I remember when I was a child growing up in Bogotá, the capital and largest city of Colombia, located in the cool, high-altitude environment of the Andean mountain range. Street and park trees were almost all of a few widely planted species: eucalypts, pines, cypress, acacias and ash. In a city that, at that time, had more than 4 million inhabitants, these trees were an essential connection for me with a natural world that grew like a scattered oasis in the middle of a concrete, brick and asphalt desert.
It was in the eucalyptus groves that I admired the hummingbirds singing and drinking nectar from the trees´ flowers; on cypress, I saw migratory black-and-white warblers seeking insects while clinging to the bark like miniature woodpeckers; big ash trees were a place to find many other birds, especially migratory wood-pewees, tanagers and warblers.
With few exceptions, native species were not taken into consideration for planting in Bogotá—until now.
Leaves of the Colombian Oak, Quercus humboldtii. Image: Mateo Hernández
When I was 10 years old, I gradually started to notice other trees growing in the city, trees which, compared to the previous ones, were smaller and fewer in number, but appeared to represent a greater diversity. These were species such as the Andean alder, with its sparse and dull foliage; the Colombian oak, with characteristic wavy-edged leaves; the Andean wax myrtle, easily identified by its yellowish-olive foliage and aromatic leaves; the myrcianthes myrtle, whose orange fruits were edible; the vallea tree, with small heart-shaped leaves and beautiful pink flowers; the “corono,” or brush holly, whose branched thorns reminded me of a stag´s antlers.
Field guides for identifying all these species were rare and difficult to obtain. Fortunately, at that time, a small pocket-sized book appeared which boosted my knowledge of the plants´ names and natural histories. The book´s title was El Manto de la Tierra (Earth´s Mantle), by Agnes Bartholomäus and others. It provided photos and easy-to-read descriptions on 150 plant species, both native and exotic, which are common in Bogotá´s environs.
It was with this book that I started to realize that plants have different origins—that some, the so-called “native” plants, have been growing in a particular place for thousands of years, while others, the “exotics,” were brought from other countries and continents by humans, in most cases after the European conquest of the New World. With this book and others that followed, I learned that the acacias and eucalypts that grow in Bogotá come from Australia and Tasmania, that our cypress and pines are actually natives to Mexico and Central America. In fact, most of the trees, shrubs, vines and garden flowers that I knew in the city were not native to this area.
Mexican Ash (Fraxinus uhdei) in Bogotá. Image: Mateo Hernández
When I realized this, a question started to whirl around my mind: which were the plants that formed the old Andean forests before the city of Bogotá existed?
Ecosystem changes
Walking the area over many years, visiting remnants of natural habitats and reading books and papers on the area´s ecosystems and vegetation, have helped to recreate the ancient ecosystems in my mind. It is well documented that most of the Bogotá plateau, formerly a lake, was covered after the last ice age with reed and cattail marshes and alder-dominated swamps. Some lower-altitude slopes were covered with dry Andean forests dominated by brush holly, duranta, hesperomeles, prickly pear, hopbush and baccharis. Other slopes supported more humid Andean forests with mountain Spanish-cedar, myrcianthes myrtle, brush holly, persea, oreopanax, and “uche” (an endemic species, related to plums and cherries). The trees´ trunks and branches hosted a great variety of epiphytic orchids and bromeliads.
Mountain Spanish Ceder (Cedrela montana) in its natural habitat. Image: Mateo Hernández
With the arrival of humans, these ecosystems were gradually replaced by indigenous crops, then by cattle pastures and monocultures, and then by the city itself. The necessity arose for planting urban trees, which, for the first four and a half centuries of the city´s history, were mostly exotic.
With few exceptions, native species were not taken into consideration for planting in the city; for some plants, this may have been because they were still common as wild species. Many were not valued because they were considered “ordinary,” in contrast with the “classy” and expensive exotics. Reforestation, strongly influenced by commercial plantations and foreign influence, employed only big, exotic trees such as eucalypts and pines as the trees of choice for restoring the plant cover on eroded hillsides.
The result of all of this was the Bogotá in which I grew up, full of big Australian eucalyptus, Mexican ash, European black poplar and American southern magnolia, to name but a few.
The native takeover
The situation of native plants in the city is gradually changing. A growing environmental conscience, fueled by the realization that we are losing our last wild areas, native forests and wetlands, and, together with them, the animals and plants that depend on such environments and that often live nowhere else in the world, has lent more and more importance to the restoration of natural ecosystems and the protection of species that have become rare. Cities are starting to be recognized as emergent ecosystems, which, if well managed, can harbor a large variety of plants and animals, including key groups such as migratory, endemic and threatened species.
Around the year 2000, during Enrique Peñalosa´s first term as the city mayor, the Bogotá Botanical Garden started a massive tree replacement in the city, in which thousands of native trees were planted. Species that were previously scarce in the city, such as the Andean Fig, Andean Walnut, Colombian Oak, Wax Palm and the Croton tree, became a common sight in parks and avenues after this program.
The white trunk of the wax palm (Ceroxylon quindiuense). Image: Mateo Hernández
Other Colombian cities, notably Medellín, also started their own tree planting programs, with emphasis on native species. Now, Medellín is planting more than 200 tree species, and the total number of tree and shrub species reported for the city amounts to 500, perhaps the largest diversity of any Colombian city and one of the largest in the world.
Still, there is much more to do before cities such as Bogotá, Medellín or Cali can truly attain the status of green cities. In terms of biodiversity and native species, it is evident that most of the smaller plants, such as vines and ornamental flowers, are overwhelmingly exotic. If we want to recreate more complex natural systems, we will certainly have to include the pieces that are still missing. Examples of elements that can be implemented include the recognition of unkempt areas of tall grass, shrubs and vines as key habitats that should be valued, protected and promoted in some areas, especially in natural reserves such as green corridors along watercourses and wetlands. The widespread use in gardens of plants which are key food sources for butterflies and their caterpillars. The implementation of low-cost, low-maintenance green roofs which recreate grassland and wildflower communities, as opposed to the expensive, nursery-plant-dominated green roofs which are being used today. And the use of green walls full of epiphytic plants, such as orchids, ferns and bromeliads.
All these elements together would bring back a wealth of biodiversity and ecological interactions into the city. It is important to point out that not all plants have to be native—exotic ones also have an important role in maintaining a city´s biodiversity. Priority should be given to native ones, if only for two reasons: 1) to regain a balance, because for centuries native species have been neglected and, as a consequence, the parks and gardens of our cities are now completely dominated by exotics, and 2) there are certain functions which only native species are known to accomplish; for example, the native chusquea bamboos are the only species known to be used as food plants by the caterpillars of tens of butterfly species that live around Bogotá. No other plant, native or exotic, has been found as a replacement for the function that the chusquea performs as a key species for the conservation of these butterflies.
Yellow trumpet flower (Tecoma stans) in the streets of Bogotá. Image: Mateo Hernández
It will be a long way until we see all these ideas fully implemented. But, as we have seen above, there is reason for hope.
Today, in many aspects, the city of Bogotá is a lot different from the one I knew in my childhood. It has grown enormously, doubling its size to more than 8 million inhabitants. This has brought more pressure to the land and natural resources, and represents big challenges for managing education, social integration, the economy, security, infrastructure and transport.
In spite of all the difficulties, I think that, in some aspects, the city has improved. Street and park trees have really changed. Now we see more diversity. One can get to know many native species without going far from home. Threatened species, such as mountain Spanish-cedar, wax palm and Colombian oak, are now part of the city. Birds have a wider choice of fruits available to eat. Eucalypts, pines and acacias are not as ubiquitous as they used to be. If we continue this way, we will certainly advance to our goal of shaping a more sustainable and biodiverse city.
Never before on the Earth or in the entire history of the human condition has something like a megacity been possible, until Tokyo and Mexico City appeared in 1950. Typically defined as a metropolis with 10 million residents or more, projections by the 2009 Edition of UN World Urbanization Prospects suggest there could be as many as thirty megacities by 2025. Over half the world’s population is living in cities and megapolitan regions according to the UN Edition of 2010. As populations migrated from rural areas to cities, megacities and mega regions became more powerful and influential than the nations and countries they inhabit. For instance, the international influence of Malaysia lies in the great commercial hubs of Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.
Endless DFW. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio
The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (an urban agglomeration referred to as DFW) is becoming a megacity. While New York City, Hong Kong or Shanghai are delirious concentrations of skyscrapers, DFW is a textbook example of a twentieth century city of nodes in an agglomeration that is almost entirely suburban. In downtown Dallas and Fort Worth, originally two separate cities, the nodes are building clusters. Once freestanding courthouse towns and county seats, the downtowns now exist as bi-nuclear centers in a vast and sparse geography. Other nodes have formed around cloverleaves and in the former town centers and municipalities that were assimilated by the mega growth.
The Branch Waters Network is a concept to use the entire waterway system in metropolitan Dallas–Fort Worth as an attraction to structure a metropolitan urbanism.
The net effect of seventy years of market-driven proliferation is a city that is dominated by shapeless open space and experienced periscopically, through the windshields of cars. Of greater concern is the fact that DFW, and other suburban megacities like it in North America, are statistically impossible to densify.
DFW is the fourth largest metropolitan region in the United States with a population of 6,450,000 residents settled on 5,950,000 acres of incorporated infrastructure. In order to preserve the economic investment of the entire infrastructure by increasing the average density of 1.1 persons per acre to match the 5.5 person per acre density of Portland, Oregon, it would take more than the population of Canada—(5.5 x 6 million approximate acres = 33 million people )—to settle the new, denser, urban footprint. The future of cities—such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston and Atlanta—that generally share the same pattern, density, and math, is potentially vulnerable to social, economic and environmental problems that could particularly affect the areas that are thinly settled.
Architecture and planning are generally without tested theoretical models to retroactively reconfigure vast urban geographies. Daniel Burnham’s overused imprecation to “Make no small plans” sidesteps a stupefying problem, namely that any “big plan” for a mega region will have to criss-cross municipalities, established communities and political structures, none of which are equipped to sustain complex projects that could take decades.
Main Street USA, Dallas West Village. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio
Moreover, planning as a potential solution quickly descends into a conundrum, considering that the great planning models and pattern books of the 19th century arose to develop cities and an urban form, not to retrofit vast geographies where the land is already atomized into private ownership and sliced apart by a fully realized infrastructure. The so-called New Urbanism, while honorable in intention, attached its sympathies to the myth of the small town and a nostalgic association with traditional architecture. America has not been a network of small towns since the 1800s.
During a March 2013 lecture at the Dallas Museum of Art, Professor Kenneth Frampton of Columbia University poignantly recalled a phrase that someone had written onto a rendering of a 1950s utopian city while it was on display at the New York Museum of Modern Art in the late 1980s.
“There are no cities anymore.
We are incapable of making cities anymore.
The machine is incapable of making cities anymore.
We’ll have to get used to living in the jungle.”
—Unknown
Image courtesy OMA / AMO Dallas Connected City Challenge
The image of a jungle city—a confused and chaotic mechanical landscape—is provocative and dramatic. Short of accepting that a blighted “jungle” of abandoned and depopulated geographies is statistically pre-ordained for the future of a suburban megacity, perhaps Frampton’s use of the word “jungle” isn’t only a metaphor, but rather a clue that the landscape and natural waterway network of a city could inform and drive an urban solution.
Where planning or pie-in-the-sky abstractions might present a challenge to the rugged individualism of American culture, the same culture seems to understand and generally appreciate nature and the value that it offers—qualitatively and economically. In lieu of conventional notions for planning, it may be more possible to develop a strategy—a game of nature driven rules for individual projects—that, taken together, could lead sprawling populations toward an orderly rearrangement and a new and unprecedented urban form that is connected by a living fabric.
Rendering of DFW Branch Waters. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio, Vince Hunter AIA Renderer
Part two: the Dallas-Fort Worth Branch Waters Network
The Branch Waters Network is a concept to use the entire waterway system in metropolitan Dallas–Fort Worth as an attraction to structure a metropolitan urbanism.
Seizing upon the familiarity of nature and how North American culture typically assigns value to it, the ribbon like strands of shade, water and continuity of the DFW system, have the capacity to retroactively re-form a future urbanism into living filaments that attract density, transit systems and reconstituted ecological systems. Segments of the DFW Branch Waters Network are already complete.
The seven-mile long Turtle Creek corridor in Dallas is the only part of a 1912 comprehensive plan prepared by George Edward Kessler, a German-born education planner. Kessler’s vision transformed an otherwise featureless ravine into a city walk for education in art, architecture, history, nature and citizenship, by adding a set of parks, sports fields and passive activities to the linear corridor, as well as a chain of lakes, weirs, trails and bridges. Turtle Creek Boulevard ties it all together.
Turtle Creek Dallas. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio
From 1950 to 1980, the location and natural beauty of Turtle Creek gave rise to several condominium towers along the edges as well as a theater designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. As evidence and a demonstration of the urbanizing potential of nature, the concentration of civility and density along Turtle Creek is an exception to the cultural raison d’être in Texas, that luxury and the good life typically means an estate lot or a sprawling Southfork-like ranch. Considering that DFW is on the same latitude as North Africa and frequently one of the hottest places in the U.S. during summer, the 100-year old example of Turtle Creek is a model for a landscape-driven DFW and a useful case study for other metropolitan cities.
White Rock Lake Dallas. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio
Contemporary with Kessler’s Dallas Plan, the 1911 construction of a lake and park on White Rock Creek in East Dallas produced DFW’s closest example of an Olmstedian park. White Rock Lake is a 1,200-acre reservoir set within a 1,600-acre public park that includes the Dallas Arboretum, two boating and sailing marinas, passive recreation areas and the Boathouse Cultural Center, circumnavigated by a continuous bike and pedestrian trail and the continuous tree cover of White Rock Lake Park extending to the Trinity, which is the river that established Dallas and Fort Worth.
DFW Branch Waters Aerial, 2015. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio / Google Earth Pro
When observed in satellite view, the waterway branches of forested creeks, ravines and rivers within the metropolitan area look like the veins of a leaf or a colossal tree that has been flattened and espaliered onto the Blackland Prairie. The water branches traverse an urban geography that is 60 to 70 miles wide east to west, 40 to 50 miles wide north to south.
Image: Kevin Sloan Studio
When the most obvious branches are mapped, there are over 300 potential miles of water branches that would double the real estate value along each side, considering each branch has two outside edges. In Dallas County alone—which is one of eleven that comprise the DFW metropolitan area—over 90 percent of the natural drainageways are intact and unimproved.
Vitruvian Park, phase one. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio, Craig Blackman FAIA
Vitruvian Park in North Dallas (Addison) configures a high-density mixed-use urban enclave on 112-acres that is organized by a 17-acre spring fed park. Completed in 2008 and master planned by my studio, Kevin Sloan Studio, the urban blocks of the five and 11-story fabric present a conventional street wall urbanism to the avenues and a contrasting, modernist repetition of residential wings to the park so that the outdoor courtyards between seamlessly key into the preserved vegetation of the public park.
Vitruvian Park amphitheater. Image: UDR Inc.
The seventeen-acre park, also designed by Kevin Sloan Studio, is fed by Farmers Branch Creek, which is also part of a vast network of sheet springs that exist throughout the Blackland Prairie region. In lieu of the dramatic artesian springs of the Texas Hill country near Austin, North Texas springs move slowly and laterally over a continuous limestone shelf until the erosion of a ravine daylights and receives the water.
In order to raise the southeast corner of the master plan out of the flood plain, the excavation at Vitruvian Park was a logical extension of a natural process of day-lighting the sheet flow for an urban park that would naturally gather density. Vitruvian Park also demonstrates that nature and landscape are effective tools that can overcome suburban suspicions of density by offering an urban-like enclave that isn’t in a downtown center.
Views of Urban Reserve. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio, Charles Smith AIA, Photographer.
For enthusiasts of modern architecture, the Dallas Urban Reserve is an example that combines water branch urbanism with low impact development to form a residential enclave of 50 lots. Urban Edge Developers in Dallas funded and developed the project on a 12-acre site that was abused for 55 years as an illegal landfill, as contractors opportunistically dumped Sheetrock, pipe, shingles and other debris in creating what amounted to an industrial earthwork.
Although houses by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien have been constructed and others by Hanrahan Meyers Architects of New York and Kieran Timberlake of Philadelphia were proposed, the subdivision is prevented from dissolving into an architectural expo because of the vigorous and visually cohesive landscape of a continuous bio-filtration street. Sloping asymmetrically to convey storm water into a system of repetitive filtration beds planted with bald cypress, pond cypress and horsetail reeds, a single two-way street connects an existing 1950s subdivision at the entrance into an existing water branch that is White Rock Creek Greenway.
Aerial map of Urban Reserve. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio / Google Earth Pro
The project was awarded a 2011 ASLA Award of Excellence and has been nationally and internationally recognized by journals such as Topos and Eco-Structure. Kevin Sloan Studio conceptualized the bio-filtration street, designed the landscape architecture and collaborated on the development planning with DSGN Architects of Dallas.
Green ribbon urbanism
Nested along any branch waterway, mixed-use edges and building enclaves would offer the forest and nature on one side and the civility of streets, squares, and neighborhoods on the other. Turtle Creek and the addition of the Katy Trail in the last fifteen years—a rail-to-trail conversion into a shaded promenade—are contemporary examples that further support the urban potential of building the entire drainage network in DFW into an urban system.
Trinity River / Connected City Challenge. Image courtesy OMA / AMO Dallas Connected City Challenge
While other projects throughout DFW are currently in development along various sections and unrelated segments of the metropolitan branch waters, they are typically seen as railway conversions into hike and bike trails, or as stand alone mega-visions such as the great Trinity River projects in the downtown environs of Fort Worth and Dallas.
No larger vision yet exists to see the common thread of all of these separate projects as stepping-stones that could produce a new and unprecedented ribbon-like urbanism tracing the shaded and continuous corridors. Considering how the sprawling low density urbanism of DFW is typical to North American cities and the perimeter rings of European and Asian centers, the Branch Water network could also be seen as a paradigm and potentially a palliative to provide connection, cohesion and a memorable character to a largely generic pattern.
Branch variety
The Branch Waters concept does not presume that the English landscape of fine lawns, azaleas and towers of Turtle Creek should proliferate throughout the entire DFW drainage network. The existing characteristics of the riverines and their potential are as numerous and varied as are the landscape types that could be added. Ultimately, communities along the network should develop a program that fits the distinctive needs of their respective branch.
View of bayou branches. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio, Charles Smith AIA, Photographer
In the lowest and flattest geography of the waterway system, fragments of the former Trinity River in Dallas, known as The Meanders, now operate as flood sumps. In their current condition, they are more akin to the static waters of a bayou than a creek with a current. A project known as the Trinity Strand has taken steps to add a pedestrian and bike trail above the high water mark of a particular piece that courses through the Dallas Design District.
View of creek branches. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio, Charles Smith, AIA, Photographer
Creeks and ravines that slope to the natural Trinity floodplain often convey a brook-like flow of water that, over eons, has cut ravines through the soft limestone and caliche geology. Many of them are sheet springs and numerous street names are clues, such as Kidd Springs, Spring Valley, and Marsh Lane. Most are protected by the Army Corps of Engineers, but the third branch category typically cradles an ecology of hardwoods that established over time in the deep topsoil that accumulated in a valley or ravine. Many of these exist along the West Dallas escarpment or in north and south Oak Cliff and seasonal rains create intermittent flows.
Circumventing red tape
In addition to the cultural, environmental and economic merits of the concept, the Branch Waters has a built-in potential to avoid problems and bureaucratic red tape that often stymies typical plans and/or grand urban visions.
Given how the waterway system in DFW is largely intact and continuous—as it typically is in most cities—no additional land acquisitions, eminent domain takings, bond programs, or the usual gauntlet of political approvals are needed to incrementally accomplish the urbanism, one project at a time. Rather, it might only need a simple set of guidelines to construct spatial relationships between the new urbanism and any water branch.
Summary: resilience or irrelevance
The Branch Waters Network also has the potential to address two significant economic and environmental questions that Dallas-Fort Worth and other Endless cities are facing, especially in the U.S. Southwest. “World leaders now understand that the future of any nation will be disproportionately delivered by megacities and metropolitan regions,” notes Bruce Katz, economist and geostrategist with the Brookings Institute. In order to sustain their relevance on the world stage, any metro must attract talent, retain talent, generate and export their own unique economy, and flourish into a culture that can compete with other world cities. Where baby boomers would move to a city after getting a job, millenials and Gen-X generations do the opposite—they move to a cities that offer walkability, parks, nature and a quality of life they desire, then they find a job.
In so-called “business-friendly” cities, such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, Houston and Atlanta, that offer income potential and tax incentives, the sprawling geography was constructed in haste and left out the kind of urban, environmental and cultural qualities that are now a first priority for individuals, families and even corporations.
After a highly publicized national competition, the Boeing Company elected to relocate their Seattle corporate offices to Chicago in 2001, alluding to Dallas-Fort Worths’s “lack of cultural amenities.” The sting of the loss set into motion an array of civic project that included the Wyly Multi-form theater by OMA, The Winspear Opera by Foster & Partners, the City Theater by SOM, an addition to the Booker T. Washington Arts Magnate School by Allied Works, and a downtown parks master plan by Margreaves and Associates in 2003 that identified 19 park sites in downtown. The Branch Waters Network can be seen as a logical extension of the downtown projects applied to the entire geography of Dallas-Fort Worth that would develop a more appealing urban form by drawing new urban densities to the edges of the metropolitan waterway network.
The environmental questions may be even more stupefying. Studies issued in February 2015 by Cornell and Columbia Universities aligned with other environmental studies that indicate a 50 to 80 percent chance that Texas and the American Southwest may experience a 35-year long drought—a mega-drought—sometime before 2100. Such an event would be catastrophic to DFW or any metro, potentially forcing the de-population of the city, the abandonment of entire parts of the city, public parks and certainly any irrigated landscape or use in order to conserve water.
The existing natural waterway system in DFW is where the region’s longevity might be secured. It is where the mature trees, water and any environmental quality currently exist. Gathering urbanism along the edges of the network would anticipate the mega-drought and forestall the potential for individuals and companies to flee the metropolitan area, while also generating an orderly rearrangement of the unsustainably suburban pattern into a form that would be more resistant to calamities and natural disasters.
Trinity River through Downtown Dallas. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio, Ting Lun, Photographer
The potential for a mega-drought and the eye opening realization that the generic pattern cannot be statistically urbanized potentially belies a much larger economic rationale to support the formation of the Branch Waters Network in DFW and other cities where a similar natural system exists.
World and national leaders understand that megacities and metropolitan regions will disproportionately deliver the future for any nation. For metros to be relevant and competitive on the world stage, they must retain talent, attract new talent, generate and export their own unique economic production, and flourish into a culture that can compete successfully, in both domestic and world markets.
Image: Kevin Sloan Studio, Wenyan Ji, Renderer
Every city currently competing on the world stage has one or more features that cannot be copied by another metro. By logical extension, the qualities of a city are now part of a broader strategy for a megacity or region to remain relevant on the world stage. The Branch Waters Network and the ribbon-like urbanism it could form may be the physical, spatial and environmental distinction Dallas-Fort Worth needs to endure.
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Eugenie Birch, New YorkNow comes the hard part—activating the indicators. Three of these indicators are strong candidates for using new geospatial technologies.
Benjamin Bradlow, BostonThe key dimension to realizing the elements of the Urban Goal boils down to understanding how cities are governed.
William Dunbar, TokyoIgnoring vital urban-rural relationships can have negative consequences for cities and their surrounding areas.
Peter Head, LondonWe need a road map and mechanism for deployment of funding for research, integrated planning, and education to build capacity and demos for Goal 11 delivery.
Mark Hostetler, GainesvilleUnique opportunities exist in cities to protect both cultural and natural heritage, one of Goal #11’s 10 targets.
Lim Hui Ling, SingaporeRelegating cities to the role of providing inputs to the New Urban Agenda is anachronistic. Cities and city groups should drive the formulation of the SDG’s targets and their implementation.
Shuaib Lwasa, KampalaAchieving Goal 11 calls for alternative conceptual frameworks, methodologies, data and tools to measure progress its targets.
Anjali Mahendra, DelhiThe urban SDG stands the greatest chance of being successful if city leaders work improve performance not necessarily in comparison with other cities around the world, but in comparison to the their own status.
Jose Puppim, MontrealTo achieve Goal 11, we need to recognize the environmental/planetary limits in policymaking at various different levels.
Karen Seto, New HavenThe Urban SDG has the opportunity to be a catalyst for changing how we conceive, design and manage cities, but right now we’re on a trajectory to repeat the city-building mistakes of the past.
Andrew Rudd, New YorkGetting the balance between structure and agency right is essential to achieving SDG 11.
David Simon, GothenburgIf the urban SDG is to prove to be a useful tool, then it is vital that it should prove widely relevant, acceptable and practicable
Bolanle Wahab, IbadanFor SDG #11 to succeed, indigenous knowledge systems must be given adequate recognition and attention.
Lorena Zárate, Mexico CitySDG11 raises concerns about the lack of an explicit human rights approach and the associated state obligations.
David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director. David's dad told him once that he needed a back up plan, something to "fall back on". So he bought a tuba.
Introduction
In May of 2014, TNOC published a roundtable on why we needed an urban Sustainable Development Goal to be one of the SDGs under consideration by the UN. At that time, an explicitly urban SDG was anything but certain, and a large coalition of urbanists was working hard to make urban issues explicitly part of the UN’s sustainability agenda. Well, an urban SDG was, in fact, adopted as one of 17 new sustainability goals that will propel work through 2030.
See https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics for an interactive website of all 17 goals.
The final SDG Goal 11 is stated this way: Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. There is a lot of meaning to be explored in these seven words. What does “inclusive” mean in an operational sense? “Safe” from what? Safety for whom? The word “sustainable” makes clear that cities are part of larger, globally interconnected chains of resources that transcend old fashioned rural-urban boundaries. But such an integrated view is at odds with the fact that urbanists and non-urbanists (for lack of a better phrase) typically work in separate spheres. The head spins.
There are ten targets for SDG#11 that start to unpack the SDG’s meaning and philosophy, and also imply actual measures of progress:
By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums
By 2030, provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all, improving road safety, notably by expanding public transport, with special attention to the needs of those in vulnerable situations, women, children, persons with disabilities and older persons
By 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries
Strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage
By 2030, significantly reduce the number of deaths and the number of people affected and substantially decrease the direct economic losses relative to global gross domestic product caused by disasters, including water-related disasters, with a focus on protecting the poor and people in vulnerable situations
By 2030, reduce the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, including by paying special attention to air quality and municipal and other waste management
By 2030, provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces, in particular for women and children, older persons and persons with disabilities
Support positive economic, social and environmental links between urban, peri-urban and rural areas by strengthening national and regional development planning
By 2020, substantially increase the number of cities and human settlements adopting and implementing integrated policies and plans towards inclusion, resource efficiency, mitigation and adaptation to climate change, resilience to disasters, and develop and implement, in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, holistic disaster risk management at all levels
Support least developed countries, including through financial and technical assistance, in building sustainable and resilient buildings utilizing local materials
This is a great, even historic start. But it is only the beginning, and much, much work remains between now and the Habitat III Conference, and then through 2030, to accomplish the goal.
So, now what? Now that we have the goal, what is our path to success? What are the pitfalls? What could go wrong? These questions are the subject of this roundtable, including many of the contributors to the May 2014 panel, and adding new voices from around the world. We invite you to join the conversation also.
Professor Genie Birch is the Lawrence C. Nussdorf Chair of Urban Research and Education, former Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Municipal Art Society of New York, and co-chair, UN-HABITAT's World Urban Campaign.
Eugenie Birch
Monitoring SDG 11: geospatial technologies offer hope for solutions, but we have a lot of work to do…
Now that the SDGs are a reality, implementation is going to be the name of the game, and crafting the protocol for monitoring is the next step in that game. As with the MDGs, the United Nations will ask nations to report on the SDG targets—all 169 of them—and at present, is working to develop indicators to provide a set of simple, uniform measures. Sound easy? Well, it’s not. Remember: the SDGs are universally applicable and not all nations have deep data collection capacities. But this situation opens the door to employing new means of monitoring.
The UN Statistical Commission appointed an Inter-Agency Expert Group for the Sustainable Development Goals (IAEG-SDGs) to recommend a set of indicators for approval in mid-March. So let’s take a look at how the IAEG-SDGs is treating Goal 11, “Make cities safe, inclusive, resilient and sustainable,” and the seven associated substantive targets on housing, transport, planning, cultural and natural heritage, resilience, environmental impact, and public space. In November, the IAEG-SDGs met in Bangkok, Thailand to review a list of proposed indicators ranked yellow (caution) or grey (more discussion needed) and set about evaluating them, ranking them green (meaning ok to go) or grey. For Goal 11, six of seven proposed indicators held yellow classifications and one was grey at the beginning of the review. But by the end of the deliberations, five of the seven moved to the green column, one was grey (11.4) and one had no classification (11.5).
Now comes the hard part—activating the indicators. Three of these indicators are strong candidates for using new geospatial technologies.
Now comes the hard part—activating the indicators. Three of these indicators are strong candidates for using new geospatial technologies in what could become a revolutionary way to bring policy-relevant information to public and private decision-makers.
The SDG 11 targets, with those most amenable to geospatial mapping circled in red: 11.2.1, 11.3.1, and 11.7.1. Source: http://unstats.un.org/sdgs/
Two tools that can help overcome the monitoring obstacles: the Global Human Settlements Layer (GHSL) and World Pop. The GHSL, a project of the European Union’s Joint Research Council, is due to be fully launched in Fall 2016, coinciding with the Habitat III Conference, the first all UN conference to be held after the passage of the SDGs. The GHSL is a free, open source platform that maps the built up area of the entire world—it can produce national, regional and local maps. It can also monitor green space, as the two images below represent, by showing the inverse of the built up area, which can be used to calculate open space. For more information, see here.
Green Spaces in Built-up Areas from the Global Human Settlements Layer. Green is green space; Red is built (grey) space. Source: Pesaresi, 2015
While geospatial mapping identifies the presence of green and open space, it does not indicate public ownership and use. For that, according to UN Habitat’s Eduardo Moreno, who has extensively studied Goal 11 and its indicators, national governments will have to work with local authorities to collect the information. This will likely require developing a sampling method, searching city records for the appropriate information, and transmitting the data back to the national government unit charged with reporting.
World Pop is a statistical application that, when applied with co-variates such as the GHSL, can demonstrate the location of population with greater detail than current assessments. The images below illustrate a progression of detail, moving from mapping census material by enumeration districts, mapping population data blended with Night Lights (one of the most well known of the current remote sensing applications often used to estimate population and economic activity [light means activity—a rough proxy]), and ending with mapping World Pop demographic assessments with the GHSL. For more information see here.
Hanoi depicted in Census Districts, in Night Lights and in Global Human Settlements Layer. Source: Sorichetta 2015
While these applications represent promising efforts in the emerging data collection front, one of the more immediate challenges will be to find ways to develop capacity in the public officials charged with reporting. This means education at national and subnational levels. In addition, work with civil society to communicate and translate the power of the indicators to guide decision-makers as they develop programs and policies in support of sustainable urbanization will also be necessary. It’s an exciting, challenging world out there!
References
Martino Pesaresi, “Global Human Settlement Data Use in the Perspective of SDG Monitoring,” presented at the GEO-XIII and 2015 Ministerial Summit, Group on Earth Observations, Mexico City, November 10, 2015.
Alessandro Sorichetta, World Pop and Flow Under Activities to Support the Sustainable Development Goals, presented at the GEO-XIII and 2015 Ministerial Summit, Group on Earth Observations, Mexico City, November 10, 2015.
Benjamin Bradlow is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Brown University. His research investigates the role of urban politics and institutions in processes of democratization and redistribution in Brazil and South Africa.
Benjamin Bradlow
The struggle embedded in the “Urban Goal”
The Sustainable Development Goals, which have now replaced the Millenium Development Goals, herald at least one major shift from the MDG era. No longer is a division posed between the “developed” and “developing” nations of the world. The SDGs are for all countries.
Long-standing divisions of the world economy and political relationships have posed spatial distinctions between East and West, or North and South. So it is interesting that one goal within this otherwise universal list makes a spatial distinction: Goal 11, the “Urban Goal.” In many countries in the “developing” world, a rural bias has been a common feature of post-colonial societies, in which urban populations are perceived to be independent-minded and critical of the excesses of post-colonial nationalist political parties that fall prey to what Robert Michels (1911) called the “iron law of oligarchy.” In the “developed” world, we have witnessed often extreme cycles of both public and private investment and disinvestment in cities, as elites oscillate between desiring the advantages of urban life and escaping its perceived dangers by moving to peripheral suburbs and fortified private enclaves.
It’s up to researchers and policy analysts to highlight the political alignments and relationships that make policy possible.
All of this suggests that the key dimension to realizing the elements of the Urban Goal boils down to understanding how cities are governed. This is not merely a matter of institutional design, which is a common pitfall of universalistic policy debates. Rather, it is of paramount importance that we understand how governing coalitions effect change, and on what bases these coalitions are maintained and changed to continue carrying out transformative agendas. The constituent groups will not necessarily be exactly the same in each city.
Goal 11 concerns the degree of inclusion of city residents in accessing land, shelter, basic services, public transport and livelihoods. These are distributional issues, and, as such, they will be contested. The language of conflict-free “win-wins” in this regard is disingenuous, as distributive struggles are the essence of political institutions. Conflict is unavoidable. The SDGs cannot provide a blueprint for how to manage urban political relationships. However, they do help provide a touchstone for the normative principles that can underpin the assembling of the coalitions that can make these relationships a reality.
My hope is that when cities want to implement, for example, public transport programs that have worked in places such as Curitiba, Brazil, or Bogotá, Colombia, and which have frequently acted as touchstones for recent experiments with bus rapid transit in major cities in Africa and Asia, politicians and planners do not seek only, or even primarily, to emulate the technical engineering details of these programs. Rather, they must first ask, what kind of politics allowed this to happen? Which groups and individuals are important to its success? What conflicts arose? What kind of compromises were necessary?
Universalistic goals like the SDGs are, by their very nature, unable to capture the political difficulties of what is being proposed. By virtue of their need to navigate the sheer complexity of urban social relationships and built environments, those individuals and institutions charged with making the SDGs a reality will be undertaking what is fundamentally a political task.
So what can we do to make sure the opportunity of a rather impressive set of goals is not lost? I believe that it is up to researchers and policy analysts to highlight the political alignments and relationships that make policy possible. Earlier generations of urban planners were once thought of as “doctors” who prescribed fixes to the body of the city. But principles of design and engineering will mean little without an analysis of the political conditions that make governments either able to effect change, or that make governments crumble under the complexity of the urban palimpsest. This will constitute a substantive engagement with the needs of policymakers and planners, which does not treat universalized development goals as a technical blueprint, but rather as a set of norms around which to frame political relationships and institutions. It is up to people in cities, their organizations, and their institutions, to struggle to make these principles reality.
William Dunbar is Communications Coordinator for the International Satoyama Initiative project at the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS) in Tokyo, Japan.
William Dunbar
“Inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”—this is the list the UN chose for headline attributes that cities should have. These are all good things, and the UN should be applauded for coming up with and approving this Goal. Of course, any list invites the reader to evaluate not only what is included, but also what is not. Some missing terms, such as “healthy” and “clean,” may be considered to be covered under the other list items, while other ideas, such as “having adequate public transport,” are mentioned in the longer description of the goal. One thing I would like to see not so deeply buried in the Goal 11 Targets is the idea of cities “integrated into the wider landscape.”
If Goal 11 is to be met, urban planning must take an integrated approach—not only in terms of the different socioeconomic classes within the city, but also in terms of the city and its surrounding landscape.
Integration into the wider landscape—this wording, which is used for protected areas under the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi Biodiversity Targets (also at #11, coincidentally), is hinted at by “inclusive,” but the description of the goal seems to be oriented toward inclusion of disparate classes within the city. It is true that both extreme poverty and wealth are often concentrated in urban spaces. But the inequality between urban “haves” and rural “have-nots” can be even starker, particularly when cities’ role as one part of a connected and integrated landscape is ignored. “Haves” and “have-nots” in this case refer not only to material wealth, but also to access to the opportunities and services that cities offer.
It hardly needs to be stated how much cities typically rely on surrounding rural, semi-rural and peri-urban areas for provisioning, regulating and even cultural services, in terms of peoples’ biocultural ties to nature. But it is also important to consider what cities contribute to the wider landscape. They provide a place for many people to live, relieving population pressures on areas needed for production activities, and also provide markets for agricultural products, among other services. Cities’ policies that ignore vital urban-rural relationships can have negative consequences not only for the surrounding areas, but also for the cities themselves.
As an example, consider a city that traditionally gets its food from surrounding agricultural areas. Policymakers are generally also concentrated in urban areas, and some of these individuals enact policies to make foreign imports cheaper, thinking that cheaper goods will improve life for urban residents. Not only does shipping larger amounts of goods from overseas mean increased pollution, noise, etc., now rural residents, deprived of a market for their products, are forced to abandon their land and move to the city, exacerbating the very problems that the policy was supposed to help, including urban poverty. This type of mass urbanization and rural abandonment is happening in many places around the world, fed partly by urban-centric policies that are meant to improve city life, but ignore the city’s integration into the wider landscape.
If Goal 11 is to be met and cities made inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, urban planning must take an integrated approach as the Goal’s description states—not only in terms of the different socioeconomic classes within the city, but also in terms of the city and its surrounding landscape. Much of our work with the Satoyama Initiative at UNU-IAS is in working toward policies that consider the landscape in a holistic manner, incorporating human settlements along with all other types of production areas. And if this is done in such a way as to maintain a healthy balance in urban-rural relationships, then cities may be able to have some of the other attributes not included in the UN’s list: “pleasant,” maybe, or even “enjoyable” and “a fulfilling place to live one’s life.”
Peter is a civil and structural engineer who has become a recognised world leader in major bridges, advanced composite technology and in sustainable development in cities and regions.
Peter Head
The first thing that has struck me is that I have been monitoring social media since September 25th, 2015, when the SDGs were launched, and Goal 11 has not had anything like the same coverage as others, apart from the push by the Urban Campaign Group. I think this is because the Goal is mainly about integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management, which is a complex and inaccessible subject for young people, compared with poverty, water supply, energy security or infrastructure provision. The critical importance of urban-rural integration makes it even more complex.
This is, of course, why we had such a tough time getting the Goal over the finishing line, but we all know that the content of Goal 11 lies at the heart of the transformational change we need to improve human well-being and resilience globally. It will be transformational on performance and, as no one is doing it, there will have to be a transformation in every urban settlement in the world!
There is a major disconnect between the words and meaning of Goal 11 and the intentions of cities and the research community.
Communication about Goal 11 and its importance is therefore going to be crucial going forward—getting the Goal is wonderful, but we need to communicate its importance to the whole world if communities are really going to get behind it. This is likely to be the role of cities and urban settlements in achieving Goal 11, as part of their lobbying of national governments to get them to adopt urban development strategies and to dedicate powers and finance to deliver the outcomes.
The second thing that has struck me is how the rhetoric in the “cities community” in the middle- to high- income countries has barely flickered as a result of the Goal being adopted. For example, in the U.K., there is a Foresight program underway which is reporting on Future Cities and their material does not reflect the importance of Goal 11. If you go onto the Future Cities Catapult website and search for SDG Goal 11, there are no responses. It seems, in the U.K. at least, that the SDGs are for everyone else?
I think one of the reasons for this is that integrated planning is complex, involves engaging communities and is little used in practice, whereas technology and sensors and IT systems are much more accessible and interesting.
So I conclude that there is a major disconnect between the actual words and meaning of Goal 11 and the intentions of cities and the research community. All the city lobby groups and mayors were great in supporting its inclusion, but I wonder if the meaning of the words was really grasped.
I went to a Future Earth meeting in Xiamen where this disconnect was discussed for China and the Asia Pacific Region and there was recognition (particularly from China) that co-design or integrated planning is really critical if the transformational change set out in Goal 11 and other Goals is to be realized. It requires an integration of social and natural science and economics in order to bring forward new tools to support capacity building for integrated planning and performance-based design.
It has been recognized that access to capital will be key to enabling these transformations to take place and this means making money available for research, planning, education and for projects. At this stage of knowledge and practice in integrated planning, there needs to be a big, fast application of money to research, planning and education that leads to capacity building and demonstration. Then, we need a massive scale up of that finance moving into city transformation using the money we know is available.
With this objective in mind, we are working very hard to develop a global funding mechanism to get money into integrated planning and performance-based design for urban-rural systems in which community participation and the economics of human well-being are embedded. What we need right now is a road map and mechanism for deployment of this funding, linked to the value this will create to society as trillions of dollars are moved successfully into delivery of Goal 11.
Cities can play a role in conserving the world’s cultural and natural heritage
Looking through the ten targets under Goal 11: Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, they essentially cover the three pillars of sustainability: social, environmental, and economic. I agree with previous conversations, particularly Yunus Arikan’s comments, that cities need solutions that are cross-cutting and holistically address social, environmental and economic concerns. I do think there are many synergies among the sustainability targets mentioned under Goal 11, but for simplicity, I’ll focus on one of the ten targets:
“Strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage.”
A laudable target, but how do cities move forward to embrace urban biodiversity conservation and to conserve the traditions, values and practices of local cultures? I do think unique opportunities exist in cities to protect both cultural and natural heritage. Many cultural traditions around the world are rooted in the use and appreciation of native flora and fauna. Landscaping and/or conservation of native plants will not only help in terms of biodiversity, but it will present an opportunity for urban residents to retain cultural traditions and practices.
Incentive-based policies that give a monetary benefit to landowners are the best way to encourage new practices that protect cultural heritage through nature.
For example, in New Zealand, the Maori use the fibers of native flax or harakeke (Phormium tenax) to make a wide variety of items including baskets, fishing nets and traps, rope, and clothing. Incorporating New Zealand flax into yards, neighborhoods, and community parks presents an opportunity for city residents to harvest fiber and to create items that were traditionally made by Maori. In addition, the nectar from NZ flax flower is an important source of food for many nectar-eating indigenous birds, such as the Tūī and Bellbirds. NZ flax is habitat to a host of other animals such as arthropods, geckos and skinks that feed on or live in native flax. One can think of such cultural and natural synergies in any city around the world.
To create enabling conditions where native landscaping and conservation practices are implemented, I think the first step is to make city policies where decision-makers, from homeowners to developers, are rewarded for incorporating native plants and habitats into the urban landscape. This can take many forms, but I believe incentive-based policies that give a monetary benefit to landowners are the best way to encourage new practices. For example, developers could get a tax break, a housing density bonus, or a permit break when they landscape with native plants and/or conserve wildlife habitat for a development project. In these native plant and animal habitat areas, educational signage should be installed that describes how these plants and animals were utilized and appreciated by local cultures. At a smaller scale, homeowners could get a property tax break or a reduction of their utility bills when they landscape their yards with native plants.
Also, to kickstart citywide efforts to protect cultural and natural heritage, cities can create examples on their own properties, such as public parks, where portions of the parks are designed for local plants and animals. These areas could serve as cultural demonstrations where people can learn about traditional use and appreciation of native flora and fauna. This can take the form of interpretive signage or outside “workshops” where people learn how to utilize local plants, such as flax weaving done by the Maori in New Zealand.
I believe to move a city forward, we need model examples. Brainstorming between citizens, ecologists, design professionals and planners can provide a suite of practical ideas to help produce local examples. Nothing speaks louder than a local project where one can observe the areas that have been transformed. People can see it and envision how they could do it on their own property. Think of a homeowner that sees his/her neighbor remove the exotic turfgrass and install a butterfly garden that has native host plants for butterfly caterpillars and nectar plants for adult butterflies. Or a developer that sees his/her competitor building a conservation subdivision where the cultural and natural heritage is infused into the design and management of the community. Such examples begin to create a new “norm” for a city and would foster the adoption of novel design and management strategies that conserve cultural and natural heritage.
As a Climate Reality Leader, Ling is dedicated to empowering others to step up and lead on sustainability.
Lim Hui Ling
Not having cities at the forefront would undermine the effectiveness of the ‘New Urban Agenda’
From the experience of the MDGs, global commitments can and have made a difference. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #11, an explicitly ‘urban SDG,’ is a win for the global development community as it signals that we are finally paying due attention to the centrality of cities to the future of sustainable development. In a way, as soon as the SDG was adopted, it exceeded its use-by date. It has served the purpose of focusing attention on the importance of making ‘cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.’ Ultimately, however, we will be measured by how well we implement this SDG.
Relegating cities to the role of providing inputs to the New Urban Agenda is anachronistic. Cities and city groups should drive the formulation of the SDG’s targets and their implementation.
The next United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in October, 2016, will be the first of the Habitat conferences to take place after the adoption of the SDGs. Aptly, the United Nations has promulgated that the conference is going to be about the ‘New Urban Agenda.’
Currently, even as the theme of empowering local governments is widespread in the discussions, there is still a focus on country-based national reports and on ‘National Habitat Committees’ in the preparation process for Habitat III. Local and regional governments are providing their inputs to the draft agenda, rather than driving it.
To be effective, the desired outcomes of the SDG have to be tackled at a localised level. From the agenda setting, to the design of the indicators and progress tracking, sophisticated local knowledge is a prerequisite. For instance, reducing urban environmental impact in Chengdu and in Prague could have different contextual meanings and would entail different approaches, with different emphases.
Considering the need for local expertise, and with city governments being most immediately connected to the people they serve, the urban level offers the optimum level of governance where public service and leadership interact with urban actors. Cities have the capacity to respond swiftly to local conditions with innovation, finance and appropriate solutions based on local resources. Good city leadership can corral resources from multiple partners, including from federal and state governments, private corporations and philanthropy, research institutions and sister cities.
There is already much talk about decentralised governance as part of the implementation of the New Urban Agenda. It might be worthwhile to bring the timeline forward; rather than centralise the negotiations and leave Member States to be the arbiters of what needs to be implemented under the ‘urban SDG,’ perhaps experiment by having cities and city groupings formulate the relevant implementation plans of the SDG instead. Relegating cities to the role of providing inputs to the New Urban Agenda is anachronistic. The governance of territories by city leadership has been evolving with the growth and expansion in economic power of urban regions. This is not a matter of Member States relinquishing their conventional roles in the international development negotiation process; it is more about recognising the reality of the ‘New Urban Agenda,’ where many cities are now the drivers of economic development, and are blazing the path in sustainable development, climate change mitigation and more; it is about harnessing the capabilities of an existing global constituency of cities, as a deserving and equal partner in delivering on the urban SDG.
Even at this stage of the agenda drafting period, Member States would benefit from bringing their cities into the inner circle of the preparatory process more by supporting Habitat III’s education and outreach efforts and ensuring that cities directly participate and take a more active role in defining their concerns and priorities and proposing implementation approaches for the urban SDG, both through the Habitat III regional and thematic forums and through other major international, inclusive platforms such as the annual World Cities Summit Mayors Forum.
If this unprecedented opportunity comes to bear, cities can avail themselves of bilateral cooperation and adapt from tried and tested approaches and the wealth of best practices that exist. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. At the Centre for Liveable Cities (CLC), based on our study of Singapore and other cities’ experiences, we have identified two very common factors underlying the successful transformation of many cities, from New York, to Bilbao, to Suzhou City, to others.
First, having a system of integrated planning is crucial, as it keeps the long-term targets constantly in view. Secondly, to make these plans into reality, the governance principles have to be inclusive, responsive and pragmatic, and effectively implemented by sound institutions embodying a culture of integrity. These principles have ensured that the conditions for the attainment of the desired liveability outcomes are well laid (See CLC Liveability Framework). With a holistic and long-range strategic implementation approach—we have until 2030—and with cities at the forefront as actors of change, we can certainly set high hopes to deliver on the targets of the urban SDG as well as the other SDGs.
To assist cities in achieving sustainable and liveable development and integrating the aforementioned principles of the Liveability Framework, the CLC regularly holds capability development programmes. These programmes are for city leaders interested in learning how to address the complex challenges related to rapid urbanisation and high population density. All cities are welcome to apply.
Shuaib Lwasa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Makerere University. Shuaib has over 15 years of experience in university teaching and research working on interdisciplinary projects related to urban sustainability.
Shuaib Lwasa
The promise and pitfalls of SDG 11
Goal 11 of the SDGs has finally embraced what I think of as a holistic view of cities and human settlements, moving from the slum-improved target of the MDGs to include human settlements ranging from hamlets to megacities. The goal’s adoption as one of the 17 SDGs is a big step in recognizing the importance of human settlements and cities, which contain more than half of the global population, as conveyors of sustainability. But cities and human settlements have long been developed with models and frameworks that idealize ‘space,’ the ‘order of that space’ and the outcomes of such order.
Whereas these frameworks have worked in some regions of the globe, they have failed to deliver in others, including sub-Saharan Africa. This implies that working towards not only effective targets, but meaningful targets that are measurable, is the challenge of the communities concerned with urban development. This is because, despite the dialogues that went towards formulating Goal 11, the dominance of strategies that have previously determined the nature and trajectory of urban development inherent in the goal are clear.
It is critically important to transcend output indicators by developing frameworks for outcomes that can be tracked through progress markers.
For example, the underlying definition of access to safe and affordable housing and to affordable and sustainable public transport systems is underlain with uncertainty. It is a tough challenge to achieve the goal and targets, which are complex. The indicators for whether these targets have been achieved are also likely to be complex, since not one single indicator would adequately measure, for example, the reduction of per capita environmental impact of cities in terms of air quality and wastes, or the sustainable urbanization of and capacity for participatory, integrated human settlement planning.
Grassroot activities for sociotechnical urban solutions and resilience building. Image: Shuaib Lwasa
Scanning the known and tested evaluation frameworks, there doesn’t seem to be an appropriate framework for monitoring such complex indictors. It seems as though the evaluation will have to embrace indices, which have a reductionist problem. The relations between goals make it even more challenging to send a signal that defines the resilience of cities and that would have some way to include risk reduction, climate actions, and poverty reduction, in all its dimensions as defined in Goal 1, but in cities specifically.
To achieve and evaluate Goal 11 will therefore require making resilience an actionable concept that is measurable, so that it becomes possible to address the inherent risks of taking action on climate and to deliver equitable development. This calls for alternative conceptual frameworks, methodologies, data and tools to measure progress in achieving Goal 11, among others. Sustainable development may be undermined by increasing risk and disasters and/or progress made so far in terms of development will likely be reversed by the increasing rate of climate-related disasters. Intensity of disasters notwithstanding, the case for extensive risk and associated disasters is a risk profile for much of Africa, and particularly for urban Africa.
There are synergies and tough choices to make to achieve resilient cities. These tough choices are potentially the basis for new conceptual frameworks, methodologies and tools for achieving the targets of as well as developing appropriate measuring indicators for Goal 11. Local specificities will play an important role, since the definition of ‘order’ as it is viewed in the global South now is different from the dominant frameworks of urban development. It is critically important to transcend output indicators by developing frameworks for outcomes that can be tracked through progress markers. These progress markers include but are not limited to the following;
Green urban infrastructure with a range of sociotechnical solutions that have been tested after failure of single unified infrastructure systems
Reducing urban risk—especially extensive risk and development-accumulated risk— and curbing losses
Transforming production processes and infrastructure that creates opportunities for all social groups for inclusiveness
Enhancing urban ecosystems and the possible range of ecosystem services dependent on locale specificities
Conventional urban development interventions have largely failed to reduce urban poverty; thus, creating opportunities for the urban poor seems a plausible progress marker to transcend traditional output indicators
A resilient city would have features that harness opportunities related to scalable resource efficiency, decentralized services and infrastructure, local employment and expanded markets and strategies that eradicate urban poverty
Dr. Anjali Mahendra is an urban planner & transport policy expert working at interface of research & practice on issues dealing with cities, transport, climate change & economic development
Anjali Mahendra
The urban SDG is important because it emphasizes the salient role of cities in advancing sustainable development goals in countries and globally. With increasing evidence on the urbanization of poverty—i.e., the fact that poverty is becoming increasingly concentrated in urban areas around the world—the urban SDG holds promise as a vision that marries the twin goals of environmental sustainability and poverty reduction in cities.
The urban SDG stands the greatest chance of success if cities to work to improve performance not necessarily in comparison with other cities, but in comparison to the their own status.
It is a means to achieve four crucial purposes: (i) to engage decision makers and build political will at all levels; (ii) to direct resources to cities through multiple national and international channels for critical investments in urban services infrastructure; (iii) to enhance technical and governance capacity, particularly at the local level and in smaller/secondary cities; and (iv) to instigate civil society, the private sector, and other actors to demand better services and governance in cities worldwide. This is a huge opportunity for nations, given the impending increase in urbanization likely to occur in the global south, especially in Asia and Africa.
Implementation of the urban SDG targets in many countries will be difficult, with some short term costs but long lasting economic, social, and environmental benefits. The targets of the urban SDG should not remain on paper, countries must redirect attention to cities, sign on to the targets, and ensure that policies and plans at multiple scales — national, regional, state, and local — are structured to enable progress towards these targets.
The urban SDG stands the greatest chance of being successfully implemented if helps create a vision for city leaders to work towards as they improve performance, not necessarily in comparison with other cities around the world, but in comparison with their own status at an earlier point in time. Measuring progress towards the urban SDG targets requires current data about gaps in access to urban services, households living in informal or substandard housing, city revenues and budgets, and other such indicators on which data is currently very limited in many cities, especially in the global south. City and national decision makers must prioritize collection of these data. Higher levels of government must design financial and other incentives for cities to improve performance in service delivery and be better accountable to citizens. The adoption of the urban SDG is a good start but decision makers must now commit to making choices that can lead to its successful implementation in cities around the world.
Jose A. Puppim de Oliveira is a faculty member at FGV (Fundação Getulio Vargas), Brazil. He is also Visiting Chair Professor at the Institute for Global Public Policy (IGPP), Fudan University, China. His experience comprises research, consultancy, and policy work in more than 20 countries in all continents.
Jose Puppim
How to recognize the natural/planetary limits in urban policy making?
The UN Post-2015 Development Agenda has indicated some of the UN goals (SDGs) for the next 15 years in order to achieve plain human development for all, while keeping life-supporting systems intact for the next generations. Nevertheless, we are far from having comprehensive governance and policy mechanisms to transform urban development processes to achieve SDG 11 (and the other goals), though there are some promising initiatives we could learn from and try to use strengthen policy processes and outcomes. One of the fundamental issues we need to address for dealing with sustainable development is recognition of the environmental/planetary limits in policymaking at various different levels. We need to make huge transformations in the way we think about development processes and their governance.
We are slow to understand how to galvanize transformation towards more sustainable urbanization and to find alternatives to our current model of development, beyond recognizing that we need significant transformation in our governance systems. A shared starting point in the criticisms on the existing alternatives, such as green growth, is that efficiency strategies, which constitute the core of the ecological modernization discourses, are not a sufficient condition for leading to a broader transformation towards sustainability.
Three levels of transformation are required to achieve Goal 11: (1) increasing speed in areas where we have knowledge, (2) ensuring balanced representation in decision-making and (3) altering our ethics.
Moreover, the world is turning into a polycentric system of governance, but our local institutions and organizations have not adapted to this new system. Faced with this reality, we can point to changes in governance patterns, both in theory and in practice, that can move us beyond the technocratic realm and can help us to negotiate a more equitable future on a shared and finite planet.
There are three levels of transformation that may be required with different degrees of efforts, needs and uncertainties. Firstly, we need to move much faster in the transformative helms where we already have control and knowledge, such as use of appropriate, more efficient technologies and existing managerial tools, as well as establishing good public transport and land-use policies to avoid sprawl. But this is not sufficient. For example, China has made great advances in the production of renewable energy and energy efficiency. Still, these changes have not been able to offset the growth in energy demand in China. The second level is the decision-making and implementation systems that constrain broader transformative changes that would come with more balanced power, such as giving voice to different groups and making organizations, in the public and private sector, more accountable, as well as trying to coordinate efforts to identify synergies among networks in a polycentric society. Tokyo has established the first and one of the most climate-friendly policies. This was only possible after almost a decade of debates with policymakers in government and civil society. Now, the city is trying to incentivize other towns to do the same. Last is the ethical level, as we need a significant change in the values and beliefs of society that would lead to changes to the large institutions that shape most of our political and economic decisions. Bhutan has introduced the new idea of the Gross National Happiness index, which challenge the fundamentals of our thinking about development.
New insights from the recent advancements in the discussions on the Post-2015 Development Agenda and the possible climate agreement after UNFCCC COP-21 can potentially help to propel larger transformative changes at the different levels. Our capacity to accelerate the transformation we need rests necessarily on how to incorporate the concept of sustainable development into different governance systems, including urban governance systems, and to translate the decisions into results in practice. The SDGs represent a new attempt to transform our approach to development, including the planetary boundaries, but we do not have the governance to steer this transformation. The history of sustainable development is littered with well-intended but ill-designed or ill-executed initiatives. Our hope is that the urban SDG will not be one more among them.
Karen Seto is Professor of Geography and Urbanization at Yale. She is an expert on urbanization in China and India, forecasting urban growth, and climate change mitigation.
Karen Seto
We will build more urban areas during the 21st century than in all of human history. Simply stated, we cannot afford to create 21st-century cities with outdated ideas and technology. Yet, that’s what we’re on the trajectory to do if we do not transform the way in which we build new and rebuild existing cities. The Urban SDG has the opportunity to be a catalyst for changing how we conceive, design and manage cities. We need to urgently work towards establishing a plan of action for implementing and monitoring progress towards these goals.
The Urban SDG has the opportunity to be a catalyst for changing how we conceive, design and manage cities, but right now we’re on a trajectory to repeat the city-building mistakes of the past.
I see three potential pitfalls with the Urban SDG. The first is that it sits on a shelf like a family portrait: it’s a snapshot that’s static, collecting dust over the years, but represents happy times and great potential. There has been a lot of energy and effort towards establishing the SDGs, but that is only the first step. The next phase will be even more challenging—implementation. Here, the second pitfall is that implementation and monitoring falls well short of the target. If the Urban SDG becomes a way to repackage and rebrand existing efforts, then it will not achieve its goals. No single city is safe, resilient and sustainable. Substantive effort, by way of science, policy and financing is necessary to make the Urban SDG a living process that can achieve its goals. The third potential risk is that cities emulate strategies from other cities that are not appropriate for their context, constituents or needs. This would be a triple loss in effort, time and opportunity. Cities will need to carefully identify sister cities with similar challenges and opportunities, from whom they can learn what works and what doesn’t.
How can we avoid these dangers? There is a long list of things that should be done, but there is at least one thing that must be done in order for the Urban SDG to be achieved and that is the coupling of strategies across scales. Many of the conditions, processes and policies that affect urban areas occur outside of urban areas, be it the political economy or regional or national contexts. Cities cannot achieve the goals of the Urban SDG if they act alone. They must have the support of regional and national governments and institutions. However, support is also not enough. Cities must work together to ensure that efforts undertaken at the local scale are not subverted by strategies at other scales or by other actors. This will require a lot of coordination and sustained dialogue among diverse institutions, leaders and communities.
Andrew Rudd is the Urban Environment Officer for UN-Habitat’s Urban Planning & Design Branch in New York, where he leads substantive advocacy for the urban dimension of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (including the SDGs).
Andrew Rudd
As with their predecessors, the SDGs will continue to bring attention to sustainability issues of global importance, encourage accountability from governments and (hopefully) attract financing. None of this is new, but that does not make any of it automatic. We, as an urban community, will have to enable much of it. In contrast to the MDGs, the SDGs are also set to tackle contemporary challenges, such as climate change, through contemporary, place-based approaches. The SDGs’ newly consultative formulation means greater stakeholder ownership. And their fresh focus on common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR) means that the developing world has as much stake in them as the developing world. (The upcoming agreement in Paris will show whether such an arrangement is feasible in practice.) These more novel aspects will also need our active support if the new issues’ metrics are to be consistently used, if cities are to actively engage in their implementation and if countries in all parts of the world are to take them seriously.
So what do we need to do now? The first thing is to help cities see why the SDGs (or the global development agenda at all, for that matter) matter. How do the million and one choices that urban dwellers make every day add up to the global consequences that ultimately return to impact them in local, personal ways? What to recommend to city dwellers whose choices are too limited in the first place to allow for sustainable behavior? How can they be encouraged to ‘do their part’ for SDG 11?
Behavioral choices generate demand for structural improvement that prompt further behavioral change.
No doubt my colleagues on this panel will have articulated many of the catalysts for its implementation, from cross-sectoral partnerships to cross-scalar governance; from lowering the risk of lending to cities to increasing their ability to generate local revenues. All of these will be essential. Let me add something else: getting the balance between structure and agency right. Urban settlement patterns often limit choice to the point where populations have little alternative but to behave in unsustainable ways (e.g. living in a freestanding house and driving a private car). The developers of such patterns often claim they are accommodating residents’ demands. Residents sometimes claim that they never had a real choice in the first place. How to address this catch-22?
The targets of SDG 11 aspire to a number of structural improvements, but the critical role of agency in them is not always clear. To remedy this, cities can do three things: (1) help urban residents better understand the trade-offs inherent in particular settlement patterns (e.g. high-density, mixed-use over low-density, single-use); (2) get urbanites involved earlier in planning processes (e.g. planning for new urban areas or retrofitting existing ones); and (3) incentivize and advocate for better personal choices (e.g. cycling over driving). Understanding the consequences of personal choices may lead city dwellers to demand more responsible choices from others, and ultimately to demand that the system itself provide more choices in the first place.
The NGO Transportation Alternatives, an advocate of nonmotorized transit infrastructure in New York, recently had an internal debate after another city motorist had struck and killed a cyclist. In this debate, a number of Transportation Alternatives members argued that continuing to advocate for a modal shift to more cycling was premature without more extensive, protected bike lane infrastructure in the first place. An opposing group argued that such advocacy had no credibility until a critical mass of cyclists could first demonstrate the demand for such infrastructure. Ultimately the consensus was ‘both.’ In other words, behavioral choices generate demand for structural improvement that prompt further behavioral change. (It is worth noting how such an intervention would contribute to the implementation of multiple SDG 11 targets: 11.2 on public transport provision, 11.6 on urban environmental impact and 11.7 on accessible public space provision, as well as 11.3 on making density more livable and 11.b on policies for accessibility, resilience and sustainability.)
With SDG 11, cities have their work cut out for them. To effectively balance structure and agency over the long term, key urban stakeholders will need to (re)configure themselves. In an earlier piece on the pedestrianization of Times Square, I wrote that residents need to contemplate and agree on common values. City leaders need to contemplate value-based priorities and execute and maintain a related vision. And enforcement bodies need to prepare to humanely and consistently guide the change inherent in any new vision. The sustainability battle we are fighting is a granular one, and it will not only be won or lost in cities, but by cities through a million different decisions; decisions that both reinforce and challenge the very structure that guides them. The implementation of SDG 11 could be very exciting indeed.
David Simon is Professor of Development Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and until December 2019 was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, an international research centre on sustainable cities based at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
David Simon
As a member of the Campaign for an Urban SDG, Mistra Urban Futures conducted a unique pilot project during the first half of this year, using its four transdisciplinary co-production research platforms in Gothenburg, Greater Manchester, Cape Town and Kisumu, along with Bangalore, to test the draft set of targets and indicators formulated by the Campaign and the UN statistical team up until that point. The extensive and detailed work of the Campaign has hitherto been undertaken in isolation from the daily pressures and realities of urban local authorities and other agencies that will be required to collect, compute and report on the indicators.
Compared with world or megacities, for instance, the five cities that formed the testbeds for this study—namely Bangalore, Cape Town, Gothenburg, Greater Manchester, and Kisumu—constitute a reasonably representative sample of the multitude of urban areas worldwide that will be faced with the new challenges of annual urban SDG reporting from 2016 forward. The precise extent of such responsibilities will vary by country in terms of how national reporting agencies allocate roles, but the specifically urban focus of most of the indicators makes some urban involvement inescapable. Indeed, this is part of the novelty and added value of Goal 11.
There is a clear discrepancy between the call for international standards on the one hand, and local realities on the other.
Our project examined the extent to which the required data already exist in accessible forms in the five cities and could thus be reported straightforwardly; which variables could be obtained or computed with relative ease, hence imposing only a small new burden; and which were unavailable without purposive primary data collection exercises.
If the urban SDG is to prove to be a useful tool to encourage local and national authorities alike to make positive investments in the various components of urban sustainability transitions as intended, then it is vital that it should prove widely relevant, acceptable and practicable. Otherwise, reporting will become piecemeal or irregular, data will be fabricated to suit perceived political advantages, or compliance with reporting obligations will become the principal objective rather than utilising the reporting as a stimulus to promote positive change towards urban sustainability.
It is noteworthy that not one draft indicator was regarded as both important or relevant and easy to report on in terms of data availability. Since the targets and indicators are supposed to be forward-looking and setting the agenda for the next 15 years, the overall consensus of the local authorities participating in this study suggests that for these to become useful and implemented at a city level, they must be relevant for local policymakers. Hence, they cannot be too few and general in scope and range, while there is a clear dilemma in striking a balance between reducing the number of indicators and increasing the policy relevance. There is also a clear discrepancy between the call for international standards on the one hand, and local realities on the other. This will not be easily bridged.
The project results made an immediate impact on the Campaign’s work and were made available to the UN statistical team for their current phase of finalising the targets and indicators. Once the SDGs are implemented, the Campaign anticipates an ongoing need for monitoring, targeted training/capacity building in urban local authorities in poor countries, and probably some revisions to the initial indicators—much as has happened with the MDGs. Mistra Urban Futures has volunteered to play a key role in this process as a critical friend, since we believe that urban areas and their inhabitants worldwide will be better off and more sustainable with Goal 11 than without it. Indeed, this has formed the basis for the entire Campaign.
Bolanle Wahab, PhD, is a Lecturer and Researcher and former acting Head of Department of Urban and Regional Planning and also the Pioneer Coordinator of the Indigenous Knowledge and Development Programme at the University of Ibadan in Ibadan, Nigeria.
Bolanle Wahab
Urban SDG #11 is a good goal, but for us to get things on the right track, especially in the developing world, this goal cannot be isolated from the other 16 goals. Of great importance are Goals 1 and 3: (1) End poverty in all forms everywhere, and (3) Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages, respectively.
For SDG #11 to succeed, indigenous knowledge systems and practices of peoples and communities in different nations and regions of the world must be given adequate recognition and attention. The range of issues to which indigenous knowledge systems can contribute is broad, including sanitation; urban planning and development control; climate change and disaster risk management; solid waste management; informality in planning; slum rehabilitation; new housing projects; urban greening and landscaping; and urban and peri-urban agriculture; and more.
Let the people be part not only of planning and implementation, but in setting the goals.
Most ancient towns and cities in Africa, for example, had no master or development plans drawn-up in planning studios; yet, these settlements developed in an organised manner through the active involvement and collaboration of all stakeholders. The siting of structures (buildings, footpaths, tracks, open/recreational spaces, markets, community halls, village square, wells etc.) was done consciously, in relation to one another. Inclusive community planning was employed, whereby physical developments were controlled and monitored to prevent incompatible land uses and developments on flood plains, wetlands and disaster-prone areas, thereby promoting safe and resilient settlements. The tool or approach used throughout was indigenous knowledge, the systems of accumulated local knowledge and practices constructed and applied by local people and communities in the course of their everyday interactions with their living and working environment. Contemporary settlement planning knowledge has abandoned this system and the result is the chaos that is the experience of many African cities.
It will be key to include the participation of “ordinary people” and indigenous communities through the integration of their knowledge, attitude and practices in policy formulation and execution at all levels of government. A shift in the planning paradigm is required; let the people (irrespective of social, economic, cultural and political class/status) be part not only of planning and implementation, but in setting the goals and thereby setting the standards for the creation of inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable human settlements—the aims of SDG #11. In this way, project beneficiaries will be effectively engaged, will exhibit a sense of ownership, and will ensure project sustainability and capacity for replication.
Although local people may be low in formal western education, the knowledge systems and practices that have sustained their needs and aspirations in their environment over time are nevertheless very relevant for more formal settlement planning process. Such practices are still very dear to them. Their knowledge and modes of thinking, participatory decision-making, and the ways they implement programmes and projects should be integrated into the framework for implementing the urban SDG #11. Local context is critical.
By missing out on key information and strategies that are part of indigenous knowledge systems, SDG #11 could go badly wrong, especially in Africa. . It is even segregatory, discriminatory, morally wrong and against the principles of equity, justice and fair play to not include them. This is more so that the peoples’ roles and services are made indispensable in the social and economic development of any village, town or city. Under SDG #11, settlement planning should focus on making city life more accommodating for the poor through more compact development with adequate infrastructure and minimal risks; urban regeneration with adequate public spaces, and accompanying greens, especially in tropical regions; and creation of employment opportunities which incorporate cultural values. Exclusive developments, as in most African capitals, should be minimized. Population shifts to urban areas could be minimized through the enhancement of living standards in rural areas while discouraging/reducing urban sprawl and its effect on the available land for agriculture.
Lorena Zárate is co-coordinator of the Global Platform for the Right to the City and former president of the Habitat International Coaltion.
Lorena Zárate
The inclusion of an explicitly urban Sustainable Development Goal inside the Agenda 2030, adopted by the UN General Assembly last September, can be seen as an important step forward if compared with the Millennium Development Goals. But at the same time, it raises some of the same concerns—and new ones too—related in particular to the lack of an explicit human rights approach and the associated state obligations.
SDG11 raises concerns about the lack of an explicit human rights approach and the associated state obligations.
It is more than evident that, in an increasinly urbanizing world, bold commitments and actions should be taken at the city and regional levels if we really want to achieve sustainability and improve quality of life for both urban and rural populations. Local and subnational spheres of government are at the frontline of those challenges and its role should be recognized and supported by national and international institutions. On the other hand, the final formulation of the urban goal and the current discussion of its related indicators reveal some important gaps and concerning omissions that could be misleading in the measurement of “progress” during the coming fifteen years.
From our point of view, here some particular concerns:
a) In tracking the access to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services, special attention should be paid to the current national and local policies for rehabilitating and increasing the social housing stock, the level of protection for tenants (including those living in so-called informal settlements), the support of social production of habitat projects and the programs to address homelessness. At the same time, mandatory data collection of privatization of public/social housing and an inventory of the stock of available vacant buildings/land and abandonned/subutilized facilities and community infraestructure should be part of the equation.
b) UN-Habitat’s current, broad definition of “slum” and “informal settlements”—that involves the lack of secure tenure, access to basic servicies, sufficient living area, durable housing and non-hazardous location—will not be instrumental in identifying the specific problems that need to be addressed in different national and local contexts. The indicator should be disaggregated in order to get more precise information about each of the five mentioned characteristics.
c) As for the “security of tenure” component, it should include data on cases of harassment and forced evictions and displacements, as defined by international human rights instruments.
d) Affordability of both housing and public transport system (including integrated multimodal and non-motorized/non-carbon-related options) should be measured in relation to the real evolution of basic income and purchasing power of the households.
e) Although the word “participation” is mentioned few times in some of the specific targets, there is no explicit mention of the need to democratize decision making processes and put in place and/or strengthen the institutional spaces and tools for a truly democractic management of the territory. The development of indicators should actively solicit input from civil society and social movements who are effective in participation processes, and include their ideas in the implementation and monitoring of public policies and budgets at local, metropolitan, regional and national levels.
f) In protecting and safeguarding the world’s cultural and natural heritage, indicators should track the percentage of the local/national budget that is being managed by indigenous people and other ethnic and minority groups, who preserve biodiversity and promote social diversity and multiculturalism.
g) The promotion of the use of local materials and traditional building techniques should be a priority for building sustanaible and resilient communities. This will require a revision of the current global and national statistical data collection that frequently characterizes such methods as “precarious,” “informal” or “irregular,” or not in compilance with the construction regulatory framework.
It is clear that we have many challenging tasks ahead. As we can see, many of the targets are multidimensional and their appropiate measurement will require more than one indicator, and often composite ones. At the same time, given the prominent role that cities will play in monitoring progress, adequate technical and financial support should be available both for governamental and non-governamental institutions for doing so. Finally, stronger intersectorial and interactoral coordination will be necessary in order to address the SDG11’s commitments.
The contents for a “New Urban Agenda,” to be adopted at the upcoming UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III, Quito, October 2016) are now being discussed inside a complex and intense process. For that to be, at the same time, ambitious and operative, we should be looking at deepening the debates and filling the gaps from the experiences and proposals for the Right to the City that social movements, civil society and local authorities are putting forward.
When Montréal’s Parc Oxygène was bulldozed in June 2014, a local newspaper article aptly spoke of a ‘neighborhood in mourning.’ The narration of its destruction by a neighbor is heart-wrenching (1). This small park in the midst of high rises was an urban oasis made and looked after by its neighbors for more than two decades (2). Parc Oxygènewas created out of a laneway that was once used as a shortcut by motorists. This form of use represented a danger to local children until residents took it upon themselves to replace tarmac with vegetation—a somewhat radical, but essentially civically responsible, act.
When the primary mechanism for decision-making is determining spending priorities, the value of citizen engagement and labor is effectively zero. It is time to account for the value of citizen engagement in public spaces.
For many years thereafter, Parc Oxygène remained a place to play or enjoy a quiet moment, a space for community events, and a site included on walking and cycling tours for people interested in citizen action and urban greening. It continued to be a shortcut, but only for non-motorized traffic, offering those who passed through it a brief experience of being in a different world between busy streets, which at moments could inspire a ‘sense of wonder’ that Rachel Carson (2011) might have recognized.
The path through Parc Oxygène. Image: Janice Astbury
The destruction of Parc Oxygèneelicited feelings of shock, frustration, devastation and despair. This outpouring was a direct consequence of the emotion that had been invested in this small site. It reflected a deep engagement with place, nature and community on the part of many people. Local governments are increasingly encouraging citizens to take responsibility for looking after and enhancing urban spaces, and many citizens are keen to take on such roles. However, Parc Oxygène is an example of how a potentially win-win scenario can, instead, end in tears.
Parc Oxygène occupied a privately owned space, a situation which is not uncommon among places cared for by citizens—and not necessarily less secure than citizen-led initiatives at public sites. As long as the owner did not want to develop or sell the land, Parc Oxygène could continue to exist, to the apparent satisfaction of many. There were ongoing calls for local government to purchase the land to secure the park’s future, but this demand was never met. When the owner eventually confirmed an intention to build on the land, the community waged a political and legal battle to save it. While government representatives expressed their sadness at the impending loss of the park and their sympathies with the local community, they did not consider purchase of the land justifiable—suggesting instead that the eventual creation of a green space of a similar or larger size could compensate for its loss.
The legal appeal to save Parc Oxygène was focused on ‘right of way’ and a safeguard order (temporary injunction) was sought to prevent construction on the site while this question was properly considered. The court refused to issue the safeguard order, stating that the right of way was questionable and, even if established, was not relevant to emission of the construction permit because a passage would remain between the existing and new buildings. The judgment also conveyed disapproval of what the tribunal perceived as an effort to transform a right of way into a right to plant trees and make a park (Syndicat de la copropriété communauté Milton Parc v. 9251-3191 Québec inc., 2014).
While the effort to save Parc Oxygène by invoking right of way was not successful, there was, at least, a framework in place to defend the principle. But what about a customary ‘right of care’? What value is given to two decades of a collective labor of love? Or to the place in the hearts of many Montrealers that Parc Oxygène occupied? Not very much, it appears.
There is sometimes a ‘right of way’ but never a ‘right of care.’ Image: https://www.facebook.com/parcoxygene
Valuing engagement
It was notable that local government representatives and engaged citizens employed a very different style of discourse when speaking about the loss of Parc Oxygène. A neighbor and friend of the park described how: “It took 20 years to build and about 20 minutes to destroy; our neighborhood is now mourning.” (Lalonde, 2014) Whereas a City Councilor justified the decision by saying:“At this point, the only way to keep it would have been for the borough to acquire it and that would have simply cost the borough too much. It would have cost about half-a-million dollars for a plot that is only seven meters wide.” (Ibid.)
The story of Parc Oxygène. Image: Janice Astbury
For the individual engaged with Parc Oxygène, its value is expressed in terms of the time that volunteers have spent making the park. The result of its destruction is deeply emotional; it elicits ‘mourning.’ The Councilor, on the other hand, while acknowledging that “It is wonderful that a group of people invested so much energy in creating a garden and keeping it so pretty for so long,” focuses on the size of the plot and promises, in the same interview with a local journalist, “to compensate for the loss of greenery in the neighborhood” (Ibid.) He commits to ensuring that the neighborhood “has more green and public spaces, bigger than the size of this lot” (Ibid.)
For the Councilor, Parc Oxygène is interchangeable with other plots or lots that provide green space and public access. Its affective value is discounted. Similarly, the Councilor speaks of the worth of Parc Oxygène in terms of the monetary value of the land and concludes that its cost is too great: “You have to look into your heart and ask if you can really justify spending that much money on such a small plot of land when we have a limited budget. We have to make choices” (Ibid.)
Perhaps half a million dollars sounds like a lot, but not when you think about things like the cost of snow removal. The City of Montreal spends on average $155 million a year (“Ville de Montréal – Déneigement Montréal – Opérations de déneigement,” n.d.) in order to ensure that traffic can move about unimpeded and cars can be parked on the sides of streets (3). Or, one can think about the value of what has replaced Parc Oxygène: a few apartments. This has not made any significant contribution to local housing availability, as they are situated in what was already one of Canada’s most densely populated neighborhoods.
Parc Oxygène: before (top) and after (bottom). Images: https://www.facebook.com/parcoxygene
The City Councilor is a member of a party that occupies all of the seats in the borough and is very supportive of both greening and citizen action. The party was founded by environmental activists and continues to call upon citizens to engage in the protection of green space, such as in its current campaign to protect Mount Royal (http://www.monprojetmontreal.org/rutherford). However, when push came to shove, the Councilor appealed to citizens to be rational and accept that the cost of protecting Parc Oxygène was too high because it was small and presumed to be of little ecological significance. The engagement of citizens and their emotional attachment was implicitly understood as having less value than other things that might place demands on public funds.
Why is citizen engagement with urban green space so little valued?
Citizens are increasingly called upon to play a role in looking after urban spaces as local governments struggle to maintain public green space and to regenerate ‘derelict’ land. Citizens agree to take on these responsibilities because they care and because they enjoy the work involved. Therefore, it appears to be in everyone’s interest to invite this sort of engagement.
However, this approach does not sit comfortably with conventional ways of governing. It generally entails broadening the possibilities of what can happen in urban spaces and many engaged citizens will not content themselves with tidying up and watering trees. So by promoting the value of responsibility for collective space, the diversity of interventions that follow may challenge certain other values.
The unpredictability of outcomes may lead to surprises—and surprises can be good, because they lead to new thinking. But the non-standard character of citizen-managed spaces may appear to some people to be somewhat messy and chaotic. These spaces may not fit the stereotype of either ‘natural area’ or ‘well-managed park.’ This is one reason that such places and the work of the citizens may be undervalued.
Urban nature also tends to be generally undervalued. It may sometimes be invisible to the uninitiated, and in some cases the value (from a human perspective) is only created through the relationship, i.e. the collaboration between people and nature.
As Hinchliffe et al. (2005, p. 643) assert: “Cities are inhabited by all manner of things and made up of all manner of practices, many of which are unnoticed by urban politics and disregarded by science.” However, “engagements with a place on a day-to-day basis, or through less frequent but recurrent visits, can generate a sensibility about, or intimacy with, ecologies of place” (Hinchliffe & Whatmore, 2006, p. 131). At a threatened site in Birmingham, U.K., the researchers, along with volunteers and ecologists from a local conservation organization, attempted to engage fully with the place and the nonhumans who lived there. In this way, they were able to recognize the presence of a species that had gone unnoticed during an environmental impact assessment because its practices were different than those noted by scientists in other settings (Hinchliffe et al., 2005).
It is also difficult to appreciate the social, cultural and ecological assets of a place without living in it. Ecosystem services are more likely to be recognised by those who benefit from them. Spending time in a Manchester alleyway transformed by citizens reveals a range of supporting, regulating, provisioning and cultural ecosystem services.
Depending on how you look at it, a cluttered alleyway or a cornucopia of ecosystem services for local residents to enjoy. Image: Janice Astbury
And, of course, everything looks different when you make (or renovate) it yourself.
Rethinking what a living room might feel like from the perspective of a green sofa. Image: Janice Astbury
The process of engagement itself is undervalued by the unengaged. That long process through which we gradually connect with a place: storing memories, deciding to take responsibility, starting to take action to make the place better… it’s what most people do in their own homes, but for many it is difficult to imagine extending that feeling into a wider, shared realm.
And when the primary mechanism for decision-making is determining spending priorities, the value of citizen engagement and labor becomes invisible—it is effectively zero. In monetary terms, it is seen as ‘free’ and it does not appear in the budget or the list of assets. However, when governments call on citizens to engage, they are often, in effect, doing the calculation; they are hoping that citizens will take on tasks that would otherwise need to be paid for. Should they not, therefore, take some responsibility to ensure that there are returns on citizens’ engagement?
Perhaps it is time to account for the value of spaces of citizen engagement. As in-kind contributions are assigned monetary value in grant proposals, it might be interesting to try to do this for the value of certain sites—because one can assume that the effort that has been put into them is some reflection of their worth. This would make an interesting contrast with the more common contingent valuation methods that ask what people would pay (if they had to pay) to use or simply protect environmental qualities and ecosystem services. Within the former perspective, citizens become active participants collaborating with nature, rather than existing as consumers or distant protectors of nature (from other humans).
Designating and protecting places that matter to communities may be an appropriate way to assign value to spaces of engagement. Manchester City Council developed a Local Nature Reserve designation for places that were not necessarily biologically important, but were important to local communities. They have an explicit function “to provide opportunities for people to become involved in the management of their local environment as well as giving people special opportunities to study, learn or simply enjoy nature.”
The right to the city should include a right to engage with nature
It is worth noting that in the case of Parc Oxygène, citizens were understood to have a potential claim to a right of way. Rights of way are well protected in some countries, so why not a ‘right of care’ or a ‘right of attachment’?
As the poet Norman MacCaig (1969) asks in his poem A Man in Assynt:
Who owns this landscape?
Has owning anything to do with love?
For it and I have a love-affair…
Hinchliffe and Whatmore (2006, pp. 132–133) describe a moment when the people engaged with the threatened Birmingham site created a willow sculpture, explaining that “they want to be involved in doing something to express their anger that despite all their efforts it seems as though development will go ahead on this site with little or no attempt to secure ecological potential. They are local residents, activists from the Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust, people who grew up near the site. They are all trespassing, as this is private land, even though they have used it for years as a place to watch wildlife, to walk in and through, to climb trees, to look upon from home and the nearby allotments.”
Should there not be a right to urban nature? As the city has evolved from a place where people went to market, and then to work, and, now, into the dwelling place of the majority of people on Earth, we may have different needs to fulfill and new rights worthy of recognition. It has been suggested that our relationships with other species are changing: An increasingly urban population has moved from a utilitarian perspective, to an ecocentric view that sees nature as best kept separate from people, to a new tendency to seek more interactive relationships, involving activities such as feeding birds instead of eating them. (Buijs, Elands, & Langers, 2009; Teel, Manfredo, & Stinchfield, 2007)
If our relationships with other species are evolving and we no longer need hunting grounds or places to graze livestock, and we are perhaps less excited about gazing passively at formal gardens, we may require different kinds of urban spaces. Perhaps we need new kinds of urban commons where we can interact with urban nature in a diversity of ways.
Parc Oxygène was the subject of a lengthy political struggle, which appeared to have garnered considerable support. Failure to save it was due in part to a lack of policy tools—and perhaps to a lack of language to talk about what urban places and urban nature mean to the citizens who engage with them. Its value was not recognized as being of the sort that can provide justification for budget allocations. There was no existing designation for a ‘site of community engagement’ and, as Hinchliffe and Whatmore’s work in Birmingham showed, ecological significance can be difficult to demonstrate using conventional measures. The engaged citizens are sometimes the only ones who can see it.
There was no protection of customary ‘right of care’ in the way that there was for ‘right of way.’ And there was no way to declare that, thanks to the dedication of citizens, a pedestrian right of way had also become a park, guaranteeing a right of access to urban nature in the manner that right of way in the U.K. often ensures right of access to the countryside.
“This alleyway is a park.” Image: Janice Astbury
A discussion remains to be had concerning what kinds of new commons are required to meet the needs of humans and other species in cities. But one thing is clear: if citizens are called upon to engage, then the depth of that engagement must be recognized and valued. Expectations of responsible citizenship demand responsibility toward citizens and to the places—and the nature—that they love.
Buijs, A. E., Elands, B. H. M., & Langers, F. (2009). No wilderness for immigrants: Cultural differences in images of nature and landscape preferences. Landscape and Urban Planning, 91(3), 113–123.
Carson, R. (2011). The Sense of Wonder. Open Road Media.
Hinchliffe, S., Kearnes, M. B., Degen, M., & Whatmore, S. (2005). Urban wild things: a cosmopolitical experiment. Environment and Planning D, 23(5), 643.
Hinchliffe, S., & Whatmore, S. (2006). Living cities: towards a politics of conviviality. Science as Culture, 15(2), 123–138.
MacCaig, N. (1969). A man in my position. Chatto & Windus.
Syndicat de la copropriété communauté Milton Parc v. 9251-3191 Québec inc., 2014 QCCS 3012. Retrieved from http://citoyens.soquij.qc.ca/php/decision.php?ID=A75BD8513CE46EF45219AFAA53D81017
Teel, T. L., Manfredo, M. J., & Stinchfield, H. M. (2007). The Need and Theoretical Basis for Exploring Wildlife Value Orientations Cross-Culturally. Human Dimensions of Wildlife, 12(5), 297–305.
Ville de Montréal – Déneigement Montréal – Opérations de déneigement. (n.d.). [Web page]. Retrieved July 16, 2015, from http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/portal/page?_pageid=8217,136273620&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL
The prognosis for urbanization is challenging—in the next 40 years, urban population will double. Under the growing pressure of modern urban development, large parks are valued by people more than ever. From the beginning of city development, large parks have played a very special role; originally, they were sacred groves, places for royal residence and hunting activity in addition to acting as public parks. The first conference entirely dedicated to different aspects of large parks was initiated by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature in Sweden and the Association for Ekoparken, in Stockholm, with the support of leading Swedish universities and NGOs.
The first conference entirely dedicated to different aspects of large parks was initiated by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature in Sweden and the Association for Ekoparken, in Stockholm, with the support of leading Swedish universities and NGOs.
It is no coincidence that the initiators of this event were people engaged in the fight for Ekoparken (now named “The Royal National City Park”): Richard Murray and Henrik Waldenström. The Royal National City Park was inaugurated in 1995 by his majesty, Carl XVI Gustaf, the King of Sweden, and was declared the first national park in the world to have a special law protecting nature, culture and recreation values. This park is an important part of Stockholm’s blue-green infrastructure and covers an area of 27 square kilometers. It is a classic example of the transformation of a formal leisure and royal hunting park into a public facility, and one of the most famous and most visited park areas in Sweden, with rich biodiversity based, to a great extent, on a large number of old oaks and a range of unique historic landscapes.
Carl XVI Gustaf, the King of SwedenHaga Park is the part of The Royal National City Park in Stockholm. Photo: Maria Ignatieva
Why were large parks chosen as a main emphasis of the conference? One of the keynote speakers, world famous American landscape ecologist, Richard Forman, clearly answered this question by emphasizing the importance of large parks (large patches of green) for preserving biodiversity, mitigating heat island effects and urban hydrology. Big parks are particularly treasured by most urban residents for recreation and are “a primary source of nature for human well-being in cities.” Large parks are the main “stepping” stones in urban green infrastructure and fulfill a variety of ecosystem services.
One of the big parks in Tokyo, Japan. Photo Maria Ignatieva
Large parks are an important basis for understanding cities’ natural and cultural histories, since some of them are oases left over from the original natural and semi-natural ecosystems. Big parks require particular attention and protection in developing countries, since they are the first green areas that are threatened to be reduced or even to completely disappear under the pressure of real estate prices. Thus, creating a network of people working with different aspects of large parks was also one of the main goals of the conference.
130 participants from 27 countries and six continents came to Stockholm. Presenters covered a wide range of visions for large parks in large cities, such as historical aspects, the role of such parks in the quality of urban life, creating sustainable green infrastructure and ecosystem services. Much attention was paid to the role of large parks in city planning and design and their relation to the European Landscape Convention.
The diversity and breadth of case studies of large parks around the world was striking. Some European cities, such as Stockholm and Moscow, are very lucky to have big national parks with wild nature within the city’s boundaries. Iranian, German, Colombian, Japanese and most U.S. cities are not so lucky—they tend to have “regular” public parks created in the 19th to early 20th centuries, in which tree groves and lawns are combined with water bodies and a wide range of recreational facilities. In some cases, in the absence of green resources in urban areas, such parks could include formal residential greens and even abandoned roads and railways.
Park Südgelände in Berlin is one of the most famous examples of including vegetation on abandoned railways in a public park. Photo Maria Ignatieva
It is also worth mentioning the role of Fedenatur, the European Association of Periurban Parks, where natural, fluvial and agricultural parks are located in metropolitan and peri-urban areas. Such parks can be found in Barcelona, Milan, Lyon and other cities in southern Europe.
Quite a few conference presenters discussed large parks in the broader context of urban green infrastructure. For example, Peter Clark pointed out that in 2009 in European cities, the proportion of green areas to total urban coverage ranged between 10 and 20 percent—a high proportion compared to 5 percent for Kuala Lumpur and 1.5 percent for Hong Kong, but less than Seoul’s 25 percent and Beijing’s 29 percent.
Park of the Summer Palace is an important part of Beijing’s green infrastructure. Photo: Maria Ignatieva
Clark expressed the importance of taking into consideration the multiplicity of economic, ecological, social and health impacts of urban green spaces. Today, not only big parks but wastelands, military exercising fields, old industrial sites, swamps, sport and recreation grounds, institutional gardens, private domestic gardens, allotment gardens, urban farms, boulevards, parkways, and roadside wedges should be re-valued. They can be “supporters” of as well as connectors to large urban parks.
In past centuries, when cities covered a rather small area, one could easily reach the nearest urban forest or pasture. With the growing congestion of industrial cities, fresh air, places for rest, berry picking and just walking in nature have started to become luxuries. In Stockholm, for example, the first public parks stemmed from formal royal parks, which were originally opened to the public from the middle of the 18th century (Kungsträdgården and Humlegården) under pressure from enlightenment actors. However, it took almost a hundred years for the city of Stockholm to plan and implement the first true public parks. In the late 19th century, two rather small parks, Strömparterren and Berzeli Park, were created. Djurgården, a former royal hunting ground, was situated just outside the built-up city and for many years compensated for the lack of public parks in central Stockholm.
Richard Murray, in his introductory presentation, demonstrated that in modern cities, land values vary a lot and even in very expensive places, such as New York, it is possible to find quite cheap pieces of land where green areas can be developed. If the costs and benefits of the ecosystem services that green areas provide were valued, developing green areas would be quite profitable.
The presentation by Mary Worrall and Sari Suomalainen on Birkenhead Park (U.K.) aroused particular interest among conference participants since it is the first publicly-funded park in the world to incorporate the concept of a park for people. This park was a catalyst and a model for the development of urban public parks in the U.S. and worldwide. The presenters’ analysis of social activities in this park uncovers the connection between the park’s history and today’s social use of the park.
Another European concept, the German “Volkspark” (People’s Park), flourished in the beginning of the 20th century. Such parks were based on natural landscapes and aimed to provide a wide range of recreational activities as well as to give work to unemployed people during the first years of WWI and the economic crises of the late 1920s.
A great example of a “Volkspark” is Amsterdamse Bos, which was developed in the 1920s and 30s with the help of 20,000 unemployed people. They turned empty agricultural land into a park full of diverse recreational facilities as well as amusing agricultural landscapes, such as a goat farm.
Parks and their role for biodiversity
In the densifying urbanized world, large parks are becoming special refuges for biodiversity. Thomas Elmquist, the guru of ecosystem services research from the Stockholm Resilience Center, discussed the importance of continuous green areas. The United Nations’ Ecosystem Millennium Assessment clearly demonstrated the value of large patches of urban greenery for biodiversity in general. Elmquist cited Ban Ki-Moon, secretary general of the United Nations, who said: “The principal message is that urban areas must offer better stewardship of the ecosystems on which they rely.” Elmquist provided recent costs of restoring waste lands, patches of urban forests and similar habitats and concluded that ecosystem services in big cities pay their costs of upkeep several times over.
Negative tendencies in large parks
Positive experiences from different case studies from around the world were overshadowed by sad stories of how great parks have lately been neglected and even ruined.
One such example is the Patte d’Oie Forest Reserve in Brazzaville, the Republic of the Congo. Benoit Fondu pointed out that rapid urbanization has “eaten” quite a big piece of this forest and has also resulted in unfavorable changes in fauna and flora. Benoit suggested ways to save the remnants of this treasured urban forest, including by creating a fence, and, most importantly, involving local communities in protection of the Reserve.
“Patte d’Oie Forest Reserve” in Brazzaville. Photo courtesy of Benoit Fondu
In the Iranian part of Kurdistan, in the city of Sanandaj, a large park called Deedgah has another kind of problem. A newly constructed highway has divided the park. The consequences are visible: there is now limited access, more noise and more inconvenience for the park’s visitors.
Deedgah and Mellat parks in Sandaj, Iran. Photo courtesy of Hooshmand Alizadeh
Similar problems are being experienced by the National Park, Losinij Ostrov, in Moscow, Russia. The Moscow Ring Road now passes through the National Park for 7.5 kilometers, fragmenting habitat and creating barriers for the park’s fauna.
However, there are solutions to mitigate such problems, such as ecoducts. Wildlife passages that have proven successful in Australia, the U.S., the Netherlands, Sweden and in other countries.
Ecoduct in Brisbane. Photo courtesy of Mel McGregor
Unfortunately, African countries seemed to be behind in solving the problems of large parks, especially in the fields of planning and design at the master plan level. Africa has the greatest national parks that are sources of pride for their respective nations, but urban parks urgently need care and awareness.
Nevertheless, there were some positive examples presented from Africa. A newly developed large park now exists in Ibadan, Nigeria. It was developed on a spot that previously had inaccessible, overgrown vegetation. Now, it is a popular spot for urban recreation. Another case study came from Beira, the second largest city of Mozambique, where a large, multifunctional city park, Parque Rio Chiveve, is being planned along the river. Here, unique White, Red and Black Mangrove ecosystems will be preserved and included in the park’s conceptual design.
Interestingly enough, a newly presented proposal—Medellin River Park in Colombia—has a similar aim: to restore the river’s ecosystem and bring it back to its citizens.
Human rights
Graham Fairclough brought up a very important point for discussion at this conference. He argued that urban parks should be seen not apart from the city, but as a part of the city. He asked: “Can a place be called a city if it has no parks?” His answer was: “Landscape is a culturally-enriched concept owned by everyone.” The Florence Charter and the European Landscape Convention are dealing with landscapes and proclaim that “landscape is an area as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” and further that “landscape is at the heart of sense of place and identity.” Thus, parks must be seen as an important part of human rights. Citizens, therefore, have rights to participate in and influence the development of and changes to urban green areas.
Diversity of large parks
During the conference, some 20 parks had their own presentations, and many more parks, either already in existance or under design, were mentioned in thematic presentations. The diversity of approaches in research as well as in existing design and management practices was addressed through presentations on such subjects as transforming royal European parks to important green areas; restoring and adjusting parks to modern use, such as in Pavlovsky Park, the biggest landscape park in St. Petersburg; evaluating old English parks in Wales; discussing the activities of the Pittsburgh Park Conservancy; designing and managing Tehran’s Laleh Park; readjusting old Moscow parks to modern green infrastructure; mitigating the heat island effect of built-up areas, and much more.
Pavlovsky Park in St. Petersburg. Photo: Maria IgnatievaLaleh Park, Tehran. Photo courtesy of Sanaz Shobeiri
There were quite a few examples of recently designed public parks: Emscher Landscape Park in Germany, a series of large parks in the Netherlands, a new nature park in Copenhagen, and designs for parks as part of green wedges in Swedish Gothenburg, Silesi Park in Poland, Ataturk Culture Park in Antalya, Turkey, and Flushing Meadow-Vorona Park in New York City.
The breadth of this park research opened our eyes to such new aspects as social study on crime in urban parks in Malaysia, community response to environmental changes resulting from Yatsu-higata Park in Tokyo, or fauna passing between urban parks in Brisbane, Australia. Likewise, presentation on park arthropods helped in understanding the significance of new research and the connection of arthropods to practical issues for protection and maintenance of large park ecosystems.
An impressive example was presented by Carmela Canzonieri, who shared a design proposal for a large park in Mexico City. The proposed park would be developed on an abandoned airfield. Ambitious designers are dreaming of reintroducing waters that have been buried for centuries and of creating a multifunctional public space.
Julia Czerniak, the leading large parks researcher from the United States, gave a special contribution. She talked about recently implemented parks such as Fresh Kills (south of Manhattan in New York on Staten Island), as well as examples from Singapore and Qian Hai Water City in China. Czerniak emphasized the importance of an ecological design approach and the use of knowledge and principles of urban ecology in designing and planning large parks.
The practical output of the Stockholm conference on big parks was the suggestion to include a section for large urban parks within the newly created organization “World Urban Parks.”
Maria Ignatieva, Richard Murray and Henrik Waldenström Uppsala and Stockholm
Richard Murray, PhD in Economics from the University of Stockholm, is president of Ekoparken Association since 1993, initiated a local political “green” party in 1978, and is senior advisor to Global Utmaning (Global challenge).
Whilst urbanization has brought many benefits to society, it increasingly denies people of opportunities for the mental, spiritual and physical health benefits from nature. Over the last decade, there has been an alarming global increase in diseases such as heart diseases, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes [Note 1]. The risk of these non-communicable diseases is linked to a number of factors, including physical inactivity. Simultaneously, we are just beginning to appreciate the wealth of human health benefits that stem from experiencing nature and biodiversity [2]. A wide range of positive mental and emotional effects have been found to be associated with human exposure to nature, such as on general health, stress reduction, increased physical activity, and reduced incidence/levels of cardiovascular, intestinal, and respiratory diseases.
There is a growing body of research demonstrating the positive influence of nature on human health and well-being.
Natural areas within and around cities restore and safeguard nature and biodiversity, and are critical for healthy and sustainable communities. There is a growing body of research demonstrating nature’s positive influence on health and well-being. Coming into regular contact with nature has been found to reduce stress levels, increase concentration, stimulate exercise, promote social cohesion, and help to treat diseases and disorders. These positive influences on mental and physical well-being in turn lead to substantial economic benefits, by increasing economic productivity and reducing health-care costs.
Nature Rx, a grassroots movement dedicated to informing people about the healing aspects of nature, created a great campaign to remind people about how enjoyable and vital nature really is. They attract attention with innovative and captivating slogans such as “nature, a non-harmful medication,” “side-effects may include spontaneous euphoria and being in a good mood for no apparent reason,” and “ask your doctor if nature is right for you.” Watch one of their videos here.
Nature Rx
Chris Ives, a Nature of Cities author from Leuphana University in Lüneburg, recently shared some interesting insights on how reconnecting people with nature can help transform society towards sustainability and emphasizing that cities are key places for reconnecting people with nature.
When ecosystems are degraded and disturbed, biodiversity is often lost, as is human health. Protected areas and natural areas within and around cities restore and safeguard nature and are critical for healthy and sustainable communities. In an urbanizing world with a growing population, protected areas are natural solutions for securing our health and well-being, while providing many other benefits such as adapting to the impact of climate change and ensure clean drinking water supply.
Parks, people and health
Representatives of Parks Agencies, cities, governments, civil society groups and international organizations, such as ICLEI, the World Health Organisation, Conservation International and IUCN, were hosted by the Salzburg Global Seminar at Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg in November 2015 for “The Parks for the Planet Forum.”
Salzburg Global Seminar – Parks for the Planet Forum, Photo: Ela Grieshaber
This initiative builds on “The Promise of Sydney,” the key outcome of the IUCN World Parks Congress 2014, which presents an ambitious agenda to safeguard the planet’s natural assets, ranging from halting rainforest loss in the Asia-Pacific and tripling ocean protection off Africa’s coasts to a business commitment to plant 1.3 billion trees along the historic Silk Road. “The Promise” includes pledges from governments, international organizations, the private sector, Indigenous leaders, community groups and individuals. It highlights the need to invigorate global efforts to protect natural areas, including scaling up the protection of landscapes and oceans. It includes commitments to boost investment in nature’s solutions to halt biodiversity loss, tackle Climate Change, reduce the risk and impact of disasters, improve food and water security and promote human health. It also aims to inspire people around the globe, across generations and cultures, to experience the wonder of nature through protected areas.
Protected areas are by far the best investment the world can make to address some of today’s biggest development challenges and nature—and nature connectedness—can and must be deployed to tackle impacts on human health and well-being linked to rapid urbanisation.
The discussion during the Parks for the Planet Forum in Salzburg revolved around urban and youth engagement in building appreciation for an access to nature; strategic coalitions for health, cities and nature; the business case for urban transformation in support of health and well-being; and communication with the purpose of improving the understanding for the value of nature for human well-being. The rich discussions during the Forum, show that while the value of nature for health and wellbeing remains highly invisible, there are opportunities and developments that show how we can bring people closer to nature, even in our rapidly urbanising world, and what we can do to spread great ideas.
Indigenous communities make no distinction between culture and nature—they are one. Today, however, we see a growing disconnection from the natural world, with children spending more and more time indoors and names of particular plant species disappearing from our dictionary. Eleven- to 15-year-olds in Britain now spend, on average, half their waking day in front of a screen [3]. According to George Monbiot, losing their contact with nature, the next generation will not fight for it. In Salzburg, Daniel Raven Ellison presented his visionary and hope-giving idea for making London the first National Park City, described as: “A city where people and nature are better connected. A city that is rich with wildlife and every child benefits from exploring, playing and learning outdoors. A city where we all enjoy high-quality green spaces, the air is clean to breathe, it’s a pleasure to swim in its rivers and green homes are affordable. Together we can make London a greener, healthier and fairer place to live.”
Gil Penalosa, Executive Director of 8-80 Cities, explained how Mexico City has benefited from unconventional partnerships between public and private sector partners to expand the resource base for improving the value its largest natural area in the city, Chapultepec park, for citizens and visitors. A group of citizens together with City officials and Park Administrators came up with a Master Plan and set of actions to restore the park. Half of the financing for restoration has been collected from donations, including one million donors at metro stations and supermarkets, and private donations by corporations and important donors. The Chapultepec park is a great example that shows how citizens care for their city and in particular their green spaces and how the impossible can be made possible.
As part of the Promise of Sydney, the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas has established a joint task force with the IUCN Commission on Education and Communication on Inspiring a New Generation. This will have a strong emphasis on reaching out to young people but also urban communities, to strengthen the linkages between people and nature as young people represent more than half of the world’s population, making this a significant group as a living and breathing force of great potential whose voices must be heard.
How nature can improve physical and mental health
To investigate the impact of urban nature on childhood asthma in New York City, researchers at Columbia University conducted a study on the correlation between the number of neighbourhood street trees and incidence of the disease (Lovasi et al, 2008)[4]. The study indicates that adding an additional 343 trees per square kilometer decreased the asthma rate by as much as 24-29 percent among children aged 4 and 5.
Public health and the environment are intrinsically linked. Environmental degradation has negative impacts on human health, whilst the conservation of nature and green spaces can deliver multiple health benefits. A study for the European Commission, led by IEEP – Institute for European Environmental Policy, explores these links and how they could be integrated into public health strategies. Marianne Kettunen, Principal Policy Analyst of IEEP, explained at the Parks for the Planet Forum that green areas, rich in biodiversity, in the direct living environment can decrease the incidence and prevalence of allergies and higher levels of exposure to green spaces are associated with improved cognitive development. She emphasized the need to combine evidence with demand and start offering solutions and rightfully stated that “A bit of biodiversity a day keeps the doctor away!”
The European Union Health Strategy 2008-2013 acknowledges the need for action to tackle climate impacts on health. The impact of heat waves is particularly strong in cities and towns. The so-called ‘urban heat island effect’ which describes the increased temperature of the urban atmosphere compared to its rural surroundings, can cause a growing risk of death from heat stress, in particular for elderly people in our ageing urban societies. The URBES – Urban Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services project has analysed the climate regulation function of green infrastructure in four case study cities, Berlin, Helsinki, Rotterdam and Stockholm (Larondelle and Haase, 2013)[5]. The results of this study confirm that green infrastructure can significantly reduce the urban heat island effect.
Due to the growing number of people in Europe and the U.S. dementia is one of the most critical health challenges. The Nature Assisted Health Foundation, a Swedish/Dutch initiative which translates scientific research on nature and health linkages into concepts for improved health and wellbeing promotes the need for stronger evidence of the benefits of nature to tackle the problem of dementia. Experiments with dementia gardens in Sweden and the Netherlands have demonstrated improvements in quality of life and a reduced need for medication resulting in a substantial reduction in health-care costs.
Partnerships for action
There is a clear scientific understanding of the human need for, and connection to, nature as well as its physical, mental, social and spiritual health and well-being benefits, which the World Health Organisation underlines. However, greater global action is needed to strengthen the evidence base on the connection between nature and human health and well-being and incorporate it into policy and practice, and in particular to engage the health sector, as nature can contribute to reduce health costs substantially. To realise this opportunity, the protected areas, health and business community need to collaborate and work closely together with researchers, governments and NGOs to create a new approach that ensures that nature can help people thrive.
Most of Bogota’s water originates high above the city in Chingaza National Park. The Agua Somos mechanism is a private-public partnership that finances the conservation of moors, forests and rivers that generate water resources in the Bogota region, ensuring not only water supply to more than 10 million people but also the wellbeing of the communities located in the area. This allows users of the water resource to compensate the efforts of both private owners and protected areas to preserve vegetable plantations, forests, and soil that protect watersheds that supply the city, ensuring its quality, quantity and regulation. Owners and protected areas do not have adequate resources to preserve forests and moors that produce the water for Bogota, but they do have restrictions on land use. The Agua Somos mechanism is an interesting alternative as it can provide the necessary funds in order to develop the conservation activities required.
Chingaza National Park, Colombia. Source: www.nature.org
To improve health and well being, we need to strengthen the evidence to show how nature affects health and promote preventative health contribution made by protected areas and urban green spaces. This entails mapping, assessment and quantification of the qualities and functions of urban and peri-urban parks and green spaces for specific cities and improved understanding of the connection between urban green elements, biodiversity, and human health and wellbeing.
Healthy Parks Healthy People was created by the Australian park agency Parks Victoria in 2000—it has been highlighted before on The Nature of Cities by Kathryn Campbell, the Manager of the initiative—and explores the links between nature and human health. They have published a report this year that reviews the post-2008 literature that examines the health benefits of parks and natural spaces. The wealth of global evidence connecting parks and their value for improving human health highlights the need to promote and invest in parks to ensure the benefits are realised across all communities.
The potential for improving health through use of parks can be enhanced in many ways. This includes park managers, researchers and policy makers promoting the health benefits of nature. The challenge is how to combine a compact city with the need for green space near where people live and the connection between nature in cities and in the surrounding areas is essential for securing the many ecosystem services that benefit urban citizens and means involvement of all relevant planning as well as other stakeholders active at the larger landscape scale.
Central Park, New York City. Photo: Chantal van Ham
Taking action starts with awareness of the values of nature. A contribution to the World Forum on Natural Capital from the Town of Gibsons, a coastal community north of Vancouver, showed how this municipality not only identified the value of its natural capital, but also made them part of urban decision making. They are pioneering a so called “eco-asset strategy” as an effective financial and municipal management approach that focuses on identifying existing natural assets such as green space, forests, topsoil, aquifers and creeks that provide municipal services such as storm water management; measuring the value of the municipal services provided by these assets; and, making this information operational by integrating it into municipal asset management. The innovation in this strategy is that it helps to explain the value of natural assets in terms of financial and management strategies.
We all know that connecting with and spending time in nature is beneficial for our health. To demonstrate how nature can be used to improve physical and mental health for urban citizens, it is crucial for the nature conservation community to strengthen awareness and knowledge of the values of biodiversity and ecosystem services and to develop a strong business case to improve the connection with non-conventional partners, policy makers and practitioners, the public health sector and urban planners to create opportunities for deploying nature-based solutions to health and well-being challenges.
The partners who participated in the first Parks for the Planet Forum made a joint commitment to find ways to identify and promote mutual co-benefits of nature, health, and a new urban generation. Cities will be usedities as the starting point for the conversation with communities that will provide support to optimize the value of the mutual benefits of nature and human health wellbeing. Turning these ideas into action, we hope to work together closely with the partners The Nature of Cities network to give nature the place in society as miracle medicine it deserves.
(Una versión en español sigue inmediatamente después.)
“We must remember that what we observe isn’t nature itself, but rather nature exposed to our method of questioning and perceiving.”
—Werner Heisenberg
In order to talk about sustainability on an urban level, it is fundamental to have an understanding of the social particularities produced by the historical, economic and cultural context of the territories that belong to each urban center. In Latin American cities, informal growth has primarily occurred due to population displacement from rural areas to large, attractive cities that offer more promising economic and job opportunities. In Colombia’s particular case, both the internal armed conflict and scarcity associated to environmental phenomena, such as water shortages, have greatly contributed to the forcible transfer of whole, and disintegrated families, to places that supposedly offer greater security and stability: large cities where, apart from the above mentioned advantages, there’s better access to government institutions.
Conversations on sustainability are dominated by specialized groups that study these processes, seeking solutions and answers, but this has to change.
Along with people displaced by conflict, other people who don’t have access to urban land settle in the city’s periphery, creating out of control, human settlements in which a “natural” and unplanned urban expansion takes place, shaped by its inhabitants. These informal growth areas coincide, not by chance, with the city’s most marginal areas, given that land occupation along the urban periphery has occured in places with difficult access because of strong geographical features like hillsides, river banks, and very steep slopes; areas with no infrastructure and on the fringes of legality, for according to policy, these are unbuildable lands. All of this makes these places highly susceptible to environmental and geological risks such as landslides, forest fires, and floods, among others (Motta C., Sobotova L. 2015).1
Las Violetas neighborhood, South Bogotá. Photo: Daniel Pineda
Inequality prevails in Latin American cities, and 57% of the population that lives in poverty is employed by the informal sector.2 In this sense, in cities where the informal economy seems to be a common denominator, it’s essential for an integral concept of sustainability to reach everyone, for in the face of urban expansion in which there is minimal planning, neighborhood authorities and residents become responsible for the environmental management of their place and its landscape.3
Currently there are multiple proposals revolving around the discourse of sustainable cities, in which green infrastructure systems are implemented and natural resources are protected to guarantee ecosystem service supply. This discourse, however, is concentrated among scholars, specialized professionals, and a limited percentage of the population. As a result, city planning and its corresponding sustainability proposals are far removed from the people who are building their spaces in terms of trends, as other groups that have settled in these territories have done before them, without taking into account water, vegetation, or open space. Instead, their logic privileges survival and permanence on the land.
11th Commune in Medellin, Colombia. Photo: Diana Wiesner
In Colombia, small villages in geographic locations where the population is diverse, access is difficult, and the topography is unstable, have been influenced by models of public space transformation found in more densely populated cities like Bogota or Medellin. In Bogota this is evinced in a tendency toward hardened spaces, away from the application of environmentally friendly infrastructure, so although the amount of public space has increased, its quality and its environmental and ecological functions continue to be a challenge. Thus, in cities located in the Amazon, like Leticia and others, we find examples of public spaces that are far from the particular social and climatic context of the place.
This problem is related to a much greater one, which is that in Latin America, public space is still associated with occupied, impermeable space. An example of this is the transformation of many streets into pedestrian thoroughfares, which in terms of prioritizing people over cars is a great advance. But in environmental terms, very few considerations are applied, except for the planting of trees.
Santander Park, Florencia, Amazonas Photo: Desiderio Martínez
Cities like Monteria, in Cordoba, show that there are important exceptions. There was an evident appropriation of the riverbank by the community, so when the Mayor’s Office started planning its recovery, and with the people’s collaboration, the forest was preserved and a common space was created for the promotion of social welfare and cohesion processes, even though none of this was included in the urban sustainability principles.
Río Sinu, Monteria Colombia. Photo: Diana Wiesner
Nuquí, Colombia. Photo: Alejandra Artunduaga
In this case, many concepts that seem limited to experts, but that are actually part of the community’s daily life, are put into practice. Some of these concepts are: resilience, biodiversity management, climate change, sustainability, low impact development, ecosystem services and green infrastructure, among others.
Biodiversity: according to the United Nation’s Environmental Program (UNEP – WCMC, 2013) the word biodiversity is a compound word derived from the term ‘biological diversity.’ Diversity is a concept that refers to variations or differences within a range of entities; biological diversity therefore refers to variety in the living world.
Climate change (FCCC usage): a change of climate, which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods. (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – IPCC)
Ecosystem Services: this concept refers mainly to the cultural or economic benefits people receive from the ecosystem.4
Green, or Ecological Infrastructure: a network of strategically planned natural and semi-natural spaces and other environmental elements designed and managed to offer a wide range of ecosystem services. This includes green and blue areas, the latter corresponding to aquatic ecosystems, and other physical elements in natural, rural, and urban terrestrial and marine areas. (Conama 2014)
Green infrastructure uses vegetation, soils, and natural processes to manage water and create healthier urban environments. The scale of green infrastructure ranges from urban installations to large tracts of undeveloped natural lands and includes rain gardens, green roofs, urban trees, permeable pavements, rainwater harvesting, wetlands, protected riparian areas, and forests. (Environmental Protection Agency – EPA)
Integrated Biodiversity Management: process through which actions for the conservation of biodiversity and its ecosystem services, such as knowledge, preservation, use and restoration, are planned, implemented and monitored in a specified social and territorial scenario with the purpose of maximizing social welfare by maintaining the adaptive capacity of socio-ecological systems on a local, regional and national scale. (Alexander Von Humboldt Institute)
Low Impact Development: works with nature to manage stormwater as close to its source as possible. LID employs principles such as preserving and recreating natural landscape features, minimizing effective imperviousness to create functional and appealing site drainage that treat stormwater as a resource rather than a waste product. (Environmental Protection Agency – EPA)
Resilience: “the capacity of a system, be it an individual, a forest, a city or an economy, to deal with change and continue to develop. It is about how humans and nature can use shocks and disturbances like a financial crisis or climate change to spur renewal and innovative thinking.” (The Stockholm Center of Resilience)5
Sustainability: making use of resources without depleting them.
Sustainable development: development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. (Panel on Climate Change – IPCC.) 6
Transformational Adaptation: “a process through which fundamental attributes of a system are changed in response to the climate and its impacts.” (IPCCC 2014)
On one hand, the terms above must be simplified in order for the people who live and build informally to understand them, and on the other, there must be a recognition and examination of existing practices that represent these concepts in informal settlements. The informal neighborhoods located on Bogota’s Eastern Mountains are important examples to consider. This mountain range is a 32,124-acre (13,000 hectare) forest reserve thanks to the wealth of its biodiversity and water sources, and it’s the city’s Eastern natural boundary. There are very heterogeneous neighborhoods here, with privileged sectors as well as and informal settlements. In the latter, representing marginal parts of the city, there are examples of social organization in which proposals with sustainable intentions are visible.
Specialists should work more closely with the population, not just during consultations, but through entire processes, and they should be more receptive in learning about people’s day-to-day risk management strategies and environmental problems that are framed by sustainability.
One of the clearest and most widespread practices is the use of local, communal aqueducts, which in the absence of a proper water supply and sewage system, make use of the mountain’s ecosystem services. In this sense, taking care of the water sources becomes directly related to sustenance, which is why these processes are related to the recovery, use, and care of the streams, another important practice that has taken place in the mountains, and the need for a sustainable use of natural resources is evident. There are additional interests linked to environmental protection and maintenance, such as projects that stimulate mountain use by civilians and increase the city’s public space. Agroparque los Soches, Parque Entre Nubes, and Reserva de la Sociedad Civil del Umbral Cultural Horizontes, among other parks and reserves, represent the possibility of the Eastern Mountains becoming a benchmark for the concepts presented here, not just for the mountain dwellers, but for every citizen.
The acknowledgement of existing practices in the Eastern Mountains brings to light how the communities faced with the greatest environmental challenges appropriate the experts’ terminology. Their location, on the Reserve’s border, makes their impact on the ecosystem even greater, and exhibits unique relationships to the environment. Although formal and informal construction in these territories must be suspended, working together with informal settlements is crucial for a sustainable city to exist. Thus, the discourse by scholars and experts must have a greater dialogue and exchange in local settings.
Ecobarrio Villa Rosita. Photo: Diana Wiesner
Photos of Ecobarrio Villa Rosita. Photos: Diana WiesnerHomeless person, Medellin River. Photo: Claudio Valcamonico
The discussion on the democratization of conversations about sustainability is now open; as an example:
Biodiversity Management: Placing value on the variety and differences of living beings and promoting healthy relationships among them.
Resilience: Ability to recover from something.
Risk Management: What mothers are permanently doing with their kids.
Climate Change: Climate changes that have become standard.
Sustainable: That which can be sustained in time.
Ecosystem Services: Benefits we get from nature, such as food, water and recreation.
Green Infrastructure: Water – nature sensitive design.
Pact for the Mountains photomontage, Fundación Cerros de Bogotá (Mountains of Bogota Foundation) www.cerrosdebogota.org. Photo: FCB Pact. Fotomontaje Pacto por los Cerros, Fundación Cerros de Bogotá www.cerrosdebogota.org
In order to achieve participatory processes in Bogota’s Eastern Mountains, we propose the promotion of pacts with the land and among neighbors, which include proposals for friendly behavior and best practices with the environment. This is how the Mountains of Bogota Foundation promotes the pact with the mountains, from each individual inhabitant of the region.
These pacts pursue the restoration of our relationship with nature, and the teachings of inhabitants of rural areas who live together with risk, and seek to teach common sense practices that respect life cycles. For this to take place, citizens must reconnect with the discovery of what’s simple and vital, using concepts such as “the common good” in order to produce ethical and socially responsible day-to-day behaviors with the environment.
Regarding public policies, there are indicators that measure a city’s environmental impacts, such as: proximity, equality, amount of public space in area of influence, pedestrian accessibility, and public safety. It’s important for these best environmental practices to become part of public policy. Equally important is the consolidation of the landscape as a common asset, as well as the implementation of new quality indicators, such as the “resilience indicators of the soul” proposed by Professor Wilches.
Commune in Medellin. Photo: Gustavo Restrepo
From the voice of a country preparing for a time of post-conflict, it’s essential to aim at building communities that appropriate an eco-friendly culture, as well as to acknowledge, from a human perspective, existing environmental practices in different urban settlements in order to strengthen the dialogue that will allow for a real transformation, with the public’s participation, of the landscape.
2 — Patricio Zambrano Barragan. IADB (Inter-American Development Bank,) Resilient, Inclusive and Innovative Cities. International Symposium on Urban Ecology, Bogota, 2015.
3 — This is not an attempt to promote or foster informal land occupation, but rather a search to generate solutions for habitation models in said areas.
Democratización de conceptos hacia la resiliencia desde el alma
“Tenemos que recordar que lo que observamos no es la naturaleza en sí misma, sino la naturaleza expuesta a nuestro método de cuestionamiento y percepción” — Werner Heisenrberg
Para hablar de sostenibilidad a nivel urbano, resulta fundamental entender las particularidades sociales, producidas a partir del contexto histórico, económico y cultural de los territorios pertenecientes a cada centro urbano. Dentro de las ciudades latinoamericanas el crecimiento informal se ha dado principalmente por un desplazamiento de la población desde zonas rurales hacia grandes urbes atractivas, principalmente por ofrecer oportunidades más prometedores respecto a su producción económica y oferta laboral. Particularmente, en el caso colombiano, el conflicto armado interno, así como escasez asociada a fenómenos ambientales tales como carencia de agua ha contribuido fuertemente al traslado forzoso de familias enteras, o desintegradas, hacia lugares que ofrezcan “supuestamente” una mayor seguridad y estabilidad, es decir, grandes ciudades, en donde, además de las ventajas anteriormente planteadas, tienen mejor acceso a instituciones gubernamentales.
Las conversaciones sobre la sostenibilidad esta dominada por grupos especializados que estudian estos procesos y buscan encontrar soluciones y respuestas, pero esto tiene que cambiar.
Al igual que las personas desplazadas por el conflicto, diferentes personas que no pueden acceder al suelo urbano, se asientan en la periferia de la ciudad, conformando fenómenos de asentamiento humano “sin control” en los que se da una expansión urbana “natural” y poco planificada hecha por los propios habitantes. Estas zonas de crecimiento informal coinciden, no fortuitamente, con los lugares de mayor marginalidad en la ciudad, pues la ocupación de lotes en la periferia urbana se ha dado en zonas de difícil accesibilidad y servicios por la presencia de fuertes accidentes geográficos como laderas, bordes de ríos, pendientes muy inclinadas, entre otros sectores sin infraestructura y al margen de la legalidad debido a que son zonas no construibles según las políticas de suelo. Lo anterior, hace de estos espacios altamente susceptibles a riesgos ambientales y geológicos como deslizamientos, incendios, inundaciones, entre otros (Motta C., Sobotová L. 2015).
Las Violetas neighborhood, South Bogotá. Las Violetas neighborhood, Bogotá sur. Photo: Daniel Pineda
Las ciudades en Latinoamérica predomina la desigualdad y el 57 % de la población que vive en situación de pobreza esta empleado en el sector informal. En este sentido, ciudades en donde la informalidad parece ser el común denominador, resulta fundamental que el concepto integral de sostenibilidad debe llegarle a todos, pues, de cara a procesos de expansión urbana con baja planificación, son los agentes y habitantes de los barrios quienes se vuelven responsables por la gestión ambiental de su lugar y paisaje.
En la actualidad es posible encontrar múltiples propuestas en torno al discurso de ciudades sostenibles, en los cuales se implementen sistemas de infraestructura verde y se protegen sus recursos naturales para garantizar la oferta de servicios eco sistémicos. Sin embargo, este discurso se encuentra concentrado entre los académicos, los profesionales especializados y un porcentaje limitado de población.
Producto de ello, los términos en los que se planea la ciudad, y sus respectivas propuestas sostenibles, resultan alejados de las poblaciones, las cuales están construyendo sus espacios de manera tendencial como lo hacen otros grupos asentados en el territorio, sin contemplar temas como el agua, la vegetación o el espacio libre. A cambio, se privilegian lógicas de supervivencia y permanencia en el territorio.
11th Commune in Medellin, Colombia. Photo: Diana Wiesner
En el caso de Colombia, las pequeñas poblaciones localizadas en lugares geográficos de población diversa, difícil acceso y topografía inestable han estado influenciados por los modelos de transformación de lo público, como se observa ciudades de mayor densidad como Bogotá o Medellín. En Bogotá, lo anterior se ha evidenciado en una tendencia hacia espacios endurecidos y alejados de la aplicación de infraestructuras ecológicas, por lo cual, si bien el Espacio Público ha aumentado en cantidad, la calidad de su función ecológica y ambiental sigue siendo un reto. Por tanto, ciudades localizadas en el Amazonas, como lo es Leticia y otras ciudades aparecen ejemplos de espacios públicos , que no corresponden a su contexto social, geográfico y climático .
Esta problemática se asocia a una escala mayor, pues el Espacio Público en Latinoamérica todavía se asocia con la connotación de espacio construido e impermeable. Un ejemplo de ello es la peatonalización de varias vías vehiculares para el disfrute peatonal, que en términos de la priorización del peatón sobre el vehículo automotor, es un gran avance, pero en términos ambientales se aplican muy pocas consideraciones, salvo la inclusión de la arborización.
Santander Park, Florencia, Amazonas. Photo: Desiderio Martínez
Ciudades como Montería, Córdoba, muestra que existen excepciones importantes. Allí, se evidenciaba una apropiación de la ronda del río, lo cual permitió que al momento de plantear una recuperación de la ronda por parte de la Alcaldía e integrando a la población, se velara por mantener la arborización del lugar y por generar un espacio en común que promoviera el beneficio social y los procesos de cohesión, a pesar de que esto no estuviera planteado dentro de los principios de sostenibilidad urbana.
Río Sinu, Monteria Colombia. Photo: Diana Wiesner
Nuquí, Colombia. Photo: Alejandra Artunduaga
En este caso, es posible observar que se ponen en práctica múltiples conceptos que parecen limitados a los expertos, pero que en realidad hacen parte del cotidiano de las poblaciones. Algunos de estos conceptos son: resiliencia, gestión de biodiversidad, cambio climático, sostenibilidad, desarrollo de bajo impacto, servicios ecosistemicos, infraestructura verde, entre otros.
Adaptación transformadora:
“Es un proceso capaz de cambiar los atributos fundamentales de un sistema, en respuesta al clima y sus impactos”.IPCCC 2014
Biodiversidad:
Según el Programa Ambiental de las Naciones Unidas (UNEP- WCMC, 2013) la palabra biodiversidad es una contracción del término diversidad biológica. Diversidad es un concepto que refiere al rango de variación o diferencias entre un rango de entidades; de manera que diversidad biológica refiere a la variedad dentro del mundo viviente.
Infraestructura verde- Infraestructura ecológica:
Red estratégicamente planificada de espacios naturales y seminaturales y otros elementos ambientales diseñados y gestionados para ofrecer una amplia gama de servicios ecosistémicos. Incluye espacios verdes (o azules si se trata de ecosistemas acuáticos) y otros elementos físicos en áreas terrestres (naturales, rurales y urbanas) y marinas* (Conama 2014)
Climate change (FCCC usage)
A change of climate, which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Desarrollo de Bajo Impacto: works with nature to manage stormwater as close to its source as possible. LID employs principles such as preserving and recreating natural landscape features, minimizing effective imperviousness to create functional and appealing site drainage that treat stormwater as a resource rather than a waste product. La Agencia de Protección Ambiental (Environmentral Protection Agency -EPA).
Resilience: is the capacity of a system, be it an individual, a forest, a city or an economy, to deal with change and continue to develop. It is about how humans and nature can use shocks and disturbances like a financial crisis or climate change to spur renewal and innovative thinking.” The Stockholm Center of Resilience
Sostenibilidad: A diferencia de la sustentabilidad, implica el aprovechamiento de los recursos sin agotarlos.
Green infrastructure uses vegetation, soils, and natural processes to manage water and create healthier urban environments. The scale of green infrastructure ranges from urban installations to large tracts of undeveloped natural lands and includes rain gardens, green roofs, urban trees, permeable pavements, rainwater harvesting, wetlands, protected riparian areas, and forests. La Agencia de Protección Ambiental (Environmentral Protection Agency -EPA).
Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Gestión Integral de Biodiversidad: Proceso por el cual se planifican, ejecutan y monitorean las acciones para la conservación (conocimiento, preservación, uso y restauración) de la biodiversidad y sus servicios ecosistémicos, en un escenario social y territorial definido con el fin de maximizar el bienestar social, a través del mantenimiento de la capacidad adaptativa de los socio-ecosistemas a escalas locales, regionales y nacionales. Instituto Alexander Von Humboldt
Servicios eco sistémicos:
This concept refers mainly to the benefit that people receive from the ecosystem, if they are cultural or economic.
Los términos anteriormente planteados requieren por un lado, que se dé una simplificación del lenguaje para los agentes que habitan y construyen informalmente el territorio, y por otro, que se reconozcan y se examinen las prácticas existentes en los asentamientos que representan los conceptos anteriormente mencionados. Un ejemplo importante para ello es el caso de los barrios de origen informal ubicados en los Cerros Orientales de la ciudad de Bogotá. Esta cadena montañosa se constituye como una Reserva Forestal de más de 13.000 hectáreas debido a su riqueza en biodiversidad y fuentes hídricas, y representa el límite natural al oriente de la ciudad. Allí se encuentran barrios de enorme heterogeneidad social, pues es posible encontrar tanto sectores muy privilegiados como asentamientos de origen informal. En estos últimos, que representan zonas marginadas de la ciudad, es posible hallar ejemplos de organización social que se visibilizan algunas propuestas con intenciones sostenibles.
Los especialistas, por una parte deberían trabajar mas cercanos a la población, no solamente en consultas sino durante todo el proceso y ser mas receptivos en aprender igualmente sobre los procesos cotidianos de resolución del riesgo o de problemática ambiental que la propia gente realiza y que se enmarcan dentro de la sostenibilidad.
Uno de las prácticas más claras y reiteradas es el caso de acueductos veredales y comunitarios que, ante la ausencia de un servicio de acueducto y alcantarillado, han logrado hacer uso de los servicios eco sistémicos de la montaña. En este sentido, el cuidado de las fuentes hídricas se convierte también en un interés directamente relacionado con la subsistencia, razón por la cual estos procesos vienen relacionados con la recuperación, uso y cuidado de las quebradas, otra práctica importante que se ha dado en el territorio de Cerros, evidenciando una necesidad de hacer un uso sostenible por los recursos. Adicionalmente, ligado al cuidado del entorno y el mantenimiento del mismo, vienen otros intereses, como la creación de proyectos que fomenten el uso de la montaña y aumenten el espacio público de la ciudad. El Agroparque los Soches, el parque Entre Nubes, la Reserva de la Sociedad Civil del Umbral Cultural Horizontes, entre otros, han representado la posibilidad de que los Cerros Orientales se conviertan en referentes de los conceptos planteados para la sociedad civil y no sólo para quienes habitan en los Cerros.
El reconocimiento de las prácticas existentes en los Cerros Orientales muestra la manera como los términos usados por los expertos se apropian y se usan en las poblaciones que precisamente encuentran mayores retos ambientales. Su ubicación en el límite de la reserva hace que su impacto con el ecosistema sea aún mayor, presentando maneras particulares de relacionarse con el entorno. Si bien la construcción formal e informal en estos sectores debe suspenderse, el acompañamiento y participación por parte de asentamientos informales es fundamental para tener ciudades sostenibles, lo cual implica que los discursos académicos y de expertos tengan un mayor diálogo e intercambio en escenarios locales.
Photos of Ecobarrio Villa Rosita. Photos: Diana WiesnerHomeless person, Medellin River. Photo: Claudio Valcamonico
Se abre la discusión a simplificar los términos como ejemplo:
Cambio climático: Cambios en el clima que se han vuelto cotidianos.
Resiliencia: Capacidad de recuperarse de algo.
Gestión de la biodiversidad: Valorar la diferencia y variedad entre seres vivos y promover sus relaciones saludables.
Sostenible, es lo que se puede sostener en el tiempo.
Gestión del riesgo: Lo que las madres hacen permanentemente con sus hijos.
Servicios eco sistémicos: Los beneficios que da la naturaleza como alimentos, agua y recreación.
Infraestructura verde: Diseños sensibles con el agua y la naturaleza.
Sustentable: lo que se sostiene a sí mismo.
Commune in Medellin. Photo: Gustavo RestrepoFotomontaje Pacto por los Cerros, Fundación Cerros de Bogotá www.cerrosdebogota.org
Para lograr procesos participativos en los Cerros Orientales de la ciudad de Bogotá se propone promover los pactos con el territorio y con los vecinos, dentro de los cuales se promuevan propuestas de comportamientos amigables y buenas practicas con el lugar, es así como ejemplos locales la Fundación Cerros de Bogotá promueve el pacto con los cerros desde cada habitante de la región.
Estos pactos buscan restituir la relación con la naturaleza, aprender de la población de las zonas rurales, que convive con el riesgo y enseñar prácticas de sentido común que respetan los ciclos de vida. Para ello, es fundamental volver a conectar al ciudadano con el descubrimiento de lo simple y lo vital, valiéndose de herramientas como la inclusión del concepto de “bien común”, con el fin de que se genere un comportamiento ético y social responsable con el medio ambiente en la cotidianidad.
En cuanto a políticas públicas, es posible encontrar indicadores que dan referencia acerca de los impactos ambientales de una ciudad, tales como proximidad, equidad, cantidad de Espacio Público próximo a su población de influencia, accesibilidad peatonal y seguridad ciudadana. Sin embargo, es importante que éstos se conviertan en una política pública de buenas prácticas ambientales, de la misma manera que consolidar el paisaje como un bien común y hacer uso de otro tipo de indicadores de calidad como los que propone el profesor Wilches: “los Indicadores de resiliencia desde el alma”.
Desde una voz de un país que se prepara para un “posconflicto” es fundamental apostar a construir comunidades que se apropien de una cultura ecológica, así como reconocer, desde lo humano, las prácticas ambientales existentes de los diferentes asentamientos urbanos con el fin de fortalecer un diálogo que permita lograr una real transformación del paisaje con participación pública.
2 — Patricio Zambrano Barragan. BID, Ciudades resilientes, inclusivas e innovadoras. Simposio Internacional de Ecología Urbana, Bogotá. 2015.
3 — Con esto no se pretende promover ni fomentar la ocupación informal del territorio, sino que se busca generar soluciones a los modelos de habitación en dichas zonas.
This past summer in Beijing, my coworker initiated a zero waste campaign for the office. Under the campaign, we pledged to live zero waste (or, at least, to consciously minimize our waste to the most practical degree) for as long as we wanted to or could. Zero waste is an ideology that strives to avoid any waste generation that would lead to dumping, landfill or incineration by promoting waste reduction, reuse, recycling and composting. My coworker was committing to zero waste for a year, a task daunting even to waste reduction believers like myself. I signed up for one week.
Over the course of the week, I collected the disposable trash that I created in a bag. The idea was that a visible volume of waste that we claimed responsibility for would drive us to minimize our waste. This motivation worked. Many interns and I began to bring our own bowls and chopsticks to the convenience store, Lawson’s, to get lunch, instead of using the store’s eagerly distributed plastic containers and disposable chopsticks. We consciously avoided disposable items—or at least delayed them. It took some guilty but practical planning to refrain from counting the large packaging waste from the air filter I had just bought, because I timed my zero waste week to officially start after the purchase, and to withhold from buying pre-packaged items until after the week ended.
The concept of zero waste reinforces the notion that waste must be reduced by consciously changing consumption and resource use patterns.
In the meantime, we tested our creativity and resolution as we wrapped food stall pancakes with handkerchiefs and obstinately said “no” to waiters intent on delivering wrapped utensils and paper napkins. (For suggestions on living zero waste, see blogs such as Trash is for Tossers, Zero Waste Home, Zero Waste Millennial and No Impact Man.) At the end of the week, my bag of disposable waste consisted mostly of tissues and plastic wrappers. I conveniently chose not to include food scraps, which I allotted to our office vermiculture composting bin; nor did I include recyclables, which I trusted the office recycling collection system to sell to recycling companies. Had neither of these systems been in place, my task of waste reduction would assuredly have been more difficult.
My bag of one week’s worth of waste. Image: Briana Liu
The greatest difficulty of our zero waste experience was in our ability to assert the creed of zero waste over the reality of living in an industrial, manufactured world. We watched videos demonstrating how to create toothpaste from baking soda and recalled NGOs organizing citizens to craft soaps from recycled oil. But while quirky and quaint, these DIY activities were neither appealing nor sustainable in the long term. Can we truly reject the convenience and effectiveness of industrial products for homemade ones, especially without undesirable costs of time and energy?
Some zero waste practitioners do commit themselves to self-manufacturing and almost absolute waste avoidance, even at disproportionate costs to efficiency. This is akin to interpreting zero waste in a puritanical sense. But instead of a strict adherence to purging waste altogether, zero waste could be seen as a goal to actively renounce waste whenever possible. Efforts conducted in a zero waste spirit can substantially reduce waste, even if they cannot eliminate waste altogether. Simple actions such as reusing grocery bags, buying in bulk, limiting cleaning products and bringing a reusable bowl to Lawson’s are neither time-consuming nor difficult. They just require a basic awareness of resource consumption, which should prod the brain to spend a few extra seconds contemplating a more sustainable alternative.
Thus, while impractical if taken at face value, the zero waste movement is unequivocally important. Like most movements, beyond behavioral change, a main objective of zero waste is to build awareness. The concept of zero waste reinforces the notion that waste must be reduced by consciously changing consumption and resource use patterns, and not just diverted into various streams of processing, be they recycling or disposal. Whether one decides to commit to zero waste or “a little bit of waste” or “as little waste as possible,” the zero waste ideology will have effectively succeeded in its aim.
A fellow zero waste week participant bringing her own bowl for lunch. Image: Briana Liu
Zero waste as a platform for less waste—and less consumption
As citizens, waste reduction and reuse are the only areas over which we exercise direct control. Once our waste hits the curb or trash can, it is out of our hands. Even in developed countries, we cannot guarantee that our waste is actually recycled in a safe and environmentally friendly manner. Millions of tons of recyclables (frequently mixed with nonrecyclable or hazardous waste) are shipped to China and other developing countries every year, where the voracious appetite exists to recycle and remanufacture them into new products. The conditions under which these waste materials are disassembled, sorted, cleaned, recycled, burnt and disposed are often atrocious, with severe and widespread damage to human health and the surrounding environment. The alternative to recycling is worse. In China, incineration plants and landfills often lack enforcement or formal management. Landfills suffer from overcapacity and insufficient treatment, and incineration plants trudge through the coal-powered burning of large proportions of wet organic matter. The result is a toxic waste system staggering from glut.
Zero waste, as a philosophy and set of life practices, empowers people to exert less strain on this overtaxed system. It encourages people to act within their scope of control and responsibility. By focusing on areas of waste management in which they have direct control and can see tangible impact, people place higher value on waste reduction and reuse. This represents a fundamental shift from the American environmental movement’s widespread obsession with recycling alone.
Critically, attentiveness to the reduction of waste may progress into much needed awareness on limiting consumption. Consumption and waste are, by default, two sides of the same coin. What may seem an obvious solution to the waste problem—consume less—is constantly averted in favor of ways to hide, contain, export, burn and convert waste. But waste and its byproducts don’t just disappear. Recycling waste, no matter in what form, always costs more to the environment and to people than if the waste were not generated in the first place. Similarly, consuming products, no matter how “green” the design, always damages the environment more than if they were not produced for consumption to begin with. This is especially true if our consumption is seen holistically as an intensive process creating huge amounts of waste at each stage in its life cycle, from extraction to manufacturing to distribution to disposal.
Taken more broadly, the concept of zero waste should by no means be limited to its current framing as mostly a municipal solid waste issue. Waste is the residual product of the severely extractive and destructive industry of consumption on resources and life on this planet. Whether waste manifests as municipal solid waste, energy inefficiency, urban sprawl, cancers and extinctions, greenhouse gas emissions, diminishing soil fertility or decay of natural habitat, it is but a product of the unrelenting demands of possession, expansion and consumption that humans make on their environment. I suspect that this aspect of consumption may be overlooked even within the zero waste movement. With so much emphasis on finding less wasteful alternatives and indeed on the tangible end product of waste itself, zero waste enthusiasts may neglect the consumption that begets waste in the first place. The natural and logical extension of zero waste ideology is a critical reevaluation of the necessity and desirability of the consumption rampant in our lives.
Culture and values control the creation of waste
I spent many years of my childhood and young adulthood in Beijing. Living with my grandparents, I learned that nothing should be wasted. We reused old socks as cleaning rags, refashioned corn husks as oil absorbents for dirty plates, and refilled jars with jams or spices unrelated to what was advertised on their labels. Occasionally, peddlers would stop in the courtyard and we would bring them some newspaper or cardboard, which they would carefully weigh and collect, giving us a few yuan in exchange for the bundle. This was the face of recycling in China.
This form of household reuse and informal recycling constituted an important pillar of waste management in urban China. Since then, cities have exploded in size, and people’s pockets have grown heavier. So, too, have the piles of waste weighing on city infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, people are not only buying and throwing away more, they are also growing increasingly reliant on disposable goods. What is more troublesome than growing rates of unrecyclable and unrecycled trash is the tendency for people to no longer regard throwing out reusable things as wasteful. It is this change in attitude that has, more than anything, created the slew of waste in which we currently live. My grandfather balks at the plates of food left to waste on restaurant and cafeteria tables. Most don’t bat an eye. I remember a campaign that I started on Peking University’s campus two years ago, where people pledged to commit to one environmentally friendly practice. There was a board with suggestions, including many surrounding resource efficiency and waste reduction. It was remarkable that many people, after glancing it over, concluded that they already do most of the practices in their everyday lives. Their comments reflect that though the average Chinese level of waste is nowhere close to American standards, the baseline for what is considered wasteful is rapidly changing. With plastered slogans and advertisements calling loudly for citizens to conserve more and waste less, one wonders if people truly know how to take those actions anymore.
A site for imported waste from developed countries in the countryside near Foshan, China. Image: Briana LiuA credit card—the key to consumption—now reduced to waste. Image: Briana Liu
Waste institutions depend on people
Many would call for government to take a greater role in establishing a system for waste reduction, reuse, composting and recycling. This is no doubt essential. Cities such as San Francisco, the city closest to achieving zero waste, and Capannori and Contarina, two Italian cities making remarkable progress towards zero waste, treat waste management as a system that takes into account the whole of the product life cycle. However, for governmental efforts to succeed, it is critical that citizens accept responsibility for their waste and act upon this responsibility. They can choose to reduce wasteful consumption, or to at least try to recycle and properly dispose of waste. Waste institutions founder without citizen engagement and support. The success of zero waste thus hinges on civic advocacy and education about waste. It is a task that most developing country governments are hard-pressed to accomplish. From international organizations such as the Zero Waste International Alliance to local NGOs carrying out initiatives on community recycling, the nongovernmental sector has been struggling to fill the leadership void in reversing the tide of unsustainable consumption and waste disposal. Central to this struggle is redefining our notion of what is waste. What can be reused or recycled, and what is needed in the first place, stems from our very perception of objects and resources. Zero waste proves its value in forcing us to reevaluate the materialism in our lives—and in challenging us to do without.
Cities are largely viewed as cultural constructs, built by humans for humans. However, the reality is that animals, whether wild or domesticated, also participate in the creation and definition of cities as sociopolitical spaces. Animals are a part of everyday urban life. Whether you are a pet-owner, a birdwatcher, or simply a person who walks on sidewalks or in the park, interactions with animals are unavoidable. We often take these encounters for granted, rarely pausing to consider their ramifications.
In Urban Animals: Crowding in Zoocities, Dr. Tora Holmberg, a sociology professor and lecturer at Sweden’s Uppsala University, asks the question: What are the multi-species experiences and politics of living in a city? The book explores a number of controversies regarding human/animal relations in urban areas, including the politics of space (who belongs where?), and the ability of animals to challenge established social norms.
Animals in the urban space have the ability to influence social, political and cultural processes.
Urban Animals begins with a chapter outlining the analytical framework employed throughout the book. Here, Holmberg claims that by expanding sociological theories beyond human perspectives to animal perspectives, human/animal crowding can be explored in ways that classical sociology is unable to achieve. Holmberg aims to remove humans from the center of analysis, placing the experiences of our nonhuman urban neighbors at the fore. She also emphasizes that studying crowding of any sort is, by definition, a spatial process. Urban areas consist of numerous types of spaces: domestic, public, commercial, industrial, etc. The spatial context of human/animal interactions has major effects on the manner in which the participants—human and animal—and the nature of the interaction, are perceived. Although wild animals certainly participate in these sorts of encounters, Urban Animals focuses on interactions between humans and their pets, mainly cats and dogs. How do our pets contribute to the delineation and definitions of our urban spaces? How do they influence perceptions of their human counterparts?
In order to answer these questions, Holmberg splits the book into three parts. Part I consists of two chapters, the first of which looks at how dogs have helped shape political and social processes centered on a public beach in Santa Cruz, California, and another about how urban cats in Sweden are defined and correspondingly treated. Swedish law is specific about how to deal with feral cats, but deciding which cats qualify as ‘feral’ is a different process entirely. Part II also contains two chapters, the first of which addresses animal hoarding through multiple lenses, such as behavioral scientific accounts, animal welfare data and U.S. reality TV shows. The next chapter takes a look at ‘cat ladies,’ investigating connections between species and gender through analysis of the portrayals of so-called ‘crazy cat ladies.’ Part III outlines the promises of crowding. A chapter on the opportunities presented by crowding is followed by a closing chapter, which consists of a conversation between Holmberg and Swedish artist, Katja Aglert.
Urban Animals does many things very well. The most important thing this book does is simple: it asks questions. Many of the themes explored here are relatively new in sociological research. The contribution of this book is its ability to form the foundation for future work in the field, more than any answers it provides to existing questions. By using a nonhuman-centered framework, it sheds light on issues from a very different angle than that from which we are used to approaching such subjects. As Holmberg notes early on in the book, cities are expanding worldwide, with more and more humans and animals living in cities. Using the animal-focused framework presented here will be crucial in understanding urban life of the present and future.
Another thing Holmberg communicates quite well through the book is that animals aren’t just along for the ride. As shown by the case of Its Beach in Santa Cruz, California, dogs, though they may be ‘mute’ in that they don’t explicitly speak English, do have ‘agency,’ a sociological term for the ability to exert influence. An iconic ‘dog beach’ in the local culture, Its Beach has recently come under fire from citizens who’d like to see the beach cleaned up and dogs excluded. In excerpts from the political arguments, it is clear that the rhetoric revolves around the dogs, with the pro-dog side pointing out not only the beach’s benefit to the dogs, but also the dogs’ benefit to the community. Here, dogs are actively participating in the sociocultural definition of a place.
Holmberg also demonstrates the role of space in human/animal interactions. A great example of how space influences definitions of animals is the case of urban cats in Sweden. Cats can be categorized (Holmberg uses the pun ‘cat-egorized’) according to their perceived place of belonging: house, farm, alley, etc. How a cat is placed in these cat-egories influences both how the cat is viewed in relation to feral animal laws, as well as how the people who associate with the animals are portrayed. For example, twenty cats living in an alley are viewed quite differently than twenty cats living in a living room. The alley cats can be considered technically feral, and therefore subject to municipal interference, e.g., population control measures. House cats are generally exempt from these injunctions, because they are perceived as closer to humans, somehow more human than feral cats through their close relationship with one or multiple humans.
There is a tipping point, though. Too many cats in a house can invert the relationship between master and pet once the care requirements of the cats exceed the capabilities of their human companion. At this point, the ownership dynamic between human and cat blurs. Holmberg relates a number of cases in which the cats have taken over the house, seemingly subjecting their human to answer to their every beck and call. In these cases, it is possible for animals to exert influence, i.e., to have agency, over the perception of their human counterparts. ‘Crazy cat ladies’ are formed in this way. In contrast, a citizen feeding alley cats is less likely to experience this sort of role inversion, maybe because alley cats are perceived as further from ‘human,’ so it is more difficult for them to ‘rise above’ their masters. Clearly, animals have the ability to influence social, political and cultural processes.
Despite all the strengths of Urban Animals, it is not a book for the faint of heart. Although it investigates familiar events and themes, the analytic content is quite dense. The text is rife with sociological theory, making the finer details of the analyses relatively inaccessible to a reader without experience in the area. Holmberg refers to the previous work of numerous sociologists, seemingly assuming that the reader is already somewhat familiar with them. This book is clearly aimed at practicing sociologists. To an outsider (such as the reviewer), this certainly clouds the points being made, but to a professional it would only serve to enhance and strengthen Holmberg’s arguments.
The other trying aspect of Urban Animals is its structure. Because it asks questions instead of seeking answers, it is not organized into a strict framework of presenting the problem, finding methods to address it, and conclusions. Each chapter instead dwells on a certain case, and addresses slightly different issues. Some common threads run though all or many of the chapters, such as the politics of space, while others, such as the ‘verminization’ of cat ladies, appear in one, or maybe two, chapters. This makes following the main point of the book difficult, though not impossible, and Holmberg does well to reiterate the goals, conclusions and opportunities brought to light in the book’s concluding chapters. Some readers may find this an obstacle, while others may appreciate the meandering nature of the narrative.
Despite the difficulties faced when reading Urban Animals, I can certainly say that it expanded my awareness of the perceptions of urban animals. As a biologist, I definitely felt slightly marginalized by the book’s sociological language, but for anyone interested in the nature of human/animal interactions, this book is sure to be a valuable resource. Professional sociologists will find that it advances the field toward a nonhuman-centered framework, and brings nonhuman perspectives to light. Interested lay readers may have to battle through some technical terminology and theory, but the case studies examined are both enlightening and challenging. Ultimately, I believe that Urban Animals would be an instructive read for anyone with an academic interest in urban animals, and an eye-opening experience for those without much sociological knowledge.
You may have noticed ambient air quality returning to centre stage globally as a hot topic of discussion and debate. While the media coverage has helped draw attention to this critical issue, the plethora of data and views can cause confusion and can delay much-needed action. In this article, I will start with recent examples of air pollution stories that have grabbed international headlines, highlighting discrepancies and drawing some conclusions. I will then discuss key policy implications and priorities.
Global rankings
A number of global rankings were released this year relating to air quality. The ranking that probably received most attention, particularly in the Middle East, was the World Bank’s Little Green Data Book 2015. For the past 15 years, this report has presented data on economic, environmental and public health issues. This year, the report replaced its 2014 indicator on urban PM2.5 [i] levels with two indicators describing PM2.5 exposure on a national level.
The recent trend towards healthy, liveable cities has helped bring air pollution back to the spotlight in many regions around the world.
The surprising result was that the country with the worst performance was not China or India, but the United Arab Emirates. China was not far behind, but India was at less than half the average national exposure level of the UAE. The UAE’s response was to focus on the naturally-occurring high levels of PM2.5 due to the country and region’s desert environment. This is true, of course, but it is only part of the issue—studies have shown that a significant proportion of PM2.5 in the UAE is from anthropogenic (man-made) sources [ii].
Within a few weeks, the World Health Organisation published its latest data on PM2.5 at a city level. Ten out of the worst 15 performing cities were in India (including the worst four), and the rest were in Pakistan, Iran and Qatar. Not a single city of the worst 15 performers was in the UAE, China, or in the rest of the world, for that matter.
As a final example, the Environmental Performance Index team at Yale published a world map illustrating results of satellite-based PM2.5 analysis at a neighbourhood level (10-by-10 kilometer square). Areas with the highest concentration of PM2.5 include eastern China, northern India, Pakistan and large parts of the Middle East and Africa. Large parts of Europe, the east coast of the United States, Japan, central Australia and Mexico are in the very high PM2.5 range as well.
Smog in Dubai.
What’s going on?
How can the results of these analyses be so different, and how can policy makers and planners use the data effectively?
It is obvious that the studies are based on different data sets. The World Bank PM data was provided by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. The World Bank report states that data is for 2010; however, the Economist’s article on the matter implies that some of the data is a decade old, and that the data collection and analysis methodologies are not entirely robust and are based on a mix of measured and estimated data. Regardless of the date or accuracy of the original data sources, what stands out about this study is the national-averaging methodology used, which masks the poor performance of polluted urban centers, particularly in countries with large rural areas.
The WHO study is more transparent, with the entire data set being available online at both a country and city level. Further, the data set clearly indicates measurement years (typically 2008 – 2012) and whether a data point is an actual measurement or an estimation.
The EPI data map is particularly interesting, as it shows EPI-generated satellite data averaged at both a neighborhood and national level. This is an improvement over the 2014 EPI map, which showed satellite-based data at a national level only. Contrasting the national and neighborhood level views makes it clear how poor the national-level indicator is, particularly for geographically large countries such as China, Russia and the U.S. The Yale team has also provided a clear and user-friendly guide explaining the significance of PM2.5, the data sources used, and the analysis undertaken. In addition, the map’s creators acknowledge that even neighbourhood-level satellite data is an average, and that ground-level monitoring is required, particularly for high-risk neighbourhoods.
It is interesting to note that all three data sets rely solely on PM2.5 as an indicator for outdoor air pollution. This is a testimony to the large body of scientific evidence on the adverse impacts of PM2.5. At the same time, it poses the risk of ignoring other significant pollutants (see below). Additionally, it is important to keep in mind that PM2.5 originates from a wide-range of sources, both anthropogenic and natural. As such, while the global measurement figures may be comparable in one sense, an understanding of PM2.5 composition is required to allow a more informed comparison across cities, countries and regions.
Europe
Moving beyond global reporting, it is worth highlighting some of the recent region-specific air pollution stories. These offer a finer grain of detail compared to the global data, particularly in relation to the success and challenges of policy interventions at a regional and city level.
The EU, generally regarded as a leader in environmental policy and implementation, is on the path towards more stringent air quality standards. These were approved by the European Parliament a few weeks ago (October 2015) and are now awaiting endorsement by member states. The new limits would allow the EU to halve the number of premature deaths from air pollution, which currently claims 400,000 lives per year.
Buses in London.
Some of the 28 member states are already having trouble meeting the current, more relaxed standards. However, the existence of the legally binding EU laws has allowed a group of environmental lawyers to take the U.K. government to court for breaching EU nitrogen dioxide (NO2) limits. The campaigners secured a major victory, with the court ruling in their favour and requiring the U.K. Environment Department to draft new plans by December 2015 that would demonstrate EU limits being met prior to 2030 Interestingly, the quote from the chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders defends diesel vehicles as being the “cleanest ever,” a myth we do not have to spend much time debating after the recent Volkswagen scandal.
If the U.K., and other EU countries, are looking to implement low-emission-zones (LEZ), then the results of the London LEZ policy should be kept in mind. Disappointingly, a recent scientific study has shown that the London LEZ has had zero effect in reducing air-quality related health impacts on school children. The LEZ was introduced in 2008 to address the air quality issue specifically, after the congestion charge failed to do so. In analysing the reasons behind the results, the authors of the study point to the larger proportion of diesel vehicles in the fleet and the inaccuracy of the EU diesel tests. In short, the London LEZ did not do enough to address the impact of diesel vehicles.
Paris’s mayor seems to be on the right track: she has publicly committed to ban diesel cars from Paris by 2020. This is definitely a development worth watching.
China
A recent story on blue skies in Beijing makes a very clear point: we know how to address air pollution in cities. To help ensure a successful national celebration, authorities in Beijing banned half of the city’s cars from the streets two weeks in advance and temporarily closed hundreds of factories. On the day of the event, 40,000 construction sites were ordered to close. The result: clear skies and a 73 percent reduction in PM. In this case, drastic measures had to be temporarily applied to produce drastic improvements. The challenge is in making this approach the business-as-usual scenario.
In addition to all-year-round transport and industry-related emissions, China has to face the issue of coal-based heat generation in the winter. There are cities in China that have reported PM2.5 levels over 50 times higher than the recommended level set by WHO. In response, Beijing’s mayor has committed to a series of coal power plant closures.
So what?
As a start, let us remind ourselves of the figures published by WHO last year: air pollution is responsible for over 7 million deaths a year. Out of those, around 3.7 million are due to outdoor air pollution. So, ambient air pollution and its detrimental health impacts are a reality. And we are almost certainly underestimating the negative health impacts, as these figures are based on the impacts of only some of the known pollutants (e.g. PM2.5). Moreover, there are additional health impacts to consider beyond mortality, such as respiratory infections. While the majority of the deaths are in developing countries, air pollution is still a serious issue in the developed world. For example, in the U.K. it is estimated that early deaths from air pollution are higher than those from obesity and alcohol combined.
Let us also remind ourselves that, as a human race, we have previously won the battle against air pollution. In cities such as London and Dublin, where pollution was primarily linked to coal, banning the use of coal in cities has helped us get rid of the visible, short-term black carbon smog. Even in the case of non-coal-related (photochemical) smog in Los Angeles and the wider area of Southern California, improved emission standards and other policy interventions over the past two decades have significantly improved both the air quality and the health of residents. This collective experience has left us with a wealth of knowledge on managing air quality—it is a science that we understand well. At least, the scientists and experts do.
Today, some cities, such as Beijing and Krakow, are still struggling with air pollution impacts of coal burning. Other cities have the challenge of addressing air pollution from transport, industry, agriculture or natural dust. In the vast majority of instances, pollution results as a combination of these sources in varying proportions. Moreover, this pollution is often not generated within the city’s limit, or even within the country’s borders.
Where does this leave us?
Measure: given the evidence on the serious health risks of air pollution and the technology and information available today, there is no excuse for not understanding a city’s air quality performance. Air quality experts can advise on the most suitable indicators to measure and the most appropriate analytical and modeling tools to utilize. With global-satellite modeling data becoming widely accessible through global ranking studies, there is little room for hiding our heads in the sand. Ground-based measurements are still needed to set context-specific standards and to monitor compliance with them.
Address root causes: understanding the root causes will help us to develop and implement effective interventions at a national, regional and city level. In drastic situations, these may need to be equally drastic interventions, such as banning use of all or some vehicles in certain locations or at certain times. Particular focus should be placed on improving air quality where people live. Mitigation and compensation measures (e.g. planting trees, moving residents away from motorways) should be a last resort and not a primary strategy.
Raise awareness: the World Resources Institute is campaigning for better access to environmental information for the general public They report that 53 percent of countries in the world do not report urban outdoor air pollution information. I strongly believe that people have a right to know when air quality conditions are unsafe in their neighbourhoods, to allow them to plan their activities accordingly and take the necessary precautions. Organizations such as Clean Air London have done a tremendous job of cutting through the myths and jargon to bring a clear and compelling argument for addressing air pollution to both the public and the politicians. One Atmosphere is a recent video they produced as part of these efforts, and it provides a good example of effective communication.
The recent trend towards healthy, liveable cities has helped bring air pollution back to the spotlight in many regions around the world. It is a global issue with many local flavours—one which we have successfully addressed before and which we cannot afford to ignore now.
[i] PM2.5 refers to suspended particulate matter of diameter 2.5microns or less, also sometimes referred to as fine particulate matter. While invisible to the eye, their small size allows them to enter deep into the human lung causing serious negative health impacts.
[ii] Environmental Burden of Disease Assessment: A case study in the United Arab Emirates, Springer, 2013.
The idea of the ‘neighborhood’ is reassuring, and it is our focus in this text, which explores how neighborhoods can help us to build and rebuild better cities for people. Good neighborhoods define cities and metropolitan regions at scales that are easier for us to relate to as humans, and as suggested in the days of yore by Gans (1962, 1967) and Morris (1969) perhaps more ‘natural’—that is, congruent with how humans have cohabited in smaller communities for thousands of years. In this series of three blog entries, we assert that good neighborhood planning is vital for more resilient and livable cities. The central argument is structured by two sets of questions and objectives:
Why do neighborhoods matter for city-building? We consider positive and negative aspects of neighborhood-scale planning with particular attention to strengthening the complementarity and interdependence of civil society and the state.
Why should we plan neighborhoods differently and more fully engage civil society in city-building? Creating better cities entails making neighborhoods a strategic focus for planning and action, as well as linking them to broader visions and strategies for progress toward ‘wholes that are greater than the sums of their parts.’ Civil-society organizations can play a pivotal role in developing ‘nested’ neighborhood strategies to strengthen cities and to drive innovation for positive social change.
The first entry (Why Do Neighborhoods Matter and Where Are We Going Wrong?)proposed that the time is right for rethinking neighborhood planning while warning about a paradox: as it conventionally has been done in the 20th century across the Anglo-American world, neighborhoods have been used to justify city-building strategies that are divisive both spatially—by setting clear geographic ‘limits’ that signal exclusion or exclusivity—and socially, by putting local interests ahead of broader interests of urban connectedness and complexity. Thus, while the motivations are noble, the practice has often been detrimental to the overall nature of cities for people.
Vital to the success of neighborhood planning is the avoidance of ‘superblock’ or ‘enclave’ approaches—what we describe as neighborhoods without borders.
In the second entry (Can ‘Nested’ Neighborhood Planning Lead to Urban Ecological Democracy?) four key components were introduced to link neighborhood-scale planning with the work of ensuring better outcomes for the city as a whole: (1) social innovation, (2) community development praxis, (3) neighborhoods without borders and (4) a vision of ecological democracy. This multi-scalar approach links dimensions of thinking, planning, and building which are often disparate: integrating scales from the neighborhood to the city to the city-region, integrating action across domains of civil society and the state, and integrating value systems of urban ecology and participatory democracy.
This third and final entry tells a story from Montréal about a place-specific approach to good neighborhood planning: the Green, Active, Healthy Neighborhoods project. It explores what can be learned from the first five years of this place-specific work led by a civil-society organization (CSO). We present this case study to discuss how nested neighborhood planning can offer building blocks for better cities in a wide range of geographic, political and cultural contexts, if all three types of integration discussed in Part 2 are present. We weave in organizational and project aims, participant rolesand a brief analysis of the project with respect to our four components of good neighborhood planning.
Context
The Green, Active, Healthy Neighborhoods project was led by the Montréal Urban Ecology Centre, a civil-society organization (CSO) that has existed for two decades, in collaboration with Quebec Coalition on Weight-Related Problems, a national partnership of advocacy groups and associations grappling with how to make it easier for Quebec’s population of eight million to eat well and to be more active.[1] The Neighborhoods project has received funding from several granting agencies with the mandate to develop and pilot a methodology for innovative community-based neighborhood planning. Detailed accounts of how the project developed and insights gained from the process can be found in a short article by Armand & Rochette (2011) and a longer piece by Blanchet-Cohen (2014).
The Centre is the lead player in this story. A small non-profit organization, it arose from a long, complex and intense struggle over neighborhood planning in the 1970s and 80s. As a major social movement contesting the destruction of a dense, socially-mixed urban neighborhood of Victorian housing located near Montréal’s downtown core, much of which had been bought up by land speculators seeking to replace the neighborhood fabric with tall apartment blocks, this battle marked the city’s history. The movement, documented by Hellman (1987), not only successfully ‘saved’ most of the local building stock, but went on to create Canada’s first and largest cooperative housing project. Several leaders of the local coalition sought to maintain the solidarity, energy and enthusiasm of the community-based social movement; in 1996, they established the Centre, which is housed in one of the neighborhood’s cooperative commercial buildings.
Since its inception the Centre has developed policies and practices to help create green, inclusive, just, democratic and healthy cities. Its approach is based on social ecology and the complex interdependence of social, economic, environmental and public health. Through its impressive accomplishments in participatory democracy, urban ecology and neighborhood planning, it has been recognized as a civil-society organization of significant importance and an active participant in a global urban movement for social change. It works primarily at the neighborhood and city scales, but also engages in special international projects, such as hosting the 2011 Ecocity World Summit.[2]
Popular manifestation for slowing vehicular traffic—an example of the Montréal Urban Ecology Centre ‘taking it to the streets’ (Berman, 1986). The banner reads ‘Our streets: a place to live!’ Image: CÉUM
Project objectives
There is widespread agreement that a shift to modes of active and public transportation is key to reducing the negative health and environmental impacts of car-dominated urban form (Deehr & Shumann, 2009; Frank et al., 2004; Frumkin et al. 2004; Sallis et al., 2004; Smith et al., 2010; Tomalty & Haider, 2009). As dominant patterns of urban growth and development in North America are still car-centric, however, the Neighborhoods approach was developed to redefine existing neighborhoods so that they support walking, cycling and transit use.
The Neighborhoods project also emerged in response to the need for concerted action in Canadian cities with growing awareness of the direct connections between the built environment of cities and public health (e.g., Frank et al., 2004; Purciel et al., 2009; Sui, 2003). It was launched in 2008 with support from key decision-makers in public health to address the problem of obesity among young people by developing participatory neighborhood plans to increase opportunities for safe active transportation (i.e., walking and cycling).It is articulated around six sets of core principles: 1) Public space and streets for people; 2) Safe active and public transport; 3) Strong people-nature connections; 4) Meaningful community engagement; 5) Sense of place and continual creativity; and 6) A long-term vision of urban livability. The Neighborhoods project aims to facilitate learning by the public, community stakeholders, elected officials and professionals in planning, engineering and design, specifically concerning how to design and create neighborhoods that make active transportation attractive and easy. It also strives to influence change in policies and professional norms and practices. The project involves research and dissemination of good practices, neighborhood-scale participatory planning, and public events and awareness-raising campaigns in four Montréal neighborhoods.
A ‘complete street’ in Malmö (Sweden) affording safe, comfortable opportunities for walking and cycling. Image: Nik LukaMap of the island of Montréal with its local municipalities highlighting the four areas in which pilot projects were undertaken in the first phase of the Green, Active, Healthy Neighborhood project. Image: CÉUM
Participant roles
Green, Active, Healthy Neighborhood planning processes have now been carried out in four areas in Montreal. The Montréal Urban Ecology Centre led each of these by establishing local Neighborhoods committees comprising representatives of civil society and state institutions (including representatives of the local government) for each of the four pilot projects undertaken, bound together with a memorandum of understanding signed by the Centre, the local partner organization and the municipal authorities. Substantial public outreach ensured that local citizens were involved in various participatory strategies. The results have been quite positive: for the most part, local participants are very pleased with the processes and the plans that were produced. Not surprisingly, stakeholders have found it more difficult to implement the progressive plans and policies that resulted from community-based planning processes, and this work continues apace.
Images of the workshops with citizens, experts, and city-building professionals. Images: CÉUM
There is an interesting twist in the CSO-state relationship here, however. When the Neighborhoods project received funding in 2008, the City of Montréal adopted its new Transportation Plan; this included major policy directives based on the notion of quartiers verts (‘green neighborhoods’) developed in Paris. These are designated urban zones where steps are being taken to promote active transportation by increasing pedestrian and cyclist safety, including the introduction of aggressive traffic-calming measures to improve the quality of life for local residents. The Neighborhoods project enjoyed heightened recognition from the City and other stakeholders because it seemed to align well with policy. Soon after the adoption of the Transportation Plan, the City of Montreal launched its own parallel Green Neighborhood project and expressed a desire to collaborate with the Montréal Urban Ecology Centre in learning together as the parallel projects progress. Regular meetings took place to exchange information about innovative approaches. Interestingly, because the City did not fund or manage the Neighborhoods project, the Centre had the freedom to ‘push the envelope’ to recommend policies that more progressively favor active and public transportation along with more people-centered uses and configurations of public space. In fact, concerns arose that the city’s Transportation Plan approach implied a ‘superblock’ concept to traffic-calming by improving the quality of urban space within residential fabrics (on local streets) while shunting high-speed heavy traffic onto the main avenues that have defined the city’s armature for over a century. Without the unconditional support of the City, however, the Centre was limited in its capacity to implement the Neighborhoods plans once they were finished—or at least the aspects that relied on public infrastructure spending.
A main street in the central city of Montréal. Photo: Nik Luka
Successes and lessons learned
How does the Neighborhoods project stack up in terms of the four key components we suggest in these three blog entries? How is it vital for neighborhood-scale planning that also generates better outcomes for cities as larger, complex wholes? We start with social innovation, where the ‘expectations-motivation’ difference is evident between CSOs and state actors. Through many public initiatives and policy proposals introduced as elements of the Neighborhoods project, the Montréal Urban Ecology Centre has created synergies for positive change, raising the expectations of diverse publics in Montréal (and farther afield!) to create better neighborhoods and cities. Because the Centre is not confined to work within the constraints of existing municipal policies and regimes, it can ‘push the policy envelope’ and make recommendations in neighborhood plans that are consistent with bolder concepts. Swyngedouw & Moulaert (2010) warn that a project such as Neighborhoods must not be ‘captured’ by the state or its ‘innovative dynamics’ will weaken. The Centre’s capacity for social innovation is further strengthened by its glocal capacity and outlook. While staff members who work on Neighborhoods at the neighborhood level focus most of their energy on developing strategies for addressing local problems, the Centre as a whole maintains a broader global perspective and connection with international movements for creating resilient and livable cities.
Our second key component is the praxis of community development. The contested space between top-down and bottom-up approaches is tricky to navigate for any organization. It is constantly changing, and it can be very difficult to know how to make appropriate decisions, and on what to base those decisions. One early lesson learned in the Neighborhoods project is that advocates need to know when to push hard and when to relent on contentious matters. For example, in one of the study neighborhoods, the local Neighborhoods committee selected participants who were clearly not representative of local ethnic and cultural diversity. While the Montréal Urban Ecology Centre was uncomfortable with the situation and recommended changes to committee composition, the local committee resisted, and so the Centre backed down. A decision was taken as to which principle was more important to favor in this case: listening to and respecting what the local committee proposed as appropriate, or seeking to ensure equitable ethnic representation in a leadership group. Continually navigating contested space is not easy, but it helps to have a clear sense of which aspects of the planning process are most important and which are negotiable—in other words, for the CSO be what Friedmann (1989) and Sandercock (1998) usefully describe as a good ‘tightrope walker’ in progressive planning.
Vital to the success of neighborhood planning is the avoidance of ‘superblock’ or ‘enclave’ approaches—what we described in the second blog entry as neighborhoods without borders. This component represents an area of difference between the Centre, as a CSO, and the City on what to do with arterial roads. The Neighborhoods project includes arterial and commercial streets within neighborhood planning areas as well as traffic-calming strategies so that they are more amenable to walking and cycling. The City’s approach is more consistent with conventional planning, using major streets to define clear neighborhood boundaries onto which heavy flows of vehicular traffic are funneled. City policy does not clearly state the aim to reduce overall traffic volume, effectively guaranteeing increased traffic on arterials and the creation of neighborhood enclaves. As argued in section two, this runs counter to a holistic approach for nurturing resilient and livable cities. Contrasting municipal regimes are seen in Toronto, where local planning and infrastructure-building efforts have focused for almost 25 years on how to transform arterial roads into livable ‘avenues’ or boulevards (see Charney, 1991; Hess, 2009; Jacobs, 1991) and also in Minneapolis-St Paul (see Forsyth et al., 2010).[3]
Intersection of two Montréal main streets where heavy vehicular traffic compromises walkability and livability, despite the many dwellings, shops and services lining both streets. Photo: Nik Luka
Finally, the Neighborhoods project is explicitly aligned with a holistic vision of neighborhoods as integral to ecological democracies. A vision of cities comprising integral neighborhoods that continually weave urban ecological approaches with participatory democracy is consistent with the mission of the Montréal Urban Ecology Centre and its partners, and congruent in principle with the vision of the Neighborhoods project. The project focused primarily on improving conditions for active and public transportation and less on other considerations important for resilient and livable cities. This can be attributed to several factors: first, it aims specifically to address the problem of obesity among young people through modifying the built environment to favor active transportation; secondly, its main objective is to rethink streets as spaces for people—as what Derek Drummond (1991) called a city’s living room. Since city streets in North America have primarily been designed for the movement and storage of motor vehicles, the Neighborhoods project is primarily focused on challenging urban transportation norms. Finally, as mentioned, Montréal’s ‘green neighborhood’ concept was first articulated as urban policy in the city’s official 2008 Transportation Plan, and so it has become local convention to associate ‘green neighborhoods’ primarily with transportation, to the exclusion of other aspects of the Neighborhoods vision such as enhancing human-nature connections, increasing biodiversity and strengthening the sense of place for everyone who spends time there.
Saint-Viateur Street in the Mile-End neighborhood during a street festival. Photo: Nik Luka
Reports by external analysts on the first phases of the Neighborhoods project confirmed that it was producing real results: the project reached a wide range of actors, and it was met with enthusiasm by many elected officials and professionals in private- and public-sector roles, who are exploring ways to enfold the project’s principles and values into their ways of doing things. Success was seen in outreach, popularization and public education, raising awareness among all sorts of citizens of the ways in which neighborhood-based initiatives can make a difference for resilient, livable cities. Familiar challenges arose on that front, however, with unevenness in terms of who participated. It is not easy to engage diverse publics in neighborhood planning even with a strategic approach that links interests, needs, capacity and possibilities for action. Local champions were found to be invaluable in making projects successes, and younger participants were found to be good ‘multiplier’ agents (spreading the enthusiasm and project content among different networks), but the appropriation of the project was found to be uneven from one pilot area to another. As planners have often discovered, not all neighborhoods are the same in terms of public interest, institutional capacity for discussing change and the potential for actually implementing proposed changes. Finally, one of the big questions that arose in the Neighborhoods project concerns how pilot projects can be successfully ‘scaled-up’ (or at least repeated as strategic methods) elsewhere in the city. This question is now being explored in the ongoing project work led by the Montréal Urban Ecology Centre, supported by Canada-wide partners.
Standing-room only at a public presentation of one of the four Green, Active, Healthy Neighborhood plans developed in the first phase of the project. Image: CÉUM
On balance, the Green, Active, Healthy Neighborhoods initiative demonstrates strong evidence of carrying out neighborhood planning that contributes to resilient and livable cities. Infrastructure, policies and practices that prioritize walking and cycling represent substantial contributions toward city-building objectives such as compact urban form, cleaner air, decreased vehicular traffic, increased opportunities for everyday exercise, fewer transportation-related accidents and a host of other qualities centered on high-quality public space with ample vegetation and permeable surfaces to prevent urban heat islands (cf. Gehl, 2010; Larsen, 2015; North, 2013). Continuing challenges for the Neighborhoods project and its successor projects unsurprisingly have to do with effective implementation, continually balancing the CSO/state ‘tightrope,’ leveraging active transportation to more fully embrace a practical vision of resilient and livable cities, and getting beyond conventional approaches to defining neighborhoods so that major streets—the urban armature—take their rightful place as integral parts of resilient and livable cities for people.
Toward a new paradigm of integrated neighborhood planning
We have argued in three blog entries that neighborhood planning is an important strategy for creating resilient and livable cities. We propose neighborhood planning with a difference—combining social innovation with community development praxis to create well-connected neighborhoods within cities that are ecologically robust and defined by healthy practices of participatory deliberative democracy. Underlying our approach is the notion of integration (Luka & Lister, 2000): integrating neighborhood and city spatial scales; integrating capacities and domains of civil society and state actions; integrating local and global visions, thinking and action; and integrating theory and practice in collaborative participatory praxis. Participants in innovative neighborhood-focused city-building processes are continually redefining and negotiating these integral relationships in working toward shared visions of resilient and livable cities in practical ways that demonstrate clear evidence of progress to skeptics and supporters alike.
Making the leap from the cities we have to the cities we want requires social change, which includes citizens expecting more from their cities and contributing in new and creative ways. This is one important way that neighborhoods matter for building resilient and livable cities. People are more likely to connect with a city-building policy or project when it maps well onto their local neighborhood and when they play active roles in shaping it. This is vital to prevent one of the major risks and drawbacks we identified with conventional (old-fashioned) neighborhood planning: an overly prescriptive emphasis on physical attributes, often articulated in generic terms. The issue is arguably that city governments have often led neighborhood planning in North America. We have demonstrated through our Montréal case study how civil-society organizations can play pivotal roles in certain these processes through a range of engagement methods.
A second concern we identified in the first blog entry is that neighborhood-scaled ‘urban building blocks’ are inherently divisive by nature, for they can easily become enclaves. We cannot lose sight of the overall city context nor compromise on wider global issues. Great neighborhoods don’t necessarily make for great cities, as Biddulph (2001) has demonstrated. Cities that are resilient and livable are defined by great neighborhoods that are well connected and overlapping in their form and function, and in how people imagine them to exist. In these three blog entries, we have sought to show that neighborhood planning is worth doing if (and only if) it integrates four key components of ‘nested’ neighborhood planning that link neighborhood-scale planning to the work of ensuring better outcomes for the city as a whole: (1) social innovation, (2) community-development practice integrated with theory, often simply termed ‘praxis’, (3) neighborhoods without borders, and (4) a vision of ecological democracy. This multi-scalar approach links dimensions of thinking, planning, and building which are often disparate: integrating scales from the neighborhood to the city to the city-region, integrating action across domains of civil society and the state, and integrating value systems of urban ecology and participatory democracy.
Our closing comment has to do with civil-society organizations as critical agents in creating resilient and livable cities through neighborhood planning. They operate in a contested in-between space that Ledwith (2005) refers to as a space of ‘community-development praxis’—a space of continual negotiation between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ forces—and this is why, as mentioned above, Friedmann (1989) and Sandercock (1998) speak of them as ‘tightrope walkers.’ As entities that challenge the dominance of the state and the market in liberal democracies, CSOs are the best example of what Susan Fainstein (1999, 2010) calls ‘counterinstitutions’ that are vital for effecting positive change for just cities. Through participatory collaborations in the contested praxis of community development, socially-innovative CSOs have the opportunity to negotiate relationships of power and engage methods for neighborhood planning that will contribute to collective action for social change to occur, making and continually transforming our metropolitan regions into resilient and livable cities for all.
1. The official title of the project, in French, is Quartiers verts, actifs et en santé; the Montréal Urban Ecology Centre is known as Centre d’écologie urbaine de Montréal and it ran the Neighborhoods project in collaboration with Coalition québécoise sur la problématique du poids. The project was funded primarily by Québec en forme and the Chagnon Foundation.
2. The Montréal Urban Ecology Centre hosted the 2011 Ecocity World Summit, in coordination with Ecocity Builders. Over 1500 participants from 72 countries and 280 cities around the world attended this event, the ninth in a series of international conferences, founded by Richard Register in 1990.
3. See also a recent study by Macdonald et al. (2010).
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Jayne Engle is Curator of Cities for People and is a PhD candidate based in Montreal, Canada. She practices participatory community planning and development in the global north and south.
Now a century old, Anchorage has at various times during its short history proclaimed itself the “Air Crossroads of the World,” a “City of Lights” and a place of “Big Wild Life” (the latter for the community’s “perfect blend of urbanity and wilderness”). But I have long believed—and yes, opined in my writings—that Alaska’s urban center could easily be called the “City of Moose.” I’m not the only one to publicly express this view. Earlier this year, former state wildlife manager Rick Sinnott, now a contributor to the Alaska Dispatch News, went so far as to write a cover story for the ADN’s Sunday magazine playfully promoting the City of Moose idea.
The question of how to weave our urban lives with wild nature is one faced in different forms all around the world.
Not only do hundreds of moose inhabit the city’s landscape, most of the 300,000 or so people who live here appreciate the ungulates’ big, wild presence. Clear evidence of that was demonstrated in a study conducted in 2009 for the Alaska Department of Game by a company called Responsive Management.
Anchorage’s human residents share their city with hundreds of moose, who must negotiate assorted urban challenges. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and GameA moose dines on the fruit of an ornamental shrub in an Anchorage yard. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Among the findings: “While acknowledging that moose cause some problems, the large majority of Anchorage residents (87%) say that encounters with moose make life in Anchorage seem more interesting and special. A further indication of tolerance toward moose is that an overwhelming majority (94%) indicate that they have enjoyed watching moose in the Anchorage area in the past 2 years.”
Still, not everyone likes having moose around. Some folks are angered by the animals’ taste for ornamental plants and garden vegetables and would like their numbers thinned. Others, particularly parents with children, understandably worry about the dangers moose present. And a vocal minority argues that cities are for people, period, and moose shouldn’t be allowed here (nor should any other big, wild animals that can inflict injuries be tolerated, most notably bears, or so the argument goes).
A young moose takes up temporary residence in the yard of an Anchorage homeowner. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Inevitable conflicts between people and moose, some of which lead to injury or even death, show the challenges of living with wildlife—and, more generally, wild nature—in an urban community, even in a place where most residents feel a close connection to what might be called the “natural world” and where people place great value on outdoors activities.
* * *
Most of the city’s human residents live in what’s called the “Anchorage Bowl,” a roughly triangular piece of lowland bounded on two sides by the waters of Cook Inlet and on the third by the Chugach Mountains. That bowl is also year-round home to an estimated 200 to 300 moose, with winter numbers tripling, to between 700 and 1,000 animals, when they’re driven out of neighboring hills by deepening snow and lured into the city by Anchorage’s relative abundance of winter food, much of it in the form of fruit-bearing ornamental trees and shrubs.
Though their density varies through the year, moose can be found throughout Anchorage in any season, even in the heavily commercialized downtown and midtown areas. In fact, I’d wager that for much of the year there’s no better locale in Alaska to see North America’s largest member of the deer family. Many that inhabit the city prefer the parks, greenbelts and wooded lots of west Anchorage, including the Turnagain area, where I have lived since 2006 after more than a dozen years on the city’s Hillside.
A cow moose nuzzles its newborn calf; cows are protective moms and will aggressively defend their young, especially in the days immediately following their birth. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and GameCinnamon colored, moose calves usually weigh 30 to 35 pounds when they’re born in late May or early June and will weigh 300 to 400 pounds by the fall. Photo: Doug Lindstrand
One cow moose, often accompanied by a calf or two, inhabits pockets of woods near Anchorage’s much-beloved Coastal Trail, where I regularly walk my dog. Occasionally a bull will amble down the street, munching as he goes. And it’s not rare, especially in winter, to find moose bedded down in either my yard or those of my neighbors.
I’ve always felt confident that I could track down an urban moose or two on short notice, if asked to show off the local wildlife by visiting family or friends. That confidence was put to the test when my mother’s two sisters visited us a few years after Mom moved to Alaska from the East Coast in 2002.
As their early summer visit wound down, the three sisters agreed they’d had a grand reunion. But neither of my aunts had seen much of the local wildlife. On something of a whim, my girlfriend and I took Mom and one of her sisters on a driving tour of West Anchorage in search of moose (the other sister had earlier headed to the hills east of town with her son, also to seek out moose).
About four-five minutes later, we spotted a cow and two yearlings, grazing among a small grove of birches, about 50 yards off the road that leads to Kincaid Park. We parked along the shoulder to watch the animals and within minutes, several other cars pulled over and a dozen murmuring people lined the road, many armed with binoculars, cameras and video recorders. Clearly we weren’t the only moose hunters out that night and I guessed evening expeditions like ours go on throughout the summer.
Former Alaska wildlife manager Jessy Coltrane watches a young moose that got “stuck” inside a fenced area and will need help finding its way out. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Pleased but not fully satisfied, we headed for a birch-spruce forest near Anchorage’s international airport. Leaving pavement for a dusty gravel road, we slowed to a crawl. Within a few minutes, a young bull appeared in a meadow behind some birch trees. Approaching to within 25 feet of our parked car, the yearling nonchalantly picked leaves from atop a willow. Later we spotted a mature cow browsing among the birches, likely the young bull’s mom. Engine off, we watched silently for several minutes. Both moose gorged on greens, unconcerned by our presence.
Nearly 10 pm, with the light dimming, we headed back. Still, we didn’t stop looking. About 5 minutes from home I noticed two shadowy forms beside heavily traveled Northern Lights Boulevard.
“More moose,” I shouted to the others. “And this time there’s a little one.”
Little indeed. A tiny, chestnut-colored calf the size of a small pony stood beside its mother in an open, grassy area. We pulled over to the shoulder and, our windows wide open, paused nearby the pair. Because cow moose are notoriously protective of their young, I watched for any signs of upset. But this one showed no evidence of being the least bit agitated. She lifted her head slightly and looked our way, then calmly resumed her grazing.
We lingered less than a minute. Then in deepening darkness we finished our tour, more impressed than ever by the city’s abundance of people-tolerant moose.
* * *
For all the remarkable tolerance they show—especially given our species’ sometimes foolish, stubborn, or mean-spirited behaviors—even urban moose remain wild animals. If pushed too far, or surprised by a close encounter, they’ll sometimes respond aggressively, especially when already stressed by circumstances.
Cow moose with newborn calves can be every bit as dangerous as bears. In 2012, for example, one protective mom injured two young girls playing in their yard. Following that attack in Eagle River (a community that’s part of the Anchorage municipality, just north of the city), local wildlife manager Jessy Coltrane told a reporter that the girls “didn’t do anything wrong. It was one of those accidental chance encounters.” Coltrane (who has since taken a job outside Alaska) further explained that cows are especially protective of their young the first two weeks after their birth, when the newborns are most vulnerable. “After that, they run like the wind and mom isn’t as aggressive in defending them.”
A moose pauses while crossing an Anchorage street; moose-vehicle collisions are especially a concern in winter driving conditions. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and GameThough most Anchorage residents love sharing their city with moose, conflicts are inevitable, for example when moose and outdoors enthusiasts meet along trails. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Mature bulls, which can weigh 1,000 pounds or more, are nearly as dangerous during the autumn rut, when they stop eating and fight each other for mating rights. The battles can take a substantial toll, leading to exhaustion, injuries, and agitated animals, and what we humans might call short-tempered behavior. And then there’s winter, when extreme cold or deep-snow conditions may lead to stressed-out moose that sometimes attack a person with little or no apparent provocation.
Dogs, of course, add to the stress in all these circumstances, and lots of Anchorage residents have dogs that they take walking, running, biking, skiing, and mushing. Though Anchorage has leash laws, many people allow their dogs off leash when using local trails. Some of those loose dogs end up harassing moose—and in turn are attacked. Fish and Game has estimated that moose injure 50 to 100 dogs each year, with a small number killed. In my estimation, it could be a lot worse; from what I’ve observed, in most situations Anchorage moose show remarkable tolerance of dogs as well as people.
Injuries to people are uncommon. Coltrane, the former wildlife manager, once estimated that moose harm five to ten people each year in the Anchorage area. Rarely are those injuries life threatening. But in 1993 and 1995, Anchorage residents were stomped to death by agitated moose. One fatal wintertime attack was caught on video and made national news when a cow moose with calf, apparently feeling cornered, trampled a man trying to enter a university building. It turned out that the moose had earlier been bombarded by snowballs, no doubt increasing its agitation and defensiveness.
Recognizing the fact that close encounters between people and moose can lead to harm (not only in Anchorage, but anywhere people and moose are likely to cross paths), the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has created a “Living with Moose” advisory that includes a section on “Safety in Moose Country.”
Up close and personal: portrait of a moose standing beside the window of an Anchorage home. Used with permission of Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Though local media tends to emphasize the dangers of moose attacks, the primary danger that Alces alces presents to people is in moose-vehicle collisions. Alaska, it turns out, has one of the world’s highest rates of moose-vehicle collisions per mile driven. The danger is greatest in winter, when visibility is poorest, streets are often slick with ice and snow, and large snowfalls can prompt moose to seek the relatively easy traveling conditions offered by plowed streets (or packed trails). Besides the winter peak, moose are most frequently hit by cars following the calving season.
In Anchorage alone, an average of 150 moose are annually hit by vehicles. Almost always, the moose suffer fatal injuries. People are rarely killed, though two people died this past October in Anchorage, when on consecutive days their vehicles (one a car, the other a motorcycle) struck moose. More commonly, vehicles are “totaled” and human occupants injured, sometimes seriously. To minimize the danger, the state presents a series of safe-driving tips.
Whether they result from stompings or vehicle collisions, moose-caused injuries almost inevitably lead to calls for moose hunts within the Anchorage Bowl. Limited hunts are already allowed on the military’s neighboring Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson (JBER) and in the Chugach Mountains, but so far there’s been no widespread support for an in-city hunt.
The most recent calls for moose hunts in Anchorage proper have been tied to increased recreational use at West Anchorage’s Kincaid Park, most notably single-track biking. A particularly strong push was made in late 2014, when resident Ira Edwards officially proposed a Kincaid moose hunt to the Alaska Board of Game.
In a response to Edwards’ proposal and a story about it by Rick Sinnott, I wrote a commentary that explained why a Kincaid moose hunt was an awful idea. Among my main points: rather than “troublemaker” moose, human actions—and especially bad judgment—have largely contributed to the upswing of moose-human conflicts at Kincaid, whether in organized events or other, informal recreational activities.
To further borrow from my commentary, I noted:
We are supposedly the more intelligent species, yet we sometimes behave in remarkably foolish, ignorant, or stubborn ways.
To repeat: the problem at Kincaid Park isn’t trouble-making moose. The animals should not be hunted for public-safety reasons, Edwards’ chief rationale for starting a hunt there. And if a persistently dangerous moose is identified, authorities should remove it, not sport hunters.
Sinnott’s story also makes it clear that there’s been no upsurge in moose at Kincaid. In fact, based on F&G studies, it’s more likely moose numbers have dropped since the mid-1990s.
Nor is there any evidence that moose have become more aggressive. Based on my own experiences—I visit Kincaid many times throughout the year—I’d wager Kincaid moose are as habituated to people as they’ve ever been, if not more so. . . .
Though neither the number nor behavior of moose has changed substantially, what has shifted at Kincaid is the human element. As Sinnott wrote, ‘Nowadays the park crawls with people most of the year.’
Actually, ‘crawls’ isn’t the best word choice. Many of the people who recreate at Kincaid are moving fast: runners, soccer players, skiers, and especially cyclists. The explosion of single-track trails and those who use them are the single biggest change that’s contributed to Kincaid’s so-called moose ‘problem.’
Those trails have greatly fragmented what remained of Kincaid’s already diminished woodlands. Thus it’s now harder for moose to avoid us humans and that in turn means more encounters. More conflicts.
Those who say we must have either a moose preserve or a moose hunt are creating a false choice. We can have both moose and human recreation. But people need to take more responsibility for their actions, they need to pay more attention to—and show tolerance for—our wildlife neighbors.
There’s more, but you get the idea.
To its credit, the Board of Game refused to take action on the proposal, arguing it had no authority to make such a decision.
Future attempts to open Anchorage to moose hunts seem inevitable, especially as increased recreational use and fragmented habitat heighten the likelihood of moose-human encounters and conflicts. The question—even in outdoors- and wildlife-loving Alaska—is whether we humans, again, supposedly the more intelligent species, are willing to make the smart decisions and compromises necessary to harmoniously share the landscape with moose—or bears, or other wild species.
On the surface, the challenges may appear larger when dealing with sometimes agitated—or traffic ignorant—thousand-pound animals, but the question of how to weave our urban lives with wild nature is one faced in different forms all around the world. Moose simply make the challenges more obvious.
After reading Pope Francis’ Laudato Si, On Care For Our Common Home, I was moved to select references I felt relevant to efforts in Portland to integrate nature into the city and weave nature into the fabric of our urban and urbanizing neighborhoods. I sent a copy to David Maddox, who asked if I would consider adapting those excerpts into a blog for The Nature of Cities. What follows is my effort to do so. The entire text of “On Care for our Common Home” can be found here, in eight languages. It makes for good reading for anyone interested in the nature of cities.
“There is a need to protect those common areas, visual landmarks and urban landscapes which increase our sense of belonging, of rootedness, of ‘feeling at home’ within a city which includes us and brings us together.”—Pope Francis
I was only half-joking when testifying at a recent Portland city council session when I said we could have saved a lot of time and energy in writing our updated comprehensive plan, climate action plan and climate preparation strategies had we received an early draft of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si, On Care For Our Common Home. I was struck by the many parallels, both conceptual and textual, between the Encyclical and our efforts to better integrate nature into the urban context, our responses regarding mitigation and adaptation to climate change, and our efforts to create an ecologically healthy, equitable and resilient city.Charlie Hales, Mayor of Portland. Photo: Mike Houck
Quite coincidentally to my reading of the Encyclical, it so happened that our mayor, Charlie Hales, had just received an invitation to attend a papal audience on Climate Change and human trafficking. Hales received his invitation on the strength of the city’s climate action plan, on its reputation for excellence in urban planning, and on President Obama’s 2014 naming of Portland as one of 16 national Climate Action Champions for Leadership on Climate Change. Sixty mayors from around the world were invited to Rome on the heels of a climate change gathering in Vancouver, British Columbia, to address modern slavery and climate change. The papal meeting was sponsored by the pontifical academies of sciences and social sciences.
The leaders were asked to share their city’s best practices, to sign a declaration recognizing that climate change and extreme poverty are influenced by human activity, and to pledge to make their cities “socially inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.”
So, what do Francis’ writings have to do with “the nature of cities,” ecological and social? A lot. For example, he laments the lack of greenspace under the heading “City Planning,” writing:
“Many cities are huge, inefficient structures, excessively wasteful of energy and water. Neighbourhoods, even those recently built, are congested, chaotic and lacking in sufficient green space. We were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass and metal, and deprived of physical contact with nature.”
Tanner Spring Nature Park in the heart of the Pearl District in NW Portland as seen from the Sitka Apartments, a low income housing in one of Portland’s densest neighborhoods. Equity of access to nature, even in the city’s downtown core, is fundamental to creating an equitable and ecologically sustainable city. Photo Mike HouckBurnt Bridge Creek Vancouver dedication. Photo: Mike Houck
Within the context of city planning, Francis takes on the privatization of public space and inequitable access to parks and greenspaces, pointing out that wealthy, “ecological” gated communities have the lion’s share of urban parks and greenspaces, while “hidden,” poor neighborhoods—inhabited by what he describes as the “disposable members of society”—have little or no public space.
John Charles Olmsted, adopted son of Frederick Law Olmsted. The Olmsted firm’s rationale for parks was deeply bedded in social equity and democratizing effect of parks.
Francis makes the same arguments that many in our community have made for decades with regard to special landscapes and the Olmstedian precept that parks are catalysts for increased social cohesion.
He writes:
“There is also a need to protect those common areas, visual landmarks and urban landscapes which increase our sense of belonging, of rootedness, of ‘feeling at home’ within a city which includes us and brings us together…Interventions which affect the urban or rural landscape should take into account how various elements combine to form a whole which is perceived by its inhabitants as a coherent and meaningful framework for their lives. Others will then no longer be seen as strangers, but as part of a ‘we’ which all of us are working to create. For this same reason, in both urban and rural settings, it is helpful to set aside some places which can be preserved and protected from constant changes brought by human intervention.”
Portland Streetcar, providing equity of access to city transit systems.
Housing and transit
He also delves into planning issues unrelated to “nature in the city,” but which are consequential to equity in urban development. He identifies lack of housing as “a grave problem in many parts of the world, both in rural areas and in large cities…”
Regarding transit, he writes:
“The quality of life in cities has much to do with systems of transport, which are often a source of much suffering for those who use them. Many cars…circulate in cities, causing traffic congestion, raising the level of pollution, and consuming enormous quantities of non-renewable energy. This makes it necessary to build more roads and parking areas which spoil the urban landscape. Many specialists agree on the need to give priority to public transportation. Yet some measures needed will not prove easily acceptable to society unless substantial improvements are made in the systems themselves, which in many cities force people to put up with undignified conditions due to crowding, inconvenience, infrequent service and lack of safety.”
Peregrine Falcon. Photo: Mike Houck
The papal case for biodiversity and intrinsic value of nature
What struck me most about the Encyclical is the depth of scientifically-based discourse around biodiversity and the intrinsic value of nature. the fact that he received received a “chemical technician’s” degree and worked in a food-related laboratory cannot, alone, account for the depth of his arguments for the need to protect biodiversity, both for our own health and for the inherent value of the Earth’s biome.
In this regard, Francis, and with what is clearly remarkable stable of research assistants, writes of the importance of non-charismatic microfauna, recognizing the importance of species that are seldom, if ever, mentioned in urban planning contexts:
“It may well disturb us to learn of the extinction of mammals or birds, since they are more visible. But the good functioning of ecosystems also requires fungi, algae, worms, insects, reptiles and an innumerable variety of microorganisms. Some less numerous species, although generally unseen, nonetheless play a critical role in maintaining the equilibrium of a particular place.”
Regarding the intrinsic value of nature, the Encyclical says:
“It is not enough, however, to think of different species merely as potential ‘resources’ to be exploited, while overlooking the fact that they have value in themselves.
Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost for ever. The great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity. Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence, nor convey their message to us. We have no such right.
We take these systems into account not only to determine how best to use them, but also because they have an intrinsic value independent of their usefulness. Each organism, as a creature of God, is good and admirable in itself; the same is true of the harmonious ensemble of organisms existing in a defined space and functioning as a system.”
Nematode
Environmental impact analysis, biodiversity hot spots and biological corridors
The breadth of the encyclical’s reach with regard to fundamental ecological principles goes far beyond what most urban planners include in their planning regime, including environmental impact analysis:
“In assessing the environmental impact of any project, concern is usually shown for its effects on soil, water and air, yet few careful studies are made of its impact on biodiversity…”
Beyond simply addressing the importance of biodiversity, the encyclical specifies the important of biodiversity “hot spots”:
“In the protection of biodiversity, specialists insist on the need for particular attention to be shown to areas richer both in the number of species and in endemic, rare or less protected species. Certain places need greater protection because of their immense importance for the global ecosystem…”
The city of Portland vowed to not limit its response to the listing of Chinook salmon and Steelhead trout to avoid “take” under the Endangered Species Act, but to enact policies and acdtions to recover the species. Westmoreland Park in Southeast Portland before restoration. Image courtesy, Portland Bureau of Environmental Services.Crystal Spring Creek post restoration. Image courtesy, Portland Bureau of Environmental Services. During dedication of the restoration project in 2014 Chinook salmon were observed spawning in Crystal Springs Creek. Water temperatures in the creek provide cold water refugia for salmonids returning to their spawing grounds, in the face of elevated temperatures in the Willamette River.
Cost-benefit analysis
Pope Francis frequently excoriates “the market” as a contributor to human misery and environmental degradation. Therefore, it’s no surprise that he takes on market failures with regard to ecosystems and human health and well-being. He writes:
“Caring for ecosystems demands far-sightedness, since no one looking for quick and easy profit is truly interested in their preservation. But the cost of the damage caused by such selfish lack of concern is much greater than the economic benefits to be obtained…We can be silent witnesses to terrible injustices if we think that we can obtain significant benefits by making the rest of humanity, present and future, pay the extremely high costs of environmental deterioration.
It should always be kept in mind that ‘environmental protection cannot be assured solely on the basis of financial calculations of costs and benefits. The environment is one of those goods that cannot be adequately safeguarded or promoted by market forces.’ …Where profits alone count, there can be no thinking about the rhythms of nature, its phases of decay and regeneration, or the complexity of ecosystems which may be gravely upset by human intervention. Moreover, biodiversity is considered at most a deposit of economic resources available for exploitation, with no serious thought for the real value of things, their significance for persons and cultures, or the concerns and needs of the poor.”
Precautionary Principle
Francis also invokes the precautionary principle in writing:
“The Rio Declaration of 1992 states that ‘where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a pretext for postponing cost-effective measures which prevent environmental degradation…If objective information suggests that serious and irreversible damage may result, a project should be halted or modified, even in the absence of indisputable proof. Here the burden of proof is effectively reversed, since in such cases objective and conclusive demonstrations will have to be brought forward to demonstrate that the proposed activity will not cause serious harm to the environment or to those who inhabit it.”
The Coalition for a Livable Future has mapped access to parks, trails, and natural areas in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan region, allowing regional and local park providers to assess future acquisition to meet equity concerns in the region.
Equity
Finally, as many contributors to The Nature of Cities have argued, and as is the case with planning efforts in Portland and many other U.S. cities, addressing climate change and city building in general must incorporate concern for equity, in all its dimensions and outcomes. This includes what I would term “interspecies equity” as it relates to the intrinsic value of nature (without regard to nature’s value to us) and to intergenerational equity as articulated in the Encyclical:
“The notion of the common good also extends to future generations…We can no longer speak of sustainable development apart from intergenerational solidarity. The environment is on loan to each generation, which must then hand it on to the next.”
Francis also addresses equity with regard to basic access to essential urban services such as affordable housing, clean air and water, and access to parks and nature.
* * *
I have referenced only a few excerpts from the Encyclical that I believe relate directly and indirectly to topics commonly discussed in the forum of The Nature of Cities. I encourage you to read the entire Encyclical, which abounds with additional insights into creating more ecologically sustainable, just and resilient cities that protect, restore and manage the natural systems that constitute our cities’ natural green infrastructure.
John Hartig is currently the refuge manager for the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge. He has 30 years of experience as a limnologist working in environmental science and natural resource management relating to the Great Lakes and, more particularly, to the Detroit River. Bringing Conservation to Cities is his story. He knows the history from personal involvement and he tells it well.
Ten key lessons for building successful wildlife refuges, from visioning to science to recruiting families and champions.
The book provides a beacon of hope, explaining how one of the most heavily polluted waterways in North America has been transformed to create an internationally significant wildlife refuge in the heart of a major metropolitan area where millions of people live—and where they can now experience nature as part of everyday life. The story delves deep: it provides countless examples of sound science being used as the foundation for ecosystem-based management of the Detroit River Refuge. It demonstrates how science and policymaking can be successfully linked given the political will, and how a radical and cohesive vision can emerge from disparate sources. The book contains 17 tables and 36 figures providing a remarkably detailed amount of information about the history, functions and successes of the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge. Hartig draws important lessons from all of this work to encourage conservation initiatives in cities across the world.
Hartig traces the story through a series of tipping points, each of which had momentous implications for the ecology of the Detroit River. First came the fur trade, which resulted in near extinction of beavers over much of North America by the mid-1800s. Then came the massive population growth associated with development of heavy industry, including uncontrolled discharges of raw sewage into the Detroit River and, later, a cocktail of pollutants, including oil slicks and industrial chemicals that devastated the previously rich fishing grounds and the wildlife. This contamination continued unabated and, in 1948, resulted in a massive winter “duck-kill” due to oil pollution. 11,000 ducks and geese died. By the 1960s, some journalists were reporting that Lake Erie was dead. The mercury crisis of 1970, which closed all the local fisheries, was the last straw for many people and a public outcry led to the first clean water acts in 1972. The tide had started to turn.
Hartig points out that important local conservation initiatives were happening throughout the post-war period, led by the growing number of wildfowlers. The 1948 incident caused them to dump piles of oil-soaked ducks and geese in front of the State Capital building and to lobby for stronger pollution control legislation. Indeed, Hartig considers that “the clean-up of the Detroit River and the establishment of the Wildlife Refuge would probably not have happened without the early and strong anti-pollution advocacy of local sportsmen.” Other hunting-related activities, including the Pointe Mouillee Waterfowl Festival, raised public awareness of the ecological significance of the area, and working-class sportsmen became strong advocates for the preservation of Pointe Mouillee for public recreation.The long-standing United Auto Workers Union, whose primary concern was wages, hours and pensions, adopted a statement in 1967 making it clear that the conservation issue was as vital to them as workers rights. This “labor environmentalism” became a major force, lobbying legislators and developing educational programs to protect the environment and to conserve natural resources. Hartig is adamant that these bodies played a critical role in influencing public opinion and legislators. They prepared the ground for future action.
Here, the story moves forward 30 years, during which major changes in both public attitudes and environmental legislation occurred at every level, from global to local. By 2000, the scene was set for a major new initiative. Senior politicians, including the Canadian Deputy Prime Minister and a U.S. Congressman, brought together fifty scientists, natural resource managers, and representatives of nongovernmental organizations, from Canada and from the U.S., for a workshop to attempt to formulate a conservation vision for the Detroit River ecosystem. Amazingly, the participants reached a consensus in only two days, and the following year the International Wildlife Refuge was created. It was and still is a remarkable success story.
Hartig makes it very clear that the whole process has depended on sound knowledge of freshwater ecology and management. He provides numerous examples to support his case, a notable one being the successful action taken to re-establish spawning grounds for Lake Sturgeon. The recovery of the whole ecosystem is reflected in the massive increase in wetland birds (with 300,000 diving ducks and 75,000 shorebirds), which has led to huge public support from those who visit to see, photograph and enjoy the wildlife. The value of reconnecting city dwellers to the wild is a theme that runs through the whole book, and Hartig makes much of this value in his final chapter on “Lessons Learned.”
He has ten lessons for us, summarised as follows:
Establish a compelling vision.
Use sound science, practice adaptive management, and be prepared to compromise.
Develop partnerships at all levels, and don’t be afraid to experiment with novel approaches.
Place a priority on developing a land/ecosystem ethic through broad-based education, outreach and stewardship.
Connect urban children and families with nature.
Build a record of conservation success and celebrate it frequently.
Quantify the economic benefits of a wildlife refuge to the local community.
Involve the public in all conservation actions to establish local ownership and responsibility.
Recruit and train people to become facilitators for urban change.
Recruit a high profile champion.
Some of these are very familiar and well established. They have been practiced with varying degrees of success for many years. Others are relatively new concepts that need to be developed further. But they are all crucial lessons that we need to take on board, and it’s good to see them dealt with in this unified way as essential ingredients for success.
The main title of the book is Bringing Conservation to Cities. It’s a long time since Ray Dasmann first urged naturalists, ecologists and wildlife managers to concentrate on the cities—instead of the forests—in his famous speech of 1966:
“They should work with regional planners, landscape architects and others responsible for the urban environment, to make towns and cities into places where each person’s everyday experience could be enriched by contact with nature.”
Hartig’s case study shows that those involved are doing precisely that. But he poses a question. He asks, “who should take the lead in such projects?” and suggests that there is a dearth of conservation leadership in most urban areas. I’m not so sure. There are many examples, in North America and elsewhere, where local strategies and projects have benefitted from strong local leadership. Indeed, strong leadership has been essential for their survival, given the pressures of urban life. But in the U.S., we have lost the national leadership on urban wildlife that was once provided very effectively by the National Institute for Urban Wildlife. Perhaps it is time to resurrect such a body.
This book is crammed full of examples of strategies that work. It is a comprehensive catalogue of the politics, procedures, studies and experiments that have resulted in success. Many are very specific to the particular conditions of the Detroit River. But a lot of them are relevant to the establishment and management of wildlife refuges wherever they occur. The emphasis on good knowledge of ecology should make it required reading for environmental managers everywhere.
The urge to contribute one’s time, without compensation, to benefit a closely held cause or purpose appears to be a deeply rooted human need because volunteerism is found everywhere, in various forms and for every conceivable reason. For instance, every year, more than 13 million people volunteer in Canada, 63 million people volunteer in the U.S., 20 million people volunteer in England, 6 million people volunteer in Australia and 24 million people volunteer in Germany. These figures work out to between 36 and 39 percent of these nation’s populations. It is difficult to accurately estimate how many people volunteer globally, but a recent Gallup World Poll found that 16 percent of adults worldwide volunteered their time to an organization annually.
Although it is not the number one volunteer choice, many people want to volunteer their time in local parks. This can present both opportunities and challenges for park departments trying to respond to such committed public interest.
Today’s volunteers
A growing body of research about volunteers and volunteering helps to document the social and economic value of volunteers, personal motivations for volunteering, and the changing nature of the volunteer landscape. The field of volunteer management is also well developed, with a number of professional organizations working to advance volunteer management and education.
Despite widespread recognition of the value of engaging with volunteers to help organizations achieve their goals and the availability of guidelines and best practices for effectively doing so, there can still be challenges in utilizing volunteers in an effective way. These challenges may surface as differing expectations about the volunteer experience.
For instance, Paula Sladowski et al. (2013) found that today’s volunteers “lead more structured lives; are more mobile, tech-savvy, results-oriented, autonomous; and have multiple roles and interests,” which requires organizations to be “more structured and more flexible at the same time, and to be well prepared for volunteers and provide the space for volunteers to bring what they have to offer.” This can create gaps between what people want from their volunteer experience and what organizations are offering to them.
Even with significant organizational constraints, local park departments can offer meaningful opportunities for volunteers.
For example, Sladowski identified the following gaps between volunteers and organizations:
Many people are looking for group activities, but few organizations have the capacity to offer them
Many people come with professional skills, but many professionals are looking for volunteer tasks that involve something different from their work life
Organizations are expected to clearly define the roles and boundaries of volunteers, but many volunteers want the flexibility to initiate what they have to offer (i.e., to create their own volunteer opportunity)
Many organizations still want long-term commitments, but many more volunteers are looking for shorter-term opportunities
Many organizations focus on what they need, but, besides helping others, many volunteers come with their own goals to be met
Sladowski says that of the gaps identified above, the most important are for volunteers to be able to fulfill their own goals and to contribute through shorter-term opportunities.
As noted, volunteers can face significant barriers to contributing their time and talents to an organization. For instance, Karen Bell lists some of the limitations to volunteering in conservation activities in Australia:
Lack of resources for volunteer projects
The need for more supervisors for volunteer projects
The need for greater coordination and technical support for volunteer programs
The perceived lack of support for the volunteer program amongst senior staff
Insufficient sense of achievement by volunteers
Having non-interesting, menial or pointless work
Unfriendly or unwelcoming treatment by staff
Poor quality of organization and management
Insufficient recognition of volunteer’s contributions
Failure of training or educational opportunities to match participants’ expectations
A lack of fun
Susan Ellis says that salaried staff may feel threatened by volunteers and this can create tension between staff and volunteers. Some of the perceived threats identified by Ellis include:
Volunteers will take paid jobs….maybe my job
Volunteers will do a bad job and I’ll be left with the blame, or the responsibility to clean it up
Volunteers will do a great job and I’ll look less effective
Volunteers are amateurs; they don’t know much and I’ll have to train them, which takes time
Volunteers are highly trained and they can’t be controlled
Volunteers are different from me
Volunteers are spies, gossips, undependable, can’t be criticized, interrupt my day, bring about unwanted change, etc.
Volunteers will take the fun parts of my job away from me
Volunteers require me to break my work down into smaller tasks, and I’m not sure how to do this
Volunteers require supervision and I have never received any training and I don’t want to ask for help
Volunteers require me to share my work space and I don’t want to do this
Volunteers make me jealous because they get all of the attention and can say “no” to work assignments
Although these challenges may exist across a broad spectrum of volunteer opportunities, they can be particularly problematic for land management agencies, where the public desire to assist with conservation activities can conflict with the ability of such agencies to meet these needs.
This can be the case in local park departments, which may have limited capacity to engage with volunteers in ways that the public desires, even though local park departments have the ability to offer exciting and interesting volunteer opportunities. These opportunities span the spectrum of activities that park departments engage in, including park management, stewardship, interpretation, operations, development, education, monitoring, policy development, special events, research and more. Because park departments manage land, a majority of the volunteer opportunities are usually directly involved with outdoor activities in a park setting. This can present challenges by the very nature of the setting, where many activities involve some degree of risk and may require active supervision.
Often, especially in smaller park departments with limited staff, the capacity of staff to manage volunteers may present a challenge. If a municipality or regional government is unionized, there may be difficulties in determining how volunteer help can be utilized without contravening the union contract. Another challenge can emerge with the political and executive leadership of the organization—if the politicians and top administrators don’t recognize and champion the role of volunteers within the organization, it can send a message to staff that it isn’t really that important for them to work with volunteers.
Following from the need for strong executive leadership, the need also exists for a well developed volunteer program within an organization, including policies, procedures and dedicated resources for managing volunteers once they are in place. This requires qualified staff to recruit, train and supervise volunteers. The presence of policies and procedures for managing risk is also essential for reducing the chance of personal injury and resulting liability of the organization.
While many local park departments utilize volunteers in various capacities to augment the work they do, these challenges can present problems for fully engaging with volunteers in ways that work well for the organization and for the volunteers. Organizations such as local park departments need to keep in mind that volunteering is shifting away from more traditional long-term commitments to short-term or one-off assignments that accommodate people’s busy lives and the growing need to fit volunteerism in with many other commitments.
With today’s volunteers being generally better educated and with more skills to offer than in the past, these volunteers also want to know that their efforts are useful, meaningful and rewarding. This puts pressure on local park departments to accommodate volunteers in ways they may not be equipped to do, which requires adaptability and flexibility on the part of the organization in creating meaningful volunteer opportunities that benefit local parks and natural areas.
The Canadian Code for Volunteer Involvement
Fortunately, a set of organizational standards for volunteer involvement exists which can benefit parks agencies looking for ways to effectively engage with volunteers.
In 2012, Volunteer Canada developed a model Canadian Code for Volunteer Management, which includes statements on the value of volunteer involvement, guiding principles for volunteer involvement and organizational standards for volunteer involvement. Many organizations have developed volunteer programs based on the Canadian Code for Volunteer Management. When such a model program is adopted, a foundation is set for meeting organizational and volunteer needs.
The Volunteer Canada organizational standards for volunteer involvement are:
Mission-based Approach: The Board of Directors and senior staff acknowledge, articulate, and support the vital role of volunteers in achieving the organization’s purpose or mission. Volunteer roles are clearly linked to the organization’s mission.
Human Resources: Volunteers are welcomed and treated as valued and integral members of the organization’s human resources team. The organization has a planned and integrated approach for volunteer involvement that includes providing adequate resources and support.
Policies and Procedures: A policy framework that defines and supports the involvement of volunteers is adopted by the organization.
Volunteer Administration: The organization has a clearly designated individual(s) with appropriate qualifications responsible for supporting volunteer involvement.
Risk Management and Quality Assurance: Risk management procedures are in place to assess, manage, or mitigate potential risks that may result from a volunteer-led program or service. Each volunteer role is assessed for level of risk as part of the screening process.
Volunteer Roles: Volunteer roles contribute to the mission or purpose of the organization and clearly identify the abilities needed. Volunteer roles involve volunteers in meaningful ways that reflect their skills, needs, interests, and backgrounds.
Recruitment: Volunteer recruitment incorporates a broad range of internal and external strategies to reach out to diverse sources of volunteers.
Screening: A clearly communicated and transparent screening process, which is aligned with the risk management approach, is adopted and consistently applied across the organization.
Orientation and Training: Volunteers receive an orientation to the organization, its policies, and practices, appropriate to each role. Each volunteer receives training specific to the volunteer role and the needs of the individual volunteer.
Support and Supervision: Volunteers receive the level of support and supervision required for the role and are provided with regular opportunities to give and receive feedback.
Records Management: Standardized documentation and records management practices and procedures are followed and are in line with current relevant legislation.
Technology: Volunteers are engaged and supported within the organization through the integration and intentional use of current technology. New opportunities are continually evaluated.
Recognition: The contributions of volunteers are acknowledged by the organization with ongoing formal and informal methods of recognition, applicable to the volunteer role.
Evaluation: An evaluation framework is in place to assess the performance of volunteers and gauge volunteer satisfaction. The effectiveness of the volunteer engagement strategy in meeting the organization’s mandate is also evaluated.
Development of a volunteer program based on these 14 principles can help local park departments strengthen and improve their volunteer engagement strategy while meeting their mandates and contributing to a stronger community.
As the next section illustrates, some of the most successful parks volunteer programs incorporate these principles into their organizational culture.
Four model volunteer programs serving local natural area parks
To accommodate the organizational and public interest in volunteering, many local park agencies have developed volunteer programs. These volunteer programs range in scale, scope, focus and opportunities depending on the nature of the organization and its strategic objectives. Often volunteer programs have clearly defined roles for volunteers, such as park warden, nature house interpreter, guide, trail ambassador or park watch volunteer.
Many programs incorporate opportunities to contribute volunteer time in more flexible ways, such as with a group or as a family, and in short-term or single sessions. Park departments with the best programs make it very clear that they value volunteers and consider them essential components of their organization.
What follows are a few examples of outstanding volunteer programs developed by metropolitan area park departments that are worth a closer look. This list represents only a very small sample of the many high-quality volunteer park programs that exist; may they provide inspiration for what can be accomplished.
The Forest Preserves of Cook County were first created in 1914 to acquire, restore and manage public open space for education, enjoyment and public recreation. The Forest Preserves are the largest in the U.S. at more than 69,000 acres; they receive more than 40 million visits each year at the 22 dedicated nature preserves, 40 managed lakes and ponds, seven major waterways and 300 miles of marked recreational trails.
The Forest Preserves showcase outstanding examples of native oak woodlands and savannas, tall-grass prairies and native wetlands. The Forest Preserves place a great emphasis on engaging volunteers to help with land management activities, providing many types of volunteer opportunities.
The volunteer program webpage provides links to the wide array of volunteer opportunities offered at the various nature preserves. Volunteers are involved as citizen scientists and monitors, in ecological restoration activities, and in other nature based positions. The programs reach out to all ages and abilities and provide opportunities for people wanting to connect with nature in a volunteer capacity.
The City of Surrey has an exceptional park, nature, and environment volunteer program. Surrey is the second largest city in B.C., with a population of over 468,000 people. The population is young and diverse, with families coming to the city from all over the world. With over 6,000 acres of parkland and green space, Surrey is known as the City of Parks.
Surrey offers a wide range of volunteer programs that focus on improving conditions in local parks, creeks and streams. The Surrey volunteer website makes it easy to find out about available opportunities. These opportunities range from drop-in volunteer projects, to nature guides trained in local ecology and interpretive skills, to group projects designed to enhance local parks, to volunteers working on the urban forest, to the Surrey Youth Stewardship Squad, and to the Coho Crew charged with protecting salmon and trout in local streams.
The City of New York, with a population of 8.4 million people living in five boroughs, is the largest U.S. city. However, this densely-populated city is also home to numerous parks and nature preserves, enabling residents and visitors to enjoy nature experiences close by. The city also has an excellent parks volunteer program.
For instance, the Forever Wild Program is an initiative of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation to protect and preserve the most ecologically valuable lands in the five boroughs by incorporating the work of volunteers. The 51 nature preserves include over 8,700 acres of forests, wetlands and meadows. New York also has a variety of green spaces tucked into neighborhoods that provide opportunities for volunteers to work on projects where they live.
NYC Parks offers a wide range of volunteer opportunities in its city parks and green spaces, including park stewards who restore natural areas and monitor wildlife, volunteers who count and map street trees on every city block, and individuals and groups who participate in hundreds of volunteer events throughout the year to improve city parks. The NYC Parks volunteer website is easy to navigate and clearly organized, with easy to follow links for information on how to get involved.
Parks Victoria, the home of the Healthy Parks, Healthy People movement, offers an amazing diversity of volunteer opportunities, ranging from campground hosts to park stewards. Volunteers engage in activities including seed collection and plant propagation, research and survey work, restoration, data collection, invasive species removal, habitat restoration, and park maintenance. Volunteers work in and around the city of Melbourne and in parks located within the State of Victoria. Opportunities range from one day in length to a week or longer.
The Parks Victoria volunteer website is accessible and provides enough information about different volunteer opportunities that potential volunteers can easily connect with opportunities that interest them.
Summary
Local parks departments have a wide range of duties and responsibilities in managing their public lands and facilities. This is typically coupled with budgets that may be stretched thin in accomplishing all the work that needs to be done. One of the ways that parks departments can increase their effectiveness is in utilizing volunteer help. Members of the public also have a great interest in their local parks and often see them as the type of places they would like to contribute their time and energy to improving. While it can be challenging for an organization such as a local parks department to offer meaningful opportunities to volunteers, it can be done, even with significant organizational constraints.
Guidelines and standards exist for developing robust volunteer programs and many examples of exemplary volunteer programs are out there to discover and to learn from. Volunteerism done right is powerful, both for people and for our local parks. I encourage you to get out there and experience this feeling for yourself!
Sladowski, Paula Speevak, Hientz, Melanie, & MacKenzie, Ruth. (2013). Volunteering: a catalyst for citizen engagement, social inclusion, and resilient communities. The Philanthropist, 25(1), 37-44.
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Pippin Anderson, Cape TownHow do I feel about exotic plant species in cities? Bring them on! How do I feel about invasive exotics in cities? Zero tolerance, extirpate!
Erle Ellis, BaltimoreThe natives are restless: it’s time to embrace species on the move and the biodiversity melting pots of the Anthropocene.
Leonie Fischer, BerlinA mix of native target and nonnative spontaneous species may perform best as viable assemblages for restoration in novel urban ecosystems.
Mark Hostetler, GainesvilleI propose that a goal for urban green infrastructure is not native purity, but a sensible mix of native and exotic plants.
Madhusudan Katti, FresnoThere is opportunity in California’s drought crisis to transform cities into more biophilic and resilient places in harmony with the regional climate and water availability.
Ingo Kowarik, BerlinIt’s time to reconcile controversial positions in the alien/native debate. We need differentiated approaches, and thinking before acting.
Mark McDonnell, MelbourneWe need to move beyond this moral dualism where we view native species as ‘good’ and exotic species as ‘bad.’
Colin Meurk, LincolnFrom a national duty of care perspective for biodiversity, there is an imperative to eradicate or manage alien organisms that pose a threat to our productive systems, biodiversity (indigenousness), and natural character of landscapes.
Matt Palmer, New York CityManage the real impacts, though measuring them is hard. “Native purity” can be a useful aspiration but is a nearly impossible goal.
Bill Toomey, Sandy Hook It may be unrealistic to think we have the time, money and resources to manage our existing urban areas and nature in cities with a purist, native-only perspective.
Yolanda van Heezik, DunelinA significant downside of allowing introduced species to take over our environment is loss of national identity.
Paula Villagra, Los RiosUrban spaces are newer ecosystem types and imply thinking about and planning for them as hybrid systems, which are neither natural nor anthropic.
Divya Gopal is a researcher at the Department of Ecology, TU Berlin, focussing on the role of culture in urban green spaces.
Introduction
Nature is dynamic, constantly evolving and adapting to changes. In its various forms and functions (be it plants or animals), nature is accounting for human-induced changes, reorganizing itself to form novel ecosystems. Urban spaces are distinct novel ecosystems with a mix of various green forms—cultivated ornamental exotics, spontaneous exotics, spontaneous natives, invasive weeds, hybrids and more. Irrespective of their origins, most forms of greenery are welcome in our concrete urban jungles. They seem to perform various ecosystem functions in our densely packed urban spaces.
While conservation of native species is important, is it viable, in rapidly evolving urban spaces, to insist on native purity? With increasing numbers of climate refugees, can native purity be stressed too much? Or is it better to look at green forms and functions—both native and introduced—where they assist ecosystem functioning, filling up gaps in urban ecosystems? Instead of the “good natives, bad aliens” narrative, should conservationists look only at aggressive invasives that disrupt certain ecosystem functions as bad, rather than emphasizing purity? How important is it to strictly plant native species in urban areas? Can non-natives also be welcome?
Pippin Anderson, a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, is an African urban ecologist who enjoys the untidiness of cities where society and nature must thrive together.
FULL BIO
Pippin Anderson
How do I feel about exotic plant species in cities? Bring them on! How do I feel about invasive exotics in cities? Zero tolerance, extirpate!
I think so much of the beauty of cities is in their diversity. Individual cities have phenomenal diversity in their people, cultures, religions, views, gardens, buildings and public spaces. Indeed, different cities even smell differently. It is this very diversity that makes cities the “fonts of ingenuity” they are celebrated for. I believe the same goes for exotic species in cities. Why not embrace this element of human choice and conviction? It brings considerable joy to be able to select plant species, and people should have the right to choose based on preference, use, aesthetics, aroma and even just keeping up with the people next door. Indigenous species have a role to play in contributing to critical species pools and linking smaller city conservation entities, for example, but I think allowing freedom of choice among urban dwellers in what they plant will still see some people choosing to plant indigenous flora.
Diversity, including exotic species, makes cities the ‘fonts of ingenuity’ they are celebrated for.
Having said that, I do think we need to take an extremely firm view against invasive exotic species in cities. Cities are typical entry points for invasive exotic species. As these species do considerable ecological harm to indigenous communities, with ecosystem service and livelihood repercussions, it would be irresponsible not to take a firm and vigilant approach to invasive species in cities. I think turning a blind eye to invasive exotics in cities, or taking a view that they somehow be tolerated due to the urban setting, is something akin to ignoring a primary cancer.
So it appears to be something of a yes/no answer from me on this question, but I do believe the two categories are clearly differentiated. There is, of course, the potential threat, in light of anticipated change, that some currently benign exotics will turn invasive. What better place to keep an eye on this possibility, though, than in our cities? Here we have expertise, resources and the opportunity for considerable civic engagement (for example, the highly effective iSpot site). I believe we should embrace exotic species, which afford the public ecological autonomy and considerable joy, but we should simultaneously use the opportunity to engage the public and ensure people are educated in what is indigenous, exotic, and invasive. I believe the City of Cape Town is making considerable inroads in this area and their website presents a number of projects to this end.
Erle Ellis is Professor of Geography & Environmental Systems at UMBC and Visiting Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Erle Ellis
Natives on the move: embracing change and evolution in biodiversity melting pots
The call to sustain native species in urban landscapes began decades ago in the U.S. Native plantings are now widespread. Partly in response to this trend, native wildlife—from songbirds to foxes, beavers, coyotes, wolves and bears—are returning to and thriving within regions they were driven from long ago. Native plantings are responsible to some degree, as native plant communities have been shown to sustain larger populations of native wildlife than nonnative plantings under some conditions. This is good news: a reversal of trends toward declining native biodiversity in landscapes increasingly inhospitable to wildlife.
Yet an exclusive focus on planting natives in urban landscapes might create more problems than it can solve. To begin with, the concept of a “native species” is, itself, a problem. Species are generally considered native based on a long history of inhabiting a specific area—but how long is long enough? In parts of Europe, species introduced before 1492 (“archaeophytes”) are distinguished from more recent arrivals (neophytes) and are therefore considered “more native.” European earthworms now predominate in soils across North America and no one realistically plans to eradicate these alien ecosystem engineers, despite their transformative effects on ecosystems. Outside the tropics, the native ranges of species have always been dynamic, migrating south ahead of glacial ice and north with the return of warming. Now, with climate changing faster than ever, species are moving north again. Attempting to keep species where they are “native” would involve limiting their northwards migrations. In the Anthropocene, there are negative consequences to labeling some species as natives and others not.
Novel communities often produce high levels of ecosystem services and provide valuable habitats for native wildlife.
What does “native” mean in an anthropogenic landscape full of built structures, tilled soils, excess nutrients and heat, pollutants, and other human-altered conditions? Urban ecosystems are novel ecosystems permanently transformed in biota and environmental conditions from those that existed before. It should be no surprise that novel ecosystems are full of species from other places, introduced both intentionally and unintentionally. Novel communities are the biodiversity mixing pots of the Anthropocene, bringing natives together with introduced species and immigrants from all over the world. Novel communities often produce high levels of ecosystem services and provide valuable habitats for native wildlife.
That seemingly inhospitable environments, such as brownfields and vacant lots, can support diverse and thriving novel communities rife with ecosystem services is truly remarkable, and these would generally not be possible if only native species were present. Some of the most common species in urban landscapes, such as the Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) and the Rock Pigeon (Columba livia) are found across the cities of the world. These are the true natives of the urban landscape.
Francisco Anzola at Ta Promh Temple, Angkor Wat, Siem Riep, Cambodia. Image: Francisco Anzola, Wikimedia Commons
To sustain the diversity of life on Earth over the course of the Anthropocene, extinction of species must be avoided while evolutionary processes that produce biodiversity are sustained. Quite often, native plantings in parks and yards are domesticates produced by large scale nurseries and seed corporations, and many are reproduced by cloning. These “natives” might as well be crops, and when they breed with remnant populations of wild natives, their narrow genetic base can reduce diversity in nearby populations of natives that are regenerating without human direction. By planting native cultivars, we may be helping to end the evolution by natural selection of our most favored native species.
As Earth moves deeper into the Anthropocene, species are on the move and coming together in ever more novel communities, ecosystems and landscapes—the biodiversity melting pots of the Anthropocene. It is time to assist native species in moving and to embrace a dynamic vision of what it means to be native: to belong in a place, whether it is urban, agricultural, seminatural or wild.
Are cities really the best places to conserve native species? The value of natives in cities is unclear, especially when these are domesticates. Biodiversity conservation is a global challenge and urban areas cover just a small percentage of Earth’s land. Yet the infrastructure of cities crosses continents; by redesigning transport networks, dams and hydrologic modifications, it may be possible to assist the migration of species responding to climate change. To conserve Earth’s remaining ecological heritage, it is time for our societies and our cultures of nature to embrace the dynamics of species on the move and the biodiversity melting pots of the Anthropocene—immigrants together with natives. We must work to sustain the wellsprings of evolution and biodiversity in the face of the unprecedented challenges of the Anthropocene.
Leonie works as urban ecologist at Technische Universität Berlin, where she focuses on vegetation dynamics, conservation and restoration in urban landscapes.
Leonie Fischer
Urban restoration: induced coexistence of natives and nonnatives in novel ecosystems
During transformational processes, many green spaces evolve in urban areas such as derelict industrial sites, unused train tracks or forgotten garden lots. The vegetation communities of such wasteland sites can bear few botanical treasures, but can also be characterized by the most common ruderal species. In either case, the participating species can be native and nonnative species alike.
Urban wastelands have a great potential for conserving and fostering biodiversity.
Plant communities of informal urban greenspaces are often shaped by the specific history and setting of the site (e.g., its soil type, its water availability or its anthropogenic disturbances), by its surrounding (the urban matrix), and by its potential seed sources (the seed bank of the site, nearby plantings or dispersal vectors such as humans, animals or cars). That is, a site’s plant community developed out of the site’s history and its surroundings, and can thus bear an unusual mix of species that is best adapted to the site’s special setting.
Given the homogenization of plant communities at the international level, I argue that urban wastelands have a great potential for conserving and fostering biodiversity. They can be used as refuges for rare and regional species, and (if succession is not the focus of conservation) can be optimized for habitat conservation. Techniques of ecological restoration adapted to an urban context can be used to establish substitute habitats that are lost outside cities. In such cases, the aim is to establish particular plant species and to ensure that they build viable populations in the long run. That means that target species need to be able to compete with their ruderal neighbors. In the end, they may jointly form novel types of species assemblages.
In my opinion, such restored plant communities do not need to display the historical stages of their reference ecosystems, but rather can be adapted to the ever-changing urban context. In addition to native target species central to conservation efforts, these communities may include those species that are best adapted to the site, independent of their origin. Only when this is true will restored sites function in the long run, without an exaggerated dose of maintenance and care.
Nevertheless, in the act of urban restoration, we can give a “signal” for native target species to establish on new sites, as these may not have gotten there due to spatial barriers or missing propagule pools in the surrounding.
Given that most city dwellers experience nature in their close surroundings by looking outside the window on their way to work, for example, I argue that their needs and preferences are of equal importance to what nature conservationists focus on. We should find out if people highly value certain natives or certain species assemblages that are dominated by natives (e.g., when defining target species for a restoration project). If urban restoration succeeds in identifying flagship species that are of native origin, the goals of both sides can be incorporated.
In the end, I speak up for (a) identifying and using the potential of urban contexts to foster native species, such as on urban wastelands, and thus contribute to a diverse, heterogenous urban flora, (b) welcoming urban plant communities that are largely a mix of species of different origins that rely on the environmental settings of a site, and (c) including aesthetic preferences of residents when choosing of a set of species, independent of the origin of those species.
Urban grassland restoration as an example that both sown native target species and spontaneous nonnatives can form viable species assemblages that are aesthetically appealing. Image: L.K. Fischer
Around the world, cities are a mixture of exotic and native species. These novel or “recombinant ecosystems” represent unique plant and animal communities that have been purposely or accidently created by humans. The question posed for this roundtable is whether “native purity” is a viable option for urban green infrastructure. I would suggest that returning urban habitats to a semblance of past, native assemblages of species is unrealistic in most cities.
Instead, we should think about restoring urban habitats in terms of “reconciliation ecology,” where the goal is not to return to pristine, indigenous habitats, but to implement strategies that simply increase the diversity of native species in urban areas. Below, I touch on why we should increase native diversity in cities and why we should be careful about the types of exotics used in cities.
Natural heritage and the extinction of experience
With more and more people living in cities, the chance to experience and appreciate indigenous flora and fauna is in yards, neighborhoods and city parks. With the same generalist (exotic) species dominating cities around the world, this homogenized environment is what urban residents experience and they lose touch with their unique natural heritage. This exposure to a more degraded habitat and isolation from native plants and animals reduces peoples’ connection to nature and willingness to invest time and money for biodiversity conservation. Implementing strategies that increase the diversity of native plants and animals would expose citizens to local species, creating a sense of place. This strong identity with native plant and animal species ultimately raises awareness and support for biodiversity conservation.
Native animal diversity, in general, is correlated to native vegetation diversity.
Exotics and risk of environmental impacts
Exotic plants in urban landscapes can require a large amount of care, which increases natural resource consumption and impacts on the environment. For example, turfgrass and some ornamental plants (e.g., roses) installed on nutrient poor soils in Florida means a homeowner has to irrigate, use herbicides and pesticides, and fertilize extensively to keep the grass and plants healthy. Excess fertilizers (e.g., phosphate and nitrate that is not taken up by yard plants) end up in local wetlands and water bodies when nutrients run off the landscape after a storm event. With pesticides, these chemicals are not specific to the pest insect and kill many native pollinators such as bees, beetles, wasps and butterflies.
Furthermore, the maintenance of turfgrass and ornamentals can actually cause a net increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gases. This is due to the use of fertilizers, irrigation and mowing of a manicured landscape, which takes fossil fuels, thus releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gas emissions from yard management practices are greater than the amount of carbon stored by lawns and manicured ornamentals.
Exotics and risk of decreasing native plant and animal diversity
Selecting and installing primarily exotic plant species would ultimately decrease native plant diversity because of the simple fact that native plants would be absent from urban areas. Also, native animal diversity, in general, is correlated to native vegetation diversity. For example, native urban bird diversity increases with native vegetation; more native plants serve as host plants for native butterfly larvae; and native bee diversity increases with the occurrence of native plants. However, some exotics can provide food and shelter for native species. For example, butterflies obtain nectar from pentas (e.g., exotic cultivars of Pentas lanceolata) in Florida and elsewhere around the world.
Another risk associated with using exotic plants is that one may introduce invasive species into the environment. While many exotics are not invasive, some introduced plants are not designated as invasive until it is too late, having already spread from urban to natural areas. When exotic plants are used, known invasive plants should be eliminated and, where information is lacking about the invasive status of a plant, perhaps the precautionary principle should be applied. This states that if the risk is serious enough, the absence of full scientific certainty should not be used to postpone actions to prevent environmental degradation.
In summary, I propose that a goal for urban green infrastructure is not native purity, but a sensible mix of native and exotic plants. In cities, this means increasing the use and conservation of native plant and animal species; using exotics that are low maintenance and provide an ecosystem service, such as sequestering and storing carbon; using exotics that provide shelter and food for native animals; and not planting any exotics that have the potential of becoming invasive.
Madhusudan is an evolutionary ecologist who discovered birds as an undergrad after growing up a nature-oblivious urban kid near Bombay, went chasing after vanishing wildernesses in the Himalaya and Western Ghats as a graduate student, and returned to study cities grown up as a reconciliation ecologist.
Madhusudan Katti
The paradox of native purity in a fundamentally nonnative ecosystem
Cities in California are at a crossroads in terms of their long-term sustainability and resilience. While a couple of recent storms have brought some relief after a long, hot, dry, and fiery summer, and El Niño promises more precipitation this winter, these won’t be enough to address the long-term drought. California’s drought, of course, is a result not just of long-term climatic variability—dry spells are more the norm than the exception in the arid Southwest after all—but also of how people have sucked up and redistributed the state’s water.
Last May, the Governor declared an emergency, ordering mandatory cutbacks in water usage throughout the state. Water departments and utility districts scrambled to develop new policies and rules to enforce the restrictions. Many of California’s urban majority felt unfairly targeted because the thirstiest sector in the state is agriculture. Nevertheless, many of the cities managed to meet the conservation targets, cutting water use by a third in just a few months.
What are the consequences of such a reduction in water use? And how does this tie in to the question of native vs. nonnative species?
We don’t actually know how to cultivate and nurture many of the native species in urban gardens!
California’s sprawling suburbs are characterized by lawns dotted with trees—not just palm trees. The urban flora is full of species from elsewhere in the world. Many come from wetter regions and thrive under the California sun only when given plenty of water. Many are dying under the current combination of drought and water restrictions. This raises new concerns about the loss of other ecosystem services that plants bring to cities and increased fire risk from dry vegetation. How can we reap the benefits of a green infrastructure in a now mostly brown region?
There is opportunity in this crisis for transforming these cities into more biophilic and resilient places in harmony with the regional climate and water availability. Indeed many residents are ripping out lawns and looking for alternative vegetation. Wouldn’t it be great if we could also get rid of all the “alien” species, and fill the cityscape with natives only greenery?
One problem with this vision of restoring “native purity” to this anthropogenic landscape: we don’t actually know how to cultivate and nurture many of the native species in urban gardens! In the Central California region, for example, there are but two local nurseries that supply native plants. There hasn’t been enough of the trial-and-error work that goes into domesticating native plants to turn them into marketable nursery products for the urban garden. Many of them also defy people’s expectation of “greenery,” and end up suffering from too much watering.
So there is a gap between the desire for native vegetation and our ability to actually grow native plants in cities in ways that meet the sociocultural, recreational, and aesthetic needs of people who live in urban landscapes. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other plants, from other regions, that can help us grow water-wise gardens. It would be foolish to turn away all such plants simply because they didn’t evolve in this part of the world. Worry about species likely to escape from gardens into the surrounding countryside, displacing native plants there, of course. But why let that worry get in the way of the benefits many other plants bring into our urban landscapes? We can keep working on domesticating more native species, even as we soften the urban landscape with a mix of whatever works to bring us the ecosystem services without sucking up too much water or disrupting native ecosystems. Nonnative species are not only here to stay, but can help us green the manufactured landscape of nonnative urban ecosystems.
Ingo Kowarik is an expert on urban biodiversity, biological invasions and urban conservation approaches.
Ingo Kowarik
The alien-native debate is always good for hot controversy, but usually risks simplification. This particularly holds for cities. Here, “native purity” is as inadequate as is an “aliens welcome everywhere” approach. I thus think that it’s time to reconcile controversial positions and to come out with differentiated approaches! Why?
Good alien, bad alien? The right answer often depends on the context.
Urban diversity requires diversity in approaches. Urban nature is often highly heterogeneous. Not everything is novel. Many cities comprise remnant ecosystems that stem from natural landscapes or traditional rural landscapes. Other green spaces have been created by humans, such as parks, or emerge as novel ecosystems in highly modified urban-industrial sites. Ecological analyses have revealed that different urban ecosystems have clearly different habitat functions for native and nonnative species, and for species of conservation concern in particular. Adopting only one general strategy for all urban habitats is thus unreasonable, regardless of claiming “native purity” or “aliens welcome everywhere.”
Good alien, bad alien? The right answer often depends on the context. Take the highly invasive North American tree, Robinia pseudoacacia, as an example. It is known to threaten rare grassland species in Europe. Yet Robinia is also a highly valuable urban street tree, well adapted to climate change. From plantings, Robinia is spreading in Berlin and colonizes urban wastelands. Counterintuitively, our recent studies revealed no important effects on native plant or animal species when we compared Robinia to a native pioneer tree. At other sites, however, Robinia transforms (semi-)natural grassland with endangered species. In consequence, Berlin’s biodiversity strategy combines two aims in regard to nonnative species: if negative impacts on species or habitats of conservation concern are evident in a local context, nonnatives are managed. If not, they are accepted as part of ever-changing urban ecosystems. Such differentiation allows urban ecosystems to evolve and saves resources. Managing alien species always and everywhere would be highly costly and, as experience from many management projects shows, highly ineffective.
Novel ecosystems, novel liaison between native and exotic species. Exotic species are often prominent in novel urban ecosystems and they underpin a range of ecosystem services. It’s thus reasonable to integrate nonnative species into the urban green infrastructure. Examples are: planting introduced trees where native trees don’t work or enhancing wild vegetation, usually a mixture of natives and nonnatives, in urban green spaces. “Novel wilderness” dominated by nonnative species has been successfully integrated in a range of parks in Berlin. Yet novel urban ecosystems can also contribute to the conservation of native species that use novel habitats as analogues to natural habitats. Since plants are usually dispersal limited—that is, they do not colonize each site where they might survive—it is also reasonable to enhance native species in some novel urban ecosystems. Leonie Fischer successfully tested adding native grassland species to urban wastelands in Berlin. Novel urban ecosystems thus also offer novel opportunities for native species, which might work in combination with nonnatives.
Novel urban woodland, dominated by the invasive tree Robinia pseudoacacia, in the nature conservation area “Südgelände” in Berlin. Here, novel combinations of native and nonnative species can develop in response to novel environmental conditions. Image: Ingo Kowarik
To conclude: Both natives and nonnatives are inextricable components of urban ecosystems. They occur in changing mixtures, usually responding to changing urban environments. Both species groups underpin ecosystem services that we urgently need in cities. It’s true: nonnative species can be a threat to native biodiversity, but this is often strictly context dependent. Evidence from Berlin shows limited conflicts, but this could be different in other cities. It’s necessary to analyze the local situation before acting. Be ready to enhance urban biodiversity by balancing risks and opportunities of individual species in individual situations—both for natives and nonnatives. Differentiation instead of simplification is promising for enhancing urban biodiversity in a changing world.
Mark has spent the past 25 years conducting ecological studies focused on understanding the structure and function of urban ecosystems, and the conservation of biodiversity in cities and towns.
Mark McDonnell
The preservation and conservation of native plants and animals in urban ecosystems is an admirable and ambitious aspiration considering cities have been built for people with little or no consideration of biological diversity for hundreds of years or more. Indeed, as Bill Cronon writes, defenders of biological diversity more commonly talk about wilderness areas rather than human-dominated ecosystems. Recently, comparative analyses of biological diversity in cities around the world demonstrate they are critical to maintaining global biodiversity. It is pretty clear that one of the greatest threats to native or indigenous plants and animals is the invasion of nonnative or exotic species. There is a large and growing body of research that demonstrates that the abundance and spread of these exotic invasive species is due to the direct and indirect action of humans.
Exotic species pose both a threat and a benefit for rapidly changing urban ecosystems.
It is important to note that the loss of native species in urban ecosystems is not due solely to the presence of exotic invasive species. Many native species are lost due to the complete destruction of, or alterations to, critical habitat or the loss of vital resources such as water or food. A recent study of 22 cities around the globe found that cities with 30 percent or more native vegetation cover experienced fewer native plant extinctions. Similarly, in another study of over 100 cities, researchers found that the presence of intact vegetation cover resulted in higher concentrations of native birds and plants. Many of us would like to see native species retained in urban ecosystems because they possess numerous recognised values that contribute to our natural and cultural heritage and because they provide a variety of unique ecosystem services.
Exotic species pose both a threat and a benefit for rapidly changing urban ecosystems. The ICUN recently published a report citing the significant threat of invasive alien species to Europe’s biodiversity. Conversely, Matt Palmer recently published a TNOC blog that discusses the many advantages of having exotic species in urban ecosystems. In general, many exotic species provide important cultural and ecosystem services in rapidly changing urban environments that are inhospitable to native species.
Because there are clear benefits to creating urban ecosystems that support both native and exotic species, I feel we need to move beyond this moral dualism where we view native species as ‘good’ and exotic species as ‘bad.’ Instead, we should adopt a concept of a ‘continuum of nativism’ (see the figure below) in which we assess the value of native and exotic species, as well as our conservation and restoration activities, as a function of the level of urban development. In the figure I use the percent of the urban ecosystem covered by impermeable surface as the measure of urban. As the percentage of impermeable surface increases in an ecosystem, there is a loss of native species and an increase in exotic species (C, Option 1). Option 2 represents the potential abundance of native species if planning, design, management and restoration practices are altered to support their survival. In Section A of the continuum, there may be little interest in maintaining native species because they are abundant in the ecosystems. In addition, exotic species would have little value in ecosystems that fall within this section of the Continuum. In Section B and C of the Continuum, we would expect more interest and support for preserving, conserving and restoring native species as they disappear (e.g., European cities). Cities that fall within Section B of the Continuum will still find it cost effective to maintain and restore native species. On the other hand, cities that fall within Section C of the Continuum may find it too difficult or expensive to preserve, conserve or restore native species. In this section of the Continuum, exotic species would be viewed as more valuable because they provide a variety of ecosystem services.
A continuum of nativism showing the relationship between percent impermeable surface of an ecosystem and the abundance of native and exotic species. The value of native and exotic species will vary along the continuum, as will the feasibility and cost of maintaining native species. Option 1 illustrates the abundance of native and exotic species as ecosystems become highly urbanized. Option 2 illustrates an alternative outcome if planning, design, management and restoration activities are implemented to maintain native species in urbanizing ecosystems.
Dr Colin Meurk, ONZM, is an Associate at Manaaki Whenua, a NZ government research institute specialising in characterisation, understanding and sustainable use of terrestrial resources. He holds adjunct positions at Canterbury and Lincoln Universities. His interests are applied biogeography, ecological restoration and design, landscape dynamics, urban ecology, conservation biology, and citizen science.
Colin Meurk
The simple answer is “no”; “native purity” isn’t a realistic or viable option! It has been said that there are no “pure” indigenous ecosystems anywhere on the planet now — if you want to get down to the microbial scale. Novel ecosystems certainly predominate (often with abundant alien plants) in temperate to tropical climes. Various words to describe these systems have gone in and out of fashion — novel, recombinant, hybrid, reconciliation ecology, even “ragga-muffin.” I’ve provided a typology (Meurk 2011) for such mixed communities based on their initial condition, imposed conditions, ratio of indigenous to exotic species, and the trend in that relative balance. It defines various stages of maturity, mixing, displacement and recombination. Four broad “initial” conditions’ are remnant, spontaneous (successional), deliberative (planted), and complex (mixtures of several states).
But, what is “wild?” There is an appetite again for “rewinding” and using “cues for care” in urban environments to make this acceptable.
The notes prepared for this forum ask somewhat rhetorically about the presence, value, threats and desirability of exotic species and their control. From a national duty of care perspective for biodiversity, there is an imperative to eradicate or manage alien organisms that pose a threat to our productive systems, biodiversity (indigenousness), and natural character of landscapes. Otherwise, regional individuality and identity will be lost in homogeneity. Check out the wilding conifers spreading across the NZ landscape in some of those Lord of the Rings settings! There is a massive effort here to arrest the exponential phase of these northern continental pines.
“Pure” ecology desires fully indigenous ecosystems. Captive, gardened plants may preserve some of the genetic story, but not their full, intrinsic potential niche — the purpose of representative, nature conservation. On the other hand, species surviving in spontaneous recombinant ecosystems, especially if responding to a range of management or disturbance regimes, may be cumulatively exhibiting their fundamental ecological niche. I call this gradient management (see Meurk & Greenup 2003). Paradoxically, at least in the idiosyncratic biogeographic context of NZ, the survival of many lowland herbaceous species may depend on creating a wide range of stressed and disturbed combinations (cf Grime) in urban environments.
But, what is “wild?” There is an appetite again for “rewinding” and using “cues for care” (Nassauer) in urban environments to make this acceptable. The niche envelopes can be as surely defined in these contrived ‘wild’ urban environments as in the real wild. With many environmental stress/disturbance combinations, native species will individually survive by chance at some points and places, in combination with some (weakened) exotic species, then reproduce and eventually find their ‘natural’ position in the gradients provided as self-sustaining populations. That may be the future of many lowland, open habitat herbs. Then invertebrates, birds and lizards will find these plants and establish their ‘natural’ interactions. Meta-populations of such plants may form on roofs, walls, pavements, rock gardens, lawns etc. These habitats can be seen as forming an archipelago in urban environments!
But we can’t afford to be complacent and simply let aggressive introduced species take over. Some may be valuable as an interim stage back to a stronger representation of indigenous nature in the landscape. There are many cases in NZ of exotic shrubs and trees (Ulex, Pseudotsuga, Salix) acting as nurseries for native regeneration, but more often than not the continentally honed, introduced species are more successful in exploiting the periodic disturbances in human landscapes. It is also a slippery slope to promote ES and function as the hand maiden of biodiversity. To maximise dollar value of ES in NZ you would replace all indigenous, predominantly endemic, species with the most productive (invariably exotic) species from across the planet. So, is green form and function the goal? Surely not, for biodiversity, regional points of difference and identity. My position would be to work hard to find niches for all biodiversity, but don’t be hung up on a losing battle for “purity!” There is lots of good urban conservation to be done in recombinant ecosystems.
Meurk, C.D. 2011. Recombinant Ecology of Urban areas — characterisation, context and creativity. Pp 198-220 in Douglas, I., Goode, D., Houck, M.C., Wang, R. (editors), The Routledge Handbook of Urban Ecology. Routledge, London.
Meurk, C.D., Greenep, H. 2003. Practical conservation and restoration of herbaceous vegetation. Canterbury Botanical Society Journal 37: 99-108.
Matt Palmer is a senior lecturer in the department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University. His research interests are primarily in plant community ecology, with emphases on conservation, restoration and ecosystem function.
Matt Palmer
“Native purity” in urban ecosystems can be a useful aspiration—but it is a nearly impossible goal. It is far more reasonable to manage our dynamic urban biosphere based on the advantages and limitations of individual species, whether native or introduced.
There are certain urban places worth intensive management to maintain their historic biota.
In the debate about introduced species, advocates can stake out strong positions. One camp holds that introduced species are strictly problems to be managed. For this group, there is a battle to be won against a rising tide of hostile enemies that threaten the lives of our native species and the integrity of our native ecosystems—urban and otherwise. On the other side of the debate are those that consider the change in biological communities as an inevitable consequence of urbanization. Cities are vastly different than the ecosystems they replaced, so trying to reconstruct original natural systems may seem a fool’s errand.
There are merits to both positions. There are certain urban places worth intensive management to maintain their historic biota. But there are also many urban places so altered from their original conditions that few natives can persist without perpetual care and where introduced species provide services with less intervention. Then there is a wide spectrum in between—sites where a mix of native and introduced species provide services with limited management.
While it’s easy to advocate for the middle ground, there are challenges to making the “big tent” approach work:
Gardening vs. restoration
In principle, we could have any mix of species in any place. This is essentially gardening, and it can be very expensive. But many urban natural areas are only lightly managed, both by design—to “let nature take its course”—and because of the limited time, money and staff available to land managers.
Most projects to manage introduced species have a period of intense activity—cutting, spraying, trapping, replanting, etc.—with expectations for limited management after the target species are “controlled.” However, many projects fail—eradication is rare and populations of introduced species recover. Success requires an extended commitment to management. This presents challenges related to the expense and difficulty of long-term planning in politics, but also because managing in perpetuity will affect people’s experience of urban nature. Our natural areas will inevitably be less wild and more designed.
Measuring impacts
While almost anyone would agree we should prioritize managing the “worst” introduced species and worry less about innocuous ones, knowing which actions to take is hard. Some introduced species cause significant damage, but are so abundant or resilient that they are essentially unmanageable. Others may displace native species but provide a similar set of services, so they may not cause as much damage as assumed. Conversely, some apparently innocuous species may be present at low abundance for decades before their numbers and impacts increase rapidly. One of the only ways to stop an introduction is to intervene early. This creates a conundrum: act early and you may spend resources managing a non-problem; wait to act to see if a species causes problems and you lose the chance to control it. It may seem prudent to err on the side of caution, but that level of caution may be too expensive.
A fundamental challenge here is that damage from introduced species is hard to measure and especially hard to predict. Rigorous, data-driven evaluation of management options is quite rare. A lot of money is spent to manage species on hunches, and with limited monitoring to evaluate success.
The conservation imperative
The debate about intervention should consider the value of the species or places threatened by introduced species. If a native species is endangered, doing nothing may doom it to extinction—an irreversible loss. If the last remnant of native forest or endemic bird population is lost from an urban landscape, the opportunity for humans to connect to indigenous nature is lost. These lost connections make our day-to-day lives poorer, but also may affect the way we engage with nature broadly—with consequences for the whole planet.
Bill Toomey is currently the Director of Forest Health working as part of the Nature Conservancy’s North American Forest Priority and Urban Conservation Strategies Initiatives.
Bill Toomey
Because many of them have been developed and built up over a period of hundreds of years, we now have a mix of native and nonnative species throughout our urban areas and cities. The species we now have in our cities are the result of choices made by millions of people, mostly independent of each other and based on person choices and preferences. Some urban nature is well planned and managed, such as in our city parks, gardens and roadsides, while other spaces are colonized by opportunistic and nonnative species. As land is converted into highly urbanized spaces, native habitats have been destroyed, altered and fragmented, and species that are not native to those areas have become established by accident or on purpose. Whether we like it or not, there are nonnative species living in our cities; they are taking advantage of the opportunity that disturbed areas and abandoned lands provide and which they are ecologically adapted to occupy. I am always amazed at the ability of some species to occupy marginal habitats and environments, such as cracks in paved areas, poor soils with high salinity or spaces with little access to water and nutrients. While there is benefit in establishing and maintaining areas that have exclusively native species, it may be unrealistic to think we have the time, money and resources to manage our existing urban areas and nature in cities with a purist, native-only perspective.
When planting, people should give preference to species that will do well in those local conditions, whether native or nonnative.
As people consider what trees and plants to include in their yard, along their streets and in their parks, preference should be given to those species that will do well in those local conditions, taking into account soil type and access to water and nutrients, and providing adequate space for the tree or plant to grow to its full, mature height and stature. In urban forestry, we stress the importance of planting the right tree in the right place for the right job. In most cases, there are good native plants to choose from, but we don’t always have to be limited by those choices. We should not intentionally introduce species into urban areas that are known to be invasive, but there are many plants that are currently in our urban environments that are not native that are well established and provide many benefits to people and wildlife species. Showing a preference to native species is important and has many benefits, for sure. But there is also a place for utilizing trees and plants that are not native, but will do well in selected locations and will not cause harm to native species, especially as we manage nature in our continually changing city environments.
Yolanda van Heezik is currently exploring children’s connection with nature, and how ageing affects nature engagement. She is part of a multi-institutional team investigating restoration in urban areas, and cultural influences on attitudes to native biodiversity.
Yolanda van Heezik
New Zealand landscapes are dominated by introduced species, more so than in most other countries, and this is particularly evident in urban areas. In the city where I live, 44 percent of bird species are introduced, and they make up over half of the bird population. Gardens typically contain twice as many exotic as native woody species, and a significant proportion of gardens have no native plants at all. Across all gardens that we studied, 83 percent of woody species were introduced, with the most popular species being roses and rhododendrons. Dave Kendal’s work has shown that people’s preferences are strongly influenced by aesthetic traits, such as flower size and foliage colour, so it’s no surprise that the most popular native trees in NZ are those that have colourful flowers, such as kowhai and pohutakawa. We’ve asked people about their preferences for native as opposed to exotic plants and found a complete disconnect: most people say they prefer natives (40 percent) or a native/exotic mix (36 percent), but when we surveyed their gardens, these were dominated by exotics.
A significant downside of allowing introduced species to take over our environment is loss of national identity.
So, should we care? In the wider literature, a debate rages between those who feel it is critical we adopt a precautionary approach to how we manage alien species (e.g., Daniel Simberloff) and those that advocate that we should learn to love them (e.g., Mark Davis). Some argue that exotic species play a functional role in ecosystems and, in many cases, without prior knowledge of the system, we would be unable to distinguish whether species are “native” or not. A number of studies have shown that native birds and invertebrates are more abundant and/or diverse in neighbourhoods with native vegetation. However our own research and that of others shows urban native birds use many introduced species, such as oak, as much as they use native trees. And in residential gardens in the city where I live, the beetle community is mostly native, despite the low proportion of native woody plants.
In my mind, a significant downside of allowing introduced species to take over our environment is loss of national identity. I am occasionally appalled by the lack of knowledge and awareness many urban residents have regarding native species. I’ve been asked if there are any native birds in our city. I’m also disappointed when I see landscaping around prominent public features dominated by exotic species. New Zealand is admired by tourists for its green, beautiful scenery, but in many landscapes that green is almost entirely exotic. I don’t think that we will ever be able to remove introduced species from urban environments, even though they are a significant source of potentially invasive species and a major cause of biotic homogenisation. However, we should be creating cities that reflect our natural heritage and that emphasise our uniqueness.
Different perspectives emerge within the social science literature. My attitude could come under fire from those that argue that a “pro-native tyranny” has developed out of a suggested link between native plant advocacy and anti-immigrant “nativism,” and that landscape professionals should not feel constrained to use native species over more attractive exotic species.
Alternatively, the value I suggest people should place in native plants might be interpreted in the context of a contemporary reaction to a history of “botanical colonization,” whereby the natural NZ landscape was replaced with an English landscape. Whatever the motivation, I believe some kind of compromise must be sought that results in a greater representation of native species in urban areas, and fosters an enhanced sense of national identity through planting and encouraging those species that are “of this place.”
Paula Villagra, PhD, is a Landscape Architect that researches the transactions between people and landscapes in environments affected by natural disturbances.
Paula Villagra
Urban spaces are newer ecosystem types and imply thinking about and planning for them as hybrid systems, which are neither natural nor anthropic. If the aim is to ensure the functioning of the natural system and, simultaneously, to provide goods and services to humans, then contemporary urban spaces should be thought as novel “hybrid” systems. As such, instead of insisting on the “good natives, bad aliens” narrative, what matters is finding the proper coexistence between them to provide ecosystem services, such as recreation and mitigation, as well as to maintain ecosystem functions, such as interactions between processes and structures.
If the purity of the environment is relevant in urban areas, then that is what must be protected, and the planning and design of the urban environment will focus on creating buffer areas and strategies to conserve that. Conversely, if natural spaces require some kind of “help” for the community to value and take care of them, such as through the introduction of alien species to give scenic diversity (e.g. diversity of color), or man-made elements to make the place more familiar and accessible (e.g. by introducing trails), then the focus will be to study which elements, either natural, exotic and/or man-made, are possible and required to ensure a good perception of the environment and biodiversity conservation.
Green forms and functions, both native and introduced, should be welcome in contemporary ‘hybrid’ urban areas.
One example in which this line of thought is relevant is the case of urban wetlands. The name says it all: they are natural systems with specific structures and processes that maintain a high diversity of species, but at the same time, they are systems subjected to urban pressures. Planning and design strategies should, on the one hand, focus to preserve their biodiversity, and on the other hand, should create an adequate bonding between human and nature.
The planning of urban wetlands in Chile, in particular, should fulfill this dual role. Given the characteristics of the country, which has more than 4,000 km of coastline along the Pacific Ocean, there are many coastal wetlands in urban areas that provide ecosystems services such as: serving as buffer zones in case of tsunami, providing water for agriculture, being part of sacred land of aboriginal people and providing pleasant places for recreation. At the same time, urban wetlands are important natural reserves worldwide, as they are feeding and nesting sites for migratory birds and also contain a high number of endemic plant species.
Regardless of these values of urban wetlands, the actions of urban dwellers who do not know their valuable functions and services is sometimes negative. In the winter season, these wetlands can be seen as ugly and marshy places, so the community perceived them as dangerous sites and used them as landfills. In summer, due to the type of vegetation they have, they are perceived as dry and lifeless places, and as sources of fire, increasing insecurity and the negative perceptions of them. However, through national and international initiatives, several of these wetlands have been defined as priority conservation sites, and as coastal reserves. These interventions have gone hand in hand with environmental education programs and the introduction of information panels and vantage points for the observation of birds, including trails linked to urban parks. These types of actions provide the opportunity for recreation while facilitating the community’s understanding of the functions of these systems and associated services to humans. Then, the perception of the community can change, because the virtues of wetlands, which are sometimes difficult to perceive for the average citizen, are revealed.
In this sense, green forms and functions, both native and introduced, are welcome in contemporary “hybrid” urban areas. Planners, landscape architects, urban designers and ecologists, among other professionals involved in urban development and biodiversity conservation, should focus their efforts on identifying those parts, structures, processes and functions of systems, both natural and man-made, which should be kept or changed. And they should work together to prioritize strategies for providing services as well as for revealing functions that are intangible and invisible to the non-scientific community.
A review of Flower House Detroit, which ran October 16-18, 2015 at 11751 Dequindre St, Hamtramck, Michigan.
Once again, something amazing and ephemeral has appeared in Detroit.
Flower House Detroit (which was actually located in the city of Hamtramck, 2 square miles enveloped by the city of Detroit) was, at its simplest, a gorgeous three-day floral installation in a two-story abandoned house. In reality, the project was much, much more.
The back stoop of the Flower House.
Lisa Waud was inspired to create Flower House Detroit after experiencing the 2012 Dior Runway show, which had been staged in an abandoned house filled with flowers in Paris. As a floral designer based in a neighborhood with more than its share of abandoned houses, Lisa knew that she was destined to create an installation that would bring the wild spirit of the Dior show to her hometown. As proprietor of pot + box, a flower studio operating in Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan, Lisa was uniquely qualified to inspire a team of designers, artists, photographers and event planners to bring her vision to life.
Lisa has long been a fan of the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the French artists known for giant, breathtaking art installations, and she knew that her piece should have that same, awe-inspiring quality. A flower shed just wouldn’t do the trick. Her vision demanded the presence of a grand old house, one of the kind that Detroit was known for in its heyday. The inspiration stuck with her and, two years later, she found herself at a county real estate auction “with her hand up.” For $500 she purchased two houses, located side by side, on a street adjacent to a freeway and not so far from her own live/work studio. That, in her own words, was when “sh+t got real.”
There is a lovely symmetry to the plans for the Flower House. An abandoned, ruined home was filled with flowers, made beautiful once again before facing its final demise.
One year, an Indiegogo campaign and a whole lot of planning later, the Flower House burst into bloom. The project was brought to life by a group of 37 floral artists, was visited by hundreds and was seen by thousands more through social media. Over 100,000 blooms filled 17 rooms; flower-filled tubs and toilets flowed from every bathroom, a 50s kitchen cabinet—trimmed in red and left behind—was stuffed full of coordinated flowers and vegetables. A dining room table grew out of a centerpiece of blooms, mosses and branches that reached from floor to ceiling and featured a self-contained water feature fed by a 50 gallon drum that had been sunk into the ground beneath the floorboards and filled with water.
Exterior urban wall paper at the Flower House.Katoi food truck at the Flower House.
From front porch to back stoop, warped floorboard to cracked ceiling, the Flower House was spectacular. Ticketed visitors were admitted in 20-minute intervals and encouraged to post their photographs using the hashtag #flowerhousedetroit. I came to the house straight from another kind of installation: a Greening of Detroit tree planting, where 85 new trees were planted on a nearby street. When I arrived, the whole street was bustling – no doubt with more activity than it had seen in years. The sidewalk was flanked with buckets of blooms and inspired visitors were encouraged to design bouquets of their own after exiting the house. A food truck was on site and visitors were queued up and gazing at the rear façade of the house, which had been covered with “Wild Floral Graffiti” reminiscent of exterior urban wall paper. On entering, visitors’ senses were engaged immediately. There was the happy hum of cameras clicking and visitors alternately whispering in awe and exclaiming with surprise, “Amazing!” “So beautiful.” “I might cry.” The smell was incredible – it was the rich warm smell of earth and fading flowers and long golden grass warmed by late summer sun. The colors were so rich, and the textures so varied, that it was impossible not to reach out over and over again, to confirm that everything was real. In room after room, the decay of a long vacancy was buoyed up by rafts of flowers arranged in the most amazing configurations of color and pattern and motion. “A Floral Whirlwind” spun in an upstairs bedroom, while another bedroom featured the bed that every little princess dreams about, strewn with flowers and bowered with an astonishing daisy chain. In the living room, the seat of a chair burst through with hundreds of stems. Every crack in the foundation, every wall where lath showed through ruined plaster, every hole where a fixture once hung, featured, for one weekend, something alive, and beautiful, and inspiring.
A kitchen cabinet in the Flower House.The kitchen at the Flower House.The living room at the Flower House.
And then, it was over.
The Flower House was designed to last only a single glorious weekend. The web resounded with the anguished cries of those who didn’t get tickets to the sold-out spectacle. But the best may just be yet to come. Lisa Waud and her partners in the Flower House are committed to the Slow Flower movement, which advocates for propagation and use of locally grown and seasonal blooms. One of the most delightful aspects of the Flower House was that it made room for local flowers. During installation, local flower farmers dropped off buckets of blooms to be added to the house, contributing to the unique character of the project. This generosity is a hallmark of Detroit’s community of growers, and it was a most appropriate way to welcome Lisa to the fold, given her plans for the future. There is a lovely symmetry to the plans for the Flower House. An abandoned, ruined home was filled with flowers, made beautiful once again before facing its final demise. The installation, designed to be fleeting, was then dismantled and composted – 100,000 blooms returned to the soil. Next, the house will be deconstructed. At least 75 percent of the raw materials will be recycled for other projects by Reclaim Detroit, a program of the Detroit non-profit EcoWorks. And finally, the site will once again be made beautiful with flowers, this time as the site of a flower farm, growing blooms that will be used in more wonderful pot + box productions.
Toilette at the Flower House.Kitchen plumbing at the Flower House.
Which American president administration of the last century has the strongest record on preserving the environment and natural beauty? Presidents Theodore or Franklin Roosevelt, who created the National Wildlife Refuge System (protecting 230 million acres) and established the Civilian Conservation Corps, putting 2.5 million people to work building trails and planting trees, respectively? President Kennedy, who created the Cape Cod National Seashore? President Nixon, who signed the Clean Air Act and created the EPA? President Obama, who has led international efforts to address climate change?
Or was it the president who hosted a White House Conference on Natural Beauty, and spoke stirringly on the importance of a clean environment in his first State of the Union message?
In fact, the U.S. president with the strongest environmental track record (particularly focused on land conservation and the protection of natural beauty) is President Lyndon B. Johnson, who—alongside his activist first lady, Lady Bird Johnson—signed more than 300 conservation measures into law, establishing the legal foundations for how we protect the nation’s land, water and air.
What would President and Mrs. Johnson think now, as partisan politics and fringe political movements in the U.S. work to strip environmental legislation of its power?
Growing up in the 1960s, I found President Johnson to be a larger-than-life figure. Unfortunately, I associated him primarily with the start and the growth of the Vietnam War, a quagmire which grew deeper throughout his administration. But recently, and particularly with the 50th anniversary of his signing of the Highway Beautification Act (known derisively at first as “Lady Bird’s Law”) on October 22, my appreciation for the environmental legacy of President and first lady Johnson has deepened.
President Johnson signing the Highway Beautification Act. Image: White House Photo Office Collection
Lyndon Baines Johnson, or LBJ, was vice president under President John F. Kennedy, following a long career in Texas state politics and both houses of the U.S. Congress. He became president after Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. He, his wife and two daughters moved into the White House soon thereafter, and he was elected president in November 1964.
President Johnson’s wife, born Claudia Alta Taylor in 1912 and nicknamed “Lady Bird” by her nanny, had spent much of her childhood in the meadows and woodlands of Karnack, Texas. She attended and graduated from both St. Mary’s College at Dallas and the University of Texas at Austin. She and the future president met and were married in 1934.
There is a lot of speculation as to why President and Lady Bird Johnson were so keenly interested in the environment and natural beauty; some think it is rooted in Mrs. Johnson’s loss of her mother at a very young age, after which she found solace in the flowers and plants around her childhood home. President Johnson—who led the passage of groundbreaking civil rights legislation and many other significant domestic policy acts of the “Great Society”—fully acknowledged his wife’s role as instigator of, and inspiration and advocate for much of his environmental legislation.
President Johnson’s environmental track record was established early. Just one year after being sworn in as president aboard Air Force One, he conveyed a strong and prescient philosophy towards the importance of a clean and improved environment in his State of the Union Address, in January 1965:
The Beauty of America
“For over three centuries the beauty of America has sustained our spirit and has enlarged our vision. We must act now to protect this heritage. In a fruitful new partnership with the States and the cities the next decade should be a conservation milestone. We must make a massive effort to save the countryside and to establish—as a green legacy for tomorrow—more large and small parks, more seashores and open spaces than have been created during any other period in our national history. A new and substantial effort must be made to landscape highways to provide places of relaxation and recreation wherever our roads run.
Within our cities imaginative programs are needed to landscape streets and to transform open areas into places of beauty and recreation.
We will seek legal power to prevent pollution of our air and water before it happens. We will step up our effort to control harmful wastes, giving first priority to the cleanup of our most contaminated rivers. We will increase research to learn much more about the control of pollution.
We hope to make the Potomac a model of beauty here in the Capital, and preserve unspoiled stretches of some of our waterways with a Wild Rivers bill.
More ideas for a beautiful America will emerge from a White House Conference on Natural Beauty which I will soon call.”
Less than two months later, at the urging of his wife and aides—including Nash Castro, White House liaison and deputy regional director of the National Capital Parks for the National Park Service—President Johnson and volunteer Chairman, Laurance S. Rockefeller, convened an unprecedented and never-imitated “White House Conference on Natural Beauty.” More than 800 people attended the two-day conference, held in late May. Castro, now 96, remembers the conference was so large they planned to hold it on the White House South Lawn. However, as Castro recalled in a recent phone interview, “the heavens opened up and we had to squeeze 800 people indoors—President Johnson stood at the door like a shepherd, herding the guests, saying ‘Come on in—hurry up.’ ”
Recently, the nonprofit organization Scenic America hosted a two-day event in Washington, heralding the accomplishments of Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson and Laurance Rockefeller. In a draft report (discussed below), they note “The Governors of 35 states subsequently [to the 1965 White House Conference] convened statewide natural beauty conferences. A wave of citizen action followed, dedicated to neighborhood improvement, protection of the countryside and preservation of historic sites.”
The conference was both preceded by and paved the way for many legislative and executive accomplishments, foremost among them the Highway Beautification Act, the Land and Water Conservation Fund (which uses offshore oil and gas leases instead of taxes as a funding source), the Clean Water Act, the Wilderness Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and many more, including the creation of 47 new national parks.
Lady Bird Johnson first became known for the beautification of Washington via the Committee for a More Beautiful Capital, which she formed in 1964 with the help of philanthropist Mary Lasker; Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham; philanthropist Brooke Astor; Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Louchheim; architects Nathaniel Owings and Edward Durell Stone; Laurance S.Rockefeller and other donors. Castro can still recite the precise accomplishments: I million daffodils planted throughout the city; 10,000 azaleas planted on Pennsylvania Ave; 1,000 dogwoods and a large portion of the cherry trees on Hains Point (part of a total of 3,800 cherry trees planted by 1965, which compose the annual, festive cherry blossom splendor for which the capitol is now known).
Lady Bird Johnson and two young people standing among blooming white azaleas. Image: LBJ Library/ Robert KnudsenLady Bird Johnson plants pansies as Sec. Stewart Udall and others look on. Image: LBJ Library/ Robert Knudsen
Lady Bird Johnson’s best-known accomplishment may be the Highway Beautification Act, a piece of legislation her husband fought for and which was mockingly referred to by Senator Bob Dole as “Lady Bird’s Law.” Castro and others recall how President Johnson promised a dinner and reception at the State Department, featuring a cameo from actor Fredric March. Despite Republican objections, the bill was finally passed, and the Congress got their promised reception very late at night.
Beyond the Washington political intrigue and drama worthy of a “House of Cards” episode, the Highway Beautification Act, though watered down somewhat by the billboard industry, led to the control of outdoor advertising, the removal of certain types of signs along the interstate highways, and the removal or screening of junkyards. It also encouraged scenic enhancement, which led to the requirement that a certain percentage of federal funds on highway projects be used for planting native flowers, plants and trees. Never resting on her laurels (or her azaleas), Mrs. Johnson made forays out to the national parks across the country on at least 11 separate trips, often with Castro and the media in tow, calling attention to the need to conserve, protect and enhance natural beauty.
Lady Bird Johnson dedicates California’s Highway 1 as the country’s first scenic highway. Image: LBJ Library/ Robert Knudsen
What drove Lady Bird Johnson in her mission to beautify an entire nation, from hardscrabble inner-city neighborhoods to vast national parks and highway systems?
Warrie Price, a very close family friend to the Johnson family (and roommate to first daughter, Lynda Johnson Robb, while they were freshmen at the University of Texas), recalls that natural beauty and plant life was “part of [Lady Bird Johnson’s] DNA as a child in Karnack…Outdoor life was her companion, partner, best friend.” According to Price, the “tragic ascension“ to the White House “put [Lady Bird Johnson] in a place where she decided that she would be a ‘doer’ nationally.” (Interestingly, Price herself went on to move to New York City from her home in San Antonio, where she also became a “doer” and led the creation of The Battery Conservancy, whose features include a spectacular perennial wild garden. Fellow San Antonians Elizabeth Barlow Rogers and Robert Hammond would create the Central Park Conservancy and Friends of the High Line—both urban repositories of great natural beauty—respectively. This prompts one to ask: What was in the water in San Antonio?
At the conclusion of the Johnson administration in 1968, the president presented his wife with a plaque adorned with 50 pens used to sign 50 laws related to natural beauty and conservation, and inscribed: “To Lady Bird, who has inspired me and millions of Americans to try to preserve our land and beautify our nation. With Love from Lyndon.”
After leaving the White House, Mrs. Johnson focused on Texas, leading the creation of a 10-mile trail around Town Lake in Austin (later renamed Lady Bird Lake) and promoting the beautification of Texas highways by awarding prizes for the best use of native Texas plants to enhance scenery. Her culminating action on behalf of nature was the creation of the National Wildflower Research Center in 1982, the year she turned 70. The Center, later moved to a new location in the Hill Country southwest of Austin, opened in 1995 as the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. The world-renowned organization, now spread across more than 279 acres, has more than 700 plant species on display and provides programs for adults and children. Alongside the American Society of Landscape Architects, the center also played a lead role in the development of the “Sustainable Sites” program, a rating system for sustainable landscape design similar to LEED for architecture.
So what would President and Mrs. Johnson think now, as partisan politics and fringe political movements work to strip environmental legislation of its power, to sell off federal lands for profit and exploitation, and to hold hostage the renewal of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which expired in September 2015 due to Congressional inaction?
Happily and hopefully, the environmental legacy and passion for public-private partnerships between citizens and government continues to inspire citizens and nonprofit groups. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of both the White House Conference on Natural Beauty and the Highway Beautification Act, Scenic America convened a conference and is working on a plan whose recommendations include increasing funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund; establishing a national inventory of parks and open spaces; restoring the defunct National Scenic Byways Program; undergrounding overhead wires; and enacting federal and state legislation to prohibit the removal of trees to increase billboard visibility, among many conservation-oriented action plans. Other major groups, including The Trust for Public Land and The Nature Conservancy, are working as a coalition to press Congress to reauthorize and fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund. And as we all travel on highways and enjoy beautiful views of fields of wildflowers, we can remember with appreciation a White House that cared passionately about native plants, vibrant parks, a clean and healthy environment, and the values of natural beauty.
Before and after tree cutting on Interstate 95 in Jacksonville, Fla. Image: Scenic AmericaBillboards along an otherwise scenic I-85 in Georgia allowed because of a nearby business. Image: Scenic America
Roadside trees are not merely roadside trees. Roadside trees are living condominiums, packed with other organisms. They are functioning communities, complete with food chains, predators and prey, nutrient capture, nutrient cycling and recycling, and an organisational hierarchy. They extend their influence vertically upwards, horizontally and downwards. They are ecosystems in their own right.
Roadside trees in Singapore.
Naturalists who have access to the riches of the true forest tend to be rather dismissive of the tree community along roadsides. It is a community that is obviously impoverished, consisting of a few hardy, widespread species that are not threatened, and do not need conservation assistance. Yet where would we be without those roadside trees? Biologically, a lot poorer. One of the extraordinary features of Singapore, for a visitor from other cities in the region, is the sound of Hill Mynas and Racket-tailed Drongos in suburban gardens; the sight of Honey Buzzards in trees along the main shopping street of the business district; or roosts of Long-tailed Parakeets close by one of the busy railway stations. The Mynas and the Parakeets are birds of the primary lowland rain forest, where they live in the tree canopy. Elsewhere in the region they have often been trapped out by the caged bird trade, or have simply found the vegetation within cities impossible to use as habitat. In Singapore, these birds find plenty of tall trees and they really don’t care that much what happens on the ground beneath them, whether it involves a pedestrian walkway or a group of joggers. What they need is the fruits in the canopy, and in Singapore, what they need is what they get.
In the rain forest, of course, everyone knows about complexity, hierarchies, interactions, communities and guilds. But the same is also true of the trees planted out in the urban environment, except that they have received less attention from community ecologists.
Bringing the trees to our roadsides
In the good old days of traditional biology teaching, final year students taking their ‘spot’ quiz at the National University of Singapore would inevitably be faced with one small, featureless, orange-green organism. Some years it would be presented by the examiner as a dry powder, sometimes as a liquid sludge, or occasionally attached to its natural substrate on tree bark. This is Trentepohlia, a genus of 36 species of chlorophyte algae. It grows on the bark of many roadside trees in Singapore as an orange scurf, and on the trunks and foliage of trees in the rain forest. It is also one of the algae known to form symbiotic associations with fungi, i.e., lichens. As species of algae and species of fungi combine to form further species of lichens, this becomes an interesting case in which the total diversity is greater than the sum of its parts.
In Singapore there are roughly 2.9 million roadside trees, planted by the National Parks Board and the town councils and tracked and managed individually along the nation’s 6,000 kilometers of roads. In a tiny city state, a high density of roads is inevitable, and the road surfaces together with the planted road reserves and central dividers make up about 12 percent of all land.
These managed trees are made up of some 600 species; this means that planted tree alpha diversity (simply, the absolute number of species present) is not far off the tree diversity of the rain forest in our nature reserves, where there are roughly 2,145 native plant species, of which roughly 700 are trees. In the rain forest, of course, everyone knows about complexity, hierarchies, interactions, communities and guilds. But the same is also true of the trees planted out in the urban environment, except that they have received less attention from community ecologists.
Trees as fundamental building blocks
Singapore has been pursuing the idea of a garden city since 1965, a concept that has now been tweaked to become “A City in a Garden.” Until the 1970s, tree species were chosen mostly for providing shade. Another layer of consideration was added from 1979 onwards, with species chosen for the colour of their flowers and variety of foliage. To these have been added considerations of maintenance, suitability for birds and butterflies, avoidance of unsightliness or risk (for example, slippery fruits falling on public walkways), and structure. Roadside plantings no longer consist only of trees, but include shrubs, palms, subcanopy trees and emergent trees to make a complex 3-D green environment. This extends upwards (to rooftop and vertical greenery), inwards (to indoor planting, with examples in Changi Airport and in offices in the central business district), and downwards (for example, beneath flyovers).
At one time cleanliness and neatness were prized, manicured vegetation was the order of the day, and that meant epiphytes – plants growing on other plants – were unwelcome. That situation began to change with the deliberate strapping onto branches of selected ferns, notably Birds-nest Ferns, Asplenium nidus. With that step, it was no longer normal practice to discourage epiphytes, and other species began to proliferate simply because they were undisturbed. The high rainfall in Singapore (around 2,400 millimeters per annum) and typically high humidity helped these species to thrive.
Pigeon Orchid.
Another major internal management change was the orchid conservation plan of the National Parks Board that has reintroduced thousands of native orchids onto trees. Whether they are self-propagating clones or not, orchids around the city tend to flower in synchrony: the Pigeon Orchid, Dendrobium crumenatum, is a classic case in which mass flowering occurs nine days after a critical low temperature night. Bulbophyllum vaginatum is another gregarious flowering orchid whose blossoms can light up the boughs of an entire row of trees.
The trees that epiphytes inhabit have been termed “phorophytes” (plant-bearers), and their inhabitants include epiphytes, hemi-epiphytes, climbers and epiphylls. But this is only the beginning of complexity. Within the trees are wood-borers and creatures living beneath the bark. Spotted Wood Owls use the Birds-nest Ferns as nesting sites (these ferns are truly named); ants form colonies amongst the ferns’ spongy root-mass and forage throughout the tree while tending aphids and scale insects. Within the tree, a cavity provides a niche for fungi, nematodes, bats, beetles and small centipedes, woodlice, termites, ants and colonies of bees and wasps. In the leaves of the tree are leaf-miners, in the shoots are viruses causing ‘witches broom,’ and on the twigs are galls.
Below ground, mycorrhizal associations between tree roots and fungi are hidden until a rainy spell encourages a mass appearance of mushrooms beneath the tree. Might a first estimate be one species of fungus per species of tree? Mulching of trees might introduce fungi other than the mycorrhizae.
Then we have the pollinators and nectar feeders – birds, bees, butterflies and bats. Fruits are being eaten and dispersed by a range of vertebrates. Inside figs, fig wasps are completing their frantic lives. Even before they have dropped from the tree, fermentation of overripe fruits has been initiated by bacteria and additional fungi. Above a flowering Alstonia tree, a swarm of tiny flying invertebrates attracts a feeding flock of swiftlets. The swiftlets and the nesting owls have specialised internal and external parasites, some of them unique. The termites parading up and down the trunk are bringing in yet more organisms, and carry their own specialised intestinal flora that helps break down cellulose. The levels of diversity go on and on.
Bulbophyllum vaginatum, a flowering orchid.
Such a diversity of life dependent on trees has been known and studied everywhere that trees grow – but usually not on roadside trees in cities. In Washington state, west of the Cascade Mountains, Richard Pederson (1991) (of the US Forest Service) found that 39 species of birds and 14 species of mammals depend on tree cavities for their survival. East of the Cascades, 39 bird species and 23 mammal species depend on these ‘snags.’ Pederson (1991) and Bottorff (2005), of Washington State University, found that in total, more than 100 species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians need snags for nesting, roosting, shelter, denning and feeding (45 species alone forage for food in such trees). In North America, hollow snags and large knotholes are used by many species of mammals, such as squirrels, martens, porcupine and raccoons.
Zack, George and Laudenslayer (2002) compared the density of snags, snags formed into cavities, and cavity-nesting bird use at two sites in northern California – one site with large trees and large snags because of protection from logging, and the other where a century of logging had left few large trees and snags. Total snags were three times more numerous in the protected forest, and use of cavities by nesting birds was 15 times greater (2002). Clearly, roadside trees, whether in North America or in Singapore, cannot be allowed to grow in so unregulated a way that snags and cavities reach a maximum. Public safety is a major driver of roadside tree management. Yet the diversity in Singapore proves that even regularly pruned and managed trees can support a high number of epiphytes, and that these are the foundation of a complex plant and animal community.
The diversity of trees, with differing shapes and bark textures, helps to support high diversity of epiphytes. In a geometric progression, the epiphytes then provide multiple niches within living and decaying tissue, roots and leaves, for the huge range of fungi, insects, birds, butterflies, and other organisms in the city. If the community is fractured by the removal of epiphytes, many other organisms suffer. Once epiphytes are tolerated or, even better, encouraged, the community flourishes.
What are the epiphytes?
In a recent study, student Ng Qi Qi (2015) from the National University of Singapore surveyed more than 12,000 trees of 306 species and found 81 species of epiphytes growing on them. The top 17 species of epiphytes (in the broadest sense) were:
Some of the biggest epiphytic surprises in Singapore are examples of plants that really shouldn’t be epiphytes at all. Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) and banana (Musa esculenta) have been seen growing where they were never designed to be, probably distributed by birds or civets. Dragon fruits (Hylocereus undatus and H. polyrhizus) are also a visual surprise.
The roadside tree in Singapore most often bearing at least one species of epiphyte is Albizia saman, followed by Tabebuia rosea and Pterocarpus indicus. Phorophyte species with reticulate or longitudinally fissured bark have a higher proportion of trees with at least one epiphyte found on them. Rough bark seems to be more favourable for supporting the formation of epiphyte communities; intuitively, irregularities in bark provide niches for seeds to lodge, for roots to penetrate, and for nutrients and moisture to gather. The three species of trees mentioned can therefore be seen as keystone species in supporting a roadside epiphyte community: not only the presence of trees, but the selection of suitable trees is important.
It is common to find many different species of epiphytes on a single tree species, and even on a single individual tree. However, Zotz and Heitz (2001) have suggested that, unlike in other plant communities, challenges such as interspecific competition and herbivory do not seem to be an issue for epiphytes. This means that the epiphyte community, including that on roadside trees, functions in somewhat different ways from the biological community within forest. It is therefore of intrinsic scientific interest. Some factors that influence the structure of epiphyte communities include the size of the supporting tree, its bark type, and water availability. In the Americas, Gentry and Dobson (1987) found that wet forest had an epiphyte diversity 500 times greater than that of dry forest. They compared this with the diversity of herbs and lianas, which were only twice as diverse in wet forest as they were in dry forest (where the epiphytes were mostly orchids and bromeliads). The epiphyte community on roadside trees should be of interest and concern because of the relative exposure of roadside trees to open, drying conditions as well as vehicle emissions and urban heat island effects.
Root fungi.
Concerns for the future
Singapore, like other countries in Southeast Asia, is vulnerable to the prolonged droughts initiated by El Niño years. These place huge stress on epiphytes and the living communities they support. In the same Singapore study mentioned above, Ng Qi Qi found that during the February 2014 drought, Vittaria ensiformis was the species most vulnerable to death by drought, followed by the poorly adapted climbing herbs Passiflora suberosa and Paederia foetida (study year). Orchids have adaptations to resist drought, such as pseudobulbs and large root masses: the two large orchids Grammatophyllum speciosum and Cymbidium finlaysonianum came through the 2014 drought successfully.
Morphology and water stress adaptations are likely to be the reasons behind the different extirpation rates of these plants during drought (Ng 2015), while the type of tree they were growing on did not seem to have much effect. The size of the supporting tree also did not seem to have an impact on the survival rate of epiphytes during drought, except for one of the mistletoes.
Nevertheless, microclimate will continue to be a concern, and 3-D planting in place of serried ranks of military roadside trees is likely to be a factor in maintaining humidity and buffering drying winds. Pruning, removal of risky branches, and repairs to wind-created snags as a result of branch snapping, will all have to be considered.
Now, back to the students’ infamous Trentepohlia. For any student who bothered to talk to seniors, this was actually a shoo-in question. But perhaps students should not have taken the identification too literally. A study of lichens and green algae on bark of trees within two tiny patches of Singapore’s rain forests (Neustupa and Skaloud, 2010) has revealed at least 57 species, not one of which was in the genus Trentepohlia! Most of them could not be identified beyond the level of genus. In all likelihood, there are plenty more algae and lichens out there to be identified. And this is not just an abstruse and pointless exercise. Trentepohlia odorata is one of the commonest algae growing on the external walls of buildings in Singapore, responsible for significant costs in building maintenance and redecoration.
To repeat the message with which we started: roadside trees are living condominiums, packed with other organisms. They are functioning ecosystems, with food chains, predators and prey, nutrient capture, nutrient cycling and recycling, and an organisational hierarchy. Where would we be without those roadside trees? Biologically, we would be a lot poorer.
Bottorff, J. 2005. Snags, coarse woody debris, and wildlife. Snohomish Co. Extension Service, Washington State University. http://snohomish.wsu.edu/forestry/documents/SNAGS.pdf
Gentry, A.H. and Dodson, C.H. 1987. Diversity and biogeography of Neotropical vascular epiphytes. Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 74: 205–233.
Neustupa, J. and Skaloud, P. 2010. Diversity of subaerial algae and cyanobacteria growing on bark and wood in the lowland tropical forests of Singapore. Plant Ecology and Evolution, 143: 51–62.
Ng, Q.Q. 2015. Effects of drought on vascular plant epiphytes in Singapore. Thesis, B.Env.Sci., Dept. of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore.
Pederson, Richard J. 1991. Managing Small Woodlands for Cavity Nesting Birds. USDA Forest Service, Pacific NW Region. 6 pages. http://www.woodlandfishandwildlife.org/
Zack, S., George, T.L. and Laudenslayer, Jr., W.F. 2002. Are there snags in the system? Comparing cavity use among nesting birds in “snag-rich” and “snag-poor” Eastside pine forests. USDA Forest Service Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-181. Pp. 179–191.
Zotz, G. and Hietz, P. 2001. The physiological ecology of vascular epiphytes: current knowledge, open questions. Journal of Experimental Botany, 52: 2067–2078
Although recent efforts to mitigate the characteristic poor air quality and largely suburban character of Los Angeles have been the focus of much debate and action, the city still faces a rash of issues today, including an increasingly severe drought and a recent “state of emergency” declared over issues with homelessness. With few existing opportunities to truly rethink its built and natural environment, the city has been fixated on the Los Angeles River as a project that could revitalize urban public space, offering a chance to “rebrand” what it means to live in Los Angeles.
Axonometric drawing of the Elysian Valley (WATERshed by LOHA). Image courtesy of LOHA.
Though history of human settlement on the Los Angeles River dates back to Native American settlements in 5,000 B.C.E., a project to pave over the riverbanks began in 1938, with the intention of preventing erratic and dangerous flooding events. Los Angeles’s desert-like climate, characterized by periods of dry weather with occasional torrential downpours, combined with poorly planned communities that were built in the river’s floodplains, led to the decision to channelize the river, replacing streams and wetlands (a natural system of flood control) with 51 miles of engineered waterway.
The future of Los Angeles depends on creative design solutions to resolve issues of affordable housing and water-stressed conditions.
However, the tides have turned in recent decades as advocacy groups have insisted the river be returned to a more natural state, issuing various proposals for restoration and urban green space projects – one of which was the focus of a 2014 TNOC essay, “The Emerald Necklace.” In response to these calls, the city formed the Ad Hoc Committee on the Los Angeles River in 2002 and released the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan in 2007. The 2007 Master Plan anticipates that the project will improve aesthetics, enrich quality of life, and sustain the economy of the region. Following the announcement of this plan, many designers and planners continued to contemplate their own visions for this major hydrological and ecological undertaking. And now, a plan created by renowned architect, Frank Gehry, is in progress, though further information surrounding this commission is being kept under wraps.
Shelter, the latest exhibition at the Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles, does not hesitate to provide additional perspectives on the Los Angeles River revitalization project. The exhibition displays a collection of proposals from six LA-based design firms which reconsider the future of ‘shelter’ in the Los Angeles River and Wilshire Corridor regions of the city. Curators Sam Lubell and Danielle Rago commissioned these proposals, which range from Late Modernist high-rises to community-owned low-rise housing densification models.
WATERshed — re-thinking the role of a river
“WATERshed,” a proposal put forth by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects (LOHA), allows viewers to reconsider the capacity of architecture to alleviate conditions of a water-stressed environment. Thoroughly relevant to the current extreme conditions in California, LOHA has created a series of “plug-in interventions that address specific underperforming and absent functions of the water cycle” within the Elysian Valley, a community located alongside the Los Angeles River. WATERshed aims to revitalize the entire system that feeds into the river through the combination of nuanced water management systems and urbanized public spaces. Design solutions range from residential structures swathed in a “sponge filtration system” to the Los Angeles River Bridge Cap, which combines oblong tent-shaped community wells and filtration systems with public space that connects both sides of the river.
The conical, organic and sometimes-outlandish geometries proposed in WATERshed were devised from a study of the existing open space between single-family homes in the region, emphasizing a key aim of this project: designing a functionality specific to the site’s environmental and social context. As its name implies, this proposal expands the parameters of the Los Angeles River revitalization project beyond the banks of the river and towards a more holistic approach that encompasses the hydrological relationships within the entire watershed.
The Los Angeles River Bridge Cap (WATERshed by LOHA). Image courtesy of Hunter Kerhart.
According to the architects, “recycled urban stormwater and increased efficiency could meet 82% of LA’s water needs,” but because of outdated land use policies and infrastructure, opportunities for capture and filtration during sporadic downpours are limited. This identified gap in the current water system of the Elysian Valley provides an opportunity to reconsider our relationship to water within urban areas, particularly when desertification is predicted for the future. Though extreme in both its aesthetic and engineering, LOHA’s proposal shows us what the future of urban ecology could look like in a world of unprecedented water scarcity, pushing past superficial beautification efforts towards the creation of a public space for utility and localized resource management.
Amid all the talk about revitalizing the Los Angeles River, worries have arisen over the social cost of this restoration. The novelty of new public green space, paired with corporate-led redevelopment, would most likely catalyze gentrification in previously affordable areas. This looming eco-gentrification, or gentrification caused by urban ecological restoration projects, has previously instigated unintended effects for projects such as the High Line in New York City. Eco-gentrification poses an unfortunate design flaw – instead of improving quality of life for local urban residents, projects plagued by eco-gentrification price out many community members, depriving them of the esteemed wellness that urban green space can bring. Lower-income communities have long been the ones to suffer the health and social consequences of industrial urbanization, and are often the last to benefit from large-scale urban greening projects.
LA-Más — a community-based approach
While many of the proposals for the revitalization of the Los Angeles River promise optimistic visions of serenity and interaction with nature, few truly consider the socio-ecological impacts this project will have. LA-Más, an architectural and urban design non-profit, addresses this issue through their contribution to Shelter: “Backyard Basics: An Alternative Story for the Accessory Dwelling Unit.” A product of ongoing research and community engagement, the group’s work includes design drawings, a wireframe model, and the Futuro De Frogtown publication. The proposal addresses the inherent necessity of community-led redevelopment and affordable housing to enhance social and environmental sustainability within the Elysian Valley.
Wireframe model representing an ADU (Backyard Basics: An Alternative Story for the Accessory Dwelling Unit by LA-Más). Image courtesy of LA-Más.
LA-Más led a five-month co-visioning process with community residents of the Elysian Valley (also known as Frogtown) to better understand the values and priorities held within the existing neighborhood. The ideas discussed during interviews, advisory groups and workshops made clear the disparities caused by corporate-led redevelopment, characterized by high-density apartment blocks with higher-level price tags. Rather than enhancing the quality of life and providing access to the river’s proposed green space for Frogtown’s existing community, this type of redevelopment would create an entirely new community with an increased cost of living. Frogtown residents wanted to preserve the physical and social qualities of their neighborhood, but were open to ideas of adaptive reuse. The solution proposed by LA-Más to counter eco-gentrification is a “granny flat” renaissance.
Accessory Dwelling Units, also called ADUs or granny flats, are compact dwellings that are typically built in the backyards of single-family homes. ADUs allow for low-rise, but high-density, development that is privately owned and, generally, better embedded into the existing community. Increasing the amount of ADUs in the Elysian Valley would be a compromise of sorts, allowing for densification without drastically changing the visual and social character of the neighborhood.
By adapting community-based modes of thinking and typologies to the climate and culture of Los Angeles, which has long valued private over communal or shared property, this re-visioning of ADUs offers a glance into the preferences of local residents for the future of redevelopment schemes. By offering the community a voice, LA-Más has uncovered a design model that would maintain the affordability of this neighborhood, allowing the existing community members to benefit from the restoration of the Los Angeles River and forgoing the classist divide between “green” and “contaminated” areas of a city. This proposal acknowledges the importance of biodiversity within an urban context, including a diversity of people as an integral part of this formula.
Architectural model showing a proposed ADU corridor (Backyard Basics: An Alternative Story for the Accessory Dwelling Unit by LA-Más). Image courtesy of LA-Más.
The future of Los Angeles depends on creative design solutions to resolve issues of affordable housing and water-stressed conditions. Though the word is basic in its connotation, Shelter gathers many of the missing pieces from the Los Angeles River revitalization equation, proving the possibility of a more resilient ecological and social future for this region. It is clear that there is a need to provide equitable access to environmentally healthy communities, a balance that needs to be achieved to ensure the social and ecological resilience of the communities adjacent to the Los Angeles River.
Listening to the residents of Frogtown, and many of the other communities that will be affected by the revitalization project, can help identify the ecology of people existing within these areas. Though many of the proposals gathered in Shelter are multiple stages away from the reality of construction and planning, the groundedness of these ideas in their context, specifically within the work of LA-Más, suggests that tides are shifting for Los Angeles’s forthcoming reincarnation.
Los Angeles has often been put on a pedestal as a leader in domestic architecture, and America’s model homes may soon mirror the ecologically sound and socially sustainable housing examples seen in Shelter. But architects and planners must remember – a “home” is more than a physical dwelling: it is the community that surrounds it.
The Nature of Cities hosted a Global Roundtable in 2014, gathering thoughts on the social justice implications of urban ecology. Read this discussion here.
So I conclude that there is a major disconnect between the actual words and meaning of Goal 11 and the intentions of cities and the research community. All the city lobby groups and mayors were great in supporting its inclusion, but I wonder if the meaning of the words was really grasped.
Ecobarrio Villa Rosita. Photo: Diana Wiesner
Pope Francis, City Planner
Regarding the intrinsic value of nature, the Encyclical says:
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