature and Health. Annu. Rev. Public Health. 35: 207–28.

Harvey, D. (1990). The Condition of Postmodernity. Blackwell, Malden.

Hillier, B., and J. Hanson. (1984). The Social Logic of Space, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage Books, London.

Krasny, M. E. & K. G. Tidball. (2012). Civic ecology: a pathway for earth stewardship in cities. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. 10(5): 267-273.

Legeby, A. (2013). Urban Segregation And Urban Form: From residential segregation to segregation in public space. Ph.D. thesis. KTH, Stockholm.

Lewis, J. (2015). Deltaic Dilemmas-Ecologies of Infrastructure in New Orleans. PhD-thesis Stockholm University, Stockholm Resilience Centre. ISBN 978-91-7649-239-0. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-119390.

McPhearson, T., Andersson, E., Elmqvist, T., Franzeskaki, N. (2015). Resilience of and through urban ecosystem services. Ecosystem Services. 12, 152-156.

Marcus, L. (2010). Spatial Capital: a proposal for an extension of space syntax into a more general urban morphology. Journal of Space Syntax. 1 (1).

Marcus, L. & Colding, J. (2014). Towards an integrated theory of spatial morphology and resilient urban systems. Ecology and Society. 19: 55.

Newman, P. W. G. (1999). Sustainability and Cities: Extending the metabolism model. Landscape and Urban Planning. 4(1), 219-226.

Rees, E., W. (1992). Ecological Footprints and appropriated Carrying Capacity: What Urban Economies Leaves out. Environment and Urbanization. 4(2), 121-140

Sassen, S. (1991). The Global City. Princeton University Press, New York.

Seto, K. C., Reenberg, A., Boone, C. G., et al. (2012). Urban land teleconnections and sustainability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109, 7687-7692.

Tainter, J. (2011). Energy, complexity, and sustainability: a historical perspective. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions. 1, 89–95.

Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life. The American Journal of Sociology. 44, 1–24.

Socially Distant Summer: Stewarding Nature and Community to Meet Basic Needs during a Pandemic

24 September 2020Essay, People & CommunitiesCommunities, Covid, Disasters/Red zoneLindsay Campbell

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

1 Comment
Join our conversation

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

SUMMER

We started to settle into our “new normal”, with the pace of our journal entries significantly slowing down. Social distancing didn’t feel as novel any more, we weren’t noticing the shifts and changes as much. Or perhaps we were worn down with mental fatigue and journaling didn’t feel therapeutic, it felt frankly depressing. Even the daily, spontaneous 7pm cheer for frontline workers from city rooftops and apartment windows had faded over time in our corners of the city. At the same time, our worlds were also expanding — ever so slightly. As we went from a complete shutdown through the stages of reopening, we found new and creative ways to socialize: in parks, on rooftops, with outdoor dining in the streets across the city. All of this had to be navigated through our personal understandings and comfort with the risk involved in doing so. We were all trying to think like amateur epidemiologists.

We found that civic groups and public agencies are stewarding nature so that it is providing some of our most basic needs during the pandemic — food, respite, and safety.

Some of us were able to find respite from the monotony and the heat in short trips outside the city, others had not left their neighborhood since March. We are cognizant that we have an enormous amount of privilege to have this mobility — access to private or rental cars, families with homes outside the city, the ability to pay for vacations. For many in the city, the heat of July combined with lack of access to public cooling centers under social distancing presented a deadly threat above and beyond the virus. In response, the city government aimed to distribute thousands of free air conditioners to vulnerable residents and opened up fire hydrants in some of the Open Streets, as part of the Cool It! program.

Research team members meet for a socially distant walk in Brooklyn. From left: Michelle Johnson, Erika Svendsen and Lindsay Campbell. Photo: Lindsay Campbell

Street dining in Brooklyn in the shade of a street tree. Photo: Erika Svendsen

Starting in June we began to conduct interviews with local civic environmental stewardship groups and public agency natural resource managers at city, state, and federal levels as part of our STEW-MAP research effort, to understand how they were adapting to and impacted by COVID-19. All of this trained our eye in new ways to attune to the ongoing changes around us — the radical and subtle shifts in how we are relating to our neighbors and the nearby nature around us. As such, this essay draws on both our personal observations of our neighborhoods as well as some of the emerging themes from interviews with dozens of civic stewards and public land managers. We found that civic groups and public agencies are stewarding nature so that it is providing some of our most basic needs during the pandemic — food, respite, and safety.

FOOD

As the pandemic unfolded and many lost their jobs, struggled to make ends meet, and needed to find a way to pay rent, food insecurity emerged as a growing problem. Recent data from Feeding America suggests that the pandemic could force an additional 17 million Americans into food insecurity, bringing totals from the current 37 million food insecure to a projected 54 million food insecure people nationwide. Mutual aid groups focused on purchasing and distributing groceries to neighbors in need, and the community fridge movement grew. While these grassroots efforts multiplied, many civic environmental stewardship groups asked themselves how they could flex and adapt their missions and programs in order to help.

Some of these stewardship groups already worked in urban agriculture and saw an opportunity to redistribute the produce they grew to community members that need it most. One group, an education program that installs and builds curricula around hydroponic rooftop farms in school buildings, was already working with community partners to distribute produce grown in the classrooms. They use their gardens to teach lessons about the food chain, including food access. COVID has further revealed food insecurity within school communities as well, and moving forward they hope to redistribute the produce to school families in need. Another stewardship group that manages an on-site demonstration garden for school groups recently started distributing their produce to community partners. Prior to COVID, the produce they grew would be sent home with students or employees, but staff realized that the 100lbs of produce they grow each week could have an even bigger impact. Now, they are donating at least 20lbs a week to five different local organizations to subsidize fresh produce.

Many community gardens across the city are well set up to grow and distribute produce, but not all of them have the resources to do so. One citywide organization decided to focus their efforts on a new community farm hub program that supports groups looking to get involved in food production. They have made introductions between civic groups that hadn’t previously partnered, distributed seed packets, and conducted online trainings to help kickstart community farming. A few participating gardens have even collaborated to start local farmer’s markets. Another urban farm partnered with existing organizations and emergent mutual aid networks to purchase and distribute free farm boxes to residents who were struggling as a result of the pandemic. In the early days of lockdown, they called neighbors to identify those who didn’t have enough food to get through the week. At the peak, they were giving out roughly 450 boxes weekly, with pick up locations in multiple spots in the neighborhood and a delivery system for seniors and those unable to pick up in person.

Groups with gardens and farms aren’t the only ones pivoting to address food insecurity. One social weaver who founded a stewardship group to address community needs after Hurricane Sandy used her contact list to start a meal distribution program in the neighborhood back in April. At first, she partnered with a food pantry to deliver ready-to-eat meals to neighbors in need, but they weren’t very popular because they didn’t always match the cultural tastes of her diverse community. Now, she is distributing boxes of groceries that allow community members to prepare their own meals. She described packing up her car multiple times a day and driving around asking people if they’d like some food. She shared a story of one particular instance when she saw a mother and child in need, did a U-turn thinking “just maybe they need something,” and the food she offered was gratefully accepted.

In addition to these and many other efforts by civic groups, the NYC Department of Education gave all NYC public schools students a $420 voucher for food as part of the federal Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer (P-EBT) program. The voucher could only be spent by the bearer and not donated. There was an effort by City Council member Brad Lander and others to encourage those with means to spend the voucher and donate the same amount used to food pantries.

These and many other efforts to address food insecurity have helped sustain many New Yorkers through an unbelievably challenging time. And yet, as people return to work and emergency relief slows, it is becoming evident that not all of these responses are sustainable in the long term. Many of the stewards and activists we spoke to shared visions and dreams of moving away from a charity model of distributing free food, and towards true food sovereignty. What would it look like for vulnerable communities to control their own food system?

TRASH

Throughout shelter-in-place orders and ongoing social distancing rules, parks remained open, accessible, and vital to community health and well-being. While playgrounds, courts, ballfields, and community gardens in NYC were temporarily closed to ensure public health, many of our interviewees steward larger parks that include forested natural areas that provided access for nature recreation and respite throughout the pandemic. Land managers at all levels — federal, state, and local — and civic stewards reflected on how parks, forests, and open spaces were experiencing record levels of use and influxes of visitors. Our interviewees — as well as public health experts, elected officials, and the media — asserted the renewed and vital importance of open green spaces for fresh air, exercise, socialization, and connection to nature during these incredibly difficult times.

At the same time, with this increase in use, there has been an increase in trash left behind from these visits, including both overflowing garbage cans and litter on the ground. The trash issue is exacerbated by the fact that many parks are operating with cuts to budget and staff. According to New York Times reporting, NYC Parks has received an $84 million budget cut. Additionally, a report by New Yorkers for Parks found that the non-profit organizations that provide maintenance, operations and other services for city-owned land anticipate a 60% decrease in revenue for 2020, which will translate into a loss of 40,000 hours of park maintenance and 110,000 lost hours of horticultural care city-wide. Public land managers are highly aware of these visitor impacts — and are redoubling their efforts to stay apace with trash pickup and other crucial maintenance tasks. Many public land managers expressed disappointment that at the time when there is such an influx of new visitors, they are struggling to provide the level or service or high quality experience. New visitation has also resulted in a new influx of volunteers. Public land managers are working to focus this energy on litter-pickup rather than horticultural activities.

Public agencies are not alone in responding to this challenge; individuals and civic groups are also involved in clean-ups and trash prevention. Some excerpts from Lindsay’s journal track individual and community-organized cleanups around Brooklyn:

8 May 2020

I don’t usually like to go to the beach at Valentino Pier after a rainy day (because of all the trash on the beach), but my daughter was asking repeatedly to go. I saw my neighbor and his toddler with a full bag of trash and a trash picker. He had completely cleaned the beach of all its debris. He is the primary caretaker of his toddler, as he lost his job during COVID. On the walk back, I saw him across the street continuing to pick up trash — so not just the beach, but strewn gloves and masks from the sidewalk.

10 August 2020

On Saturday morning, my family and I went to Prospect Park for the first time since the lockdown and met up with friends and their dog for a distanced hello. I was really surprised by the amount of trash — not just cans overflowing, but cups and cans and things just loose on the ground under trees. It was 11am and the park was already quite full and we had to walk a ways to find a shady, safely distanced spot. Then, what should I see, but a parent and 2 kids with trash pickers and bags going around picking up trash. And they weren’t the last — I saw about 6-8 people doing the same thing throughout the park. Call it “COVID plogging,” but people are definitely helping to maintain the “loved to death park.”

A neighborhood Red Hook mom I know organized a trash pickup on Valentino Pier at the beach for this Monday, 10am. The beach seems like a special issue though, because most of the trash is tidal, not litter.

27 August 2020

A South Brooklyn mom is organizing folks to adopt their blocks to pick up trash — started a google map — and following a model she read about from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Reminds me of the way that the rainbow scavenger hunt map started and went viral.

LEFT: Screenshot of community beach cleanup flyer posted to neighborhood Facebook group
RIGHT: Volunteer participant at a Monday morning community cleanup with Prospect Park Alliance. Photo courtesy of Janeen Potts.

These community-led clean-up efforts are being encouraged and nurtured by public agencies (e.g. community cleanup tool lending from the Department of Sanitation) and elected officials (e.g. Bronx Borough President Reuben Diaz’s “Meaningful Mondays”). From our interviews, we found that civic stewardship groups are helping to address this gap by creating campaigns encouraging users to pick up their trash and some are even handing out trash bags as visitors enter parks. Park conservancies and other partners to the city are sounding the alarm about park budget cuts and making efforts to restore budget for these crucial services in future budget years. Park advocates have formed coalitions and are calling for city budget increases to maintain parks as well as writing opinion pieces calling for the creation of new parks in areas where they are most needed, to address disparities in park access that have been magnified under coronavirus.

Tropical Storm Isaias tree damage on an Astoria street. Photo: Michelle Johnson

STORMS

The impacts of the COVID-19 crisis intersect with pre-existing inequalities and vulnerabilities across our population. One horrifying, but incredibly plausible scenario that city officials had to prepare for was the possibility of pandemic, heat wave, and hurricane co-occurring.

As tropical storm Isaias barreled toward the city, residents — particularly those in coastal communities–found themselves bracing for impact. Fortunately, New Yorkers were spared from experiencing flooding because of its trajectory, timing, and alignment with the tides — if these had been different, coastal neighborhoods could have experienced the sort of storm surge that occurred during Sandy. However, the storm’s high winds had an incredible impact on the city’s urban forest — leading to over 3,300 downed trees and over 32,000 tree-related public service requests sent into 311, the city’s customer service line, in five days (data provided by NYC Parks as of 28 August 2020). This is the largest number of public service requests since storm event record keeping began in 1997 and more than a third of what is typically received in a year. These downed trees damaged property and created power outages, some of which stretched on for a week, during summer daytime heat in the 90s. Residents in New Jersey, Westchester County, and Connecticut experienced extensive power outages as well. New York City Parks responded by mobilizing its workforce to respond rapidly in real time to these resident calls, to ensure that streets and sidewalks were safely cleared.

We are reminded that in addition to the first responders who stabilize life and property after a disaster, those we call “green responders” work to restore communities and landscapes by caring for the natural world. These green responders include both public land managers and civic stewards, and disturbances can be acute (storm, tornado, hurricane) or more slow moving (food insecurity, economic disinvestment) — and their actions are a crucial part of long-term recovery and preparedness cycles.

The residents of the waterfront community of Red Hook, Brooklyn — particularly low income, often people of color living in NYCHA’s public housing–understand firsthand what it is to experience multiple vulnerabilities. In 2013, Hurricane Sandy devastated the neighborhood with flooding, power outages, and sustained damages to infrastructure and the built environment. After seven years, major retrofits to the NYCHA buildings and grounds are finally being made this summer to improve flood resilience. Yet, according to interviews with neighborhood activists, this construction is occurring at a large-scale across the entire campus all at once — cutting off residents from vitally needed local open spaces during the pandemic, removing over 450 mature trees, and leaving piles of construction debris and soil uncovered and exposed to air. These unintended side effects of much-needed capital improvements reflect the complex realities of and dire need for retrofitting our infrastructure and landscapes to be resilient to multiple disturbances, while working closely with and listening to local residents. On several instances, water mains had to be shut off to allow for construction, which simultaneously cut off access to fresh water for drinking and hand washing for residents. Local activists, nonprofits, and mutual aid groups stepped in to ensure that water was provided to residents — along with the already existing food distributions that were occurring. Going further, they organized advocacy efforts, including a public rally on 28 July, to target elected officials and the media to ensure that residents’ concerns were heard and addressed (see also #LetRedHookBreathe and #FullyFundRedHookHouses). Local leaders continue to educate the public, the media, and elected officials on the ways in which threats like climate change intersect with social justice and inequality to affect people’s lived experiences, particularly for public housing residents (e.g. see upcoming webinar).

We are cognizant that we are writing these reflections on storms and COVID-19 from the Eastern United States, while huge portions of the west coast are ablaze with unprecedented wildfires. How can we best protect, prepare, and adapt our communities–particularly the most vulnerable among us — to sustain in the context of extreme weather and climate change occurring alongside a public health crisis and massive social upheavals? How can caring for the land–as both a profession and as an avocation — play a part in making us more resilient?

POWER OF PUBLIC LANDS

Reflecting back on this summer, it has been a stark reminder of what food, shelter, and safety means to different groups of people. For some it is the continuance of good food while supporting one’s local restaurant and for others it is the basic need for food. Safety may mean public recreation free from debris and for others it may be access to clean water or safe streets. Shelter for so many this summer has also been about finding a respite in our public lands as a walk in the woods or neighborhood park can offer relief from this time of stress and uncertainty.

Of course, our public lands — wherever they may be — do more than offer temporary relief. As we enter these spaces, we are in the company of others — past, present, and future humans. In these spaces, we are, perhaps, reminded of a shared humanity and of natural forces that are great and alive, redemptive and destructive. As summer comes to a close, we prepare again for a season like none other. Many teachers will be in the classroom while their students are at home, on-line or struggling just to stay connected. Families and friends will find new ways to mark the fall and winter holidays and remembrances that often accompany the year’s end. And we know that public lands will continue to play an abiding role in our daily lives, as public space has always been a stage for the performance of everyday life. An excerpt from Erika’s journal:

1 September

I was reluctant to go to the park this evening with so much weighing on my mind. What would school be like this year for my kids? Will they fall behind? How will they stay safe but still be with their friends? Will they still feel part of a community? Eventually, I grabbed my mask, a blanket and a few snacks to share for an impromptu, socially-distanced picnic in Prospect Park. There I joined other mothers, fathers, and friends as we talked about our hopes and fears for the coming academic year. We shared stories of the summer that made us laugh. And we shared moments where one of us might have cried out if our kids hadn’t been within hearing distance. Our talk went on as the moon rose over the trees. A man on a bike approached our group. He stopped and shared a song with us. Soon we were encompassed by the music of Earth, Wind and Fire’s, No. 1 hit from the 1970s, September. Suddenly, we forgot our train of thought and leapt to our feet to dance under the moonlight. Wild, crazy dancing. For a moment, our children stared back at us in mild shock. Eventually, everyone joined the needed revelry on this first night of September.

Do you remember the 21st night of September?
Love was changing the minds of pretenders
While chasing the clouds away

Our hearts were ringing
In the key that our souls were singing
As we danced in the night
Remember how the stars stole the night away

Hey hey hey, say do you remember?
Dancing in September
Never was a cloudy day

— Excerpt from “September” by Earth, Wind and Fire

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

On The Nature of Cities

About the Writer:
Michelle Johnson

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

About the Writer:
Laura Landau

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

About the Writer:
Sophie Plitt

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

About the Writer:
Erika Svendsen

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

Socioecological Science is Failing Cities. The Humanities Can Help

24 March 2018Art & Awareness, Essay, FRIEC, FRIEC Essay, Science & Tools, StoriesArt, Awareness, Biophilia, Culture, Ecosystem services, Education/Knowledge/Learning, Experiencing Nature, Health, Landscape, Livability, Tools, Value, What is urban nature?Diane Pataki

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

4 Comments
Join our conversation

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” — Max Planck

As a graduate student, I was often assigned to read the foundational work of pioneering ecologists such as the late W. Dwight Billings, who was still on the faculty of Duke University when I was enrolled there. The first few decades of ecological research generated an extensive body of descriptive papers that used the new and evolving ecosystem concept to explore the biomes of the world. Writing in 1933, Billings’ Ph.D. advisor Henry Oosting framed his work on a lake in the area around Minneapolis, USA by noting that “the present study, principally descriptive of the environment and vegetation…was begun as a necessary early step in the cultivation of a field of research as of yet almost untouched in Minnesota…” While quantitative methods were available to scientists at this time, qualitative observations still comprised an important component of the field. “Statistics,” Billings wrote in the journal Ecology in 1941, “cannot replace clear thinking, and masses of figures should not be allowed to obscure a clear picture of a problem.”

While ecology has learned a great deal through an increasingly strict approach to scientific positivism, these constraints are no longer needed, and indeed, no longer desirable in the advancement of urban ecology.

Embedded in these early qualitative and personal accounts is important information that I fear has been lost from ecology as a discipline. Descriptive ecological science, I was taught as a graduate student, had met its end by the 1990s (and indeed many years before that), and the field was entering an era of highly quantitative methods. Advanced statistics, computational models, and the merger of physical and biological sciences was the future of the field as it was presented to me and my fellow students at the time. Consequently, my graduate curriculum included far more coursework in thermodynamics, meteorology, and fluid mechanics than in biogeography or natural history. Like most scientific disciplines, ecology aspired to emulate the foundational sciences in Comte’s hierarchy, which is built on mathematics, followed by astronomy, physics, chemistry, and at a later stage of development, biology. Sociology, according to this framework, is built later still upon the tenets of all of the natural sciences. The more recent distinction between the “soft sciences” and “hard sciences,” formalized by Storer in 1967, has also been influential in ecology as it has struggled to be accepted as a “hard” science.

“Chroma S5 St. Francis” by John Sabraw, Acid mine drainage pigments, gold leaf, and other paints on aluminum composition panel, 36″ x 36″, 2017.

Ecology’s journey to distinguish itself from its “softer” roots is a bit of an ironic twist in the development of the discipline, at least as it pertains to urban ecology. The increasing recognition that human activities are becoming indistinguishable from “natural” processes has led increasingly to calls for a science of biocomplexity and coupled human-natural systems. One common methodological approach to understanding cities as complex ecosystems is to bring together the ecological sciences as they have been practiced as part of biology, with various sub-disciplines of the social sciences. While ecology is ostensibly the study of the relationships between organisms and their environment, in the last two decades many, if not most, ecologists have acknowledged that humans are not interchangeable with other organisms. As Pickett et al. (1997) summarized, “simply inserting humans in the organismal component of the ecosystem concept is correct, but hardly adequate to understand their role in ecosystems. This is because humans are social creatures with large manipulative capacities, whose primary means of adaptation is by learning…the second feature of humans that makes viewing them merely as biological agents inadequate to the task of understanding urban ecosystems is that humans are self aware and can learn individually, as groups, and as institutions.”

“Shindig” by Patrick Dougherty, willow from Double a Willow, Fredonia, NY, 16′ x 12′ x 90′, 2015. Photo: Diane Pataki

This argument certainly holds true today: humans are not sparrows, and there is more to studying human-dominated ecosystems than biological methods alone can reveal. And yet, more than two decades later, where do we stand in the development of socioecological science as a set of theories, a sub-discipline, or even as a set of methodologies? I have been deeply engaged in this field for many years, and I will confess that my answer is not far enough. Not enough to claim major advances in the scientific understanding of how cities work, and not nearly enough to help cities solve critical environmental and social problems.

I’m sure some readers engaged in this field will disagree. Perhaps some of you think that in fact, major breakthroughs have been made, or that socioecological research has greatly assisted contemporary cities with their most pressing problems, or perhaps simply that the field and its practitioners need more time to accomplish these things. But let me offer something else: the possibility that while ecology has learned a great deal through an increasingly strict approach to scientific positivism, these constraints are no longer needed, and indeed, no longer desirable in the advancement of urban ecology. This idea is somewhat implicit in the framework of “ecology for cities” that is becoming popular with urban ecologists in the United States. Ecology for cities advocates for an applied ecological science that will help inform urban design in ways that meet the needs of stakeholders and urban residents. Not surprisingly, this notion is somewhat contentious given the diversity of views on the varying and blurry lines between modern “objective” science, applied science, and advocacy that undermines public trust.

But there might be another way beyond the science vs. advocacy debate. Although numerous knowledge-to-action frameworks exist, ecology has yet to fully and explicitly interrogate the range of models of scientific objectivity, and their various challenges as implicit in modern urban ecology and it sibling disciplines: environmental science, sustainability science, and conservation biology. To varying degrees, these fields are built upon an implicit or explicit interrelationship between the observer and the object of the study: the city, society at large, and biodiversity. An interrelationship implies some degree of subjectivity and normative concern for the outcome: the practitioners of these disciplines have an interest in contributing to the livable city, the healthy environment, and the survival of non-human species. This conflict between normative ideals and post-Enlightenment scientific methodology has been plaguing the ecological and environmental sciences (and many sciences that have clear societal implications) for decades. But new generations of both scientists and philosophers, including feminist scholars, have challenged the assumptions of current methodologies. Evelyn Fox Keller, the mathematical biologist and feminist philosopher of science, pointed out that “scientific knowledge is made objective first by being disassociated from other modes of knowledge that are effectively tinged and hence tainted.” In the conventional view, the subjective mental experience of nature has little to offer science as a mode of knowledge. However, embedded in this experience are the reasons why we wished to engage in knowledge to action in the first place. In other words, we not permitted, in the traditional scientific method, to fully explore our personal connection to our object of study, how it came about, and how it may (or may not) be common to the human experience. As a result, cut off from ways of knowing in which nature affects us directly through personal experience, the broader relationships between people and nature remain elusive in ecology.

The human experience in the urban environment is, in fact, at the heart of what we need to understand if we’re to use scientific knowledge to build better cities. It’s no accident that human-environment interactions are among the most poorly understood aspects of urban ecology; many of the tools that can be used to access these experiences are deemed to be unusable in modern science, because they are too qualitative, subjective, or unverifiable by experimentation. This dilemma was a major impetus for bringing together the social and natural sciences to study urban complexity. However, the social sciences are also strongly influenced by positivist ideals and methods, going back to Comte. Perhaps less so than the natural sciences are today, but nevertheless, though much has been made of the conceptual and methodological differences between the social sciences and biology, they share many ideals and historical trends in development. Even social constructivism as a contrast to positivism is probably fairly accessible to most natural scientists, at least conceptually.

But the humanities offer additional, new possibilities of direct access to the human experience in urban nature, as well as a fresh understanding of what it means to construct nature in the urban environment, that are also needed in the expansion of ecology as an urban discipline.

The problem is that central to the humanities are assertions that contradict the very basis of modern science: that knowledge can be gained through subjective experience; that there is reality beyond what can be materially measured and physically verified; and that generalizable theory is not always the most insightful path to understanding nature. It is no trivial task to expand the concept of ecology to encompass these views, antithetical as they are to what not just scientists, but all of our modern society has to come to accept as a hierarchy of ways of knowing, with materialism at the top.

Taking materialism all the way to its logical end, the modern scientific method presumes that the human experience can be reduced to atoms, chemistry, and physical laws. Do ecologists really believe that this is true? I suspect that most do not; nevertheless, we’re on track to reduce humans and life in the general to the “ ‘universal laws of life’ that are…mathematizable so that biology could also be formulated as a predictive, quantitative science much like physics,” to quote Geoffrey West in Scale. To this, as a proposed endpoint for biology, I would answer that as a science that embraces uniqueness, context, variability, and interrelationships, ecology is, perhaps, the branch of the life sciences that is the least well-served by strict reductionism.

There are, in fact, biologically-based arguments for expanding our ways of knowing in ecology. In his dazzling book, The Master and His Emissary, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist argues that modern cognitive science locates scientific materialism in only one part of the brain. While most of us have been presented with a simple view of the functioning of the left and right hemispheres of the brain (logic on the left, art on the right), the reality is, of course, more complicated. McGilchrist builds a case based on cognitive studies, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and case studies in pathology (in which parts of the brain have been damaged) to present a more nuanced view. In his synthetic framework, the left hemisphere is responsible for evaluating information in relation to what is already known, placing objects and experiences in more abstract categories. It further contends with the impersonal, the literal, and the mechanical, but is not well-equipped to understand individuality, the otherness and the howness of things, their context, their interrelationships, and the experience of empathy. Rather, these aspects of cognition are the domain of the right hemisphere, which processes “relational aspects of new experience, emotion and the nuances of expression” as well as wholeness, connections, and uniqueness. McGilchrist then sweeps through all of western history, arguing that some periods have been dominated by left hemispheric thought, while others (the early Greek period, the Renaissance, and the Romantic period) have drawn more completely on all of our powers of cognition. According to this view, we are currently in a period where the left hemisphere is almost completely dominant over our culture and now constitutes virtually the entirety of the scientific method.

As an ecologist, I find this argument striking, since most of the asserted functions of the right hemisphere—context, interrelationships, the individuality of organisms, and the whole as more than the sum of its parts—are both central to ecology while still remaining the most uncertain and elusive aspects of our understanding of ecosystems and their functioning. Given that the post-Enlightenment scientific method has devalued many possible means of fully exploring these aspects of the natural and human-created world, it seems plausible that without a more radical expansion of the boundaries of ecological concepts and methods, we are highly constrained in our ability to understand, let alone successfully shape, the nature of cities.

“Your Memory is Already Fading” by Wendy Wischer, cast, cristal clear resin, false floor and stereo sound of an original script on loss, 13′ x 10′ x 7.8′. 2015.

Art-science collaborations in ecology abound—I’m not suggesting that they don’t exist—however, more often than not, scientists view these projects as a means of communicating scientific ideas and results to the public. What I’m calling for is a flow of information in the other direction, in which scientists are open to the arts and phenomenology as a means of gathering much needed knowledge about the intersection between people, cities, and other aspects of nature. At the very least, science and the humanities certainly need not be at odds where their goals intersect, as I believe they do with respect to urban nature. In a wide ranging essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Steven Pinker describes this relationship as nothing short of a war between the disciplines, with each side hurling accusations of racism and other atrocities against the other. I must disagree when Pinker implies that all critiques of the scientific method contribute to the cultural “war on science”. Pinker calls for a reconciliation between the humanities and science as I’m doing, but all the while calling practitioners of critical analysis of science “resisters to scientific thinking” for implying that not all phenomena can be quantified. His solution is for the humanities to move closer to science, while science need not question a single digit in the numerical depiction of nature by viewing the world through the lens of the humanities.

I am very much a practicing research scientist and not a humanist, but sometimes our traditional methods simply fall short of the questions that need to be answered. When it comes to the intersection between ecological processes, the built environment, and the experience of living in modern cities, this problem is both acute and urgent. If there is a chance that the arts, literature, philosophy, and other humanist disciplines have something to offer our understanding of what urban ecosystems are and can be, then I think we should explore that chance, and quickly. Given the pace of environmental and social change, we don’t, unfortunately, have another two decades to wait to see the results of urban ecological studies to come to fruition.

Diane Pataki
Salt Lake City

On The Nature of Cities

Soft Animal

4 September 2024Essay, Europe, People & CommunitiesBiodiversity, Birds, Europe, Experiencing Nature, Wildlife People InteractionsAndreas Weber

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

Add a Comment
Join our conversation

The housemartins are my allies against the rampant heartlessness with which people treat the world. They are suffering from it, too, but the suffering does not diminish their grace.

Did you know that baby housemartins speak in their sleep? I did not ― until some nights ago in early July.

I was walking down the deserted main road outside Varese Ligure, an old-fashioned Italian mountain town. It was the evening of the day I had arrived. Following the dimly lit street, I passed a 1950s building with single-storey flats above some workspaces, derelict farming machinery lined up in front of the glass doors ― those narrow Bertolini tractors where the driver’s seat and the motor are articulated to allow manoeuvering steep Apennine meadows.

A street with multi-story buildings and cars parked along the road — Credit: Andreas Weber

I registered the faint chatter when I came upon the next building, equally constructed in that distinctive Italian postwar style, a high multi-purpose ground floor, and a second floor with tall windows, barred with green roller shutters. The house behind a rusty fence with a “no trespassing” sign is the local office of the Carabinieri Forestali ― the branch of the Italian state police that is doing ranger duties in state forests.

When I stopped outside the gate, I could hear the flowing, melodious, multivocal chirping much more clearly. I looked up at the weakly lit façade, following the flow of sound. And then I saw what seemed its sources: Right under the eaves, visible as dark bulging shapes in the twilight, hung a series of rounded cupules, firmly attached to the wall. The sound, I understood, came from a housemartin colony’s nests.

From their openings, soft high-pitched babble emanated, a dreamy chatter in a multitude of tiny voices. The street lay silent under the light of few lamps, the Apennine sky was huge and quiet, stars sprinkled across the black. The night smelled of hay and jasmine. There was darkness and tranquility, and the silvery ringing of the little birds in their mud cradles, like tiny rivers flowing towards an invisible stream.

The sound touched my heart. Was there anything more innocent, more carefree, more trusting than the young bird’s murmur in their precarious housings, two storeys above the concrete ground? Their voices felt like a hidden source of sweetness welling up in a vast silence. The sound plunged me into a sudden trust, coming from some unknown place, regardless of how everything looked.

I had greeted the housemartins already earlier on that arrival day, in the oblique evening light, watching them circle through the transparent mountain sky. I was relieved that they were still here, their nests hanging untouched under the police station’s roof, right as last year when I left them. I felt relief that life was still perpetuating itself.

A wall with several house martin nests made up underneath the roofline — House martins. Credit: Pixabay

This life is embodied in 15 cm long, black and white feathered bodies, each weighing not more than 20 grams, with wings spanning about the length of a letter sheet. Their existence had flown steadily from the last summer into this one, as it was supposed to be.

Human interference had inflicted no visible damage to the colony. Its members had survived two globe-spanning journeys. Last September they had crossed the Mediterranean southward, then headed across North Africa, the Sahara, and the vast stretches of the African continent towards the Cape. In late winter they had started to fly back north again. And here they were.

Housemartins are swallows. They populate the whole northern hemisphere. Ornithologists estimate their numbers to be several million across the European continent alone. The tiny acrobats of the air are still a sort of everyday bird. You can expect to meet them in the Italian summer. But that does not mean that the shadow of decline is not cast over their daily business. I could not find reliable numbers for Italy apart from the notion that populations are decreasing. In Germany, the species is officially counted as “endangered”.

Housemartins have not always settled on houses. They are a rock-dwelling species, and some still nest on natural stone surfaces. In Tibet, housemartins can be found breeding on towering mountain cliffs up to an altitude of 4600 meters. Human dwellings made of stone supply a suitable ersatz nesting place for rocky cliffs. They do so for other birds who chase the air for insects, e.g., for the housemartin’s close cousin, the long-tailed barn swallow, or his distant relative, the large-winged swift. Attracted by the artificial rocks provided in the form of buildings, swallows and swifts followed humans into dense settlements and even big cities.

Over the centuries, the melodious chatter of swallows, together with the sharp cries of swifts, has become a common element in the soundscape of bigger and smaller settlements. Once housemartins were a common sight even in London. They vanished from there after the air pollution had become too severe ― but recently turned back to a now cleaner sky over the British capital.

From my childhood years at the northern fringe of Hamburg, I remember that both barn swallows and housemartins nested at seemingly every farm. Barn swallows build their homes inside the buildings, and housemartins on the outside, under the roof. The birds’ sharp swirlings, curving in right over my head, their chatter and chirping were part of the sweet presence of summer. They somehow constituted a thread in the fabric of reality itself ― like the sand between my bare toes, like the sinking evening sun, setting the grass pannicles aglow, like the July air, tender and inviting. Housemartins were part of the welcoming structure of the cosmos. They were exponents of life’s promise to never end.

Birds who hunt the skies for food catch the tiny insects that are part of the “aeroplancton” ― little beings who are drifting with the wind and welling up with air currents. Housemartins eat mites, mosquitos, aphids, little flies and occasionally overwhelm bigger prey like butterflies. They swallow their food while flying unless they are not feeding their young. Then they store the insects they caught in their crop. Once back at the nest, clinging to its rough outside with their claws, they push the food into the wide-open beaks of the little ones which peak eagerly through the opening of the mud cupule.

Every day, now, I stand under the birds’ nests for long stretches of time. I come and take satsang with the housemartins. I drink in the life that unfolds, life that is put together from what is necessary to do in order to create life. This necessity unfolding above my head without questioning has its own irresistible grace: Each bird is a “soft animal” allowing its “body [to] love what it loves”, as the Mary Oliver’s famous line (in Wild Geese) goes.

Now, in July, the chicks in the nest are already the second generation of this year’s offspring. Many of the birds feeding the nestlings are probably their slightly older siblings from this year ― a particular culture housemartins have developed to raise their young more securely.

The colony under the police station roof is rather large. More than two dozen mud balls cling to the wall under the eaves. In the night, all is silent, apart from the soft baby bird chatter. During daytime, there is a constant coming and going of birds. The air in front of the orange building resembles the bustling village square on a market day’s morning.

I stand there early in the day, my muscles swelling under the dance of the birds through the “clean blue air” (Mary Oliver). I come back in the heat of noon, while the adult housemartins relentlessly swirl around the nests and carry out their feeding business. I watch after sunset when the blue air is vibrating from wings like an ocean brimming with plankton.

* * *

Housemartins and other swallows, as well as swifts and bats, are directly linked to the availability of insects. The more chitinous bodies are floating through the skies, the easier it is for the flying predators to feed their young. But the air is less and less filled with life. As anyone riding a car in summer witnesses, the windshield remains clean for a long time. Insect density has drastically fallen. In Europe, their biomass is down by nearly four-fifths compared to 1975. Imagine a supermarket with only 20 percent of the shelves remaining filled with food.

Housemartins, although a staunch follower of human culture, are suffering from many sides. Lately, construction work during the summer and new, smooth wall coatings, create particularly devastating effects. In Italy, state subsidies have allowed energy-saving refurbishments of housewalls to peak. Often the builders don’t care, or don’t care enough.

In the provincial capital La Spezia, a ninety-minute bus ride to the sea from Varese Ligure, two winters ago reconstruction work on a city apartment block led to the destruction of all housemartins’ nests on the façade. Only thanks to the intervention of residents, artificial nest cupules from concrete were installed under the eaves, leading to a successful breeding period.

In Italy, all bird nests are safeguarded by law ― and housemartins (as barn swallows and swifts) are a protected species anyway. Not all municipalities, however, act accordingly. Homeowners sometimes even hack down the nests, as the birds create dirt going about their business of raising their young.

In Varese Ligure, I have discovered two new mud nests on another building some distance from the police station. Traces left by the birds are clearly visible on the wall. Every time I pass under that house’s roof, I hold the air. But, so far, the owners have not interfered, and I am grateful.

I know that always something bad can happen. Not because I have a pessimistic mindset ― but because it empirically does. Even if a species is doing halfway well, its life is precarious, and a little change can extinguish its local presence. The dread is not subjective, but objective. It has become a feature of our daily reality, which therefore runs counter to a profound truth: the trust-inducing generosity to give life. This creates painful cognitive dissonance.

Swallows need natural water bodies in order to form the mud balls that they roll in their beaks with the help of their saliva. They put their nests together brick by brick ― about a thousand beaks full of mud are needed to form a cupule. Earlier this year massive excavators dug up the shores of one of Varese’s two rivers and secured them with heavy boulders against potential flooding ― taking away some of the little mud ponds along the stream. It was only a little move towards more regulation, more order, and less complexity. It will not drive the housemartins out of town. And yet it was one more of the endless number of needle stings that the other-than-human beings have to endure, one more little scare in the atmosphere of dread.

Why does the owner of the small house on the road above the town mow the embankments every two weeks, cut down the diversity of flowers that distribute their sweetness to butterflies, bees, beetles, hoverflies, all those beings that create the soft skin of the earth? Another need for order, another desire to keep things controlled ― and it plays out as yet one more needle sting ― into my heart, and into the heart of life too.

Sitting with the housemartins is my medicine against these sort of experiences, although they are not immune against them. The housemartins are my allies against the rampant heartlessness with which people treat the world. They are suffering from it, too, but the suffering does not diminish their grace.

I am still wondering why swallows and swifts convey to me such a feeling of lightheartedness and inspire so much confidence. Is it for the reason that they do what they need to do, at the same time dogged and effortless, as though there was no labour at all involved, revealing that, in the end, everything meaningful is endlessly simple? Is it because their existence seems to be a dance from beginning to end?

The gracious flyers in the blue create a shortcut between inner dimensions and the material all life is made of. They prove that matter is desire, that the world of flesh and blood and rock and air and mud is at the same time a deeply felt experience. They show without words, without concepts, that sweetness is the other side of gravity. They are tiny bodies with fast beating hearts and delicate plumage, and they are the joy that sits at the source of everything that arises, the joy that is nothing else than the pure, direct experience of being, unhindered by thinking, by worrying, by any abstraction. Housemartins are, and this being is the smile of the world.

It seems that the birds manage to follow the old Zen proposal: do everything you do with one hundred percent dedication, do it with the sense, that you are fulfilling a sacred action. Do your dishes as satsang, too. When we acknowledge that even the most repetitive task done is a profound engagement with divinity, then everything becomes divine material. You are immersed in it. There’s nothing that is not the smile of the world.

The biggest housemartin colony I know of is spread out under the eaves of a Buddhist temple. The building is not in Asia, it is in Italy, too, in the Tuscany Hills, shaded by old umbrella pines. From its windows, you can steal a glance of the ocean’s silvery surface. The monastery was founded by a close follower of the Dalai Lama. It is one of His Holiness’s most favored temples outside India, so the saying goes.

The main building where the birds nest, is an old Tuscan villa, which has been adapted to the monastical needs, prayer flags fluttering across its courtyard. Beneath the imposing building lies a row of stupas, their cupolas magically recreating a Himalayan atmosphere in the Italian hills.

During summer school at the monastery, I used to sit on a bench in the courtyard every evening when the sky’s bright blue turned into the soft orange of the Mediterranean dusk. I watched the elegant circles and ecstatic loops hundreds of housemartins described in the air, swirling around the monastery, dancing above it, industriously returning to their tiny nest cupules and feeding their young. The mud nests were lined up one after the other between the roof beams, around all sides of the villa. I counted more than fifty breeding cupules.

On one of those evenings, I realized that the Buddhist monastery did not belong to its human inhabitants. In reality, it was the temple of a thousand stupas, where housemartin worshipped life. Humans dreamt of spiritual realization here. But it was through the little creatures of the air that realization happened. Every curve of flight, every catch of prey, every gift of food to their babies was incessant devotion, full of chant and dance. The housemartins were completely without thought, they surrendered without question. They allowed being to be.

Andreas Weber
Berlin

On The Nature of Cities

Solving the Global Water Crisis

3 December 2023Essay, Europe, People & Communities, Place & DesignAwareness, Design, Europe, Sustainability, Water, Wetlands/Rivers/StreamsChantal van Ham

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

Add a Comment
Join our conversation

Many of the challenges we are experiencing in cities and communities around the world are connected to water. What we can do to make our water flow in abundance, and life on this planet thrive again?

In 2010, the UN General Assembly explicitly recognized the human right to water and sanitation. Equal access to safe and clean water, however, requires a major change in how decisions over use and rights to water are made and needs appropriate legal frameworks to curb over-extraction and unsustainable behavior.

Qanats are an ancient system of under-ground water channels in Iran that together equal the distance from the earth to the moon; they are now recognized as a World Heritage site. They are still in use for agriculture and livelihoods in arid regions of the world. They give back water to nature and have given life to millions of people over centuries. They are an excellent example of sustainable water management solutions that remain valuable over time.

Water is our source of life but, unfortunately, it often features in the news through stories of crisis: flooding, droughts, oceans filled with plastic, water pollution, scarcity, and contamination of drinking water. Populations of migratory fish have fallen by three-quarters in the last 50 years (The World’s Forgotten Fishes, 2021). In 2020, 6.13 billion people were living in critically water-insecure or water-insecure countries, (Global Water Security Assessment 2023). Around one-quarter of the global population lives in water-stressed countries, and by 2050, 5.7 billion people are likely to live in water-scarce areas, while the number of people at risk from floods is projected to rise to around 1.6 billion (UNEP, 2023).

Water deserves all our attention, as it is essential for life on earth and for all business and economic activities. The reason why I want to dedicate this essay to water is to better understand how the challenges we are experiencing in cities and communities around the world are connected to water and what we can do to make our water flow in abundance, and life on this planet thrive again. The aim is to give insights into water-related challenges and the value of restoring nature in addressing these challenges.

Even though we may think that we are in dire water straits, there are a range of solutions that we all can contribute to. The secret to some of these solutions is trees. Forests have a crucial role in regulating the water cycle and the frequency and intensity of rainfall (Global Environmental Change, 2017). Restoring forests and natural landscapes can impact water cycles, water availability and quality, and climate change adaptation in extraordinary ways.

A tall tree with many leaves in a forest — Chinese Water fir, Botanic Garden Meise. Photo: Chantal van Ham

Universal water challenges

A growing demand from an increasing world population, insufficient infrastructure, climate change, pollution, overexploitation, and flawed water governance lead to multiple water-related challenges around the world.

Every year, we withdraw 4.3 trillion cubic meters of fresh water from the planet’s water basins. We use it in agriculture (70 percent of the withdrawals), industry (19 percent), and households (11 percent). We often are not aware that all industries depend on water for some part of their production processes: for food and beverage companies the water use is obvious, but metal and mining companies need water for dust control and drilling, data centers require water for cooling and apparel companies rely on water to grow cotton and wash garments (McKinsey, 2020).

An example is the export ban on rice in India. India is the world’s largest rice exporting country, providing around 40% of the world’s supply, 22 million tonnes in 2022. India is home to 18 percent of the world’s population but only has 4 per cent of the world’s water resources, which leads to high levels of water scarcity. To grow rice, water is added to aid weed management and increase nutrient uptake for higher yields, so-called “ponding conditions”. This consumes 60 million litres of water per acre of rice paddy, or the equivalent of a hundred households’ domestic water consumption a year. The volume of water used to grow rice cannot be replenished by rainfall alone, therefore farmers pump groundwater to irrigate their paddies, up to 5,000 litres for every kilogram of rice produced. This means that water is exported with rice production rather than used for meeting domestic needs. Last year at least 47 billion liters of water were used to increase rice supply to sell overseas. Transition to other less water-intensive crops, such as millets or pulses, vegetables, and fruits may be needed in the coming years.

A burlap sack with a red and black text — Bag of Indian Basmati Rice. Photo: Chantal van Ham

The supply of fresh water has been steadily decreasing while demand has been rising. In the 20th century, the world’s population quadrupled—but water use increased sixfold. A study on freshwater stress and storage loss published in Nature last year (Huggins et al. 2022) indicates that the most vulnerable freshwater basins encompass over 1.5 billion people, 17% of global food crop production, 13% of global gross domestic product, and hundreds of significant wetlands.

Water is a growing business risk and to tackle this, companies need to understand how they are interacting with basins that are projected to become water stressed and prioritise efforts there. Companies can focus on several areas of action to help mitigate water stress: direct operations, supply chain, and wider basin health. Some companies are already taking action in all three areas. Apple, for example, anchors its water stewardship policies by mapping its global water use against regions with heightened water risk.

In partnership with The Nature Conservancy, Starbucks China pledges to replenish at least 1.5 million tons of water annually to Qiandao Lake, by the beginning of 2030. Qiandao Lake is the largest manmade freshwater lake in the Yangtze River Delta and a vital water resource for 10 million residents in Hangzhou, Jiaxin, and other areas in Zhejiang province. By focusing on sustainable agriculture and wetlands restoration, this partnership will meet the annual water consumption needs of 23,000 citizens in the vicinity. As water is essential to the Starbucks agricultural supply chain and store operations, it aims to give back water used by protecting surface water against pollution and allowing water from rain, storms, and rivers to naturally replenish the local ecosystem. It entails the restoration of 2 hectares of wetlands and support to local farmers to implement sustainable agricultural practices for their crops, to reduce the use of fertilisers and pesticides, reduce soil erosion and surface runoff while improving yield.

All these examples of business and economic activities that depend on water, demonstrate that insight into risks and the need for efficient use of water is not sufficient to ensure equal access to clean and abundant water, in particular in cities and water-scarce areas, such as India and China. Investment in water infrastructure and measures for water saving and groundwater management and water price reform are important actions, but effective legislation that prevents overexploitation and unsustainable water use is essential in every part of the world.

The origin of water and its use — biodiversity matters

To understand the state of water, it is important to start with the origin of water: more than 97% is salt water, held by our oceans. The remaining 3 percent of freshwater is mostly frozen in glaciers. What remains for drinking water is 1 percent. Availability of fresh water differs by location and the majority originates from a few hundred named basins, of which the Nile, Indus, Amazon, Congo, Yangtze, Mekong, and Colorado rivers are well-known ones. Freshwater can be found in lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, and wetlands, but also in less-obvious places: more than half of all fresh water on our planet seeps through soil and between rocks to form aquifers that are filled with groundwater. The top surface of an aquifer is called the water table, and this is the depth where wells are drilled to bring fresh water into cities and homes (National Geographic).

According to Hydrologist Emma Haziza, every species living on earth needs water as much as we do. Water extraction creates economic wealth and is part of everything that is produced and consumed, clothes, food, electronics, houses, cars, technology, and machinery but this destroys the water cycle on a planetary level. This leads to a loss of biodiversity as droughts increase.

A bowl of leaves and cherries on a wood surface — Cherries and lime blossom. Photo: Wameed Al Ganim

With climate change and increasing temperatures, the water cycle is accelerated with more evaporation, evapotranspiration, and precipitation. The risk of torrential rains also increases and droughts occur more frequently. Emma Haziza has worked for more than 20 years on the International Panel for Climate Change projections and as we are currently noticing around the world, the scenarios for future drought are beyond what has been predicted. In parts of France for example, in one year of drought deep water reserves collapsed by more than 70%. Most parts of Europe experience extreme droughts, groundwater is overconsumed and water stress increases, as well as urbanization and soil sealing. Heavy agriculture machinery also prevents water from penetrating and reaching the groundwater and harms soil quality due to pesticides and fertilisers. Such lifeless soils have no water absorption capacity and harm the deep water table as they are unable to recharge. The way we treat the soil determines to a large extent the water resources available in the world’s aquifers. Without deep water tables, there is no river flow and life disappears.

Trees sustain biodiversity and climate resilience

By evapo-transpiring, trees recharge atmospheric moisture, contributing to rainfall locally and in distant locations. Trees’ microbial flora and biogenic volatile organic compounds can directly promote rainfall. Trees enhance soil infiltration and, under suitable conditions, improve groundwater recharge. Precipitation filtered through forested catchments delivers purified ground and surface water (D. Ellisson et al, 2017).

Species richness, particularly native species and forest rehabilitation can provide positive effects on the health of forests and their water-related ecosystem services. Forest rehabilitation offers opportunities to restore water-related ecosystem services (Ellisson et al, 2017).

Drought is not caused by a lack of water but by a failure to convert water vapor into viable clouds, rain, and a failure to retain that water on the earth within plants, soil, and water structures. Converting heat-holding water vapor into viable cooling low-lying clouds produced through bio-aerosols made by plants while protecting soils, is essential for combatting drought (Cindy Morris, INRA, 2017). Water retention landscapes, rich soil fed by micro-organisms and livestock nutrient cycling, cover crops, trees, and plants of all varieties producing as much foliage as possible, cool the earth, release necessary cloud seeding aerosols, and induce rainfall.

More information about the hydrologic cycle which explains the continuous journey of water between oceans, atmosphere, and land can be found here: NASA Water and Energy Cycle.

How nature brings water to life

Nature plays an important role in keeping urban water sources reliable and clean. Natural solutions, such as reforestation, better farming practices, river bank, or wetland restoration can reduce erosion and run-off that pollutes water. This can improve water quality and reduce treatment costs. The Urban Water Blueprint (Mc Donald, Schemie, 2014) analyses the state of water in more than 2,000 watersheds and 530 cities worldwide to provide science-based recommendations for natural solutions that can be integrated alongside traditional infrastructure to improve water quality.

The Urban Water Blueprint explains that source watersheds provide the natural infrastructure that collects, filters, and transports water. On average, the source watersheds of the largest 100 cities are 42 percent forests, 33 percent cropland, and 21 percent grassland, which includes both natural and pastureland.

Watersheds and their land use greatly influence the quality of water cities receive; it is a dependence that becomes clear when significant changes happen. Changes in land use, particularly the conversion of forest and other natural land covers to pasture or cropland, often increase sedimentation and nutrient pollution. Increased human activity and the expansion of dirt roads in source watersheds can also lead to many other pollutants increasing in concentration, impacting the cost of water treatment and the safety of urban water supplies (McDonald, Schemie, 2014). In the period 2000-2012, more than 40 percent of source watersheds have had significant forest loss, which results in growing water challenges. Protecting and restoring the natural functions of watershed areas, through forest protection, reforestation, riparian restoration, agricultural best management practices, or forest fuel reduction can improve water quality and regulate water flow. It can reduce the costs of drinking water provision while providing multiple other benefits for nature and people. For instance, New York City avoided having to build a filtration plant by agreeing to the conservation of the Catskill watershed, the main source of its drinking water, thereby saving US $110 million per year. The water that originates from the watershed complies with water quality standards as a result of natural filtration by trees, swamps, and soils on its way to NYC.

In a time where technological solutions are spreading with the speed of light, we need to keep an eye on ancient systems that have proved themselves over centuries of life on the planet. New is not always better. Trees and natural ecosystems offer some of the most effective solutions to water security and climate change mitigation and are much cheaper than technical solutions such as carbon capture and storage (Nathalie Seddon, 2022). What is most important, they offer additional benefits, such as water filtration, clean air, biodiversity, livelihoods, and health.

When Charles Darwin arrived in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1830s, there was a chronic lack of drinking water due to the deterioration of the forests surrounding the city. He observed the complete deforestation and soil erosion of the hills around Rio that resulted from sugarcane and coffee production. The same hills that today are covered in lush native forest. This forest is Tijuca, the largest replanted tropical forest in the world that was created due to long-term government laws, regulations, management plans, and conservation policies (Drummond, 1996). Seeds and seedlings from mountaintop forests were collected and replanted on the hills over the course of more than 20 years, which resulted in a new forest in which rivers and streams flow again, and that cleans the air and lowers the temperature for citizens of Rio.

Another example of natural solutions to water challenges is under development by the Weather Makers, an engineering company that is involved in an ambitious project to bring rain back to the Sinai Peninsula. As land use in the Sinai changed with overgrazing and depletion of water, the loss of vegetation prevented the formation of clouds, allowing more and more water to evaporate from the area, increasing the rate of desertification. The local population suffers from heat waves, sand storms, and flash floods. By looking at the peninsula on Google Earth, they discovered that the scars of old rivers crossing the desert are still visible.

Re-instating the hydrological ancient water cycle leads to a substantial increase in water sequestration, a decrease in land surface and air temperatures, combined with unprecedented carbon sequestration. The Weather Makers works with a range of partners to regreen the Sinai desert, starting with the restoration of Lake Bardawil and its surrounding wetlands and an integral planning approach for regenerative landscape development of a total area of ~30,000 km². The fertile marine sediments that are dredged from the bottom of the lake are used, as well as sustainable sediment treatment, freshwater management, water harvesting, and flash flood prevention. In this way, native vegetation can be brought back, and it will change the direction of the winds, bringing water vapour from the Red Sea and Indian Ocean back to the Mediterranean land and as well the rain that is so desperately needed. The restored wetlands will increase the presence of birds, add fertility and new plant species, improve water and food security, and provide extensive carbon sequestration benefits.

A city with a river running through it — The Nile in Cairo. Photo: Chantal van Ham

Reflecting on the earlier mentioned Qanats, which harvest and convey water in a sustainable manner without damage to the tapped aquifer, their success relies on the social systems, the so-called Qanat Civilisation. This allowed for peaceful and cooperative management of water in arid regions of the world for safe drinking water, food security, water quality, and sanitation and we can learn a lot from this at a time when the world faces increasing water scarcity. These social systems were based on deep knowledge of the natural environment, indigenous culture, communal trust, and social cooperation. The social institutions fostered by the Qanats spread to other realms of social life, becoming part of the social capital of the society.

The cultural and social structure of Qanats offers a foundation for optimising water and land use to ensure sustainable socio-economic development based on cooperation. Cooperation is essential for any successful solution and in relation to water and management of water sources and their distribution will require new forms of stewardship and trust as well as the sharing of ideas and knowledge. This will strengthen societal efforts for change within and across societies.

United for water and nature

During the UN Water Conference in March 2023, the Freshwater Challenge was launched: a country-driven initiative to leverage the support needed to restore 300,000 km of rivers and 350 million hectares of inland wetlands by 2030 to enhance water security, tackle climate change, and reverse nature loss.

Trees are among many other things, food suppliers, rain makers, water keepers, and oxygen providers. If we restore forests and our natural vegetation systems, temperature extremes can drop, and the hydrological cycle will restore their cooling potential and with that improve the health of soils and biodiversity. This may even help to mitigate geo-political tension, as water does not stop at borders, which makes trees also peace makers.

As the examples mentioned before demonstrate, restoring nature is of tremendous value to make our watersheds healthy again in every part of the world. There are many success stories to present, but what they all have in common is that investing in nature-based solutions brings many benefits. However, despite these benefits, raising the financial capital and political will for their implementation remains very challenging. It requires cooperation between all of society and across disciplines, awareness, education, and capacity building. Not one watershed, river, or wetland at a time, but with united efforts across the globe.

As Sumetee Gajjar in her TNOC essay from May 2019 points out: “as scholars are allowed to experience and visit a living ecosystem from the past, they may be able to imagine and wish to sustain nature of their cities in the future. The lake thus becomes a classroom”. She adds that this is not only through what we can learn by studying it as a living social-ecological system but also by simply existing alongside its physical and ecological presence.

Urgency and large-scale action towards regulation are essential to address the water-related challenges in a changing climate, and part of the solution is up-to-date information about water developments. Global Water Watch, by Deltares, WRI and WWF, is an excellent resource that provides high-resolution information on thousands of global reservoirs, estimates the current state of a reservoir, and maps surface water. This can help to determine priority areas for action by governments and the private sector to conserve and restore ecosystems and natural water cycles.

If water is to be everyone’s business, then stakeholders will need to unite in water-scarce countries to make some difficult trade-offs on the road to water resource security (Charting our water future, McKinsey). Some solutions may require potentially unpopular changes, such as higher prices and the adoption of water-saving techniques and technologies by millions of businesses, farmers, and households.

In large water basins, individual action by a particular city’s water utility may not make economic sense as many millions of people live in cities that rely on this water. Conservation action would benefit multiple cities and water users downstream. Although each action alone may not have enough benefit to solely fund conservation, collective action may make economic sense. In this way, the scale of the intervention will go from a local level to regional and beyond, developing approaches that strengthen the landscape-wide application of land use planning for the provision of ecosystem services.

Countries with largely informal water sectors can re-allocate subsidies to incentivize water conservation. Simply removing subsidies and adjusting pricing might incentivize more prudent use of water but would also lead to challenges for farmers or other water users who cannot afford additional costs. Therefore, market-based mechanisms and financing instruments have to be designed in an inclusive and equitable manner, as demonstrated by the ancient Qanats, making water available to all in a cooperative manner.

“Water is not a commodity – it is life-making material. We need to ensure every living being has access to it” – Sadghuru.

Chantal van Ham
Brussels

On The Nature of Cities

Some Birds Love Cities—Can Cities Love them Back? TNOC Podcast Episode 9

10 August 2016Place & Design, Podcast, Science & ToolsArchitecture, Birds, Design, Sustainability, Wildlife People InteractionsPhilip Silva

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

3 Comments
Join our conversation

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Also available at iTunes.

Story Notes: House sparrows, rock pigeons, and red-tailed hawks are three bird species that have successfully—and very visibly—adapted to life in cities. Yet as the number and the size of cities across the globe continues to grow, more birds find themselves dealing with the challenges and the opportunities of urban life. While some species find ways to take advantage of living near humans, up to a billion birds die each year after flying into glass buildings, according to the American Bird Conservancy. Architects, engineers, and planners in some cities are working to make the built environment more bird friendly, adapting to the needs of our feathered neighbors.

A White Crowned Sparrow. — White Crowned Sparrow.

This podcast episode, produced by Philip Silva, checks in with Kim Todd, a science journalist and the author of Sparrow, a book that explores the social and natural history of a tiny bird with an oversized representation in poetry, song, and theater from the past two thousand years.

We hear from Dr. Christine Sheppard, a scientist with the American Bird Conservancy and co-author of the organization’s Bird-Friendly Building Design guidelines. While Todd’s writing investigates the ways different bird species are adjusting to human habitats, Sheppard’s book—co-written with TNOC contributor Glenn Phillips—collects insightful examples of buildings purposefully designed to make urban life easier for birds.

Finally, we hear from Jennifer Sánchez Acosta, an environmental educator at Parque La Liberated in San José, Costa Rica, where the first annual Urban Bird Festival recently introduced city dwellers to more than fifty bird species found within city limits. Educators at Parque La Liberated hope that residents of San José can grow to appreciate the diversity of birds living alongside them—and, perhaps, take steps to help make the city more bird friendly over time.

The Orange Cube, in Lyon, France, was designed by Jakob+ MacFarlane, Architecture as is a bird-friendly building. — The Orange Cube, in Lyon, France, was created by Jakob+ MacFarlane, Architecture and is a bird-friendly design.

Some Kind of Nature… But What Will We End Up With?

15 November 2017Essay, People & Communities, Science & ToolsAwareness, Biodiversity, Communities, Ecosystem services, Experiencing Nature, Health, Value, What is urban nature?Yolanda van Heezik

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

Add a Comment
Join our conversation

There are many motivations to create urban green space, but current trends suggest that real ecological value and function is losing its place among them.

Whenever I listen to the song Some Kind of Nature by the Gorillaz & Lou Reed, it makes me think about what kind of nature we are going to end up with in our cities, even though the song isn’t actually about urban nature at all. From my perspective here in New Zealand, it seems as if there are some prevailing ideas driving urban biodiversity research and urban restoration initiatives that might compromise the ecological authenticity of the nature that results from these efforts. I think we are in danger of ending up with a very watered-down and biodiversity-poor version of nature. This reduced version of nature will only exacerbate the ongoing process of shifting the baselines of expectations of what nature of urban nature is. Are we all going to end up with fake nature, and be happy with it?

Urban ecologists see nature in cities through a lens that is focused on the requirements of other species, the integrity of habitats and systems, and the potential for enhancing and restoring biodiversity to spaces that are often quite small. Urban ecology also recognises the significance and the potential of the human dimension, and acknowledges the importance of community-driven approaches to restoration projects. To be successful, restorations need to include families and communities, provide opportunities for social connections, be relevant to everyday life, encourage free choice and learning, target local issues, promote collective action, foster roles of local stakeholders, and promote direct experiences with nature. Of this list of requirements (Wilson 2011), most of the objectives are social.

While satisfying the human dimensions is essential for success, and acknowledging that restorations should be community-led, social and management constraints associated with urban restorations include “lack of ecological knowledge, lack of social acceptance of management approaches, human-wildlife conflicts, and conflicting goals based on varied views and value systems” (Clarkson & Kirby 2016; DOI: 10.1111/emr.12229). Research shows that many urban residents do not know what natural habitats look like, they aren’t able to recognise common species, they don’t know how those species function within the food web, and they do not feel comfortable in wild spaces with which they lack familiarity. If the health of cities, in terms of ecosystem services, biodiversity, and the quality of the nature experiences available to adults and children, depend on how much local communities value and know about nature, then we could be in trouble. For example, In New Zealand, many urban residents are unaware of the impacts their pet cats have on native wildlife. Many believe that it is natural for cats to kill native wildlife and it’s just a question of reaching a new equilibrium. In community consultation about cat management, I’ve heard people say that cats are just like lions, at the top of the food chain, so it is natural that they eat native birds and lizards. This attitude reflects a lack of awareness that in New Zealand there are no native terrestrial mammals except for two species of bat. I’ve also been asked if there are even any native birds within the city. A city-wide survey revealed that only a few nationally iconic bird species are recognised by most people as being native, while between a quarter and two-thirds of people are uncertain or incorrectly label other common urban native species as exotic when they are native, or native when they are exotic. This same lack of knowledge has been reported in other countries and attributed to the abundance of exotic species in home environments and the media. However, values drive community demands for green spaces and the design of these spaces. Can we rely on those things a community deems valuable if we are to achieve worthwhile ecological outcomes? Shifting baselines mean people’s concept of “wild” and “natural” will have changed.

An example of a restoration that was driven at least partly by community consultation is Boneyard Creek, which flows through Champaign, Illinois (USA), draining much of the city, including the central business district and the University of Illinois Campustown area. Poor water quality and flooding issues prompted the city and university to create a redevelopment plan. The redevelopment plan involved community consultation, and took into account social acceptance of restoration techniques, the socio-political atmosphere in neighbourhood groups, and was careful to include cultural perspectives. However, none of the reported wishes of the public reflected a desire to restore ecological function, except possibly tree planting and the creation of a pond, but rather reflected a desire for recreational spaces. The list on their website includes the following: provide landscape plantings; bike and pedestrian paths; get rid of ugly stuff; create parks; create a beautiful, safe trail; trees; create an outdoor amphitheatre; create a pond; build a beautiful bridge; convert the lumberyard into a beer garden. The completed restoration serves its primary function of increasing stormwater capacity and improving flood protection, and it provides an attractive amenity park with spaces for recreation, fulfilling four of the five defined goals, but the fifth goal of enhanced wildlife and habitat is hardly met. While some new species, such as ducks, Canada geese, turtles, and green heron have been observed on the site, the habitat value of the site has increased from being “poor/marginal” to only “sub-optimal”.

Is functionality for social purposes always going to conflict with ecological functionality? The aesthetic values of many people still reflect preferences for an Arcadian/Romantic landscape form, seen in parks with widely spaced trees that in New Zealand are usually exotic species, scattered across a mown lawn with no understorey—not the best habitat to support wildlife. Recreational spaces are not always conducive to thriving wildlife populations, except in the case of the most tolerant urban adaptors. Popular recreational spaces are likely to be noisy and well-lit. Some animals abandon areas when frequent or chronic noise interferes with their ability to pick up auditory cues, or when sounds are perceived as threats. Pedestrians interrupt bird foraging, causing birds to flee, and the presence of dogs can force birds to spend more time being vigilant, waste valuable energy, and lose foraging opportunities if they have to repeatedly fly away.

Another urban ecological restoration that is often touted as a great example of what can be achieved is the Cheonggyecheon River in South Korea. A critique of the restoration by Cho (2010; doi:10.3828/idpr.2010.05) provided a very different perspective on this restoration. Although a dramatic transformation was effected, and social goals were achieved, little public consultation was involved and the opinions of ecologists ignored. The end result has been labelled fake nature by some. The Cheonggyecheon Highway, which ran through Seoul, was seen as obsolete and an impediment to the competitiveness of the city, and so it was removed as part of an urban renewal project. It had covered the Cheonggyecheon River for decades. Now the space is occupied by a stream, lined with parks and urban-gathering spaces. It is very popular; 90,000 people visit the stream banks on an average day.

Figure 1. A view of the Cheonggyecheon River restoration in Seoul, South Korea (https://inhabitat.com/how-the-cheonggyecheon-river-urban-design-restored-the-green-heart-of-seoul/)

However, the result is hardly ecologically authentic. Almost all of the water that now flows between the mostly concrete banks of the Cheonggyecheon is pumped there through 11 km of pipes from another river. Cho (2010) describes the whole process as a staged political performance, launched on the eve of the Mayor’s inauguration and completed 10 months before the end of his term. Criticisms are that the Mayor used the environment as an instrument of urban development, that engineers were not open to alternative ways of water flow because it would take too long to construct, and that the approach prioritised flood control over restoration of the range of habitat types and associated species assemblages that likely existed long ago before the river was modified. Its design allows a high volume of water to flow downstream promptly, but it is not a good habitat for species. Stream engineering dictates its design, the stream bed is cleaned of moss, the water quality controlled daily, and plants are actively maintained. It is simulated nature.

But what kind of nature experience should people be entitled to? A body of literature is accumulating that supports the connection between nature contact and human well-being. Frumkin (2001; doi.org/10.1016/S0749-3797(00)00317-2) stated in his review; “As we learn more about the health benefits of contact with the natural world, we need to apply this knowledge in ways that directly enhance the health of the public”. As ecologists, we should be pondering what the consequences are of a focus on using nature to enhance human health. For example, a rise in green prescriptions has the potential to intensify use of green spaces, increasing levels of human disturbance, and even resulting in pressure to modify green spaces to make them more user-friendly, with the likely result that wilder areas will be lost.

The concept of nature contact as a therapeutic device has been widely applied, but recently more specific questions regarding the required dose of nature have been asked (Shanahan et al. 2017, doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biv032; Cox et al. 2017; doi: 10.3390/ijerph14020172). That is, for how long and how frequently do you have to be in nature to gain benefits? A few studies have tried to identify the elements of nature that people perceive and respond to. Do we enjoy the same benefits from a park filled with introduced species, as from a native woodland? These studies are presented in the context of public health gains and aim to identify minimum doses needed to effect well-being benefits. For example, Cox et al. (2017) conclude that their analysis demonstrates that quantifiable reductions in the population prevalence of poor mental health can be achieved if minimal thresholds of vegetation cover are met. My concern is that we should not be cornered into thinking about the minimum amounts of nature needed to improve human health.

While human health gain is a powerful rationale for investing in green spaces, inevitably human need will dominate all other justifications, and quantifiable needs tend to trump those that are less easy to quantify. By viewing nature as a commodity that supplies health benefits, and by identifying the minimum needed to gain benefits, we run the risk of trivialising a deep and significant affective response to nature. This view could provide an incentive to create natural spaces that are structured primarily to satisfy our well-being requirements, rather than according to ecological goals. What if we discover that we get the same well-being benefits from sitting on a lawn as from a biodiverse wetland, or woodland? And what if we gain the same benefits from a virtual experience? Chang et al. (2016; doi: 10.3390/su8101049) asserted that the absence of a relationship between physiological benefits in relation to different levels of invertebrate diversity meant that city planners should not hesitate to use ecological best practice in their designs, since settings rich in biodiversity will not necessarily influence people’s physiological well-being in a negative way. I might be accused of being cynical, but I believe that that kind of information could be used to do the exact opposite: to create spaces with minimal ecological value. The infographic below outlines all the benefits we can gain from nature in our backyard, but the yard itself is presented as just lawn with one tree. The website advises that lawns can make you feel happier.

Figure 2. Infographic from Orethapedia website (https://orethapedia.com/2017/04/10/your-lawn-can-make-you-happier-infographic/) outlining well-being benefits in a biologically depauperate garden environment.

Biodiversity has been conceptualised within economic frameworks, and can be divided broadly into use values and non-use values. Non-use values include those values relating to the feel-good factor nature provides us with—existence, altruistic, and bequest values. We should be careful not to shift the way we think about and value our natural green spaces more into the “use” part of the framework. Whatever the motivations for protecting and restoring green spaces in cities, the input of ecologists, as well as input from a well-informed public, is essential. Despite principle motivations that may not be primarily about biodiversity enhancement, such as social, hydrological, and well-being goals, and despite lack of knowledge in the public driving the project, what we end up with must have ecological value.

Yolanda van Heezik
Dunedin

On The Nature of Cities

References

Chang, KG, Sullivan, WC, Lin, Y-H, S, W, Chang, C-Y. 2016. The effect of biodiversity on green space users’ wellbeing – an empirical investigation using physiological evidence. Sustainability 8: 1049; doi: 10.3390/su8101049

Cho, M-R. 2010. The politics of urban nature restoration: The case of Cheonggyecheon restoration in Seoul, Korea. International Development Planning Review 32 (2) doi:10.3828/idpr.2010.05

Clarkson, BD, Kirby, CL. 2016. Ecological restoration in urban environments in New Zealand. Ecological management and restoration 17(3): 180-190.

Cox, DTC, Shanahan, DF, Hudson, HL, Fuller, RA, Anderson, K, Hancock, S, Gaston, KJ. 2016. Doses of nearby nature simultaneously associated with multiple health benefits. International journal of Environmental Research and Public health 14: 172. DOI: 10.3390/ijerph14020172.

Frumkin, H. 2001. Beyond toxicity: human health and the natural environment. American Journal of Preventative Medicine. 20:3. 234-40. doi.org/10.1016/S0749-3797(00)00317-2

Shanahan, DF, Fuller, RA, Bush, R, Lin, BB, Gaston, KJ. 2015. The health benefits of urban nature: how much do we need? BioScience 65(5): 476-485. doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biv032

Wilson, C. 2011 Effective Approaches to Connect Children with Nature, Department of Conservation: Wellington, New Zealand.

Soul and the City: Re-Establishing our Relational Capacity Beyond COVID-19

3 August 2021Essay, People & Communities, TNOC FestivalAwareness, Covid, Europe, Food, Sustainability, TNOCFestivalMartina Artmann

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

1 Comment
Join our conversation

Aren’t we living in crazy times? It seems that the COVID-19 pandemic may never end. Home office, covering our faces with masks and social distancing have suddenly become part of our daily routine. In the beginning of the first lockdown, the world outside seemed so near due to the various digital events such as webinars, online conferences and virtual field trips offered. However, over the weeks and months of social distancing and staying at home most of the time during the dark European winter time, the feelings of being alive, getting inspired, being touched by and affecting the people or the garden on the other side of the screen have popped-up only recently or not at all. Now, one year later, tiredness and fatigue are spreading.

Although all of these digital offerings are a great opportunity to bridge the current social distancing dilemma, it is becoming evident that they cannot replace meeting in person or being in nature in order to experience ourselves, once again, as sentient members of the web of life. Digital events are exhausting since we cannot deeply connect with each other. We can neither smell nor touch the digital landscape. It is hard to grasp how the person vis-á-vis really does feel, to read between the lines of what is said, so that we can react and connect comprehensively. What remains is this sense of how crucial these deep connections with human and nonhuman nature are in order to feel alive.

Maybe this is one of the crucial lessons learnt from the current pandemic we should reflect on: How can we strengthen our urban relational capacity in a world characterized by individualization, digitalization and instrumentalization? How can we also deeply re-connect with each other and with nonhuman nature in cities — in light of the socio-ecological crisis, which will not disappear after COVID-19?

Covid-19 as a symptom of a sick system?

In fact, in light of the socio-ecological crisis it can be argued that this pandemic isn’t happening right now by chance. For instance, during the webinar Earth Talk: Gaia’s Lessons organized by the Schumacher College, parallels between COVID-19 and the anthropocentric destruction of the rainforest were discussed. Rainforests as the lungs of our earth are cleared for humans’ never-ending demand for natural resources and meat. Just recently the WWF warned that Europe is in the second place of the world ranking of tropical forest destroyers behind China, making our imperial way of life visible.

Looking at this sad news through the lens of the Gaia theory, which considers nature as an intelligent self-organizing system, is it only a coincidence that the pandemic attacks humans’ lungs? Can the recent pandemic be interpreted in a way that implies that the corona virus is a wake-up call by nonhuman nature warning humanity to change our way of life, to remind us that we are part of nature and that we are destroying through our exploitation, domination and instrumentalization of nonhuman nature our own basis for life — in material and spiritual terms? Although the developers of the Gaia theory, the chemist James Lovelock and the microbiologist Lynn Margulis, do not consider the Earth to be alive in the same way as humans or other living beings, the theory can be considered a scientifically-based alternative to overcoming the Western human-nature duality by emphasizing the mutual relationship and interconnectedness between humans and the planetary ecosystem. Fostering a responsive relation between human and nonhuman nature in external-material and internal-spiritual terms is also a crucial task for cities, their decision makers and residents.

Reconnecting urban residents to nourishing food

In material terms, it is difficult for the urban population to comprehensively understand and, in particular, to deeply experience multi-scale impacts of our consumptive decisions and routines, such as the destruction of the tropical forests. Most of the inner cities look similar, calling us to buy things — things we usually already have enough of — such as clothes and shoes and when we are hungry from shopping we can consume some hot dogs or sausages. In fact, food is a kind of metaphor for the challenges of human-nature alienation in cities, providing us with a creative and multi-level pathway for how we can achieve more sustainable connections between food and nonhuman nature.

On a material-collective level, issues such as food miles (describing how far food has travelled from its source of production to the consumer) of exotic food or deforestation of the tropical forest for meat production are relevant when exploring responsive human-food connections. That strengthening urban food production can be an effective leverage to foster urban sustainable development and food resilience in times of crisis (also becoming quite relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic, see also this blog-post), is recognized by a range of bottom-up and top-down activities bringing sustainable food consumption to the urban planning and policy table, such as shown through the Edible Cities Network. Edible cities and urban food production can be considered a systemic nature-based solution that addresses a range of challenges connected with urbanization such as fostering biodiversity, social cohesion and green jobs. Overall, bringing food back into cities is not only about strengthening ecologically sound food self-sufficiency, but also cognitively and emotionally reconnecting urban populations with food, thereby fostering pro-environmental food behaviour through an embodied perspective on human–nature connection.

Edible City Andernach. Photo: M. Artmann

Such an individual-embodied perspective can then also strengthen the establishment of a responsive relationship with food. Thus, we should internalize that food is nourishing us physically and spiritually. We put (more or less) nature-based food products into our body that nourishes us to stay alive. Shouldn´t we then reflect deeply upon what kinds of foods we are supplying our body with so that we can not only survive but feel alive? For instance, how was the food produced — was the vegetable nourished by healthy soils? Do we absorb the suffering of animals with the dead bodies we are consuming? Since cities are usually dependent on food imports outside their boundaries, there is a risk that urban residents are increasingly becoming disconnected from processes related with food production.

Thus, it is worthwhile to contemplate which key processes and situations have the potential to influence urban residents to transition to a plant-based, organic and regional diet, which are crucial pillars for sustainable food consumption. Potentially influential processes could include experiencing meat alternatives through an appealing choice of food in an urban restaurant (in fact, perceived availability of sustainable products is suggested to be crucial for nudging pro-environmental behaviour). For instance, in the cities of Dresden and Nuremberg, where we live, more and more vegan restaurants and coffee shops with delicious meals and cakes are emerging, which offer the opportunity to discover that a plant-based diet is very tasty and does not necessarily mean self-sacrifice. Besides tasting sustainable plant-based food, experiencing vegetable production through the physical engagement of urban gardening, for example, can become a crucially transformative process when we experience how much effort is needed to grow food, thereby motivating us to reduce food waste. Since animal-based food production in particular is usually placed outside the cities, we need to be aware how meat is produced at the expense of animals as sentient beings (see related to this topic this interesting ARTE-documentary (in German)). Thus, the current overconsumption of meat and milk products has crucial negative multi-scale effects on the environment and human health — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is therefore voting for plant-based diets.

To consume animal-based food is also an ethical and moral issue and it has to be discussed whether causing animal suffering for human desires is immoral. To inform urban residents about what precisely meat consumption entails, from farm to table to consumption, social awareness campaigns about the negative aspects of meat production in urban public spaces such as Anonymous for the Voiceless can be an important pillar for developing empathy regarding animals exploited for food production.

Overcoming the exploitation of non-human nature

In Western culture, from whose viewpoint we write this blog-article, cats and dogs are considered as a valuable part of our family, but when it comes to our daily food habits the brutal way we treat cows, pigs, and poultry so that we can acquire meat and milk-products shows the dark side of modern society and industrialized food production. An example to make the dimension of animal exploitation visible: In Germany, each day about 2 million animals are slaughtered. In contrast, in January 2021, on average 3,500 people died in Germany daily. If each day as many people would die as animals are slaughtered, Germany would have no population anymore in about 42 days. Is this extraordinary extent of killing animals that are subordinated to the will of humans ethically justifiable? Furthermore, is this exploitation of nonhuman nature not a logical explanation for the development of zoonotic pandemics as a response of nonhuman nature to the human caused socio-ecological crisis? In fact, according to a joint report by the United Nations Environment Programme and the International Livestock Research Institute, issues related to human-food connections such as the worldwide increasing demand for animal protein and industrial meat processing must be considered when discussing how we can decrease the risk for future zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19.

Developing a responsive connection to non-human nature

To explore responsive human-nature relations and the awareness of and empathy for all human and nonhuman members of the web of life, it is worthwhile to learn from indigenous communities and wisdom. The responsive characterization of human and nonhuman nature is interlinked in indigenous communities in the form of kin-centric ecology. In kin-centric ecology, one views oneself and nonhuman nature as members of an extended ecological family connected through spiritual and material life, their common ancestors, souls and the land holding intrinsic value to be respected and protected in the same manner as humans.

In the field of urban ecology, such as also shown in this TNOC-blog, a lot of effort is being made to emphasize the importance of urban nature experience for mental and physical health and psychological resilience, in particular during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, what could a responsive soulful human-nature connection in cities look like? A responsive nature experience does not include visiting urban nature with the intention of instrumentalising nature experiences such as recovering from a stressful day or increasing one´s personal fitness. Neither does it mean to reduce nature experience to an aesthetic quality and its passive “consumption”. When aiming at a responsive nature connection, mindful practices with a focus on listening to nature speak with her own voice is crucial. We personally have the impression that there is recently an increasing demand by urban residents to reawaken place-based spiritual practices and ceremonies to deeply reconnect with our and nonhuman nature’s soul.

For instance, in many German cities shamanic cacao ceremonies are offered. The raw cacao used for such ceremonies should not be mistaken with the industrial processed chocolate found in the supermarket. Raw unprocessed cacao usually tastes bitter and astringent compared to the sweet industrial chocolate processed with sugar and milk. Raw cacao can be considered a master and teacher plant, which was used and valued by indigenous communities for ritual and shamanic purposes, such as for weddings, sacrificial rituals, and currency. Legends of the Maya say that the cacao tree, its plants and seeds come to humans when they treat Mother Earth carelessly to re-establish the lost harmony. Maybe this lost harmony is the reason that a new strand of urban shamanism offers cacao rituals in cities? Mother cacao, which is also called the food of the gods, has with its chemical super food composition the potential to create heart-opening processes and moments of strong bonds. Embedded into an urban circle culture, its ritual use accompanied for instance with meditation or dancing, can offer participants of such rituals answers to specific questions, foster creativity or re-solve deadlocked emotions and patterns. In teachings, such as offered by the Earth School Berlin, urban residents can learn about cacao rituals, shamanic practices, inner and collective transformative capacities to re-establish deep connections with ourselves and the Earth.

Creating a multi-dimensional space to explore non-duality

Taking into account that the urgency of the present socio-ecological crisis demands to think — or better to feel — outside our rational-centered box, sustainability research on urban socio-ecological systems can take a deeper look at transdisciplinary strategies that strengthen our urban relational capacity for responsive human-nature relations. TNOC and its festival in February this year offered a great space to explore together with academic and non-academic methods how we can deeply experience, learn and feel human and nonhuman nature in material and immaterial spheres such as through poems, journaling or dancing. We were very happy that we got the chance to be part of this family with our session on soul and the city. Together with the session attendees we created a multi-dimensional space to explore the inner and external nature of cities. A crucial focus of the session was a meditation which we developed inspired by the Advaita Vedānta tradition found in Hindu philosophy referring to non-duality.

These are some major excerpts and stations of the meditative journey:

Point of departure: Think about a place in a city, for instance, a city you are living in, a city in which you had experience that shaped your life, an experience in a city, which touched you significantly. Stick with your first idea, your first feeling, which is popping up inside you without any judging.
Connecting with the urban environment: Feel inside the place. Maybe you can perceive a special smell, a sound next to your ear. Gradually start to move from the place you are. Slowly walk along the path, perceive how you are synchronically breathing with your steps. Take a look at the urban environment you are walking along, consciously observe how you feel at this place. In front of you there is a bench, slowly walk towards the bench and take a seat.
Connecting with urban residents: When you sit on the bench, take a closer look at the place that surrounds you. Are there any other people? What do they look like and what are they doing? Do they look relaxed or stressed, are they alone or in groups? Look into their eyes? What do you feel?
Becoming an urban animal: While you are observing your environment, you´ll see how a bird lands next to you on the bench. The bird is curious and is coming closer to you so you can look each other into your eyes. Maybe the bird would like to share something with you. You´ll start to establish a connection with the bird and then you perceive how you become the bird. It is very normal for you to become a bird, there are no doubt why you should not become a bird. You feel how you can spread your wings, how the wind is carrying you away from the bench, you move your wings up and down synchronically with your breath.
Connecting with an urban tree: You appreciate that you can effortlessly surf with the wind, you enjoy the silence, being one with the air. Looking down, you see a tree, the tree is a good old friend of yours and you land on your favourite part of the tree. You say hello to your friend, the tree is happy that you came around, so s/he can share some news with you. Just listen to her/his words without any judgement, how is the tree doing?
Becoming the urban wind: While the tree is chatting with you, you hear the wind touching the leaves from the tree, maybe the wind also brings some special smell to you or a sound. You feel how the wind has the same rhythm as your breath and heartbeat. You feel how you are becoming the wind. You say goodbye to your friend and you are roaming through the city, the streets, the urban nature, and the mystic cemeteries. You feel how you can expand yourself, how you can through your energy connect people, plants, animals, and buildings with each other.
Becoming one: Dive one more time in the feeling of oneness, allow yourself that this feeling is flowing through your being, let this energy nourish you with whatever you need. Connect again with your breath, slowly come back into your body.

Logo for our session at the TNOC-festival. Logo design: K. Artmann

Based on the meditation, we afterwards reflected on the experiences made and discussed ways of soulful relations in cities. The discussions showed that transdisciplinary approaches such as mystical and embodied experiences, journaling, mindfulness practices or storytelling can help to nourish our soul in the city and to experience urban nature as a sentient, soulful member of our kin. Motivated by the supportive feedback after the session, we got inspired to develop further activities for transdisciplinary conferences and festivals dealing with urban human-nature relations and sustainability transformation. For instance, in September this year we will offer a cacao-ceremony at the IOER Annual Conference 2021: Space & Transformation ‒ hopefully taking place in presence.

Martina Artmann and Katharina Artmann
Dresden and Nuremberg

On The Nature of Cities

Acknowledgement

Martina’s work is supported by the Leibniz Best Minds Competition, Leibniz-Junior Research Group under Grant J76/2019.

About the Writer:
Kathi Artmann

Kathi Artmann studied Geography in Austria and design in Germany and today works as a texter, graphic designer, firedancer and hoop-dance-trainer. Her interests lie in processes of alienation and how they endanger coexistence in society. In her artistic works and movement workshops, she tries to encourage people to reconnect with themselves and their environment to visualize and heal alienation.

Southeast Asia’s Urban Future: A Snapshot of Kuala Lumpur

19 February 2017Essay, Europe, People & Communities, Place & Design, Science & ToolsBiodiversity, Conservation, Development, Experiencing Nature, Housing, Justice, Planning, SustainabilityChris Ives

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

2 Comments
Join our conversation

We found ourselves scrambling along the slippery, vine-entangled slope, ducking under branches and contorting ourselves around fallen trees. The air was hot and thick with humidity, causing us to sweat after just a few minutes on the trail. As we walked, the noise of the busy highway slowly subsided and the sounds of the rainforest could be heard in the breaks in our conversation. We stopped to look up at a large dipterocarp tree of the Shorea genus. Its straight trunk made it desirable for timber, we were told—one of the reasons so little of this type of forest remained.

For a green future in Kuala Lumpur, multiple actions need to be taken: from localized high-level policy frameworks, to harnessing residents’ love for nature.

From a small scar in the bark flowed an aromatic, sticky sap. We selected a picnic spot: a section of the trail just wide enough to spread a mat, but steep enough that we had to be careful not to drop our fruit lest it tumble down the slope in to the water below. From our vantage point above the lake, we watched as the inhabitants of the jungle revealed themselves. A Bee-eater flew quickly into view and perched on a branch. A kingfisher darted from one bank across to the other. A water monitor lizard glided gracefully through the turquoise water to the great delight of the children. This was a side of Kuala Lumpur that few visitors to the city would experience.

This artificial lake was created by diverting river flow around a new urban development of multi-storey apartments. It is within a piece of biodiverse, remnant rainforest.

As we wandered back through the forest, we caught a glimpse of the imposing residential apartment blocks not more than a kilometre away, which had been constructed just in the past year. It was these apartment blocks that had necessitated the diversion of the creek, resulting in the formation of the artificial lake we had followed. When we finally left the dense canopy behind and entered the clearing, we looked out to the new “eco-village”—a gated settlement of generic bungalows and green lawns surrounded by razor wire. It had been rolled out some years prior, across land that once was covered completely by the same dense rainforest we had walked through. This picture of contrast represents the interface between the city of Kuala Lumpur and the landscape beyond. It raises the question: what does sustainability mean in this city? And what kind of future can be expected here?

Kuala Lumpur: a city of contrasts

Asia is a hotspot for urban growth. In the coming decades, the population of Southeast Asia is expected to increase from 634 million in 2015 to a maximum of 804 million in 2065, and finally to decline to 769 million in 2100, based on 2015 UN modelling using a medium fertility estimate. Projections of urbanisation (based on 2014 UN modelling) suggest that by 2050, 65 percent of the population of Southeast Asia will be urban. Malaysia, in particular, is predicted to experience high rates of urbanisation, with 86 percent of the population projected to live within urban areas in the future. If urban sustainability is to be pursued on a global scale, progress in rapidly developing nations is going to be critical.

Greater Kuala Lumpur (including Kuala Lumpur the federal territory and surrounding municipalities) is a city of contrasts. It is a city of immense diversity, where a Muslim mosque, a Hindu shrine, a Christian church, and a Buddhist temple can be found in the same place.

Total population (both sexes combined) by Southeast Asian nations, annually for 1950-2100 (thousands). Modelling based on medium fertility variant, 2015 – 2100. Data from “United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2015). World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision”.

Annual Percentage of Population at Mid-Year Residing in Urban Areas. Singapore not plotted, as current population is 100% urban. Data from “Urban Areas by United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2014). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision”.

This cultural and ethnic diversity is reflected also in the diversity of urban forms. The centre of the city contains some of the most impressive sky scrapers in the world, notably the Petronas Towers and the KL Tower. There are high end shopping malls and luxury apartments. Construction is occurring all around the city, including high density residential areas and intermediate density, planned estates. In Kuala Lumpur, new train stations and highways are being constructed all across the city in a move to help transport the growing population, while, in the meantime, roads are clogged with ever-increasing numbers of cars. The traffic chaos during much of the day in central Kuala Lumpur is a hallmark of the city, as it is for many developing nations (see Jenn Baljko’s recent post on Dhaka). The city of Putrajaya is the new federal administrative centre of Malaysia and is located just outside Kuala Lumpur. Constructed over marshland and oil palm plantations, people planned Putrajaya as a garden city according to Ebenezer Howard’s principles; 38 percent of the area is designated as green space and it is the home of Malaysia’s largest botanical gardens. With all this varied and diverse development, the question remains: What kind of a future is greater Kuala Lumpur is likely to experience, and what place is nature likely to have in it.

Kuala Lumpur is a city of great diversity, as seen by the many varied urban forms visible from the vantage point of the KL Tower.

To understand the future of Kuala Lumpur, the city needs to be considered in the context of Malaysia’s growth and development over time. Malaysia has developed rapidly over the past 50 years. In 1970, almost half of the population was living in poverty, yet this figure had dropped to only 1 percent in 2014, according to the Department of Statistics Malaysia. In this regard, Malaysia is a success story. But this increase in social and economic capital has come at a cost to its natural capital. Malaysia is a global biodiversity hotspot, ranking 12^th in species richness and endemism globally. However, resource extraction and deforestation has resulted in a reduction in forest cover, from nearly 80 percent to 44 percent between 1940 and 2014

Malaysia is ambitiously pursuing future economic growth, with the Eleventh Malaysia Plan setting out a strategy for the country to be an “advanced nation” by 2020 through promoting “productivity and innovation”. Although one of the strategic thrusts of the plan is “pursuing green growth for sustainability and resilience”, there is a degree of scepticism amongst Malaysians as to the practical outworking of this plan. Greater KL’s current population of 7.2 million (2016) is set to increase to 10 million in 2020 – 2025 (according to Land Public Transport Commission (2013)), which will bring many more challenges related to green space availability and transport.

Different forms of housing and levels of affluence sit alongside one another in Kuala Lumpur.

Connections to nature and sustainability

During our recent time in Kuala Lumpur, our thinking wandered to the type of connections with nature that people in the city have and how these are likely to change over time. These thoughts have emerged from conversations with academics and community leaders, but are still loosely formed.

There has been little research on perceptions and behaviours towards urban nature in Malaysia. Some research has shown that distance to a nearby green space is very important in influencing frequency of use, along with ethnicity. A recent study also highlighted that Malaysian residents who grew up in rural contexts were much more likely to engage in nature-based activities as children than those whose childhoods were in an urban context. Experience of nature by people living in cities has been shown to be relatively uncommon in the U.K. Considering the increased rural-urban migration in Malaysia, what could this pattern mean for people’s experience of the natural world more generally? Might people become more disconnected from nature just as has happened in the West, or will people actively seek out nature experiences? And how might these experiences of urban nature influence their attitudes and behaviours towards the environment?

In Kuala Lumpur, a great deal of the new housing stock is in the form of master-planned, gated communities. The expansion of this development is threatening existing forest remnants, like the one we walked through for our picnic. Yet ironically, these are frequently sold as “eco” housing, or “green” communities because of the emphasis placed on the provision of communal green spaces within the estate. It appears that the environmental image is a powerful one in marketing terms, presumably because of the notions of freedom, space, and healthy living that it conjures. However, it is the wealthy and affluent residents of the city that are attracted to this type of housing. These are the same people who statistically consume more energy and resources than those in lower socio-economic classes. In contrast, the people who are moving from the countryside to the city typically reside in higher density areas, disconnected from nature experiences, yet their ecological footprints are likely to be much lower. A move to the city is considered a move towards financial independence; concrete and “development” are equated with progress. These dual narratives are a mere snapshot of the complexity of the nature of Kuala Lumpur. So what of the future of the city?

New medium-density “eco” development in the outskirts of Greater Kuala Lumpur in Semenyih.

Nature and the future of the city

Malaysia is at a crossroads. With strong economic prospects and rapid urban expansion, it is clear that decisions made in the coming years will shape the social and ecological future of the city greatly. Moreover, global connectivity between urban activities and changes in ecosystems elsewhere as a function of trade and consumption means that Kuala Lumpur’s development will impact the rest of the world. For a green future in Kuala Lumpur, multiple actions need to be taken. First, the high-level policy frameworks that promote “green growth”, such as the Eleventh Malaysia Plan, need to be operationalised at finer scales. Tangible strategies for curbing expansion of housing into remnant forest and promoting more green infrastructure in the city will be crucial. Second, the love for nature that many residents feel needs to be mobilised in a way that can shape the future of the city. Particularly for those who engage in nature-based activities, translating this passion into decision-making for parks and reserves will help to promote a sense of public ownership of these features. Finally, greater opportunities for residents and visitors to engage with urban nature will help to embed nature experiences in the culture of the city. Designing spaces that are easily accessible, yet provide mystery and opportunities for exploration, may help here. Malaysia is a country of immense biocultural diversity. We hope that this biocultural diversity will also be reflected in the country’s cities of the future.

Chris Ives and Alex Lechner
Nottingham and Kuala Lumpur

On The Nature of Cities

About the Writer:
Alex Lechner

Dr. Alex Lechner is a landscape ecologist and Assistant Professor at the School of Environmental and Geographical Sciences at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus.

Souvlaki Coyote and other Tales of Urban Wildlife

11 September 2012Art & Awareness, EssayArt, Awareness, Biodiversity, Experiencing Nature, Wildlife People InteractionsBob Sallinger

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

12 Comments
Join our conversation

Much of the fabulous writing on The Nature of Cities blog site to date has focused on integrating the built and natural environment, erasing, or at least softening the lines that separate the natural and the manmade. I would like to shift focus a bit and explore the intersection between people and wildlife and suggest that we would also be wise to consider how we integrate animals into our urban stories, poems, art, culture and collective narrative. We need to bring the same level of creativity and imagination that we are currently investing in transforming our physical landscape into repopulating our mental landscape with the diversity of life that surrounds us.

In short, we need to do a better job telling animal stories — urban animal stories.

I am not talking here necessarily of ecology, biology and natural history, although ecological literacy is of critical importance. I am taking at least one step further back into the realm of mythology, legend and folklore, about how we tell and retell our own story in a way that truly recognizes wild beings as fellow travelers on our urban landscapes.

For many years I ran Portland Audubon Society’s wildlife hospital. There we treated upwards of 3,000 injured wild animals and responded to more than 15,000 wildlife related phone calls each year. The vast majority of both calls and animals emanated from the urban and suburban landscape. One of the indelible impressions from those years was how often somebody would walk into our center having taken significant time out of their busy day to deliver an injured animal, and ask us some variation on “what is it and why is it here?” They would insist that until that very morning, when the animal was dragged in by the cat or slammed into their kitchen window or collided with their car, they had never seen this creature in their neighborhood before. We would slowly open the box only to find ourselves eye to eye with…a crow…or a robin…or a scrub jay…or a fox squirrel. Often however, when the same people returned a few weeks later to pick-up the repaired animals for release, they would tell us that their neighborhood was suddenly teaming with never before seen wildlife. A connection was made…eyes were opened.

FishInWall — Fish art on downtown Portland, Oregon (USA) building, Photo by Bob Sallinger.

The human mind is good at filtering information and more than 35,000 years after humans first painted wild animals on cave walls, we have done a remarkable job of exorcizing wildlife from our consciousness. We don’t expect to see wildlife in our cities and therefore we don’t…until something or someone alters our expectations.

Those animals we treated at our hospital were sad and broken, but at the same time they also painted a rich tapestry of stories about how wild animals live and die in our urban landscape and how they interact with one another and with us. These stories are not the stuff of field guides, PhDs or wildlife management plans. They are funny and sad and weird and mysterious…sometimes they are mystical.

RacoonAsTrickster — Raccoon as urban trickster. Photo by Michael Durham.

They are messy too.

If we restore it, critters will come, but we are not always sure what to do with them when they get here. Coyotes run off with cats, raccoons roll garbage cans, birds slam into windows, deer browse grandma’s flower beds, otters crack shellfish on the decks of high priced yachts…they are our own modern day tricksters.

Throw a high concentration of humans into the mix and the opportunities for mayhem increase exponentially. Among my favorite vignettes: the woman who wanted me to suggest a natural area to release her pet alligator. It was cute, apparently, when she bought it, but now it is three feet long, won’t stay in the bathtub and seems inclined to eat the kids and Chihuahua.

TheyDontReadSigns — Apparently they don’t read the signs. Photo by Bob Sallinger.

The gentleman who graciously shared his hot tub with the neighborhood raccoons because “all the wetlands have been filled” and could not understand why the ungrateful little beasties decided to dismantle it one day while he was at work.

The lady from the Greek restaurant who delivered leftover souvlaki to a street corner in an upscale Portland neighborhood each morning to feed the local coyotes who promptly began associating all people with restaurant handouts.

Nursing moms who suckle orphaned raccoons (yes, really… and it happens more often than you might think!). Working on urban wildlife management issues is sometimes a bit like living inside of an extended “Far Side” cartoon.

A friend who works as an urban natural resource planner once told me that 90% of her job was trying to get people comfortable with “messiness.” She is right. A big part of the challenge before us is integrating messiness into a culture that increasingly prioritizes higher and higher levels of organization.

CoyoteMashup — Souvlaki Coyote on the prowl in downtown Portland, Oregon (USA). Photo by Bob Sallinger.

Over time I came to realize that wildlife rehabilitation was about fixing broken animals, but it also was just as much about being a chronicler of the animals in our midst. I slowly realized that the succession of stories that I heard day in and day out were indelibly transforming my own mental map of the city. As I move about Portland now I can’t help but transpose those stories onto the landscape. That corner is where coyote loped across the highway and disappeared behind a bar….this fire escape is home to a pair of red-tails that sometimes bop high-rise construction workers that intrude upon their airspace…that bridge is where a pair of Peregrines have nested since 1994 and fledged 58 young…and so on.

PeregrinePortland — Peregrine nesting on Portland Bridge. Photo by Bob Sallinger.

I can already hear the lamentations of my friends on the scientific community: “uou are talking about anthropomorphizing wildlife—that’s the last thing we need.”

Actually I am not.

I am after something different here.

How do we create stories that fundamentally reconnect our communities with the life forms that surround us? The types of stories that imbue our urban landscape with the magic, mystery, ambiguity, messiness…inspiration that comes with a recognition that we are not alone…we weren’t even here first.

PeregrinePortland2 — Fledgling Peregrine exploring Portland’s industrial landscape on foot. Photo by William Hall.

Our lack of awareness plays out subtly as we consider policies to re-green our landscape. Too often our decision-makers and the community at large view wildlife as something we should consider adding as opposed to recognizing wild animals as something that has always been and will always be part of our urban landscape. In a city like Portland, which sits at the confluence of two great rivers, wild animals will continue to live upon and migrate through our landscape. The only question is whether we will provide for their needs when they are here.

There are signs of progress. I am intrigued by the proliferation of urban wildlife webcams. Several years back, Portland Audubon collaborated with a local television station and placed one above a pair or Red-tails that nest on a downtown fire escape and “Raptor Cam” was born. As something of a Luddite, I was initially skeptical and frankly appalled by the substitution of digital experience for direct experience.

RaptorCam — Raptor Cam Red-tail on nest. Photo by Dieter Waiblinger.

Half a decade later, I see it differently. Each year the site gets nearly a million hits as people track these birds like a soap opera. They anticipate and celebrate and grieve and discuss and opine on line with one another. I hope and wonder if perhaps it causes them to look skyward more often when they actually are outdoors.

My friend Mike Houck of the Urban Greenspaces Institute (and who also writes on this blog) was after the same type of awareness when he commissioned a giant mural of our urban birds on an bare mausoleum wall overlooking Portland’s first natural area at Oaks Bottom and when he convinced a local brewery to name a microbrew after Portland’s official city bird, the Great Blue Heron.

HeronMural — Oaks Bottom Mural, Portland, Oregon, commissioned by Mike Houck. Photo by Nelson Photography.

I see it as well in books like Wildwood by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis which transforms Portland’s Forest Park into an impassible wilderness occupied by baby snatching crows and scheming coyotes. Even the television show Portlandia, with its ubiquitously referenced (at least in Portland) “Put a bird on it” sketch edges towards what I am after.

Restoring ecologically healthy cities will require the participation of a far broader cross-section of the urban population than is currently engaged, whether that is naturescaping backyards, reducing nighttime lighting to prevent migratory bird strikes, housing cats indoors, or funding green infrastructure. At Audubon we often talk about the conservation continuum of appreciation, understanding and action, but I think sometimes we skip a step, perhaps the most vital step, of simple awareness. I think we underestimate the degree to which the concept of “urban wildlife” remains an anomaly for much of the populace. People can’t care if they are not aware…

Awareness — Wildlife of Portland Poster produced by Portland Bureau of Environmental Services http://www.portlandonline.com/bes/index.cfm?c=32184 to raise awareness of urban biodiversity

This site has attracted an amazing array of experts already but I hope as it continues to expand it can perhaps pull in some poets and storytellers. To that end I will leave those who have read this far with one of may favorite urban wildlife stories. It involves a crow named “Havoc” that I came to know several years ago. It has been more than a decade since I last saw him, but he has forever altered the way I look at crows.

One of Portland’s more unique residents was a crow appropriately dubbed “Havoc.” Havoc was discovered in downtown Portland where he spent his days drinking out of the Benson bubblers, dodging traffic and barking at blond women. Our best guess is that he had been illegally raised as a pet and then set free.

Eventually his antics resulted in his capture and delivery to Audubon’s Wildlife Care Center. Upon arrival, he immediately released himself from the confines of the pet carrier in which he found himself imprisoned, flew to nearest sink, turned on the faucet and had himself a nice, long, cool drink. Once satiated, he turned to the assembled staff and volunteers, gave three high pitched barks, “whoop, whoop, whoop,” and bowed.

Havoc lived at Audubon’s Care Center for a year during which he served as an education bird teaching kids about the importance of keeping wild animals wild. With a penchant for blondes, bathes, mice and mealworms, he quickly became a favorite of the general public. Generally he had the run of the place during the day but was caged at night—something he openly and vocally despised. He would greet us each morning by springing up and down in his cage like some manic, feathered pogo stick. Failure to satiate his ever-changing desires quickly resulted in what only can be described as a vindictive temper-tantrum, a full-fledged squawking, shrieking, food flying, ankle pecking, crow freak-out. His tastes were expensive too—one day I turned to find him removing the prism from a five hundred dollar ophthalmoscope.

Several months after arriving Havoc decided to test out what it was like to be free again—my suspicion is that he was thinking about it for quite some time because he waited until several doors were simultaneously open and then launched himself through a succession doorways and out into our sanctuary. A short while later we began receiving reports of an oddly vocal crow down by the creek that runs through our property.

The creek was running high and muddy from winter rains and perched in the middle on a barely exposed rock was Havoc. Upon seeing us, he immediately leapt off the rock and made like some sort of mutant dipper, dunking himself completely below the surface and then reappearing to preen and make sure that we were still there watching. Each time we moved toward him, he inched away. It was about the time that we were about to leave him to his freedom that a particularly large swell in the creek caught him off-guard. The sight of the distraught crow tumbling beak over claw down the creek surfacing occasionally to gurgle out a forlorn shriek was matched in absurdity only by the foolish human who dove in after him and emerged on the opposite bank muddy, drenched, ungrateful biting crow firmly in hand.

He was sent for a short time to live at Oregon State University where he participated in a study of captive crows. The professor in charge arranged for a cohort of blond coeds to visit Havoc on a daily basis to keep him reasonably entertained. I have always wondered about how many times the professor in charge got turned down before he found students willing to participate. “So, I have this crow that likes blonds and I was hoping you might be able to swing by my lab about 3 pm…” Havoc eventually returned to Audubon, irascible as ever.

Eventually Havoc was set free on a property at the edge of the urban growth boundary where the neighbors were apprised and accepting of a somewhat odd bird. He spent many months in the vicinity perfecting the art of pushing azalea pots off porches and showing up uninvited at local barbecues.

One day Havoc was sighted keeping company with other crows. However, when the flock left to roost Havoc was left behind, apparently absorbed in watching a man fly his model airplane in the field below. As time wore on his interactions with the flock increased. The last known Havoc sighting was at a local school. A man working in the school basement turned to find Havoc barking at him from the window well. That was just around sunset. The next morning the flock had moved on and Havoc was nowhere to be found.

Bob Sallinger
Portland, Oregon
USA

Sowing the Seeds of Green Urbanism: ‘Spring is Here and the Time is Right for Planting in the Streets’

14 December 2015Art & Awareness, Place & Design, ReviewAgriculture, Architecture, Art, Design, History, Livability, Participation/Democracy, Sustainability, What is urban nature?Paul Downton

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

1 Comment
Join our conversation

A review of The Revolutionary Urbanism of Street Farm: Eco-Anarchism, Architecture and Alternative Technology in the 1970s, by Stephen E. Hunt. 2014. ISBN 978-1-906477-44-8. Tangent Books, Bristol. 246 pages, including 16 pages of illustrations.

Street Farm cover — Front cover image adapted by Joe Burt from poster by Paul Downton originally in Rotring ink pen drawn for Street Farm’s visit to Cardiff in 1973 and inspired by their collage work.

Visions of cities draped in vegetation are now de rigueur for any architect, planner or urbanist who wants to lay claim to any kind of green mantle. But in the early 1970s—when environmentalism had no eye to the city except to see it as an abomination—and demands for insulation and double glazing in buildings was challenging the conceptual comfort zone of the average architect, the Street Farm vision was almost obscenely green. They wanted to plough the streets! To transform banal highrise office towers into fantastical forms consumed by vegetation gone wild! As an architecture student at the time, I loved it! And, I confess, I still do, so news of this book and the opportunity to make a small contribution to it rekindled all that old excitement. Reading the book caused the flames to rise again.

Author Stephen Hunt is from a humanities background and isn’t trained in architecture or planning—or ecology. His specialism is radical history, and this book records just that: a radical history of some of the most influential pioneers in the field of what the protagonists themselves called ‘revolutionary urbanism.’ Noting that ‘Radical history learns from the past to inform the present and inspire the struggle for the future,’ Hunt saw his project as ‘an unparalleled opportunity to look at the ideas of a unique grassroots activist group and to help understand the intersection between alternative architecture, the counterculture and the ecology movement in the 1970s.’

Street Farm paved the way for an approach to urbanism that is simultaneously playful and trenchantly critical.

Hunt is an advocate of oral-history interviews ‘as a method for revealing the overlooked experiences of unofficialdom,’ and was keen to capture directly remembered experiences of a part of a remarkable period in western cultural history. It was the time of the first Club of Rome report on Limits to Growth. The Internet had barely been invented, photocopiers had barely begun to have an impact and mechanical typewriters were the norm. It was a time of foment and the atmosphere in the student world was febrile and charged with the idea that radical, creative political change was not only necessary, but possible. It can be difficult, now, to appreciate the disenchantment felt by young people about the state of the world at that time. Paris had undergone near-revolutionary uprisings in 1968. The shadow of the atom bomb stretched across the entire political landscape. Environmental concerns were making headlines and affecting public discourse for the first time. ‘The Limits to Growth’ was published in 1972, the same year Street Farmhouse was built (and both predated the 1973 ‘Oil Crisis’).

There are now twice as many people on the planet, energy costs have continued to rise and the planet’s tree cover has halved, but almost every new architectural project claims to be ‘sustainable.’ The term has usurped ‘ecological,’ but I would argue that the latter contains more meaning, as it embraces the language of living systems. Hunt tells us that a flag with a clenched green fist flew from the top of the polyhedral greenhouse which was part of Graham Caine’s Street Farmhouse, built after securing temporary planning permission on the playing fields of Thames Polytechnic in Eltham, London, by Caine and friends between September and December 1972. The project ‘hit national and international headlines as the first structure intentionally constructed as an ecological house.’ It was the first time the term ‘Ecological House’ had been applied to a dwelling. It has had enduring influence on people such as eco-architecture pioneers Brenda and Robert Vale—and myself.

Caine was supported in his endeavours by Alvin Boyarsky in his role as chair of the Architectural Association, a school of architecture known for both the high quality of its programs and for possessing a long and illustrious tradition of supporting radical and challenging ideas in architecture and design. Begun when he was age 26, Caine and his partner lived in the house for the two years while Caine still a student. He later abandoned pursuit of an architectural qualification in favour of ‘pursuing the betterment of the planet’—one reason, perhaps, that he is not in the notable alumni list in the Architectural Association’s Wikipedia entry.

The eco-house was featured in the U.K. magazine ‘Undercurrents’ and in ‘Mother Earth News’ and in various other publications at the time, including the influential counter-cultural book ‘Radical Technology’ (eds. Godfrey Boyle and Peter Harper 1976). Street Farm’s contemporaries included The New Alchemists, ‘fellow anarchists with similar underlying principles,’ who built the Cape Cod Ark Bioshelter in 1976. In conversation with the book’s author, Graham Caine stated that, to him, ‘an ecological house was about a biological system, so it had an ecology going on within it… it was about experiencing yourself as part of nature.’

Street Farm formed as a small group of radical, like-minded architecture students—Graham Caine, Peter Crump and Bruce Haggart—who, like Pink Floyd back in the heady days of the late 60s and early 70s, were dissatisfied with the status quo and set out to change it. The ‘Floyd focused on music, the ‘Farm took aim at the largest, most complex creations in the human universe—cities. Placing themselves at the most radical end of the counter-cultural spectrum, Street Farm linked the personal with the political and the philosophical. The spirit of Street Farm was that of the Situationists, one of whose favourite slogans was ‘Be realistic. Demand the impossible!’ In the 1950s, the Situationist International developed ‘Unitary Urbanism,’ a critique of status quo urbanism that informed much of future Situationist thinking and which rejected a functionalist approach to urban architectural design and the compartmentalisation of art away from its surroundings. In Paris in 1968, through slogans and graffiti, these ideas gained a kind of popular currency with widely repeated phrases such as ‘Sous les pavés la plage’ (‘Under the paving, the beach’—which was also a reference to the fact that the cobblestones torn up to be used as weapons against the police in street riots were laid on sand). Such imagery simultaneously reflects the idea of the city as a blanket stifling the natural world, and as a potential place of imagination and liberation. Such powerful themes can be seen in Street Farm’s playful, sometimes deliberately amateurish ‘anti-graphics,’ in which sheep overrun city streets, tractors plough the roads between terraced houses and the ‘urban alchemy’ of creative vandalism leads to streets being transformed into new age villages.

Street Farm rebelled against the system but, because the system is all-embracing and brooks no real escape, they worked within its constraints with sufficient alacrity to deliver genuinely fresh ideas and to produce the first eco-house alongside some of the earliest attempts to reimagine the city as a place of fecund biological activity rather than sterile, technological imagery. Street Farm were the antidote to Archigram, nascent technocrats brewing at the same time in the same school of architecture, who purveyed images of cities as slick, mechanical devices, even walking machines. In an attempt to break down the traditional walls of alienation associated with architecture, Street Farm used multi-media in their presentations at a time when that meant slide projectors and tape recorders. Adopting the roles of entertainers and jesters, they created ragged montage-rich movies and their magazines made extensive use of collage—all to convey the message that architecture and cities could be reclaimed by people through revolutionary direct action, that alienation could be overcome. They drew upon Murray Bookchin and on the Situationist critique of consumerism, the ‘society of the spectacle’ and the potential to remake the urban environment through popular, creative, subversive play.

Many strands of environmental concern can be traced back to movements and ideas that arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but ‘green urbanism’ is rarely mentioned. The ideas of Street Farm were radical but are now almost routine—every week sees more images of urban buildings splattered and trailing with vegetation in a way that almost mimics the cartooned proposals of Street Farm to simultaneously undermine and remake the city by planting seeds to encourage rampant vegetation. Their vision included planting seeds to change the way living and managing cities took place, as part of a whole remaking of the economic and social order in favour of workers’ control, self-determination and autonomy from the state. At a time when most of the publications of the counter-culture seemed to be all about back-to-the-land romanticism, Street Farmer One proclaimed itself ‘an intermittent continuing manual of alternative urbanism,’ calling out that ‘Spring is here and the time is right for planting in the streets.’ In the ‘road not travelled’ that the counter-culture promised, one can find countless examples of failure, but also examples where it provided the fuel and impetus for changes that have made their way into the DNA of the mainstream. This is one of those examples and it still resonates over four decades later.

SF1 p19 — Street Farmer One, page 19. Image: http://streetfarm.org.uk

Hunt’s interest in the group seems to have been very personal. He was inspired by the need to document the people and ideas that made the counter-cultural 1960s and early 1970s so fecund and fascinating, to show how so much of what we now take for granted in the realm of mainstream ideas can be traced back to initiatives and inventiveness that characterised the best of those years, and to capture something of the spirit and intentions of the times before they melt away into the ether and are lost with the passing of the characters who made it all happen. In this, he has done an excellent job. By concentrating on the activities of a small, almost forgotten group who were extremely active in their day, he provides a snapshot of their concept of ‘revolutionary urbanism’ that delivered ‘a toolbox for practical change’ which could be used in pursuit of the ‘desire for liberation in the nature and quality of our daily lives…and…a transformation of the visual appearance, sound and smell, the texture and ambience of the urban environment’.

Hunt puts it in a nutshell: ‘Taking inspiration from Situationism and social ecology, Street Farm offered a powerful vision of green cities in the control of ordinary people.’ (Think Paris 1968 and anarchist philosopher, later ‘municipal libertarian,’ Murray Bookchin). Their concept of urbanism was about social liberation, but integral to it was ‘a reconsideration of the human relationship with other species and their habitats.’

Street Farm’s narrative consistently advocated an urbanism based on community and, as Hunt observes, were exponents of ‘community architecture’ long before the term was coined. Cities are fundamentally about community and require co-operation and shared endeavour before anything can be built. In many ways, cities are the antithesis of the kind of Ayn Rand individualism that is sometimes mistaken for anarchism. Anarchism is arguably the most misunderstood and maligned of any political philosophy. It conjures up images of chaos, lawlessness and disorder. Although anarchism does mean ‘absence of government,’ it does not mean absence of order, anymore than chaos in nature means there is no order in the patterns assumed by natural processes.

Cities are complex, highly organised structures made up of countless unpredictable individuals, each with a personal agenda made up of needs and wants, informed by circumstance and whatever knowledge each possesses, yet collectively, people are predictable. Can anarchists make cities? Surely, cities require leadership? Street Farm provided a kind of leadership, demonstrating the ethos that leaders should offer concrete solutions to real problems and proffer working models of what can be achieved, but should not lay claim to membership of any kind of pantheon. In this model of leadership, skills, ideas and organisation are made available for as long as they are needed without dynastic tendencies or attempts to cement the leaders themselves into a permanent power structure.

Mikhail Bakunin, founder of ‘social anarchism,’ is famous for claiming that ‘the urge to destroy is a creative urge.’ That can be understood as another way of saying we’ve got to get rid of dead wood. A number of people would argue that on a planet where the very survival of our species is threatened by anthropogenic climate change, the urge to destroy the hegemony of coal and oil companies is an entirely creative urge. Even then, that process of destruction demands that people work collectively to achieve it; they cannot be in constant opposition to one another. Street Farm’s creative urge offered images of destroyed cities, but these were existing cities transmogrified—a favourite Street Farm term—from lifeless piles of concrete into places reinvigorated by nature, covered with vegetation and, crucially, under the direct control of their citizens.

Advocates of green cities and ecological urbanism might wonder where their ideas come from or not care at all. But I hope they will understand that if they are to succeed in shifting the culture, a memory helps. Henry Ford may have claimed that ‘History is bunk,’ but for a culture to lose its sense of history is like a person losing his or her memory. The person might still function at a basic level, but loses nuances, sense of meaning, purpose…and, most of all, can’t learn from past mistakes or successes. When Street Farm advocated alternative (renewable) energy, they drew from Bookchin and made the crucial distinction that they were proposing the use of liberatory technology… ‘a technology that will change the existing situation,’ whereas ‘alternative technology is one that will make the existing situation more tolerable.’

In many ways, it is possible to discern Street Farmer sensitivities in much of the best of modern practice and theory in regard to urban systems. Hunt argues that their revolutionary view of the nature of cities was an expression of ‘an ecological sensitivity that aspires to human interaction with the natural environment and other species and looks to confront and abolish the urban/rural divide.’

Street Farm paved the way for an approach to urbanism that is simultaneously playful and trenchantly critical, whilst putting forward ideas about what cities should be like that encompass social justice and revolutionary change, and ceding a central place to the fecundity of nature and the energy of community. That’s no small vision, especially considering that they were active at a time when environmentalism was pessimistic to the point of being ‘doomful’—which was a reasonable response to the increasingly informed analysis, exemplified by Limits to Growth, which warned of ecological and thence social collapse without major shifts in the patterns of industrial civilisation. That those warnings were not heeded is an historical fact, that the general gist of the warnings was correct is disputed with the same fervour that some apply to denying that the Nazis designed and manufactured the Holocaust. Hunt rightly points out that Street Farm were not ‘doomful.’ Their critiques and analysis of the dominant paradigms of capitalism and its consequences in the creation of modern cities wasn’t cheerful—how could it be?—but their solutions were marvelously creative, positive and joyful to anyone who could see past conventional prejudices.

SF1 p16 — Pre-internet. Prescient. Street Farmer One, page 16. Image: http://streetfarm.org.uk/

Hunt concludes with a chapter that includes the offer of ‘an index of possibilities’ for how a revolutionary urbanism might be realised. This is an entirely legitimate exercise but it interrupts the flow of his otherwise immensely readable narrative by being in the form of a slightly clunky, annotated list of nineteen items like ‘Ecological awareness’ and ‘Thoughts to street furniture’ that could have been presented better in an appendix. The rest of his concluding chapter would have read well without this in its middle, and perhaps could have avoided the question of whether a list that included the ‘Rational organisation of space’ had quite the Situationist timbre that the topic deserves and that, otherwise, the book conveys well.

This book will be of particular interest to anyone with an interest in the lineage of ideas that have informed the movements towards ecological design, eco-architecture and green cities. Those with an interest in radical politics will find it a comprehensive and very digestible study of one of the ‘lost treasures’ of the counter-culture. This thoughtfully illustrated book may favourably dispose the reader towards the concept of transmogrification and it should be read by anyone interested in efforts to refresh, remake or reimagine the nature of our cities.

Paul Downton
Adelaide

On The Nature of Cities

Sparrow, Our Constant Friend

24 July 2017ReviewArt, Biodiversity, Culture, Education/Knowledge/Learning, Experiencing Nature, Invasive Species, What is urban nature?, Wildlife People InteractionsIan MacGregor-Fors

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

2 Comments
Join our conversation

A review of: Sparrow by Kim Todd. 2012. 192 pages. ISBN 978-1-86189-875-3. Reaktion Books, London. Buy the book.

“Picture the basic bird, the stripped-down, super-efficiency model, and a sparrow probably comes to mind.”

Sparrows are everywhere! They are varied in types and forms, offering a unique repertoire of opportunities to get to know and assess them, from their scientific study to the most diverse artistic interpretations. In Sparrow, award-winning, science and natural history writer Kim Todd, journeys through the “sparrow” concept in revealing ways.

As an urban ecologist, I’ve studied the house sparrow, the “agrarian” (as we call it in some Mexican regions), for over a decade now, and had never been aware of the infinity of human expressions related to sparrows in general. In this book, Todd gathers an impressive cumulus of facts, stories, and references to the generic concept of “sparrow” together with an exquisite palette of artwork by artists from around the globe.

“It’s hard to generalize about sparrows”, Todd argues while transiting spontaneously between their natural history, ecology, distribution, related art, references in stories and books, and shifting species to present different sparrows to the reader, making this book feel like an encyclopedia of sparrows.

“House sparrows are not picky (…) They are risk-takers.” Given their boldness, broad diet, and feeding and breeding strategies and behaviors, they have become one of the most successful invasive birds of the world. Albeit the current perception of the sparrow is, overall positive, it has not been so throughout time. Todd comprehensively reviews the metaphoric use of the sparrow concept in texts and shows that it has been associated with a wide array of perceptions that range from death to love and desire.

But sparrows have not only been on our minds and books, they’ve also been in our crosshairs and on our tables! Haunting images of sparrow hunting together with impressive data on their culinary use color Chapter 2, Sold for Two Farthings. One generally unknown fact related to sparrow massacre is summarized in this book: the massive killing of sparrows (together with rats, mosquitoes, and flies) in Mao’s Great Leap Forward sought to make China competitive industrially with Western nations. “Nature was the enemy of progress, and China would fight back with its most potent weapon—its large population.”

Cover image. U.S. Department of Agriculture leaflet, Kalmbach, E.R., 1931.

I must confess that, given my interest in the invasion of the house sparrow and its ecological effects in North America, my favorite part of the book is Chapter 4, The Sparrow War. Briefly, this section reviews the reasons behind the idea of introducing birds, including the “English sparrow” in New England. “Slowly, notes of doubt began to creep in. In 1867, Dr Charles Pickering gave a talk at the Boston Society of Natural History, warning of the evils of these introductions.” With a detailed walk-through of the social and environmental process, Todd describes the realization that bringing the sparrow to the New World was not a great idea at all.

By the end of the book, Todd describes the current history of house sparrow studies focused on its ecology and traits that make it an incredibly successful invader, as well as its role in contemporary art, including poetry and photography. “One reason for the sparrow’s success appears to be its flexibility in terms of behavior, particularly when moving to a new place. (…) All of these traits combine to make a very hardy bird. ‘They are survivors’, says researcher Denis Summers-Smith, who is known as the ‘sparrow guru.’

The final chapter emphasizes the environments that sparrows face at present, during the so-called Anthropocene. With the extinction of the dusky seaside sparrow, Todd’s view always contextualizes both the facts and the social perceptions. Finally, the current house sparrow paradox is set on the table, with it being a hyperabundant invasive bird in North America and with declining populations throughout Western European cities. Such a scenario is really intriguing, as no precise answer exists to date to solve the riddle.

To end with a golden snap, Todd wraps this singular piece with a Timeline of the Sparrow, going from “A sparrow ancestor begins to radiate out from the African tropics” 1 million BCE, to “House sparrows join the list of UK’s ‘Birds of Conservation Concern’” in 2002, providing a brilliant temporal synthesis of the book.

Ted R. Anderson’s 2006 Biology of the House Sparrow: From Genes to Populations gave us the first comprehensive radiography of the species from the natural sciences lens. With Todd’s Sparrow, we now have a thorough, yet subtle, expedition through the sparrow concept in an accessible book woven with natural history and cultural knowledge as approachable guiding threads.

Ian MacGregor-Fors
Xalapa

On The Nature of Cities

To buy the book, click on the image below. Part of the proceeds return to TNOC.
<br />

Species on the Move: Assisted Migration in an Era of Rapid Change

3 September 2022Essay, North America, People & Communities, Science & Toolsadaptation, Awareness, Climate change, Conservation, migration, North AmericaDaniel Phillips

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

Add a Comment
Join our conversation

Although, not without controversy, Assisted Migration is one tool in a larger toolbox of strategies that can be aided by more transdisciplinary collaboration as we work toward building resilience in and around our cities. It presents unprecedented and exciting opportunities.

In April of 2022, the New York Times ran a viral piece on its front page entitled Trying Everything, Including Lettuce, to Save Florida’s Beloved Manatees. It details a sordid tale of Floridian Manatees — sea cows — struggling for survival amid a riverine habitat polluted by industrial effluents and agricultural and stormwater runoff that was choking out the seagrass upon which they rely.

It spoke of an experiment that would be funny if it weren’t so tragic, of well-intentioned scientists and citizens dumping tons of romaine lettuce into local waterways as a last-ditch effort to curtail mass starvation events. It’s not every day that aquatic vegetarian mammals are graced with front page coverage in the Times, but it’s precisely these kinds of stories that are likely to persist in one form or another as we hurdle deeper into the 21st century. Perhaps even more than the memetic images of starving arctic polar bears clinging for dear life atop melting ice rafts, accounts of charismatic megafaunal plight in our own backyards seems to pluck at heartstrings in particularly visceral ways, and implore us to action.

An AI-generated picture of a desert with a bug-looking creatures and a group of people behind them standing far away from spire-like structures — AI-generated composition depicting “The Mass Movement of Species From Desertifying City” (by the Author via Midjourney)

Yet, somehow immediately, another image came to mind―not of emaciated sea cows, but that of an upside-down Black Rhino, blindfolded and dangling precariously from a helicopter as it hurdles toward a distant horizon. These are images depicting the early stages of another grand experiment―the Assisted Migration (AM) of species from one place to another.

A picture of a Black Rhinoceros hanging upside-down by its feet from ropes with a person standing underneath in the savannah — African Black Rhinoceros in transit (Source: Atlas Obscura/Cornell School of Veterinary Medicine)

In the case of the critically endangered African Black Rhino, it entails a one-way trip for groups of selected individuals to various partner sites across South Africa with the goal of extending their range to well-suited and lesser-poached locales. Early data for the Black Rhinos are promising, with the WWF accounting for a 21% increase in South African populations since 2003. In the case of the starving Floridian manatee, it might conceivably entail a search for congruous aquatic habitats elsewhere in the US; For example, in and around the port of Galveston, TX, where, by all accounts, the seagrass is thriving by comparison.

But would they survive such a trip? Who would pay for it? Who would benefit? Would it be socially, ecologically, and politically viable? And what about the unanticipated problems of adjustment on both sides?

These are just a few of the complex questions that are implied by Assisted Migration (AM), an emerging practice for human-led adaptation. Contemporary examples of AM extend beyond just fauna to include many beloved or economically valuable plants and trees whose historic range is becoming untenable. Proponents of AM argue that if climate or anthropogenic pressures prove too high for a species to survive in situ, it may be possible to help them move to new, less risky locales. AM is controversial because it often conflicts with established conservation paradigms that favor maintaining the status quo of species ranges, and in situ management strategies.

Although there have been vigorous debates among land managers and conservation biologists in recent years, it appears to be a subject insufficiently interrogated here at TNOC, especially amongst designers, artists, and urban ecologists. It’s time we applied this topic not only to exceedingly exotic plants and animals, but to our own species, and our primary habitat: cities.

What are the implications of considering AM of cities? To cities? Within and for cities? And what does it mean for the future of nature in cities?

Assisted migration of cities

It is important to recognize that AM was largely a sociological notion before it was an ecological one. Before the 2000’s the use of AM in the English language refers primarily to the movement and displacement of human populations: across and within various regional and national borders and for various reasons not limited to climate risk aversion. It wasn’t until the late oughts and early 2010’s that interest (and debate) exploded among ecologists and conservationists (evidenced by analogous terms like facilitated migration, assisted colonization, species translocation).

AM of cities considers the possibilities for urban populations in risk prone areas, rather than investing in adaptation or mitigation (or continuously rebuilding in the same place), to pick up and move elsewhere. Starting in the 1960’s and 70’s, AM was used to describe efforts by federal and local actors to do just this.

A histogram of the use of assisted migration — Use of Assisted Migration (and analogous terms) over time (Source: Google Scholar)

Consider, for example, the case of Soldiers Grove Wisconsin, a small logging town established along the banks of the Kickapoo river. After decades of devastating flood events and expensive subsequent rebuilding efforts, local authorities began to plead for federal funding—not to simply rebuild after flooding or invest in expensive levee projects along the Kickapoo, but to shift the entire city further from the river and onto higher ground. In the late 1970’s, they finally received authorization and federal funds to relocate large portions of the residential and business district to an area better suited for long-term resilience, with the lowlands of the former settlement converted to public open space.

A picture of a newspaper clipping of a man holding a poster titled "Relocation" standing next to another man in the middle of a street — (Soldiers Grove, WI Newspaper Headline from 1970’s Source Madison.com)

Soldier’s Grove provides an example of what’s possible when local, state, and federal stakeholders work together on wicked challenges and think big. The question is whether the wholesale relocation of entire cities can or should be upscaled to other contexts in the face of climate change.

Today, this process is commonly referred to as “managed retreat” or “Climigration”, whereby entire communities are compelled (by legal and financial instruments) to move away from places threatened by floods, droughts, fires, and high temperatures. This usually entails a federally funded “buyout” of a homeowner’s property and assistance for relocation to a place of their choice. Unlike the case of Soldier’s Grove, a challenge often arises when some homeowners choose not to move or choose to move from one floodplain to another. There are many complex socio-economic factors at play, including questions of land dispossession through eminent domain, and the often-disproportionate impact these risks pose on already vulnerable communities.

To ensure such efforts are done equitably, with substantial subsidies to assist those who can’t afford it, managed retreat on a large scale entails enormous initial investment and the capacity for long term planning (not exactly the strong suits of contemporary American political system). Yet to date, the federal government in the US, primarily through the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has already spent billions of dollars relocating at-risk populations (from floodplains, coastal areas, superfund sites, etc.).

Three maps of the US in blue, red, and yellow — Federal buyouts to date in the US: Source: March, K et al. (2021)

But how might strategies for AM in the flood-prone parishes of coastal Louisiana look different from those targeting the high-end vacation homes in The Hamptons, on the coast outside of New York City? Notwithstanding the obvious logistical, geopolitical, and socioeconomic constraints, embracing AM of cities must contend with the reality that no place is really “safe” from the disruptions brought on by a rapidly changing climate.

The risks we face today extend beyond merely flood risk to include myriad challenges of drought, wildfires, agricultural failures, and civil unrest, among many others. The risks we face tomorrow will include those that we can’t currently anticipate, occurring in places we never thought they would.

Responding to these unpredictable patterns of disturbance may require that we collectively upend conventional models of home ownership and financial equity, which are currently based on long-term settlement in a single place. Resilience may soon entail frequent cycles of re-settlement in response to shifts in the geography of livability. In some ways the bourgeoning #Vanlife movement and the normalization of remote work and digital nomadism (for some) offer glimpses of the alternative models that may continue to set the stage for a more itinerant future. Will these trends remain reserved for the middle class with the skillsets and the means to move?

Or can we imagine it becoming a normalized reality for all?

If the assisted migration of entire cities seems far-fetched, it shouldn’t—especially if we pause to consider the estimated 250 million people globally living in areas that could be underwater by the end of the century.

Assisted Migration To (and Within) Cities

As with AM of cities, AM to and within cities is nothing new. For as long as humans have built and settled in particular places, we have been in the habit of moving things around and moving things in with us. We call it by a different name: Gardening. But gardening, perhaps, requires a more expansive definition as a process that includes not only conventional modes of planting selected species in our yards, but the various ways in which we curate plants, animals, and materials, and, in turn, how they cultivate us as humans. For thousands of years, we’ve harvested materials in some form or another from the larger landscape. Stone, mud, and timber are shaped into houses and temples and prisons. Even our sleekest modern buildings, rendered in steel and glass and gypsum are ultimately highly processed landscapes. In and around our built structures we cultivate our private and public landscapes in ways that reflect our norms and needs: For beauty, for shade, for food, for belonging.

We move species in and around with us in cities because they bring us joy. We own teacup yorkies and labradoodles that have been selectively bred to exhibit the traits we prefer. We plant begonias and lilies in our front yard to project an image of ourselves to the neighborhood. Many have known the pleasure of sneaking a clandestine cutting from a neighbor’s cactus and carrying it with the poise of an international spy, to plant one’s own garden (it’s a common theory in some urban gardening circles that stolen plants grow better). Gardening extends to commercial plant and animal trades, local seed banks and informal modes of seed exchange. Gardening includes the stowaway seeds we bring back with us on the soles of our shoes, embedded in the dried mud of a recent adventure abroad. Even our giving in to the allure of the latest houseplant (or pet spider) trend on social media often entails the mass movement of captives from some distant rainforest and into our bedroom.

Adding these exotic species to our urban landscapes often supplements, rather than supplants what was already there before. Invasiveness on the part of many common urban species is the exception rather than the rule. It’s by these means (and many others) that the vegetation observed in cities have grown to be, on average, more biodiverse than their surrounding hinterlands. This, of course, flies in the face of many tropes of city life as being somehow devoid of ecological complexity.

Cities are now home to a number of fascinating novel ecosystems (“freakologies”) that have arisen in tandem with our cities. From the thriving populations of escapee green parrots in the Telegraph Hill district of San Francisco to the Mexican Freetail Bats who’ve taken up residence underneath Austin’s Congress Bridge. These novel conditions are produced by (and generative of) many layers of social, ecological, and spatial complexity that were only beginning to understand.

Sometimes we go to extreme lengths, mobilizing considerable labor and resources to move species around. In 2014, private donors to the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business famously paid over 400 thousand USD to move a 250-year-old, 700,000-pound Burr Oak a single block to save it from the pressures of development. Salomé Jashi’s beautiful 2021 Documentary Taming the Garden depicts the movement of a single enormous tree across the Black Sea to a billionaire’s private garden in Georgia.

A picture of a boat in the middle of the ocean — Film still from Salomé Jashi’s Taming the Garden Documentary (2021)

Whether by chance or by charter, we’ve proven ourselves capable of fundamentally altering the geography of other species. What if we embraced our capacity to cultivate novel urban ecosystems with more collective intention?

Assisted Migration For Cities

For better or for worse, the world we have inherited, the world we’ll leave to our children is an urban one. Recognizing the realities and disruptions of climate change means exploring new sets of intentions, new frames of mind, and new goals. Rather than fetishizing the protection or re-establishment (at all costs) of what thrived in a particular urban context in the past, we might instead invest our resources and attention on anticipating what might thrive there in the future.

AM for cities offers a hopeful conclusion to this triad and considers an alternative to the retreat of our own species away from cities. In an ironic twist on the very logic of AM, what if the intentional translocation of species in and to our cities help us to ultimately stay put?

AM for cities requires we look at species, not in terms of their geographic origins, but instead on their functional traits. Focusing on traits allows us to consider how and where those traits can be better leveraged in and around our cities and toward specific measures of socio-ecological resilience.

For example, in a hotter, drier future we might focus on drought-tolerant trees with big shady canopies which mitigate urban heat islands and maximize thermal comfort for the neighborhoods below. In an era of insect collapse, fast growing, perennial species with dense above-ground biomass might better support pollinators and viable habitats for other urban invertebrates. In an era of increasing urbanization, more intense storms and erratic stormwater runoff patterns, we must shape and plant our urban landscapes to better capture excess water and pollutants. In an era where human values will continue to matter a great deal, we must design planting and maintenance regimes that balance the need for urban beauty with the imperatives of ecological performance.

In some cases, finding appropriate species may require us to look far afield, and other times the answers may be right in front of us. As urbanization continues to shape the biotic and abiotic factors of terrestrial ecosystems, some common urban species that may be considered weeds today, may in fact become the keystone species of the future, providing a range of services that we don’t currently recognize.

Consider a recent example, beautifully documented by researchers Yuanquiu Feng and Yun Hye Hwang, detailing a dense Mangrove plantation intentionally introduced by informal occupants of a former landfill in the Baseco District in Manila, Philippines. Here, vulnerable urban communities recognized the need for an increased sense of community identity and ecological resilience along a riparian bank that was subject to frequent flooding during the seasonal monsoons.

Atop heaps of Styrofoam, plastic, and other discarded detritus, they cultivated the only space available to them, and it has grown over the course of just 10 years, into a thriving novel urban forest, offering provisioning functions to local residents and significant reduction in flood events. The success of these efforts has even sparked renewed interest in the revitalization of the larger Pasig River network (one of the world’s most polluted), with a number of other projects now underway.

A high angle view of a grove of trees on top of litter next to a body of water — Mangroves in the Baseco District of Manila, Philipines (Source: Yuanquiu Feng and Yun Hye Hwang for Places Journal)

Other higher profile precedents are being developed by Landscape Architect Kate Orff/Scape Studio. Visionary waterfront proposals like Living Breakwaters and Oyster-tecture propose a network of coastal “scaffolding” that allows various aquatic species (including Oysters), to move in and thrive, while simultaneously providing water quality benefits, economic opportunities, and coastal armoring against future storm surges. The bold idea implied here is that we design and provide an armature upon which novel ecosystems emerge over time. We can invite rather than prescribe. We can catalyze new ecosystems rather than merely mourn the loss of historic ones.

Some may dismiss these approaches as overly optimistic hypotheticals. Yet, they are not as untested as they may initially appear. Researchers at Arizona State University recently reported that sunken ships provide the ideal habitat for reef-building corals, citing decades of case studies where accidentally or intentionally sunken vessels have been overtaken by thriving aquatic ecosystems. Could a larger-scale, more intentional version of these approaches (seeded with translocated coral species that can thrive in warmer waters) potentially offset the mass die-off of coral reefs elsewhere?

A diagram depicting reef infrastructure, water currents, and habit deterioration — Oyster-tecture (Source: Kate Orff/Scape Studio)

The Mesquite Mile, a project of which I am a co-collaborator along with Kim Karlsrud, Travis Neel, and Erin Charpentier, employs an AM approach for the purpose of urban afforestation. In this work, we focus on a single iconic species: the Honey Mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa).

The Mesquite has long been considered both a savior and a scourge for ranchers and farmers since the times of early Colonization across the southern High Plains region, providing needed shade and food for livestock during the hottest, driest stretches of summer, but quickly invading open grasslands and pastures when undigested seeds are deposited in the fertile droppings of cattle.

To contemporary farmers and ranchers in West Texas, the Mesquite is largely considered an invasive nuisance tree and is routinely removed through controlled burning, mechanical or chemical means in rural landscapes. Meanwhile, in nearby cities such as Lubbock, there exists an entirely different, and considerably more positive perception of this tree, its value, and its meaning. Urban properties in this semi-arid climate with any kind of tree come at a premium. It’s here in the city that the Mesquite, in particular, is widely known and celebrated for its lore, its delicate foliage, its pollinator-friendly yellow flowers, and its association with smoked meat.

It’s perhaps not surprising that urban trees are associated with increased property values, decreased heating and cooling bills, and higher urban biodiversity. But planting from a sapling can take decades to pay off (if at all). This high level of risk and lengthy time frame are more than many are willing to stomach. It’s this inverted perception of the Mesquite that drives our team toward a (provocatively simple) reciprocal bargain–to carefully facilitate the strategic relocation of these trees from one context to the other, and in so doing maximize their cumulative benefits over time.

Drawing upon over 4 decades of collective experience, we are exploring what is possible when Art, Design, and Science productively collide. Utilizing AM as a mode of public art and public placemaking, we are working with both urban and rural stakeholders to remove nuisance Mesquites from properties in the periphery of Lubbock county and replant them into volunteer front yards in the Heart of Lubbock neighborhood. To view footage of our pilot-scale assisted migration experiment, please follow this link.

These efforts, of course, are not without challenges. The success of any given transplant depends heavily on its size, the season in which it is transplanted (dormant defoliated is best), the underlying health of the tree, and the conditions of its new home. Another important factor is making these efforts palpable to the public by introducing conspicuous aesthetics of sustainability and supplementary programming alongside these interventions to encourage long-term care can be established. Public buy-in is an equally vital aspect of urban sustainability, without which even the best ecological intentions could fall flat. The long-term goal of these efforts is to invite communities to register these actions as contributive to a collective whole that extends beyond the purview of private landscape choices that currently dominate (and atomize) the identity of residential neighborhoods.

Three pictures of a machine digging out a tree, a truck driving down a road, and a machine replanting a tree — Stills taken from documentation of a transplanted Mesquite Tree from Tahoka to Lubbock, TX (Source: The Mesquite Mile, Travis Neel, Erin Charpentier with Commostudio)

We are currently seeking additional funding to increase the scale of our Mesquite migration efforts and amplify the scope of our community engagement. This includes the creation of a public website for the project, a multi-lingual survey assessing public perceptions and needs, and the creation of a larger-scale network of demonstration sites in areas of the greatest need. We intend to track how translocated trees contribute to local biodiversity, hydrologic response, and thermal comfort over time.

Moving into an unsettled future

If the past 200 years of our urban story has been largely about mastering the patterns of settlement, the next 200 years will be marked instead by the patterns and processes of unsettlement. Although, not without controversy, Assisted Migration is one tool in a larger toolbox of strategies that can be aided by more transdisciplinary collaboration as we work toward building resilience in and around our cities. It presents unprecedented and exciting opportunities for Designers, Artists, planners, policymakers, and scientists to take action together. The issues and examples raised here barely scratch the surface. Consider this a call to continue and expand the conversation, here on TNOC, and within our disciplines. How is it that you consider the ethics, aesthetics, and ecological implications of Assisted Migration of, to and for cities?

Daniel Phillips
Lubbock

On The Nature of Cities

St. Petersburg: Towards Integrated and Sustainable Green Infrastructure

18 September 2013Essay, Place & DesignBiodiversity, Communities, Design, Development, Europe, Gardens, Livability, Parks, Planning, Policy, StewardshipMaria E Ignatieva

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

Add a Comment
Join our conversation

Compared with other countries, Russia came relatively late to the world of market economy. It was a quite painful process as the Socialist planned economy changed to the demands of the market and working with private investors. Rapid urbanisation and new rules of planning require searching for new approaches to design and management of urban green areas in Russian cities.

St. Petersburg is the second biggest Russian city, with 5 million people. The city is famous as the cultural capital of Russia with its unique historical monuments and museums. The whole central part of the city is protected by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, and there are numerous historical parks and gardens. Green areas cover 7,209 hectares.

Summer Garden is the oldest St. Petersburg green area founded in 1703

These facts leave a mark in policy discussions and require a special approach to the city’s development policy. The main task in central districts of St. Petersburg is, first of all, to protect existing green areas from densification and growing demand for parking. Compared to the central area, with its very dense built infrastructure, districts that were created later during the Soviet era have quite a high amount of green area. But after years of neglect and lack of management these green areas need extensive repair and improvements.

New residential areas constructed in recent areas are often lacking any greening. There is also another trend directly related to urbanization and globalization: a growing suburbia with individual houses that are “eating” surrounding green belt of native forests and coastal landscapes.

One of the Soviet time “microrayon”(microdistrict) founded in late 1960’s

New Russian suburbia in pine forest in the outskirts of St. Petersburg

The main and the oldest street of St. Petersburg-Nevsky Prospect

The Ring Road in St. Petersburg (finished in 2011)

St. Petersburg has experienced tremendous growth of private cars, which has resulted in incredible traffic problems. The Old Baroque city structure is really struggling to accommodate such a number of vehicles. Even construction of the Ring Road has not help to solve traffic jams in the City.

Another recent St. Petersburg phenomenon is directly connected to the new economic situation. Quite a few industrial factories in the central districts are closing and vacated areas are waiting for reuse. Looking at the plan of St. Petersburg it is quite easy to see the limitation of city’s growth. The most important is the Gulf of Finland and a big forest greenbelt.

Plan of St. Petersburg with Gulf of Finland and Forest Greenbelt

At the moment the most disadvantage of St. Petersburg is isolation of the small central green areas from suburban residential greening (microdistricts — “microrayon” in Russian).

All these factors are contribute to the need for a new strategy of green infrastructure development. We believe that the following principles should be considered for the new sustainable green infrastructure in the city:

Planning of green infrastructure should be an important and integrated part of the overall architectural and urban planning development strategy (master plan) of the city. It is a time for an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating principles of landscape ecology into urban design and planning. Principal St. Petersburg axes (along main streets) started in the central cities should have logical extension into suburban areas.
New infrastructure should not be a random mosaic of different green spaces but interconnected infrastructure. One of the proposals is to create a system of ecological axes along main urban axes. They would start in the city centre with a system of green streets and pedestrian zones, then continue to newer residential areas and finally create relatively large green areas on the intersection of such axes, or lines.
Strengthen the links within the green infrastructure through the development of linear green areas along the main city roads and river embankments. This strategic line has a lot of potential in St. Petersburg, even in the historical central part of the city through organization of pedestrian zones with pockets of vegetation.
One of the important principles of any new green infrastructure strategy is the relative autonomy of the individual parts of the green infrastructure elements. Different types of green areas should penetrate into the most important structural and functional urban planning in each of residential, industrial and recreational units.
The organisation of new park areas in existing residential areas and the newly built up areas.
Greening of embankments in St. Petersburg is restricted due to historical preservation. Most of Neva river embankments is covered by granite and is the part of the historical heritage. However there are still a lot of potential for river’s vegetation restorations of banks in smaller Neva’s tributaries and other minor rivers within city’s boundaries.
There is a lot of potential for ecologically effective and rational organization of inter housing estates (courtyards) which are primary units of green infrastructure in St. Petersburg. For example, even the city centre — very restricted by heritage status — has potential for increasing green areas ratio by introduction of new technologies (e.g., vertical and container gardening, “green roofs” and “green walls”).

Pedestrian Malaya Sadovaya Street in historic centre

Granite embankment of St. Petersburg is the part of St. Petersburg Heritage Site

New strategies for old embankment greening

New life of old St. Petersburg inner courtyards

One of the few green roofs in St. Petersburg created by enthusiastic citizens — One of the few green roofs in St. Petersburg — created by enthusiastic citizens

One of the goals today is to increase the level of green areas of St. Petersburg by 150 percent (compared to the present status) by moving some companies and businesses from the historic centre to the suburbs and re-purposing these newly vacant lands. There are quite a few already demolished areas which are planned to become new park areas. This strategic process should include reclamation of areas of former industrial sites and landfills of municipal and industrial waste and their landscape development.

The formal cable factory of Edwards and Kavos in the surrounding park

The lack of land for urban development in St. Petersburg dictates another direction in green infrastructure planning: development of the coastal areas of the Neva River and the Gulf of Finland through the creation of new parks and gardens on the reclaimed lands. Park “300 years of St. Petersburg” is the most recent examples of such areas.

City of St. Petersburg has a lot of potential for designing green corridors along transport lines first of all railways and roads. Design peculiarities of public railroads spaces in St. Petersburg give the opportunities for introducing green areas. For example, spontaneously appeared parking facilities can be relocated to specially designed parking towers and the liberated space can be reuse for green recreational facilities. The most recent Ring Road (bypass) also great great potential by using motorway slopes for greening.

This parking can be turned to residential park — This parking lot could be turned to residential park if a parking tower was created for the cars.

The pressure for private housing developments in the unique forest belt zones required a reexamination of existing legislation and tightening of protections for remnants of native vegetation and nature reserves in general. Thus, we insist on the idea of including water protection zones, sanitary protection zones of enterprises, and protected natural areas into the united green infrastructure system of St. Petersburg.

Existing Network of Special Protected Areas in St. Petersburg in 2005

One of important tools for implementing a new green infrastructure strategy at intermediate scales in real neighboorhoods is using innovative approaches such as ecological design and low impact design principles of stormwater management.

In 2012 we used a typical St. Petersburg suburb, Novoye Devyatkino, as the first case study of implementing principals of Low Impact Development in Russia. Novoye Devyatkino has active residential construction and as a consequence its very limited green spaces face increasing pressure. The traditional approach to the design of the urban environment, promoted in Russia for the last 15 years, follows globalization trends and dramatically changes the face of the territory towards placeless landscapes. This approach usually does not take into account the character of the local plant communities and contributes to the creation of biologically unstable ecosystems.

Low Impact Design has been used in many European, USA, Australian and New Zealand cities. The key task of this design is to create a sustainable environment by using typical local plant communities. We also take into consideration the dynamic character of vegetation as well as respect the natural flow of water and its infiltration into the soil. The project has to deal with stormwater runoff without creating a network of traditional drainage systems, which in our case, is replaced by a chain of “rain gardens”.

One of the main challenges of our conceptual approach is abolishing the idea of a traditional lawn, which requires intensive management and maintenance (weekly mowing, very often herbiciding and pesticiding). Instead, the design proposes creating meadows, requiring a minimum of care and calling for the preservation of biodiversity. The project provides for the use of decorative groups of shrubs and trees, based on a mix of species from natural biomes, which will allow the creation of the “spirit” of the Karelian Isthmus.

Meadow with native plants is one of the targets in Novoye Devyatkino — Meadows with native plants is one of the design goals in Novoye Devyatkino

The project also proposes a “public garden” where residents of neighboring houses could grow common garden plants and vegetables without using pesticides and fertilizers. We also introduce interactive gardens such as a “Garden of bugs”, “Garden of touch”, and “Garden of Sounds”.

One of the Kew Botanic Gardens exhibits was an inspiration for Novoye Devyatkino design

Workshop with local residents in June 2012. The Novoye Devyatkino project involves local citizens in designing and implementation process and can be seen as a good example for other St. Petersburg areas.

Traditionally, the maintenance and construction of urban green areas in Russian cities is a task of specialized landscape companies (private or municipal). However the experience of European cities, for several years using the concept of ecological design, proves the success of direct involvement of local residents into the design, construction, and maintenance process. By introducing a similar approach we hope to reduce vandalism and increase social interest in maintaining and improving the status of residential areas.

Another positive aspect of this project is its cost effectiveness compared to traditional methods of improvement, as well as the possibility of preserving and increasing the biodiversity of the urban environment.

Maria Ignatieva, Irina Melnichuk & Andrei Bashkirov
Uppsala, St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg

In The Nature of Cities

Maria Ignatieva
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

Irina Melnichuk
St. Petersburg Forest Technical University

Andrei Bashkirov
Landscape Architecture Firm “Sakura”, St. Petersburg, Russia

Steady Friction Between Nature-based and Engineered Solutions for Urban Coastal Flood Adaptation

7 November 2023Asia, Essay, Europe, Latin America, North America, Place & DesignAsia, Design, Europe, North America, Planning, South America, What is urban nature?Zbigniew Grabowski

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

Add a Comment
Join our conversation

A view from the joint meeting of the San Juan ULTRA and the NATURA Early Career Network

Embracing Nature-based Solutions as part of the adaptation toolkit is not a panacea. Rather, it offers a way of thinking that seeks to work with nature rather than against it. Our commitment to transformative NbS likewise does not seek to resolve social differences but to embrace processes through which diverse perspectives and approaches lead to more robust problem formulations and potential solutions.

1. Nature-based Solutions in the Context of San Juan, Puerto Rico

On a sunny day in San Juan, Puerto Rico, life is good. Along the beaches, crabs scuttle in the riprap next to beachgoers posing for selfies on the shore break. Others nap in the shade of fig trees or float in the warm Caribbean waters. Stand-up paddle boarders and kayakers explore the mangroves along the lagoons, where the city’s many small rivers enter the sea. Farther up in the watershed, abuelitas tend to the trees their grandparents planted along the lush riparian “bosques de galería” of the Río Piedras.

Connecting the center of the island to the beaches of San Juan, the Río Piedras watershed embodies both celebration and fear. Heavy rains occasionally transform its calm waters into torrents, inundating the city streets. And when hurricanes hit, the once tranquil sea metamorphoses into a tumultuous and vindictive paramour, unleashing its fury with relentless force.

Puerto Rico has a long history of adapting to and recovering from hurricanes. The devastating back-to-back storms of Irma and Maria in 2017 were unprecedented. They shut down the island’s entire energy grid for months, and nearly half the population lost access to water services. Over 60 people lost their lives during the storms, and while contentious, it is estimated that they led to over 4,500 premature deaths.

Not surprisingly, San Juan residents have a high demand for effective flood protection. They are not alone. In many coastal cities worldwide, these challenges are only increasing in magnitude. The effectiveness of coastal cities responding to the challenges of sea-level rise and extreme weather largely depends on their internal capacities and their relationships with larger networks of resources and expertise.

Nature-based Solutions (NbS)―such as restored agro-ecological systems, forests, wetlands, green roofs, and rain gardens―are increasingly considered as means to enhance coastal, urban, and fluvial flood resilience. Yet they must overcome unfamiliarity and an inertial preference for hard-engineered solutions, such as channelized rivers and sea walls, as well as address perceived conflicts over the use of space in dense urban environments.

In June of 2023, our global NATURA Network of early-career researchers and practitioners organized a workshop to examine how these dynamics play out in the context of San Juan, Puerto Rico. With a wide range of expertise ranging from ecology, art, and design to engineering, urban planning, and philosophy, the group has been focused on collaborative methods for NBS planning and design. In San Juan, they learned about and reflected on ongoing initiatives to co-plan and co-design NbS in the city against the backdrop of large-scale flood mitigation projects pursued by the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). One such project centers on the Río Piedras, a biodiverse and socially valued river running through the heart of the city.

A group of people standing in a line by a pond — Participants of the Early Career Network workshop visiting the site of Río Piedras in San Juan.

2. Río Piedras case study

Following a series of devastating hurricanes in 1978, the Governor of Puerto Rico requested help from the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to design flood control projects across the island. In San Juan, USACE proposed a project to channelize several parts of the city’s main river, the Río Piedras. This “Río Puerto Nuevo Flood Control Project” was approved in 1984 after an Environmental Impact Assessment as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process. The project was subsequently shelved due to lack of funds.

In 2015, the Municipality of San Juan formed a special commission with interdisciplinary scientists who had conducted research on the social-ecological dynamics of the Río Piedras watershed through the San Juan ULTRA network. Their aim was to explore the utilization of green areas in flood management. This collaboration resulted in a municipal resolution that highlighted the importance of urban green areas for flood management, building upon the city’s 2003 Comprehensive Plan, which recognized the importance of ecological corridors as part of the city’s green infrastructure system.

Another outcome of this collaboration was forming the “Alianza del Proyecto de Canalización del Rio Piedras” (Amigos del Río Piedras) coalition. This alliance of NGOs, state and federal agencies, private practitioners, community-based groups, and residents aims to engage more sectors interested in the sustainable management of the watershed. After Hurricane María, the US Congress approved over $4.5 billion for recovery funds for Puerto Rico. Although the release of these funds has been much slower than in other US jurisdictions, with this funding in sight, the long-dormant USACE revived and reactivated its decades-old river channelization plans.

Many residents had forgotten about these plans, which came as a surprise to community members, many of whom did not even recall the over-30-year-old NEPA process being used for project approval. Thus, they were shocked when contractors began initial site investigations and bulldozers started clearing vegetation along the riverbanks. The USACE plan consists of channeling multiple parts of the Río Piedras, renovating and upgrading existing channels and drainage pipes, and removing the “bosques de galería”, all of which would reduce the ecological value of the Río Piedras, and fundamentally alter the beloved character of the river.

Despite being an urban river, the Rio Piedras has surprisingly high biological diversity; ecological surveys have found over 100 species inhabiting the river ecosystem, including rare endemic species like migratory freshwater shrimp, locally known as the Palaemon, which have endured urbanization but escaped the fate of other Puerto Rican rivers dammed for hydropower development.

A stream running through an overgrown forest — The Río Piedras with a low water level and extensive herbaceous vegetation along its banks

To respond to the proposed alterations of the ecology and function of the Río Piedras, the Alianza advocates for a more equitable process to analyze the causes, impacts, and options for flood mitigation in the watershed. They aim to develop sustainable solutions that enhance overall climate resilience. But also, including the need for community gatherings, recreation spaces, and extreme heat mitigation documented in a series of publications about citizen knowledge systems and a collaborative knowledge-action network. Recognizing the importance of collaboration, they seek to engage with USACE to address the concerns of local communities through a collaborative process.

An ongoing challenge for the Alianza is ensuring the differences in how San Juan communities experience flooding, as well as their varying access to resources and ability to adapt, are heard and adequately addressed by the USACE and local government. Addressing these internal differences requires sensitivity to those needing immediate flood protection while balancing demands for alternative and greener solutions. Another challenge is the risk that opposing the USACE plan could forfeit funds to address current flooding issues. The Alianza navigates this delicate situation by challenging the project’s assumptions, seeking genuine participation, and ensuring that affected voices are heard.

An orange triangle sign with writing on it — The top sign warns of a fine for garbage dumping, the bottom sign mentions “The Ecological Corridor of Río Piedras” community project

The top sign warns of a fine for garbage dumping, the bottom sign mentions “The Ecological Corridor of Río Piedras” community project

The Alianza contests several assumptions underlying the USACE plan. Outdated projections for population growth, urban development, low-resolution characterization of land cover, and associated peak flood estimates all mean that the proposed concrete channel is oversized. The Alianza also contends that extensive concrete dikes will lower water levels within the river during dry spells, leaving much of the remaining flow to come from sewer systems that need their own upgrades.

Given USACE’s extensive technical expertise, the Alianza urges them to address these concerns within their modeling and design processes. They want the agency’s unit of “Engineering With Nature” (EWN) to review the project to determine if there are design alternatives to manage flooding in the Río Piedras that incorporate ecological components like green infrastructure. The EWN is becoming a global source of expertise actively seeking to incorporate Natural and Nature-Based Features into flood resilience projects (NNBF), even hosting a symposium in May of 2022. While initially resistant, USACE appears to be increasingly open to collaboration due to sustained pressure from community members, members of Congress, and federal agency representatives.

Broader changes are also at work as USACE’s approach towards flood mitigation evolves, they must also overcome perceived and very real barriers to building rapport and trust with communities that have been colonized over centuries and are skeptical of plans and projects imposed on them.

Overall, the Alianza and the local community are demanding fair and transparent processes for understanding the causes and impacts of flooding, including the relationship between flood mitigation options and the values, fears, and concerns of San Juan residents. These can be addressed by collaboratively building representations of the urban system, more broadly considering social-ecological relationships, and explicitly evaluating how citywide NbS fit within a more comprehensive climate resilience strategy.

This alternative approach contends that flooding of the river is not the main problem, but rather a more complex situation that cannot be resolved with single technological solutions like channelization. Turning the Río Piedras into a channel does not address the causes of flooding nor does it account for climate uncertainty. What’s more, while the Río Piedras channelization was conceived and proposed in isolation, it intersects with numerous other USACE projects for dredging in the San Juan Bay and restoring urban waterways. Nevertheless, the cumulative impacts of these projects on ecosystems or society have not been evaluated.

3. The NATURA Workshop

During the first day of the three-day workshop in San Juan, members of the ECN learned about various proposals for more integrated blue and green infrastructure solutions for flooding in other sections of the city. Several thorny wicked issues were exposed, namely that in very low-lying areas, green infrastructure will not be able to absorb projected flood waters without removing upwards of 30% of buildings within the district. Such wicked trade-offs will likely arise in other low-lying coastal areas, prompting tough conversations around planned retreat and large-scale urban reconfigurations. Cities that can engage in such projects proactively will have a much better chance of weathering accelerating rates of sea level rise and extreme weather than those that are forced to react.

Members of the ECN also explored strategies for collaborative framings of urban flooding challenges and collective envisioning of desired urban and island future scenarios. While the full report from the workshop is forthcoming, initial insights were that often the causes of urban flooding are not due to simple land use changes and hydrology, but rather the political processes that govern land use and flood management. In this view, human decisions around infrastructure and land used create uneven vulnerability and path dependency in how we respond to flood challenges. Similarly, explorations of future scenarios explored the connections between diverse economic sectors like agriculture, materials handling and recycling, manufacturing, and urban planning, and economic and political self-determination. One group even envisioned a resurgence of the Antillean Confederation, or a political organization of small island states in the Caribbean, which would organize for collective well-being through interdependent economic and political development.

Other elements of these futures included complete circular economic development, restoring fisheries by converting submerged buildings into reef habitats, building closed waste-to-energy systems, elevated cable cars and other mass transit options, and even an endemic freshwater shrimp (Palaemon) smart city disco. Such radical departures from the status quo may seem improbable to some, but if we learned anything in our time in San Juan, it is that those without dreams often have their lives dreamt for them. If cities around the world are to transform in advance of climate change, it will be through bold and visionary means that throw off the status quo of complacency in the face of bureaucratic and infrastructural inertia.

Preemptive adaptation in coastal cities requires a transformative approach, embracing the value of local community knowledge and legacies of uneven infrastructure. The power imbalances that skew decision-making processes need to be recognized and confronted. By acknowledging these imbalances, we can work toward developing alternative ways of managing urban watersheds that are more inclusive and equitable. Community members are local experts with memories and lived experiences that must be acknowledged within the development of NbS. Their insights can provide valuable guidance and ensure that solutions are tailored to local needs. Participatory design and planning methods, premised on the notion that local values, experiences, and priorities are legitimate and credible, can effectively help bridge the gap between local preferences and technical planning and design.

4. The Future of NbS in San Juan and Beyond

Against monumental challenges, Puerto Ricans find strength in unity. When the rains pour down and the streets become rivers, neighbors come together to help each other, forming human chains to pass sandbags and protect their homes from the rising water. They open their doors, offering shelter to those displaced by the storm, and share their food and water reserves. Volunteers from all walks of life, armed with shovels and tools, join forces to rebuild what was lost. When the rain ends, the city resonates with the sounds of hammers, saws, and laughter. Working together, communities construct sturdier homes and stronger foundations under the scorching sun and vibrant music, matching the loud colors of murals on buildings and overpasses. Boricuas are creative and resilient people; all they ask is to work together with federal agencies to collaboratively address their concerns while achieving USACE’s mission to protect their lives and property.

The flooding issues of the Rio Piedras are exacerbated greatly in the coastal zone. Like many coastal cities, it inhabits the junction between freshwater rivers, the built environment, and the ceaseless dynamism of the sea. Salt spray and pounding waves leave their marks on buildings and coastal infrastructure, rapidly aging new structures. Freshwater rivers provide a vital lifeline for humans and ecosystems alike can also be overwhelmed by heavy rains. Mangroves and salt marshes are in constant motion. Wave action relentlessly exposes the local bedrock until its erosive force is balanced by sediment delivery from streams and rivers. Coastal cities require continuous human interventions to maintain their form and character: washing the salt spray off the windows, filling the cracks in the sea walls, unclogging the sand from the stormwater system, and dredging harbor channels. Long-term solutions to coastal sea level rise must consider the balances of these titanic and microscopic forces and their relationships to the ecological and built solutions proposed for extreme weather and flood mitigation.

The residents of San Juan are not alone in their struggles. Coastal communities worldwide are grappling with interdependent challenges of rising sea levels, extreme weather, and constraints on resources and imagination available to respond to disastrous events. These factors combine to escalate the frequency and severity of coastal, pluvial, and riverine flooding, endangering lives, and the very fabric of cities, with varying impacts on humans, ecosystems, and the built environment. The coast has always been a dynamic environment; sea level rise exposes the weakness of existing infrastructures and the paradigms that design and maintain them.

Living in an era of unprecedented social inequality and environmental change likewise exposes inequalities in technical capacities and social power required to address climate justice. Embracing NbS as part of the adaptation toolkit does not offer a panacea. Rather, it offers a way of thinking that seeks to work with nature rather than against it. Our commitment to transformative NbS likewise does not seek to resolve social differences but to embrace processes through which diverse perspectives and approaches lead to more robust problem formulations and potential solutions. For better or for worse, coastal communities have always navigated these challenges; their prosperity is drawn from the sea even as they live in the shadow of its storms.

By continuing to build connections across countries, cities, and communities, we in the NATURA ECN hope to bridge dialogue from the global to the local. Our work, including the forthcoming Compendium of Participatory Methods for NbS, will continue to develop tools and approaches to improve human and ecological relationships in an era of unprecedented and rapid transformation.

Zbigniew Grabowski, Laura Costadone, Erich Wolff, Mariana Hernández, Yuliya Dzyuban, Marthe Derkzen, and Loan Diep
Hartford, Norfolk, Singapore, Sacramento, Singapore, Arnhem/Nijmegen, New York City

On The Nature of Cities

About the Writer:
Laura Costadone

Dr. Laura Costadone is an Assist. Research Professor at Old Dominion University for the Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience. Laura brings her expertise in co-design and co-create pathways to uptake and implement urban sustainable development goals by engaging directly with municipalities, practitioners, decision-makers, and citizens.

About the Writer:
Erich Wolff

Erich Wolff is a Research Fellow at the Earth Observatory of Singapore and the Asian School of the Environment at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore. His research delves into the challenges of implementing nature-based solutions in the Asia Pacific region and explores the role of communities in the development of green infrastructure.

About the Writer:
Mariana Hernández

Mariana Hernández is a PhD student at the University of Manchester. Her areas of expertise include biodiversity conservation, multi-criteria analysis, vulnerability and resilience of complex systems, socio-environmental studies in global south cities, and scientific communication to inform decision-making processes and foster positive environmental outcomes.

About the Writer:
Yuliya Dzyuban

Dr. Yuliya Dzyuban is a Research Fellow at Singapore Management University for the Cooling Singapore 2.0 project exploring the impact of vegetation on urban climate and perception of heat. Her area of expertise lies in using mixed-methods approaches to uncover relationships between urban morphology, microclimate, and human wellbeing.

About the Writer:
Marthe Derkzen

Dr. Marthe Derkzen is a researcher and lecturer with the Health and Society chair group. She studies urban nature from a social justice perspective with an interest in climate adaptation, local food, healthy neighborhoods and stewardship of the commons.

About the Writer:
Loan Diep

Loan is a researcher in environmental studies. Her work is centered on the development of cities that are green and inclusive of communities, most particularly those trapped in marginalizing systems. Her PhD focused on green infrastructure for rivers in informal settlements of São Paulo.

Acknowledgements:

The NATURA ECN would like to thank Tischa Munoz-Erickson, Elvia Melendez, Miriam Toro Rosario, Cynthia Manfred (Guarda Río), and others in San Juan ULTRA and the Alianza for the opportunity to learn about flooding and NbS issues in San Juan.

A beach with people on it and a city in the background — Two typical views of San Juan’s ocean front

A sand beach and water in front of buildings — Coastal stormwater infrastructure bisecting one of San Juan’s sandy beaches.

A rocky beach with a building in the background — relic limestone and coral exposed along a sea wall in San Juan

A colorful mural of naked people in various moving postions — One of San Juan’s numerous vibrant murals, “El Batey” (1976) by the artist Rafael Rivera

Stewarding Memories: Caring for People, Trees, and Land

3 September 2014Essay, People & Communities, Science & ToolsCommunities, Design, Disasters/Red zone, ResilienceLindsay Campbell

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

Add a Comment
Join our conversation

“We will never forget.” After September 11 (2001), this claim was made in countless political speeches, memorial eulogies, bumper stickers, carved stones, tattoos, and tee-shirts.

But we do forget. Time rolls on. We age. New people are born who have no lived experience of the tragic occurrences of that day. So too, does the landscape change. New buildings rise, trees grow, roads are built. We exist in an on-going cycle of disturbance and recovery. As such, our lives and our landscapes are constantly shifting in new and different ways.

So what happens to the places that were purposively set-aside as spaces of remembrance? How do they change or persist? What role do they play in the lives of their creators, their stewards, and their users as we move further in time away from a particular event? These are the questions that we are exploring as we re-visit sites associated with the Living Memorials Project. These sites are community-based memorials that use nature (from single tree plantings, to park dedications, to forest restoration projects, to labyrinths, to community gardens) to commemorate September 11, 2001.

Living memorials exist all across the country, but are concentrated in the areas surrounding the crash sites: the New York City metropolitan area, the Washington, D.C.-Virginia area, and near Shanksville, PA. Many of them were created in the immediate days and months following September 11, on much quicker timelines than the formal, state-led built memorials that are now dedicated and open to the public at these sites. The Living Memorials Project was funded by the USDA Forest Service to provide community grants to stewardship groups and conduct research to understand changes in the use of the landscape post-September 11. In many cases, the creation and maintenance of these sites was led by civic groups—from informal groups of friends to formalized nonprofits—who sought to create a more immediate, accessible, and local response to the event. (To search a list of these sites, visit the National Registry. To read 12 journeys through these Living Memorials, visit Land-Markings. To learn more about the social meanings of community-based memorials in the ‘pre-memorial period, read this article.) So, unlike the Gettysburg Battlefield or the built monuments on the National Mall that are meant to remain in perpetuity in a fixed image, these sites may be more malleable in response to local changes and needs—both because of their physical form as nature-based sites and because of their governance as often civic-led spaces.

The Living Memorials Project national map shows the spatio-temporal patterns of memorials across the country and over time, from 2002-2006. Map created by Urban Interface and the US Forest Service.

Starting next year, we plan to systematically return to a sample of the 113 stewardship groups that we interviewed and the nearly 700 sites that we documented nationwide. We began that process earlier this summer at the request of documentary filmmaker, Scott Elliott, who is creating a film called The Trees. In seeking to tell the story of the memorial forest at the World Trade Center, Scott learned of the hundreds of community-based sites that use trees, plants, and nature to memorialize the event and wanted to visit a few. So we selected two sites in the New York City area that we hadn’t formally interviewed or interacted with since 2006, not knowing what we would find.

The trip inspired us as researchers about the power of these sites and reinforced some important lessons about community stewardship as it persists over time. In particular, our visits to two sites have reinforced our appreciation for the persistence, responsiveness, and adaptability of civic stewardship. We see that community-managed spaces can be sustained throughout the passage of time, changes in leadership, changes in the economy, and even changes in climate. We’d like to share some reflections….

Tribute Park, Rockaway, NY

One common concern about community-led stewardship is that it is temporary or fleeting—as many informal groups are small in terms of staff and budgets, are volunteer-powered, and lack the institutional authority of government. Yet, Tribute Park shows the persistence of community stewardship even in the face of leadership transitions and major disasters.

The site was created, starting in 2002, by the local Chamber of Commerce. It was a vacant, waterfront lot, on the Jamaica Bay side of the Rockaway Peninsula. Just blocks from the busy, public beach on the Atlantic Ocean side, the Bay side of the Peninsula always offered a more quiet space for interacting with nature through viewing, fishing, and crabbing. On September 11, members of the public gathered along the bay, including at the vacant lot, to view the smoldering World Trade Center (WTC) towers. The Chamber of Commerce envisioned a contemplative space that would reflect the seaside character of the Rockaways and would uniquely commemorate the victims of the Rockaways. The peninsula lost a number of residents that day—including many members of the uniformed services—as well as downtown workers in New York City’s financial district.

Tribute Park site in 2002-2003. Credit: Living Memorials Project National Registry.

Since then, a new group has emerged to tend the site—The Friends of Tribute Park. Still powered by volunteers, many of whom are retired residents of the Rockaways, the care for the site is clear. They have added new elements to the park—including a piece of WTC steel that they had to go to court in order to secure and install. Every Tuesday morning, from 8:30-10:00am—in remembrance of when the planes struck the WTC towers, they hold volunteer stewardship days, where anyone from the public can come and help take care of the site. Bernie Coburn of Friends of Tribute Park called the site a “hands on park” that will keep changing over time as the group works to “maintain beauty with a personal touch.” When asked whether he considers the site a sacred space, he said that it was, because it is “a living project—I live for it.” Clearly, the ongoing stewardship and maintenance of the site—perhaps more so than the physical form or the symbolism or design—makes the site sacred.

Tribute Park in 2014, with members of Friends of Tribute Park, the documentary film crew for The Trees, and the Fire Department of New York. Credit: Living Memorials Project National Registry.

The site also endured and persisted through Hurricane Sandy, which inundated the entire peninsula of the Rockaways. While many residents were struggling to rebuild their homes and restore their lives, stewards also took the time to help restore Tribute Park—because they knew that the site was an important gathering space and community resource that merited rebuilding. In addition, the NYC Parks Department provided crucial personnel and heavy equipment, showing that civic stewardship does not work in the absence of government support. Indeed, the volunteers told us that NYC Parks’ crews visit the site weekly to assist with maintenance of the site. While the initial creation of the park was civic-led—with civic stewards operating as a unique form of “first responder” to the 9/11 tragedy, they still work in partnership with state through grant funding, regulatory compliance, and general maintenance. We see that these public-private partnerships exist at many scales and in many contexts. Just as the flagship parks of Central Park and Prospect Park have their prominent private partners—the Central Park Conservancy and the Prospect Park Alliance, so too does this tiny, 30,000 square foot site have the Friends of Tribute Park, which ensures its care and upkeep.

New Jersey’s Grove of Remembrance, Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ

Community-based stewardship is often expressed in vacant lots and community gardens—sites that are outside the reach or care of the state or the market or that are deliberately managed via community control. Discussing the case of the North Brooklyn post-industrial waterfront in the 1990s, Daniel Campos writes about these moments in time and space as an “Accidental Playground”—where members of the public have the ability and autonomy to create, shape, and manage the use of space. Once the state and the market come back in, even in a case where a formal park is designated as it was in North Brooklyn—the role for the public tends to shift from creator/steward/manager to “user”. The Liberty State Park memorial, however, is a unique example of ongoing civic stewardship within a designated state park.

Liberty State Park planting day in 2003. Credit: Living Memorials Project National Registry.

When community stewardship occurs on parkland, it can range from one-time, large-scale volunteer tree planting days to decades long dedication by ‘friends of the park’ groups, alliances and coalitions. The Grove of Remembrance at Liberty State Park was born out of the spirit of long-time community stewardship and created via hundreds of volunteer arborists, 9/11 family members, New Jersey residents, and Friends of Liberty State Park who came together to help plant this 10 acre former brownfield site with 691 trees (to honor all of the New Jersey victims who perished). These volunteer events are filled with the excitement and energy of getting hands dirty and “doing something.” Indeed, both authors participated in the planting of this site, and we feel materially and physically connected to its creation.

The ongoing care and attention of the nonprofit New Jersey Tree Foundation (NJTF) over the past 10 years has created opportunities for the public to continue to be involved. NJTF is primarily responsible for the maintenance of the site, though it is on state land, so we see an example of hybrid governance at work. Thus NJTF uses its own staff and its partnerships with civic, private, and school groups to help maintain the site. For example, NJTF has worked with area schools to use the grove as a space for environmental education. Area students learn about the life cycle of trees and plants, starting seedlings in their classroom, and then coming to the grove to engage in planting and maintenance.

Another pattern we see repeated with these sacred sites of social meaning: people go above and beyond their traditional professional roles and see their engagement with sites as a form of ‘giving back’ voluntarily. Working via NJTF, the professional arborist and forestry community in New Jersey has effectively “adopted” the site—donating thousands of hours of services, labor, and expertise. Like Tribute Park, the waterfront Grove of Remembrance was also flooded and heavily affected by Hurricane Sandy. The site is directly adjacent to a marina and after the storm, entire boats were found stranded and overturned inside the grove. Heavy equipment was required to remove the boats, remove the downed trees that could not be saved, and right the trees that could be saved. Volunteer arborists were involved in all stages of the Sandy recovery of the grove, making tree assessments, removals, and continuing to monitor the site over time.

What is even more unique is when we see signs of individual acts of stewardship and care that occur outside the frame of these formal events and programs. The ability to embrace these acts as healthy and productive forms of engagement, rather than intrusion into the authorities of the land manager, requires an ethos that is open to community action, voice, and power. Lisa Simms of the NJTF showed us examples of “guerrilla plantings” that occurred in the grove—people have brought bushes and flowers and are planting in the understory to complete the grove through their individual acts. Lisa pointed out the flowers that she, herself, planted from her home garden. These are examples of the public intimately engaging with the space, adopting it, and transforming it. This type of engagement, regardless of whether it deviates from the master plan, is welcome in places like this as stewards are more interested in cultivating an attachment to place rather than viewing a ‘pristine’ ecological restoration site.

Liberty State Park in 2014. Left to right: Lisa Simms of New Jersey Tree Foundation speaks to the filmmakers; trees that sustained damage during Sandy; guerilla planting in the understory. Credit: Living Memorials Project National Registry. — Liberty State Park in 2014. Top: Lisa Simms of New Jersey Tree Foundation speaks to the filmmakers. Bottom, left: guerrilla planting in the understory. Bottom, right: trees that sustained damage during Sandy. Credit: Living Memorials Project National Registry.

* * *

Through these visits, we can see the crucial connection between the need for unplanned space, the role for community stewards, and the ability for neighborhoods (people and places) to cope with change. Thus, stewardship can be understood as a mechanism for cultivating social-ecological resilience. While there are many forms of community stewardship in community gardens, street trees, waterways, and vacant lots—we know that these living memorials are special and even sacred places. They are imbued with the memories and intentions of their creators who sought to set aside land for remembrance, healing, and community cohesion.

One issue to explore in our ongoing longitudinal research is whether this persistence and adaptability is a broad-based trend. It is entirely possible that the need for and meaning of some sites is temporary and short-lived. Thus far, our investigations have found the opposite. Instead, we found a dedicated cadre of neighbors and friends keeping vigil in a waterfront park in Queens and a forest growing across the river from the former World Trade Center site. Finally, a key question is whether and how this sense of deep attachment to place and people can be cultivated, expressed, and celebrated outside of the context of disturbance and tragedy? What can we take from the horribly singular experience of 9/11 that translates to how we care for the land and its people every day?

Lindsay K. Campbell and Erika S. Svendsen
New York City

On The Nature of Cities

About the Writer:
Erika Svendsen

Stories of the Nature of Cities 1/2 Hour—Episode 4: Oasis

31 January 2021Podcast, Stories of the Nature of Cities 1/2 Hour, Upcoming WebinarDavid Maddox

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

1 Comment
Join our conversation

Episode 4: Oasis

“Happy Hour at the Green Man” by Kate Wing, read by Lucy Symons
A small bar in the middle of the city has a portal to an ancient ghost forest.

“Where Grass Grows Greener” by Jenni Juvonen, read by Nora Achrati
The narrator explores a forest and meets a fox.

The stories are read, and then authors Kate and Jenni are joined for discussion by David Maddox.

POSTPONED TO MARCH. Date TBD

Nora Achrati is a voice actress based in Washington, DC.

Voice over artist Lucy Symons has had a varied and peripatetic life – spending a couple of decades on the continent of North America and an equal number in Britain.

“Stories of the Nature of Cities 1/2 Hour” is a monthly series of readings from TNOC’s collection of very short fiction about future cities. Each episode is 30 minutes and features two readings and then a conversation between the authors and an urban practitioner. The stories are drawn from the book of flash fiction (less than 1000 words) on future cities TNOC and partners created, called “A Flash of Silver Green”. Previously recorded Episodes can be explored also: https://www.thenatureofcities.com/conversations/

Banner image: Bamboo forest of Kyoto.

Our sponsors:

Stories of the Nature of Cities 1/2 Hour. Episode 1—Biodiversity

28 September 2020Stories of the Nature of Cities 1/2 HourArt, Biodiversity, Climate changeClaire Stanford

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

Add a Comment
Join our conversation

Episode 1—Biodiversity

We read two stories: Claire Stanford’s “Neither Above Nor Below” and Elizabeth Twist’s “May Apple”. Both stories were prize winners in the original Stories of The Nature of Cities 2099 contest.

The Stories are read by actors Howard Overshown and Dori Legg.

Authors Claire and Elizabeth are then joined for conversation by ICLEI’s Paul Currie from the Biodiversity Centre in Cape Town.

“Neither Above Nor Below”
Hasan chases a turtle around the waterways of a flooded Jakarta.
Read by Howard Overshown

“May Apple”
Sammie receives her seeds to look after on her 21st birthday.
Read by Dori Legg

The stories are drawn from the book of flash fiction (less than 1000 words) on future cities TNOC and partners created, called “A Flash of Silver Green”.

Our sponsors and partners:

About the Writer:
Elizabeth Twist

Elizabeth Twist writes speculative fiction, some of it dark, some of it dreamy. She loves the wobbly line that separates the known from the unknown. Her work has appeared in NonBinary Review, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, and most recently in The Fiends in the Furrows II: More Tales of Folk Horror. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario. Find her on Twitter @elizabethtwist.

About the Writer:
Paul Currie

Paul Currie is a Director of the Urban Systems Unit at ICLEI Africa. He is a researcher of African urban resource and service systems, with interest in connecting quantitative analysis with storytelling and visual elicitation.

Stories of the Nature of Cities 1/2 Hour. Episode 2—Sea Level Rise

7 October 2020Podcast, Stories of the Nature of Cities 1/2 HourAlyssa Eckles Alyssa Eckles

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

Add a Comment
Join our conversation

Episode 2—Sea Level Rise

The read stories are Rym Kechacha’s “Old Father Thames” and Alyssa Eckles’ “Uolo and the Idol”. The Stories are first read, then authors Rym and Alyssa then join David Maddox for conversation.

“Old Father Thames” by Rym Kechacha
The narrator gets swept away by Old Father Thames after playing on a riverbank and ignoring a flood warning. Read by Lucy Symons (London).

“Uolo and the Idol” by Alyssa Eckles
Uolo discovers an idol of a woman while fishing in the automobile reef. Read by Bernadette Dunn (New York).

The stories are drawn from the book of flash fiction (less than 1000 words) on future cities TNOC and partners created, called “A Flash of Silver Green”.

Our sponsors:

About the Writer: Michelle Johnson

About the Writer: Laura Landau

About the Writer: Sophie Plitt

About the Writer: Erika Svendsen

About the Writer: Kathi Artmann

About the Writer: Alex Lechner

About the Writer: Laura Costadone

About the Writer: Erich Wolff

About the Writer: Mariana Hernández

About the Writer: Yuliya Dzyuban

About the Writer: Marthe Derkzen

About the Writer: Loan Diep

About the Writer: Erika Svendsen

Episode 4: Oasis

Episode 1—Biodiversity

About the Writer: Elizabeth Twist

About the Writer: Paul Currie

Episode 2—Sea Level Rise

About the Writer:
Michelle Johnson

About the Writer:
Laura Landau

About the Writer:
Sophie Plitt

About the Writer:
Erika Svendsen

About the Writer:
Kathi Artmann

About the Writer:
Alex Lechner

About the Writer:
Laura Costadone

About the Writer:
Erich Wolff

About the Writer:
Mariana Hernández

About the Writer:
Yuliya Dzyuban

About the Writer:
Marthe Derkzen

About the Writer:
Loan Diep

About the Writer:
Erika Svendsen

About the Writer:
Elizabeth Twist

About the Writer:
Paul Currie