“We all know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?” says a famous Zen Koan. At first consideration, it seems impossible to conjecture about the “just city” without having already in mind what is an “unjust city,” and vice versa. But my opinion is that this is wrong: It is possible to define what a “just city” is per se. To give flesh and substance to this essay I will focus on Paris and sustainability. First, because they are my fields of expertise, but also because sustainability and justice are two alleged priorities cited lavishly by the planners and elected officials to promote their urban policies. Their doxa considers that these two priorities are perfectly synergistic, but they are not. Planning for one may produce redlines in the other: sustainable policies often increase social injustice, as shown by Elizabeth Burton in a large sample of UK cities, or by Neil Smith when he denounces the veil thrown over profoundly unfair environmental dynamics that involve the departure of socially vulnerable people out of newly gentrified ecological neighborhoods. In fact sustainability and justice are like two rival brothers, and combining them in urban policies is certainly challenging.
It’s sitting everyone at the table, so that all the inhabitants understand that the urban affairs are also their affairs. It is about erasing the invisible walls.
One among the many challenges of urban sustainability is reestablishing the inclusiveness of the urban fabric instead of just popping-up buildings and projects. But generally, it doesn’t work like that. Mayors, representatives and other elected officials adore showcasing constructions, and they love them brand new. They are so much more visible. They are less interested in urban design and holistic approaches, which are more important to foster sustainability but harder to implement and less profitable as an electoral issue.
Thus, a sustainable city should result from the confrontation—or the synergy—of choices made by multiple actors, each acting for its own concern. But usually, only elected officials, developers and technical staff are invited at the table, which is a big mistake. All those who are affected by the decisions should be involved in the process of decision-making, as shown by the failure of the Trames Vertes et Bleues (Green and Blue Grid) in the region of Paris (a land management tool for the preservation of biodiversity). Local and regional authorities forgot a few things when fixing them. They forgot that livability, justice and sustainability are technically three different things, but three things that should contribute together to what the people affected by their policies will call a “good environment.” A “good environment” is one in which the improvement of environmental conditions stricto sensu (water quality, air, biodiversity, etc.) leads to improved living conditions. A polluted environment can be a place where life is good. Conversely, an environment with clean air and clean water can be quite intolerable as evidenced by windswept segregated social-housing complexes settled in the middle of nowhere, where the quality of life is low. The developers of Trames Vertes et Bleues just didn’t care to ask the people what a “good environment” was for them, even less did they make room for them at the decision-making table, as I explained in a recent paper. Do you know that the current regional master plan of Paris proposes—as an important mean to foster sustainability—a quantitative objective of 10m2 of public green area per inhabitant? As though it were sufficient to display “green” to become suddenly sustainable. Amazing, isn’t it?
In fact, urban sustainability should be about designing a new social contract that addresses the following questions: What type of society do we want to live in? Which compromises are necessary between the goals and interests of the different actors?
Well, the very notion of a social contract has a lot to do with justice—at least social justice—right? Which raises a tricky issue: What can we say about “Justice and the City?” (No, it is not a new sitcom, it is a real question.)
Let me dig into my own history to answer this question as clearly as possible. I was born in Paris. I grew up in a neighborhood called La Goutte d’Or, east of Montmartre, bordered by railways, technical facilities, and railroad tracks. Not a nice place to live. In the 19th century, Émile Zola set there the plot of his novel L’Assommoir, depicting it as a miserable slum. In the sixties, it was a highly disadvantaged place, characterized by substandard housing and violence in the streets. It still is.
I remember that in the seventies the Paris City Council initiated a program of urban renewal: libraries, parks and gardens (square Léon and square Amiraux-Boinod) were created, as well as swimming pools (piscine des Amiraux, piscine Bertrand Dauvin). Did it change anything? Not even the slightest. The content of the trashcans still littered the streets. Substandard housing was still there. So were the drug dealers and thugs. What happened, or better, what did not happen that should have? Well, nobody frequented these new libraries, parks and pools. The population stuck to its usual way of living, as if these amenities were not for them. They were perceived as vague threats, put there only by the will of planners and local moguls, rather than opportunities for a richer life. It was not so much a matter of access and capability really. The people decided not to use them, because they considered that they didn’t belong to their world. They built an invisible wall between themselves and these amenities.
Nowadays, La Goutte d’Or has become a “Sensitive Urban Zone” (ZUS), a prioritized urban area characterized by high percentage of public housing, high unemployment, low percentage of high-school graduates, and huge security issues. For the record, it was the ZUS that were misrepresented by Fox News in January 2015 as “no-go zones”.
As a teen, each and everyday day I crossed another invisible wall to go to a Parisian high school in Montmartre, which was already a fashionable place to live. Lucky me! My father was a refugee from Spain, and I benefited from a better cultural background than most of the kids in my age group. I skipped a grade and had the chance to integrate into a high school outside La Goutte d’Or. Out of more than 200 kids in my neighborhood, only three of us had this option. When I wonder what my other schoolmates became, I feel a bit depressed. Anyway, three of us were going to school out of La Goutte d’Or, and I remember our discussions: Why do we never meet our old friends there? Why do they never cross the line? We did, everyday, and nobody ever treated us badly. There were no official boundaries, no gates confining them in a ghetto. They could go to the cafés, to the movies or just walk the nice streets and hang out there. But they didn’t. They didn’t feel like they belonged to this other Paris.
What does my experience say about justice and the city in Paris? It says that people suffering from bad living conditions, are not only victims of planning procedures, hidden political agendas, segregation or whatever else—or at least they are not only victims in need for help. They also are actors whose choices, convictions and presuppositions contribute to maintain, to worsen, and even in some cases to create the miserable condition in which they live. In the case of La Goutte d’Or internal social barriers got transformed into internal spatial barriers—invisible walls.
These invisible walls go both ways. Let’s turn our attention to the case of Seine-St-Denis, north of Paris. The place has a very negative image, both for its inhabitants as well as for the Parisians living outside. It is associated with environmental shortcomings due to its industrial heritage. The prejudice remains very strong despite deindustrialization forty years ago and despite many major urban regeneration programs, among them sustainable neighborhoods and green areas. To this day it is a “bad area” and a stigmatizing place to live in. It is not a coincidence that almost all of last year’s French urban riots took place in the large housing complexes of Seine-Saint-Denis. As mentioned by Susan Fainstein, desirable end states and the forces to achieve them should be contemplated simultaneously in urban planning.
This means that fostering a just city is not about repairing previous mistakes to help people reduced to the status of “victims.” It is not about undoing what seems unjust. It never works. The expressions of injustice are exactly what they look like: expressions, representations, and symptoms that something has been going wrong. They are like the pipe in the famous painting of Magritte, called “The Treachery of Images.” It shows a pipe, and written under it are the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). This statement means that the painting itself is not a real pipe. You can’t smoke it. You can’t touch it. Similarly, the expressions of injustice are the result of complex dynamics. We cannot make things better only by opposing the expressions of injustice in the city. It would be like treating a disease only by addressing only the symptoms, or trying to smoke the pipe of Magritte.
Oh, wait a minute . . . but we tried for decades and are still trying, with nothing to show for it but gutted neighborhoods.
Two or three years ago, I paid a visit to La Goutte d’Or. Nothing had changed. Well, actually it is not all that true. The environmental goods that rained down La Goutte d’Or—parks, plazas, cleanups, etc.—produced some results, though very slowly, and not the ones that were expected. In the last two or three years the structure of the population has begun to change in some patches, such as place de l’Assommoir, villa Poissonnière or rue Polonceau. An embryonic gentrification is underway there, with a continuous and lasting rise in house and apartment prices (+ 144 % in only 4 years). Where are the evicted people relocating? Who knows?If this is going to be the only result of these “repairing” policies, it really is a miserable one.
The more top-down repairing planning procedures, the fewer results. Building a just city is something different, completely. It requires involving everybody in the decisions and the definition of the policies, not only of their neighborhood but also of the city as a whole, as I showed in a recent article where I developed how local actors, non-market organizations, local communities and individuals able to form self-determined user associations should be involved in the making of the city. The just city requires the right to decide and the power to create, renewing and deepening what Henri Lefebvre calls Le Droit à la Ville (The Right to the City).
It’s sitting everyone at the table, so that all the inhabitants understand that the urban affairs are also their affairs. It is about erasing the invisible walls. In a very recent post for The Nature of Cities. I showed how the inhabitants of La Fournillière—a neighborhood of the French city of Nantes—erased one of these walls by turning a wasteland into a very popular park, combining leisure amenities and urban agriculture. They did it outside any legal framework, but they knew how to play the eternal game of deception and force, confrontation or bargaining with the local authorities, so that at the end of it their reputed “illegal” initiative turned into an official amenity.
I don’t pretend that sitting everyone at the table will suddenly make poverty, segregation, or lack of access disappear. It will not. But such an approach—even if insufficient—is the necessary condition to design and carry out a just city.
On the flipside you can do anything (…) the flipside bring a second wind to change your world. Encrypted recipes to reconfigure easily the mess we made on world, side B —Song ‘Flipside’, written by Nitin Sawhney and S. Duncan
My brainstorming for this essay started thinking about the comprehensive list that follows the affirmation of “a just city is a city that…” But my brain fell to the temptation of looking at the task from the reverse angle. What are the key ingredients of the perfect recipe for the mess of injustice in a city?
Urban development has been dominated by silo thinking and action, aggravating the interconnected challenges that lead to injustice, and running against environmental sustainability.
For me, in a nutshell, the key ingredients are poor, inadequate, or opaque or simply inexistent frameworks, spatial planning, management, financing and governance. All these inefficiencies put together, we get a city that is trapped in, or inexorably marching towards, injustice.
The main point I would like to make is that frameworks, spatial planning, management financing and governance are essential foundations and enablers for a multidimensional conception of justice in a city. Why? Because justice in a city is about social, political, economic and environmental justice. Once more, why these enablers? Because not only they can, but actually in many cases will, deliver better results if conceived and operationalized with the city-region scale as their wider framework. Justice in a city goes beyond its administrative boundaries. Ultimately a city will not be just if it is triggering injustice in the peri-urban or metropolitan areas or the wider region it relates to.
Frameworks, spatial planning and management
Today cities are home to half of the world’s population and three quarters of its economic output, and these figures will rise dramatically over the next couple of decades. Urban development, with its power to trigger transformative change, can and must be at the front line of human development.
We seem to forget, though, that urban development is a complex process. It is a social process, and one that develops over time. To avoid getting trapped in morally abhorrent injustice, it is about time we collectively realize that urban development, like any other complex social process, needs to be soundly and sufficiently framed, planned and managed. City and regional spatial planning—territorial planning—can be an essential enabler of justice.
The majority of population growth in cities is the result of natural increase, rural-urban migration and the reclassification of formerly non-urban areas. It is also predominantly taking place in cities in developing countries, most notably in Africa and Asia. In many areas of the world, cities tend to endlessly sprawl, consuming the periphery land and, ultimately, nullifying the social, economic and environmental advantages of agglomeration. Spatial planning at the city-region scale can achieve balanced territorial development. It can promote mutually reinforcing urban and rural development and hence control and correct scenarios where cities trigger injustice in the peri-urban or metropolitan areas or the wider region they relate to.
Spontaneous proliferation concludes in forcing and segregating the most deprived and those facing vulnerability; those too often trapped in a life of morally unacceptable slum-like conditions. Spatial planning and urban design for the just city can secure a grid that enables food systems across the rural urban continuum and that provides access to affordable, safe and sustainable housing, water and sanitation, energy, waste management and mobility. In case these were not enough elements of justice, let us not forget their inextricable links with human and environmental health, prosperity and socio-economic development, community resilience, and, ultimately, respect for human rights.
Statistics show that in unplanned cities, public green space and publicly accessible open space virtually disappear. Gone with these public spaces are their benefits for social cohesion, equality, intercultural and intergenerational exchange, healthy lives and environmental sustainability—aspects inextricably linked to a multidimensional notion of justice. Spatial planning and urban design can offer solutions to fix this; solutions that can be exponentially empowered with strategies and norms to regulate the private ownership of land.
In a global sample of 120 cities, the sum of all urban areas that are not covered by impervious surfaces was estimated between 30 percent to almost half. Out of the 40 cities studied by UN-Habitat, only 7 allocated more than 20 percent of land to streets in their city core, and less than 10 percent in their suburban areas. In Europe and North America the cores of cities have 25% of land allocated to streets, whilst suburban areas have less than 15%. In most city cores of the developing world, less than 15% of land is allocated to streets and the situation is even worse in the suburbs and informal settlements where less than 10 percent of land is allocated to street. This is a reflection of the huge inequalities in many cities of the developing world. Over the last 30 years, public spaces are becoming highly commercialized and have been replaced by private or semi-public buildings. Commercialization divides society and eventually separates people into different social classes.
The United Nations programme for cities and human settlements, UN-Habitat is proposing a set of targets for the amount of land allocated to streets and public space in urban areas to ensure adequate foundation for the city. It is proposed that 45 percent of land should be allocated to streets and public space. The World Health Organisation recommends a minimum of 9 square meters green space per capita and that all residents live a 15-minute walk to green space.
Cities in their socio-cultural, economic and environmental complexity contain systems — cities are systems of systems. For far too long, urban development has been predominantly dominated by silo thinking and action. This has resulted in the aggravation of interconnected challenges leading to injustice in cities, including running against environmental sustainability and its notion of planetary boundaries. An integrated and systems-based management for our cities can take us very far in correcting and preventing the socio-economic and environmental injustice many cities face.
On the positive side, several pioneer cities across the globe have make proof of political and technical commitment to find planning and management solutions for sustainability in its three dimensions: social, economic and environmental. For the curious reader, I would vividly recommend taking a look at the inspirational collection of case studies that the network ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability has recently compiled. This collection of case studies sees the light on the occasion of the historic adoption of the global 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, including the unprecedented SDG11 to “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable in the horizon of 2030.”
Important examples include the integral urban development project of Medellín (Colombia); the district energy pilot project in Rakjot (India); the framework for uniting municipalities around a regional food system in Vancouver (Canada); the actions to turn trash into food in Mexico City (Mexico); the integrated moves to tackle city growth traps in Dongguan (China); the “Ecological Capital” approach in Curitiba (Brazil) as a world renowned model for innovative integrated planning and management; the strategies for protecting a world treasure of biodiversity from urban pressures in Cape Town (Africa); or the multi-annual efforts in Bristol (UK) to win the European Green Capital Award. All these and many more are examples of real tools and approaches to commit to sustainable urban development and rip its benefits for social, political, economic and environmental justice.
A last but not least crucial point needs to be highlighted. Spatial planning at the city-region scale, as well as integrated and systems-based city management are indeed answers for reconfiguring the mess of injustice in cities. However, this does not equal leaving it all to the sole action by the city or the regional levels. Achieving just cities will require strong action by governments and policymakers at all levels. Strategic frameworks and plans at the national level are a 21st-century must-have in order to achieve social, political, economic and environmental justice in a city and beyond its administrative boundaries. National urban policies, adapted to the needs and assets of a country, its regions and cities, and crafted by close collaboration among all levels of government, must be incentivized by international frameworks and implemented at the national level. With 70 percent of global population projected to live in cities by 2050, it is profoundly disconcerting that only around 30 countries have national urban policies.
Financing
Local and regional/state governments across the globe are regularly responsible for the provision of housing, public services and utilities, among other important services and tasks for justice in a city. Besides, many cities face the costly struggle of adapting to increased vulnerability to climate change and natural disasters. All this while they can no longer afford the cost of updating infrastructural backlogs. Around the globe, it can be said that on average the revenue and expenditure share of local and regional/state authorities is not commensurate with the strenuous financial burden these three realities impose on them. In this predominant context of inadequate financing the ability of local and regional/state governments to effectively combat poverty and inequality is reduced.
The highly political question of mobilisation of resources for and at the local level is also an issue of justice in the city. It cannot be left only to local and regional/state governments because the prevailing models for financing and for access to financing across the globe are leaving them hand-cuffed. International and national frameworks must change course to empower and enable new models for financing local and regional/state governments, as well as to open further access to financing for them.
Perhaps we could dream of a break-through in this political impasse, if the international financial institutions, the multilateral organisations and national governments could assess this question from the perspective of socio-economic and environmental justice for people and their communities. Enablers to reconfigure the mess exist, can be incentivized by international frameworks and operationalized with sustained dialogue among all levels of government.
Updating the level of national transfers and/or authority to generate additional income through taxes, as well as non-tax mechanisms will enable improvements. Local and state/regional governments need to be empowered to raise local revenue and tap local resources, while linking revenue enhancement with service delivery and transparency. Strengthening municipal finance is key for these levels of government to become credit worthy and access external financing.
There are other enablers to reconfigure the mess and enable the mobilisation of more resources for local and state/regional governments to invest in social, political, economic and environmental justice programmes. Improving the capacity of these levels of governments to capture land value is one. Another example is implementing frameworks for their access to capital markets. A third enabler is strengthening their capacity in areas of bankable infrastructure project development, land-based financing, and access to municipal development banks and/or pooled municipal financing. The set up of city and regional investment funds, combined with green growth funding and social enterprise funds, for instance, can also support justice objectives. Last but not least, participatory budgeting can provide a collectively owned framework for investment in multidimensional justice at the neighbourhood and city scale.
Governance
For me, governance and justice in a city are two sides of the same coin. The list of enablers to reconfigure the mess of injustice here is so naturally long, that it would be impossible for me to honour it in the space provided for this essay. Different words may be used, but I would like to believe that those who share my passion for urban and territorial development for their people and by their people would agree that governance is the lifeblood of a just city.
There are two obvious and fundamental enablers to reconfigure the mess: the empowerment of healthy democracies at all levels of governments, as well as of decentralisation in respect of the principle of subsidiarity. The principle of subsidiarity indicates that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if possible and more efficient, rather than by a central authority. I am saying that these are obvious and fundamental enablers; not that they are easy in the current state of world affairs.
Other enablers to reconfigure the mess of injustice in a city that I would like to focus on relate to the critical decisions that will be taken at the United Nations within 2016. These decisions will operationalize the universal 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals—including SDG11’s “Make cities and human settlements safe, inclusive, resilient and sustainable.” Moreover, in 2016 urban development leaders will be adopting the “New Urban Agenda” for the next 20 years at the Third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development Habitat.
Indicators that will assess progress against goals and targets will be crafted. Monitoring and review systems will also see the light of the day. Justice in cities calls for data collection that provides the basis for disaggregation down to the micro-level, to the neighbourhood level. Situations of social, economic, political and environmental injustice in cities cannot go hidden behind national averages.
Grass-roots data collection systems and citizen-generated data, involving directly the urban poor and other disadvantaged groups should underpin monitoring systems. Data should be legitimated via institutionalized arrangements between regional and local governments and the experts collecting it and should focus on identifying community-driven priorities, with particular attention to the needs of those living in vulnerable situations and of the urban poor. Moreover, data should remain publicly available and accessible to all citizens and communities.
An inspiring ongoing initiative of grass-roots data collection is the project of Shack/Slum Dwellers International with the Ghana Federation of the Urban Poor (GHAFUP) for profiling Accra’s slums, which builds upon several previous projects carried out in other countries.
Transparent, inclusive and participatory accountability and review systems from the international to the local levels are non-negotiable and constitute enablers to reconfigure the mess of injustice in cities and beyond cities.
Multi-stakeholder partnerships for the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, for the implementation of each SDG and for the “New Urban Agenda,” if well managed, will be powerful enablers to reconfigure, re-invent and imagine. The frameworks for these partnerships at all levels must ensure the engagement and participation of civil society and all relevant stakeholders. They should also build capacity in all levels of governments for fair, transparent and human-rights anchored public private partnerships, which are central to the provision of public services and utilities to urban dwellers.
All these enablers to reconfigure the mess of injustice we have made on the side B of our cities are not exempt of complexity, political cost, innovation and bravery. Just sustainable urban development is not an easy task but my arguments above show that we have tools and approaches to plan it, manage it, fund it, govern it and achieve it. As humankind, over the centuries and the different civilizations we have found solutions to evolution challenges.
We learned to make fire. We invented the wheel, the steam engine and the airplane. We discovered penicillin. We get a bit further in outer space every year. We have propelled an information technology revolution that has changed at unprecedented pace the face of what we deemed possible.
I am not ready to accept that we would let the complexities of operationalising just sustainable urban development shy us away from the moral imperative of achieving it.
Once upon a time the city was called the “marvelous” one: Rio de Janeiro, cidade maravilhosa. Rio was the birthplace of samba, chorinho and bossa nova; internationally famous for supposedly being a city of fun and carnival 365 days a year, it has been the capital city of Brazilian proverbial optimism. Austrian novelist, playwright and biographer Stefan Zweig regarded it as the symbol and epitome of the whole of Brazil in his book Brazil, Land of the Future, published in 1941. Sure, it was as an idealization, some would say an ideological invention. After all, there were dictatorships (between 1937 and 1945 and again between 1964 and 1985) and their cortege of atrocities; there were huge socio-economic disparities; and so on. But the idea of a “marvelous city” seemed at least plausible. No ideology survives if there is not at least a grain of truth in it.
But then, things began to change.
If cities mirror their societies, then we surely need to talk about how radical social change can be ignited—not forgetting that the cities can and must play a decisive role in this process.
The poor became less and less “patient” and “tolerant” with what they began to realize as injustice and not simply as fate. The magic powers of soccer and carnival became less effective; not only because “the people” (o povo) were politically more conscious, more demanding and less submissive now, but also because they could no longer be tamed by an increasingly commercial and elitist carnival and an increasingly corrupt soccer.
It happened a week ago. A sunny Saturday, the Copacabana beach full of people having fun—flirting, playing, drinking coconut juice—or just resting after a week of hard work. Suddenly, a scream of despair was heard. More people screaming, many of them began to run or were simply paralyzed. Dozens of teenagers from neighboring favelas or even from the distant periphery were robbing and stealing. If one resists, one can be beaten at the moment. Everything occurs very quickly, is a matter of a few minutes; the police were unprepared and taken by surprise (the police are almost always unprepared, unless it is organizing its own corruption schemes). Panicked beach-goers ask for help, some people cry in despair, some try to escape (leaving some of their belongings behind).
It happened last Saturday, but the phenomenon known as arrastão (literally “dragnet”) had already occurred many times in Rio since the 1990s.
Who are the victims? Who is to blame? Is there a simple answer for these questions?
Again, the mass media reverberate the deepest fears and angst of the middle classes in a superficial, sensationalistic way. Facing the fact that it is economically and politically unfeasible to remove all favelas (or even a small but significant part of them), many middle-class people and even some journalists have seriously advocated “solutions” such as the following (among others) in the last two or three decades: to enclose the favelas with wired rope and even walls; to cut off some bus lines that connect the periphery with the affluent South Zone and their beaches; to strictly control the access to the beaches and demand entrance fees from the beach-goers. Probably they really believe these “solutions” are compatible with Brazilian “democracy.” Ironically, they are probably right — these “solutions” do not seem out of place in a “democracy” with quotation marks.
“Marvelous city”? Maybe. But do not poverty, residential segregation, class resentment and racial prejudice also make it ugly?
Social scientists have conceptualized “the city” for generations, but there is a very simple fact about this geographical entity: it is always a mirror of the society in which it exists. In light of this, residential segregation and urban poverty cannot be adequately understood without a whole social context characterized by inequality and prejudices; traffic problems cannot be adequately understood without paying attention to the economic interests that support and live from the car industry; consumerism (or rather frustrated consumption on the part of so many worldwide) cannot be understood without the cultural framework—”to have” as the very foundation of “to be”—nurtured by advertising and ultimately by capitalism itself at a very anonymous level; environmental degradation cannot be adequately understood without reference not only to the economic circuits but also to the consumption habits that are so functional from the perspective of capitalism’s maxim “grow or die”; crime and violence cannot be adequately understood without reference to all those institutions and systems (mass media, electoral machineries, the whole penal system, etc.) which have more often than not a clear interest in nurturing collective fear (by the way, an extremely useful tool of government). And so on.
It is against this background that we should see the failure of the academic contributions to a so-called “sustainable urban development” that have appeared in the last two decades. The problem of “sustainability” is usually discussed in a superficial way because the tacit premise is that we cannot challenge the pillars of our socio-economically very unequal and ecologically irrational society (capitalism as a mode of production and statecraft as a mode of government). Therefore, we can read and watch passionate debates around consumerism, depletion and waste of resources, poverty, “cultural emptiness” and the like, but at the end of the day a certain feeling is unavoidable: most people are just beating around the bush. Sure, we can find interesting and useful technical contributions from time to time (sooner or later co-opted by the status quo); however, technology can be in the best of all cases a part of the solution, never the solution itself.
How can we achieve a city that combines social justice (lack of structural asymmetries in terms of power and wealth) and environmental qualities (fresh and clean air, availability of and accessibility to green and recreational spaces, etc.)? Considering the intrinsic limitations of both the state apparatus and private capital in terms of offering and implementing long-term solutions, the main ideas must surely come from elsewhere else. We need emancipatory social movements, but ones that do not simply resemble pressure groups and lobbies. And they must cooperate with each other in order to combine different (but complementary) agendas and efforts. As different kinds of problems are inextricably linked (environmental problems, different types of oppression, and so on), so must be the possible solutions for the problems, too.
Many people around the world have already begun to develop their own solutions, more despite and/or against the state apparatus than together with it. Some intellectuals have called this mixture of “do it yourself” and “give a good example here and now” “prefigurative politics,” which seeks to demonstrate the future societies we want through personal or group actions. Yes, it is not acceptable to endlessly postpone the achievement of less unjust social relations to a post-revolutionary, chimerical “perfect society.” In spite of all difficulties and limitations, it is essential to begin with the building of ethically defensible and inspiring alternatives here and now. The Zapatistas in Chiapas (Mexico) could be mentioned as an example, but we can find several examples in large metropolises, too. When the Argentine economy became “dolarizada” and the peso totally lost its importance at the beginning of last decade, the people on the ground (at the periphery of Buenos Aires, in the villas miseria, in the barrios) organized themselves not only socio-politically but also economically: they created circuits of “solidarity economy,” self-managed some services and facilities, grounded cooperatives, took over and managed bankrupt factories. More important perhaps, they began to develop new ways of sociability, based on more solidarity and self-reliance.
However, the naive maxim “think globally, act locally” must be avoided. We must grasp the fact that our main urban problems arise as a complex of interwoven factors and processes at various levels (local, regional, national, international) at the same time. Progressive “prefigurative politics” is politically-pedagogically inspiring, but it has its limits.
A just city is a city in which spatial resources and natural amenities will be available and accessible to all (that will require imagination and cooperation, not to mention the limitation if not the end of private property of the soil, considering that space cannot be reproduced and multiplied as easily as TV sets or cars).
A just city is a city where the burden of disposal of waste, pollution etc. will be not carried by some groups (inevitably the poor and some minorities) much more than by others. In other words, a just city requires environmental justice.
Furthermore, a just city cannot be built on the basis of a lack of a radicalized form of solidarity: if we want to achieve environmental justice, we have to see that less pollution at home (in our city or country) cannot be achieved at cost of more pollution (and very often terrible forms of pollution and disposal of toxic waste) abroad. Environmental justice (and social justice in general) must be conceived not only “inter-generationally” but also socio-geographically.
A just city cannot be a city where many people do not have access to places, simply because they cannot afford the costs of travel. And it goes without saying: a just city cannot be one where public transportation is a factor of segregation.
A just city cannot be a city where some of its districts and neighborhoods (call them favelas, ghettos, barriadas, villas miseria, callampas, townships, bidonvilles . . . ) are stigmatized just because the people who live there are dark-skinned or belong to an ethnic minority. If the city is the place of encounter and dialogue par excellence, then segregation and intolerance cannot be compatible with a democratic city.
Without all of that, our cities—and I mean above all but by no means exclusively the big cities and metropolises of the Global South—will be increasingly unsustainable in the long run. We do not need only cities which are environmentally sustainable, but cities which are socially sustainable—as places that are truly inspiring, as representatives of humanity at its best in terms of culture and democratic politics.
I would like to mention examples of what mainstream urban planning literature has called “best practices” of urban management. However, I do not know any example of a big city that pass the test of social justice in a truly persuasive way from the point of view summarized above. That is understandable: if cities mirror their societies (and if taking partial examples out of the whole socio-spatial context can be very misguiding), then we surely need to talk about how radical social change can be ignited—not forgetting that the cities can and must play a decisive role in this process. We need to rely more on progressive “prefigurative politics” if we want to achieve just cities and just societies. Worldwide, as inequality and injustice at the local and national level is constantly influenced and shaped by inequality and injustice at the global level.
As we see as soon as we share the premises of the previous account, there is no easy solution. But we cannot dare—for the sake of our children and grandchildren—to think that there is no solution; or, as Margaret Thatcher once said, that “there is no alternative.”
A review of the status of and need for green urban work in Latin America as of 2015.
Throughout the Latin American continent, metropolitan areas and intermediate cities are growing rapidly with their individuality and particular regional features. More than 80 percent of the population in Latin America lives in cities, and by 2050 the number is expected to reach 90 percent. The region is simultaneously the world’s most urbanized one, has some of the world’s largest social and economic inequities, and hosts a quantity of the world’s most biodiversity-rich ecosystems (Pauchard and Barbosa 2013). Occupancy patterns and urban development are in many cities far from sustainable. Sprawl, loss of vegetation and fragmentation of ecosystems, waste pollution and water contamination, diminish life quality.
South America is simultaneously the world’s most urbanized region, has some of the world’s largest social and economic inequities, and harbors a significant quantity of the world’s most biodiversity-rich ecosystems. There is much green urban work to do.
On the other hand social inequality in Latin American determines that cities are strongly dual, divided, and segregated spatially with many of them showing uneven distribution of green space availability and quality within cities. The perception of insecurity has escalated in the last years to become the number one public concern in many Latin American countries. As reported by UNDP (2013) today, although the region shows stronger economies and less poverty, crime and insecurity are greater than before and higher than for other regions. As reported by LAPOP-UNDP (2012), as an example, 23.6 percent of Argentine and 25.8 percent of Colombian respondents have limited their visits to places of recreation for fear of becoming a victim of crime. Nevertheless, across the region cities are working hard to change the current models of urbanization, making urban centers more inclusive and sustainable. In line with this there is an increasing attention by Latin American planners on the need to revitalize the public space through important transformations in aspects that include poverty reduction, security, education, service provision and social inclusion.
Presently city’s urban planning is highly influenced by the Barcelona model and these results can be seen in urban interventions reshaping cities with solutions to the growing challenges facing their communities. Following this model some significant changes can be recognized in many cities. Public intervention linked to the demands of the local community, transportation enhancement, encouragement of innovative architecture and thinking, the creation of new communal open spaces in strategic areas encouraging social mixing and strong political and local leadership to drive the regeneration process, are some of the drivers observed.
The new government building of Buenos Aires city (Foster+Partners). The administration has placed an emphasis on the construction and renovation of urban infrastructure in the southern part of the city, a strategy of social inclusion that aims to integrate the poorest districts in the urban development of the city. Photo: Ana FaggiTransportation improvement in Bogotá. A green roof at the bus stop. Photo: Ana Faggi
The “Transmilenio” and “Metrobus” following the model developed by Curitiba many years ago, improved transportation in Bogotá and Buenos Aires cities fostering at the same time the emerging of new areas and others coming back to life.
Jan Gehl’s legacy is also visible in the region. As a practicing urban design consultant and university professor of urban design he has transmitted his findings about smart uses of public space throughout many Latin American cities. His recommendations for public space improvements, based on the knowledge of how the city is being used, have become to practice across the region,
“First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works.” Jan Gehl ‘s advices in Buenos Aires. Photo: Ana Faggi
Since 1999, the city of Bogotá, capital of Colombia, has won many international awards for innovative urban planning showing a very successful recovery of public space and its advanced public transportation system. Communal spaces and residential areas became meaningful and attractive as diverse activities occur in combination and feed off each other.
Last September the city of Bogotá was home of two significant meetings: the III International Forum for Public Space (8-9 September) and the 1st International Symposium of Urban Ecology (8-10 September) showing how imperative these issues are for Latin Americans. The first meeting had the motto “Transforming spaces for people” and was an opportunity to share existing public / private strategies, seeking revitalization, and recovery of public space for and from the community. Special emphasis was put into governance, the empowerment of public space by citizens and development of practical tools for improvement.
The 1st Symposium of Urban Ecology, which took place in the Bogotá’s Chamber of Commerce, placed the importance on other bias. It focused on ecological services and benefits of the different components of the urban ecosystem. As a major collaborative project, the event was organised by the International Society for Urban Ecology (SURE), EcoNat, and the Humboldt Institute.
SURE fosters and develops knowledge and implementation of urban ecology worldwide by strengthening contacts and enriching the dialogue between researchers and practitioners. EcoNat is a consulting firm providing professional advice in environmental issues, while the Humboldt Institute is mainly devoted to research on biodiversity and ecosystem services for decision making with close contacts with universities and ministries.
The symposium brought together 400 people, who came to attend nine keynote presentations and several talks to discuss many themes on urban ecology. In addition, more than 200 people followed the three days of activities by streaming.
Urban Ecology Symposium in Bogotá. Photo: Ana Faggi
Some of them posed questions. How should Latin-American cities be? Which shape should they be? What are the consequences of their sprawl? What role should Nature play in daily life and how we can we make our cities more liveable and equitable for bothSociety and Nature?
The event aroused much attention, to the point of having numerous members of the public involved. Those coming to the Chamber of Commerce have been selected to take part, ensuring the even representation of different society groups. This particularity was then reflected in the discussions, as the audience participated very actively with smart questions and interesting, multidisciplinary proposals.
The event was also an encouraging opportunity for some active members of The Nature of Cities blog, including Cecilia Herzog (Brazil), Martha Fajardo, and Diana Wiesner (Colombia), to share experiences that could enhance the urban environments in which they live and work.
Speakers emphasized that cities are complex socio-techno-ecological systems and that, in the Latin-American region, there is a big need for managers and citizens to consider the city as an ecosystem, with different ecosystem services that are necessary to maintain. This vision, which is common in the academic world, is presently very little incorporated into the management of Latin-American cities. Nevertheless, it is an essential tool for municipal planning and management, because it shows the interrelationships between Nature and human well being.
Although numerous towns and cities have begun multiple transformations, many of them are struggling with the difficulties of integrating the multiple aspects of sustainable development. Political commitment, the use of experience gained from previous work, environmental education, and civil participation appear to be key elements to achieve success, according to Diana Wiesner.
The Symposium’s message was this: Latin-American cities should raise awareness on societal dependency on ecosystems, as the use of technology has made us forget that we are only one link in the ecosystem chain. This lack of understanding is the reason why there is a physical and cognitive decoupling of urban dwellers and the surrounding Nature, as discussed by Erik Gómez-Baggethum.
Several examples along Latin America showed that urban horticulture can give an excellent opportunity to reconnect with Nature, Cecilia Herzog said. The economic valuations of different enterprises indicated that urban horticulture’s greatest strength is in its ability for “place-making,” for providing experiences with Nature and education, and to reinforce community sense. Linear parks along rivers or connecting small remnant green areas are chances to re-green the city. Also, urban horticulture can sustain landscape integrity, serving many purposes at the same time, such as recreation, nature conservation, and floodwater management, just to mention some.
A central concept that was stressed was that each urban conglomerate should not forget the ties to its rural area and to the eco-region where it is located by trying to reduce its ecological footprint. At this point, the conservation of urban reserves, national parks, or botanical gardens plays a decisive rolein the sustainable debate because they are living resources that can promulgate a strong message about the links between urban health and the health of the region.
Chingaza National Park near Bogotá. A vital source of fresh water for the city. Photo: Ana Faggi
A good example is the Botanic Garden, Jose Celestino Mutis, in Bogotá, which we were able to visit during the Symposium. It contributes to the conservation of the flora of the Capital District, to the environmental sustainability of its territory, and to the use of their genetic heritage through scientific research, technology transfer, and environmental education. Much more than keeping a collection of plants, the garden is committed to advising the city on issues of urban forestry and greening. A distinctive aspect is that the garden has developed a special sector devoted to urban agriculture, green roofs, and ecological treatment of pruning waste,demonstrating the organization’scommitment to mitigating the effects of climate change.
Green roof at the Botanic Garden Jose Celestino Mutis . Photo: Ana FaggiCecilia Herzog taking a photo of an edible green wall at the Botanic Garden. Photo: Ana Faggi
Martha Fajardo’s talk reminded us of the importance of the landscape as a common good to be respected and valued. Cities should guarantee a living and liveable landscape. Her lecture was illustrated by many good-looking projects that demonstrated that respecting the landscape is the way to create resilience against avalanches, floods, and other climate changeimpacts. Also, the construction of eco- neighbourhoods may be opportunities for improving socio-economic conditions in under developed municipalities.
Supporting these concepts, many contributions presented during the Symposium´s afternoons showed the importance of investing in green and blue infrastructures, representing win-win strategies for reconciling urbanization with the maintenance of ecosystems services.
Martha Fajardo showing some ecological friendly own projects in Colombia.Photo: Ana FaggiSome examples of the diverse green Infrastructure in Bogotá city. Photos: Ana Faggi
Through the lens of this meeting, it was evident once again, that Latin American cities share great similarities in their cultural heritage, development history, planning tradition, and social structure, offering big opportunities to share successful experiences for a sustainable future. Following this spirit during the symposium, the Latin-America chapter of SURE was launched in order to exchange information and expertise in the coming future. At this point, we are delighted to invite TNOC’s readers and writers interested in joining SURE to become members of the society, with a special invitation to those from Latin America. Our understanding of urban ecosystems is already emerging, but with little explanation of how these ecosystems function. A collaborative exchange will bring a better understanding, allowing cities to build a harmonious society with Nature.
LAPOP-UNDP 2012 Latin American Public Opinion Project. Vanderbilt University.
Pauchard A, O Barbosa. 2013. Regional assessment of Latin America: rapid urban development and social economic inequity threaten biodiversity hotspots. In. Elmqvist, Th., Fragkias, M., Goodness, J., Güneralp, B.,Marcotullio, P.J., McDonald, R.I., Parnell, S., Schewenius, M.,Sendstad, M., Seto, K.C., Wilkinson, C. (Eds.) Urbanization, biodiversity and ecosystem services: Challenges and opportunities. Springer.
UNDP (2013) Seguridad ciudadana con rostro humano: Diagnóstico y propuestas para América Latina.
You want to read about a vision of a just Karachi? The contract killer ($50 a hit) ripping up the road behind Disco Bakery on his Honda 200CC and the secret service colonel cracking skulls in a Clifton safehouse will both cite one vision: Dubai. This happens to also be the vision of the one-armed Afghan refugee selling Beijing socks off a cart in Saddar bazaar and the unsexed Karachi Port Trust shipping agent waiting for shady clients to cough up cash so he can escape to Phuket. To borrow from an old Urdu election rallying cry: Chalo, chalo, Dubai, chalo. Come, come, let’s go to Dubai.
A vision of a just Karachi? I am laughing. Visions are supposed to create. What do you call wanting to undo?
Vision presupposes the ability to see what is in front of you, and based on the understanding this seeing yields, you can plan with some measure of wisdom to create what you do not want to see in the future. And so, it is noble to ask what could be a vision of a just Karachi—except that this is an unfair assignment given that this city completely confounds the senses. Just when you think you have some idea of what Karachi is, the landscape will chimerically shift. It is small wonder that the people who live here are forever trying to explain Karachi to themselves and to each other, to define it and even try to form some vision of what it should be. But the city is elusive. In our desperate attempts to exercise some control over this kind of existence, we tend to do two things in reaction: look outwards or backwards.
Those who look outwards have fixated on Dubai, a long-time employment destination for the Pakistani laborer who idealizes it as a city where the streets are paved with gold. Given that Dubai is a 90-minute flight away, the elite and upwardly mobile middle classes of Karachi exalt it as an escape from Karachi’s filth and madness. Dubai fits their vision of a shiny, clean, crime-free metropolis where you can exhaust yourself in air-conditioned malls with their Nine West stores, JC Pennys and Starbucks. Dubai assuages our near-Catholic sense of Islamic guilt of enjoying things too Western; not only is the city Arab but if it is kosher for the sheikhs to order hickory barbecue (chicken) bacon cheeseburgers at the Hard Rock Café, so can a Muslim from Karachi without going to hell in a breadbasket. Stories of Dubai’s real estate bust or the effects of its sterile soullessness and hidden human rights violations don’t figure much in conversations in Karachi.
So, one vision of Karachi is to become a Dubai. Sadly, this is the vision of policymakers in Karachi and the powers that be in our federal capital of Islamabad, who hold the purse strings to our infrastructure development. You can see this vision manifest on our streets in the 44 pro-car and anti-pedestrian overpasses, the new malls, the gated communities. We look outwards when we want to envision Karachi. We would rather mimic instead of indigenously assessing what Karachi is and what its people—rich or poor—need.
Those in Karachi, who do not worship Dubai as an urban model, look backwards. They are full of nostalgia for a postcolonial port city that had dance halls, cinemas, nightclubs, booze, cabarets, promenades, bars, even the British. Dizzie Gillespie came to Karachi in 1956. Custard was served at the Scottish Freemason Hope Lodge. The nostalgia is dated to the 1980s, however, when political violence started to erupt. But oh, before that you could walk around the old city parts of Saddar and not get murdered. Now you can’t even wear your diamonds beyond Sind Club (where a sign once said, “No women and dogs beyond this point”). The lament for this Kurrachee, as the British spelt it, and the yearning for it to return, conveniently ignores that it was, as Karachi historian Arif Hasan puts it, “a culture of a colonial port city with a colonial administration under the Empire.” It was bound to eventually end as it did in a decade with the exit of the British upon Partition in 1947.
Either way, Dubai or Kurrachee, at least these residents of Karachi have some idea of what they want this city to be like. I envy them. I look—but I see nothing. I am afraid to form a vision of Karachi, much less one for a just Karachi. This should not be a challenge given that I know and love this city as a journalist can. Each day, for fifteen years, I have been editing news about it, writing it, scouring it, cajoling reporters and photographers to go forth to negotiate with it. We are reluctantly intimate with its subterranean economies, its government extortions, its skins, its rejections, its hidden mercies, not to mention where to get the best goat curry.
Oddly though, the knowledge of these Karachis has had the opposite effect of creating confidence to comment with any authority on the city. If anything, I know that you cannot know anything about it for sure. I have come to see it as intellectually dishonest to hold forth on Karachi. To generalize, especially, is a sin.
Take for example, the long-held view of the residents of Karachi and its police that our slums are the root of crime and religious extremism. It is a convenient snobbery to declare that the poor are criminals. More specifically, we assume that the Afghan refugees, who flocked here from their homeland upon the Russian invasion in the 1970s, are holed up as the Taliban or are the only ones peddling crack on our streets. Crime statistics reveal a more nuanced picture that criminals also live in middle class apartments and not just our ghettoes. When crime shoots up the police and paramilitary forces raid slums. Young men are rounded up, blindfolded and trundled off to police stations only to be released a few days later because there is no evidence against them. The crime graph doesn’t budge a coordinate. We fool ourselves into thinking we know this city.
Perhaps my caution when it comes to reaching conclusions—and hence developing any vision—about Karachi seems extreme. But even if I suspend it for an essay to try to envision a just Karachi, I am stumped by a paralysis of imagination. I baulk at drawing on the examples of cities in the global North because there are no guarantees that what works for New York will fit for Karachi. The catch phrases resilience and smart city fail to resonate with Karachi (so much so that a friend in urban studies has started a “Dumb City Project”). Similarly problematic is casting an envious eye towards our neighbor India with its Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, Ministry of Urban Development and e-Seva services. I have come to believe that this inability to even dare to dream of a just Karachi is in part a symptom of living in a city that has been forced to run on crippled formal systems or none at all. Where would I even begin? By shamefacedly admitting that we don’t even have an office of the mayor? We have not had an elected city manager since 2009 but it is only now that the Supreme Court is trying to push the provincial or state government to hold local government elections before the year ends. (In the meantime a handpicked bureaucrat, officially referred to as a city administrator, has been in charge. But his mandate is not to run the city efficiently as he is not answerable to the people of Karachi.)
To be fair, though, not all of what Karachi is today can be attributed to the current failure to form local government. But if I am to draw from the accepted international standard of having city government systems in place to run our cities, I can be forgiven for assuming that this would be a prerequisite to forming any vision in the first place. Isn’t it supposed to be like this: You elect the best qualified mayoral candidate who presents what is closest to your vision for your city?
Instead, over the decades, there has been an erosion of the institutions that have traditionally managed Karachi, with the office of the mayor being the last nail in the coffin. With the recession of these formal systems has come a slow descent into informality, which explains why the city keeps spinning. Our water doesn’t flow from the tap because a tanker mafia steals it from the bulk mains at source and sells it back to us at Rs2,500 (US$25) for 2,000 gallons. The government’s inability to provide affordable housing has left people at the mercy of loan sharks and real estate middleman who squat on state land by developing slums. Informality is the only formality we know. To borrow from beat writer Richard Fariña: “Been down so long it looks like up to me.”
In this ‘down,’ Karachi has learned how to survive and keep working. There is a special Urdu word for this: Jugardh. It means ‘make do’ or ‘quick fix,’ to put it roughly. This is our new city social contract in the absence of government. If we want to get anything which the city management would otherwise do for us, we have to rely on informal networks. If you want to get a sewage pipeline fixed in your street, for example, you call up your uncle who happens to know the managing director of the water board.
I understand that perhaps people who have lived in cities with long histories of experimenting and honing the formula for local government are now wondering if a certain measure of informality or organic bottom-up self-determination isn’t a better model. This is a position that can be taken by someone within the luxury of a working system. To me a system is a safeguard from inequality. The system applies to everyone, not just those with enough powerful connections. Inequality and justice are two sides of a coin to me. Isn’t justice, by one definition, the administration of the law or authority to maintain what is fair and reasonable? If so, then without an elected City Council with its Treasury and Opposition to keep in check a mayor and his administration (called the Karachi Municipal Corporation), nothing this city decides for itself will be fair and reasonable. Systems inherently carry checks and balances because they are premised on rules. If informality is the only ‘system’ we have then no rules apply.
One example stands out in memory. When we did have an elected city council from 2001 to 2009 Opposition councilors from one political party locked horns with the Treasury members and the mayor, Mustafa Kamal, over the distribution of funds to their neighbourhoods. They could prove to the city, their voters and those who gave Karachi city its funding that they had been gypped. Don’t get me wrong; our experiment with devolved local government was not untainted by corruption, which emerged at the smallest city unit, the union council level. But at least people living in UC-9, for example, had someone to go to with their needs and that councilor could take it to the town nazim who could make a noise in the city council in front of the mayor.
A vision of a just Karachi then perhaps just asks for a basic system of governance. Its residents—whether they drove Mercs or motorcycles, lived in mud huts or mansions — should be able to elect their own representatives. And through them the people would be able to provide their own sense of a just Karachi or at least be able to fight an unjust one.
In the absence of a city council we have been left at the mercy of the ‘vision’ of ill-informed bureaucrats who have been handpicked by the province’s (state’s) powerful political parties to ‘run’ Karachi as puppets. So we have a Karachi Administrator instead of a mayor and he runs the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation which includes, for example, the departments of transport and communication, sanitation services, parks, land management and local taxes. This has essentially allowed the only two powerful political parties on Karachi’s scene to make unchallenged decisions about the city’s resources. Let me give one example of a series of coordinated yet unexamined decisions that were made without any input from Karachi’s residents that will have devastating effects on the future of the city.
In 2010 the government created a new high density law and declared 11 zones in Karachi, many of them slums, open for high-rise construction. Height-related restrictions were removed. The amalgamation of plots was allowed, plot ratios were removed and the sizes of buildings were increased. The reasoning provided by policymakers was that Karachi’s population was rapidly growing and densification was needed. No one pointed out that the areas earmarked for high density zones were already dense and there were plenty of rich neighbourhoods with sprawl that were untouched.
This law has opened the door to mega real estate projects without any oversight from the city’s Master Planning department, which has essentially a fairly good design for the city till 2030. This important department has been administratively placed under Karachi’s building control authority, which doles out permits for all construction in the city. The world over this hierarchy is the opposite; only if a building adheres to the plan the city has made for itself can it get the green signal.
For those of us who have tried to keep track of the changing face of Karachi it is dismaying to behold a constant slipping away of its beauty and charm, or that intangible magic that makes us love this city despite its madness. It is being taken over by the untrammelled development of gated communities. The timber mafia keeps felling its ancient Banyan trees. We had a water crisis this summer because no one is at the helm to plan for the future of our supply or fix our leaky pipes. Our footpaths are disappearing under billboards. Our parks are being taken over by the offices of political parties. Public spaces are being taken over by parking lots.
A vision of a just Karachi? I am laughing. Visions are supposed to create. What do you call wanting to undo?
[The Right to the City is] the right to change ourselves, by changing the city. —David Harvey, 2008
The cities we have
The cities we have in the world today are far from being places of justice. Whether in the South, the North, the West or the East, the cities we are living in are a clear expression of the increasing inequalities and violence from which our societies suffer, as a direct result of putting capital gains and economic calculations—greed!—before people and nature´s well being, dignity, needs and rights.
Many governments have abandoned their responsibility for any urban-territorial planning, leaving “the market” to freely operate the private appropriation of urban spaces.
The concentration of economic and political power is a phenomenon of exploitation, dispossession, exclusion and discrimination whose spatial dimensions are clearly visible: dual cities of luxury and misery; gentrification processes that displace and evict traditional and low-income populations; millions of empty buildings and millions of people without a decent place to live; campesinos without land and land without campesinos, subjected to abuses by agro-businesses, mining and other extractive industries and large scale projects. In other words, the injustice that emerges from destruction of public and community´s goods and assets, and the weakening of regulation, redistribution and welfare policies in States that instead facilitate private appropriation and accumulation of the commons, the resources and the collectively created wealth.
The conditions and rules currently present in our societies are globally condemning more than half of the world population to live in poverty. The inequalities are increasing both in so-called developed and developing countries. What real opportunities are we giving to young people if, according to the UN, 85 percent of the new jobs at the global level are created in the “informal” economy?
At the same time, the spatial segregation of the social groups, the lack of access to adequate housing and basic urban services and infrastructure, as well as many of the current housing policies in different countries, are creating the material and symbolic conditions for the reproduction of the marginalization and disadvantages of the majorities. Impoverished neighborhoods (“urban slums”) are home of to at least one third of the population in the global South—in most African and some Latin American and South Asian countries it reaches as high as 60 percent or more, including the Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Somalia, Benin, Mali, Haiti and Bangladesh. Not having a place to live and not having a recognized address also results in the denial of other economic, social, cultural and political rights (education, health, work, right to vote and participate, among many others). What kind of citizens and democracy are we producing in these divided cities?
It is not news to anyone that, especially during the past 25 years, many governments have abandoned their responsibility for any urban-territorial planning, leaving “the market” to freely operate the private appropriation of urban spaces, almost without any restriction to real-estate speculation and the creation of exponential revenues. It does not require expertise to realize that almost everywhere land prices have grown hundreds of times while minimum wages have remained more or less the same, making adequate housing unaffordable for the vast majority of the population.
The Cities We Want: Right to the City and Social Justice for All
At the occasion of the World Habitat Day commemoration in October 2000, more than 350 delegates of urban social movements, community based women and indigenous people organizations, tenants and cooperative housing federations, and human rights activists from 35 countries around the world got together in the great Mexico Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) over an entire week to exchange concrete experiences and build proposals for more inclusive, democratic, sustainable, productive, educative, safe, healthy and culturally diverse cities.
Under The City We Dream motto, this first World Assembly of Inhabitants produced what would become one of the pillars for the elaboration of the World Charter for the Right to the City, a process developed inside the World Social Forum between 2003 and 2005. For the past decade, that document has inspired several similar debates and other collective documents of the city we want, as the Mexico City Charter for the Right to the City (2010), not as simple wishing list but as a clear roadmap on how to achieve it. Many of those are now included in political and legal instruments signed by local and national governments, as well as some international institutions.
Based on that foundation, the Just City for an Urban Century must be based on the six strategic principles of the Right to the City:
Full exercise of human rights in the city
A just city is one in which all persons (regardless of gender, age, economic and legal status, ethnic group, religious or political affiliation, sexual orientation, place in the city, or any other such factor) enjoy and realize all economic, social, cultural, civic and political human rights and fundamental freedoms, through the construction of conditions of individual and collective wellbeing with dignity, equity and social justice.
Although universal as they are, provisions should be taken to prioritize those individuals and communities living under vulnerable conditions and with special needs, such as homeless, people with physical disabilities or mental and chronic health conditions, poor single parents, refugees, migrants, and people living in disaster-prone areas.
As duty holders, national, provincial and local governments must define legal frameworks, public policies and other administrative and judicial measures to respect, protect and guarantee those rights, under the principles of allocating the maximum available resources and non-retrogression, according to human rights commitments as included in international legal instruments.
Cities around the world, like Rosario in Argentina, Graz in Austria, Edmonton in Canada, Nagpur in India, Thies in Senegal and Gwangju in South Korea, among several others, have declared themselves as Human Rights Cities, going beyond specific human rights programs to try to instill a human rights framework in the city daily life and institutions. Of course they face many contradictions and challenges, but they also represent a concrete path for other cities to consider.
The social function of the city, of land and of property
A just city is one that assures that the distribution of territory and the rules governing its use can thereby guarantee equitable use of the goods, services and opportunities that the city offers. In other words, a city in which collectively defined public interest is prioritized, guaranteeing a socially just and environmentally balanced use of the territory.
Planning, legal and fiscal regulations should be put in place with the required social control, in order to avoid speculation and gentrification processes, both in the central areas as well as in peripheral zones. This would include progressive increase of property taxes for underutilized or vacant units/plots; compulsory orders for construction, urbanization and priority land use; plus-value capture; expropriation for creation of special social interest and cultural zones (especially to protect low-income and disadvantaged families and communities); concession of special use for social housing purposes; adverse possession (usucapio) and regularization of self-built neighborhoods (in terms of land tenure and provision of basic services and infrastructure), among many others already available instruments in different cities and countries, like Brazil, Colombia, France and the United States, just to mention a few.
Democratic management of the city
A just city is one in which its inhabitants participate in all decision-making spaces to the highest level of public policy formulation and implementation, as well as in the planning, public budget formulation, and control of urban processes. It refers to the strengthening of institutionalized decision-making (not only citizen consultancy) spaces, from which it is possible to do follow-up, screening, evaluation and reorientation of public policies.
This will include participatory budgeting experiences (being used in more than 3,000 cities around the world, with some important examples like Dominican Republic, Peru and Polonia), neighborhood impact evaluation (especially of social and economic effects of public and private projects and megaprojects, including the participation of the affected communities at every step of the process) and participatory planning (including master plans, territorial and urban development plans, urban mobility plans, etc.).
Several other concrete tools are already being used in many cities, from free and democratic elections, citizen audits, popular/civil society planning and legislative initiatives (including regulations around granting, modification, suspension and revocation of urban license) and recall election and referendums; to neighborhood and community-based commissions, public hearings, roundtables and participatory decision-making councils.
Nevertheless, several countries—specially in the Middle East and the South Asian region—still have strong, centralized, and in many cases non-democratic national governments, that appoint local authorities and hinder more participatory decision-making process to happen.
Democratic production of the city and in the city
A just city is one in which the productive capacity of its inhabitants is recovered and reinforced, in particular that of the low-income and marginalized sectors, fomenting and supporting social production of habitat and the development of social and solidarity economic activities. It concerns the right to produce the city, but also the right to a habitat that is productive for all, in the sense that generates income for the families and communities and strengthen the popular economy, not just the increasingly monopolistic profits of the few.
It is known that in the Global South between half and two thirds of the available living space is the result of people’s own initiatives and efforts, with little, if any, support from governments and other actors. In many cases, these initiatives go against many official barriers. Instead of supporting those popular processes, many current regulations ignore, or even criminalize, people’s individual and collective efforts to obtain a decent place to live.
At present, few countries—namely Uruguay, Brazil and Mexico—have put in place a system of legal, financial and administrative mechanisms in order to fully support what we call the “social production of habitat” (including access to urban land, credits and subsidies, and technical assistance); but even there, the percentage of the budget that goes to the private sector remains above the 90%, for the construction of “social housing” that remains unaffordable for more than half of the population.
Sustainable and responsible management of the commons (natural and energy resources, as well as cultural patrimony and historic heritage) of the city and its surrounding areas
A just city is one whose inhabitants and authorities guarantee a responsible living relationship with the nature, in a way that makes possible a dignified life for all individuals, families and communities, in equality of conditions but without affecting natural areas and ecological reserves, cultural and historic patrimony, other cities or the future generations.
Human life and life in urban settings is only possible if we preserve all forms of life, everywhere. The urban life takes a vast diversity of the resources it needs from outside the formal administrative boundaries of the cities. Metropolitan areas, regions that include smaller towns in the countryside, agricultural and rural areas, and rain forest are all affected by our urban behavior.
There is an urgent need to put in place more strict environmental regulations and use of appropriate technology at an affordable cost, promote aquifer protection and rain-water collection; to prioritize multimodal public and massive transportation systems; to guarantee ecological food production and responsible consumption, notably including reuse, recycling and final disposal; among several other urgent measures.
Democratic and equitable enjoyment of the city
A just city is one that reinforces social coexistence, through the recovery, expansion and improvement of public spaces, and its use for community gathering, leisure, and creativity as well as critical expression of political ideas and positions. In recent years, and especially as a local and spatial consequence of the neoliberal policies, a great part of those spaces that are fundamental in the definition of the urban and community life have not been taken care of, have been abandoned or left in disuse or, worse yet, have been privatized: streets, plazas, parks, forums, multiple-use halls, cultural centers, etc.
Infrastructure and programs to support cultural and recreational initiatives, especially, those that are autonomous and self-managed with strong participation of youth, low-income sectors and minority populations are needed. In short, public policies must guarantee the city as an open space and as an expression of diversity.
* * *
In an urban century, the meaning of justice will necessarily include all the dimensions of social life: political, economic, cultural, spatial (territorial) and environmental. The just city of the new century will be a city in which the decision making processes are not monopolized by few “representatives” and political parties, but are in the hands of the communities and the citizens; the land, the infrastructure, the facilities and the public and private resources are distributed for social use and enjoyment; the city is recognized as a result of the productive contributions of the different actors and the goal of the economic activities is the collective wellbeing; all human rights are respected, protected and guaranteed for everyone; and we conceive ourselves as part of nature, and nature as something sacred that we all should take care of.
In an urban century, the just city would be the result of, and at the same time the condition for, a just society on a healthy planet.
I believe that Urban Planning & Design (UP&D) should be considered a ‘Right’ and brought to public dialogue. The democratization of UP&D would be a significant step towards the achievement of just and equal cities. Exercising this right would be an effective means for bringing about much-needed socio-environmental change.
The impact of urban spaces on our lives is so enormous that it is necessary to focus on the planning and design undertaken by governments and various private agencies, planning that reshapes spaces continuously through time. As a matter of fact, planning and design can be effective democratic tools of social change and therefore must be brought to public domain and popularized in order to free it from the shackles of manifold control and exclusivity. Moreover, cities are built not merely with physical structures—buildings and infrastructure—but also with social and civic capital, for which building inclusive cities is a priority. Sadly, the two realms are polarized. Barriers between people and development decisions are continuously reinforced by sophisticated government policies and programs. This often leads to unacceptable and unsustainable growth with alarming social and environmental consequences.
Claiming urban planning and design rights has to be understood as part of larger movement for claiming “right to the city,” as much as other democratic rights movements, enshrined in law.
Mainstream UP&D ideas that predominantly reflect the political ideology and interest of the ruling class and their agents are often in conflict with larger development interests. This has been realized through many examples world over, including in the historical cases of Haussmann’s plans for Paris and Moses’ plans for New York, and the protests that followed in both cities. Plans for cities could be utilized for exactly the opposite objective: to achieve social integration by engaging communities as agents of change, as has been championed by Jane Jacob and others. In the context of rapid urbanization, people’s movements in and across cities claiming “Urban Planning and Design Rights” have therefore come to be essential. It is heartening that people in different parts of the world are intervening in decisions that affect their lives and questioning the plans and projects that are being forced on them. Communities in different neighborhoods and cities are demanding public discussion on matters relating to planning and design issues.
In India, for reasons that suit the policy makers and governments, UP&D are not considered important in defining the nature of cities. Instead, city building is driven by policies without any understanding or assessment of their impact on built-form. By claiming planning and design as a right, people across communities would no more be casually or cynically invited by governments to participate and respond to decisions after their formulation and announcement. Rather, they would have opportunities to engage in the process of decision making right from inception of plans, deciding the objectives and intent of proposals. This demand for planning and design rights goes beyond the generally accepted notion about the limitations of their right of participation.
Public perception in India is that planning requires exclusive knowledge and only few are capable. This must be de-mystified and expose its bluff. It is important for people to not merely respond to change but envision change. Most important, the democratization of UP&D would hopefully facilitate unification of the fractured cityscapes and heal deep social and cultural fissures.
Urban planning and design dialogue
In my own city Mumbai, where I have worked for many years as architect-activist, the exclusion and marginalization of the majority from development decisions has produced critical levels of social alienation and apathy. Meanwhile there has been unsustainable and anarchic growth of the city.
Today, citizen’s movements in many Indian towns and cities are actively engaged, not just in questioning the government’s plans, but also evolving people’s vision and alternatives for democratization. A notable example is Mumbai, where there are two important movements: the Open Mumbai plan, by this author; and the integration of slums into the development plans and programs of the city, by Nivara Hakk, an housing rights movement by slum dwellers. I have been a key participant in both these movements.
CAPTION: Left: Slums & open spaces mapping (in red) carried out by Nivara Hakk and this author in the year 2012, is the first comprehensive viewing of the slums occupied areas. Right: the vast extent of natural areas (in green) of Mumbai, bringing out facts that expose many myths and bluffs. Both these efforts brought critical data to public view.
In Mumbai, close to 5.5 million people, constituting nearly 50 percent of the city’s population, live miserably in slums. They occupy just 8 percent of the cities developable land, living under traumatic high-density conditions, without adequate services, infrastructure or open spaces.
Over the years, through various sophisticated slum redevelopment policies, the slum lands are forcibly taken-over for free by private builders. Under this policy existing populations in slums are squeezed to one third of the land they occupied prior to redevelopment. The land reclaimed from slums is built over with expensive housing and commercial projects for sale in the open market. This development model is leading to further slummification of the city and worsening living conditions for slum dwellers. Displacement and dispossession continue to characterize slum clearance and redevelopment schemes. Tragically, there is no space and opportunity for participation and engagement of the slum dwellers in the redevelopment of their areas.
Slums proliferate in Mumbai because there is no construction or availability of affordable housing in the formal market, for both the poor and middle class people. Slums are spread widely, and mostly are informally located (i.e., without government sanction or planning), thus adversely affecting the quality of life and environment of the entire city. As a matter of fact, Mumbai, or Bombay as it was once and sometimes still is called, is referred to as ‘Slum-bay’ by many academicians and activists. A documentary film jointly produced in 1989 by the Indian Institute of Architects and the Commonwealth Association of Architects and co-directed by this author is titled Slum Bombay.
Yet Mumbai’s official development plan leaves them as blank areas, without documenting them, and a detailed mapping of the slums has been avoided over the years. For the first time the city got to see and realize the extent of slums across Mumbai is when this author and Nivara Hakk mapped the physical extent of slum land. This map showed that slums were substantial and contiguous. It exposed the myth that slums occupied most of the open spaces, reserved lands and large tracts of mangroves and other natural areas, posing serious threat to the environment of the city. This had been the incorrect claim of middle and upper class people.
More importantly, our mapping put forward a larger vision for slums redevelopment and their integration with the city. The need for comprehensive planning and design finally got acceptance in the government parlors and housing policy documents. The Slums Redevelopment Authority under the state government has now begun a detailed mapping exercise and is considering a new slums redevelopment master plan.
In one of the largest slum demolition and eviction drives in India, ordered by the court, a protracted struggle waged by the over 75,000 slum dwellers families (over 400,000 people) residing in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Nivara Hakk challenged the order, demanding rehabilitation first. Brutal attacks by the demolition forces of the government, deploying armed forces and helicopter surveillance, led to many homes being crushed and lives lost. After legal interventions, the court amended their order of eviction, proposing to the government to undertake rehabilitation of the eligible people at an alternate location and only then carry out demolition.
Nivara Hakk conducted this rehabilitation, successfully carrying out a participatory planning and design exercise, and organized the slum-dwellers into co-operatives at the new site for management and maintenance of their buildings and common areas. Today, more than 12,000 families proudly occupy their new homes.
On the other hand, Mumbai is a unique city having a vast and diverse extent of rich natural assets, covering nearly 240 km2, or approximately 50 percent of the city’s total area. These include, wetlands, mangroves, creeks, rivers, watercourses, creeks, hills, forests and beaches. Sadly, over the years, we have not only turned our backs on these valuable natural areas but have continued to abuse them. Rampant destruction of these sensitive areas over the years by land sharks and real-estate agencies has led to threatening environmental situations. Yet the development plan for the city does not document them in detail nor does it record their boundaries and areas. Through the “Open Mumbai” plan, we have demonstrated how creating open spaces all along the natural areas would enable their integration with the city, put them to daily life experiences and ensure their protection through citizens vigilance.
The lack of transparency in planning and urban land use demonstrated by these examples is a problem world over, as governments and their various agencies publish specific plans and projects for public knowledge and response, doing so with a set of severely imposed conditions. In many instances the relevance and need of the project itself is seldom open to question. Instead, they tend to engage the public with technical details with which most people cannot engage. As a result, only select individuals and groups respond with their suggestions and objections. Such a situation has lead to systematic exclusion of large sections of the public who are adversely affected by the very plans that should benefit them. For most people, their interaction and relationship with the city is limited, apparently by design of those in power.
A key objective of open dialogue in land use and planning is to inform and educate the public on the ideas, objectives and impact of various plans and development programs that are promoted not just by governments but also by powerful private agencies that have achieved specific development rights. This way people who are detached from the city can get closer to it. Ironically, urban design as a tool has been most often used to promote discriminatory and exclusionary practices, as in Mumbai and other Indian cities, operating within the confined and barricaded city spaces.
Values: a paradigm shift for cities
Today, planners and architects are operating within a web of contradictions. With market driven city builders being increasingly obsessed with construction turnover, they have come to consider designers as mere service providers. In turn most designers express very little or no concern for larger socio-environmental causes. The prevailing context of exclusion and discrimination, and the city’s fragmentation, along with environmental abuse, has to be radically altered towards the achievement of social and environmental unification. These objectives have to form the basis of urban planning and design programs, leading to a paradigm shift in the idea of cities and their built forms and structures. This shift requires going beyond the obsession with viewing cities only through the lens of financial valuation and into an assessment of socio-political and environmental economy.
Public dialogue ensures that governmental organisations and elected representatives are answerable throughout their tenure and not just during election period, turning urban development into a dynamic, vibrant and sustainable process.
Let’s review an example from Mumbai. Recently the Municipal Corporation and the state government put forward the new Draft Development Plan 2012-2032. The plan was clearly anti-people and detrimental to the ecology and environmental interests of the city. It avoided the question of slums redevelopment and their integration with the city, and proposed plans that would further cut down the meager open spaces. Mumbai has a miserable ratio of less than 1.5m2 per person open space. In comparison, London has 31.68, New York, 26.4, Tokyo, 3.96.
Citizens groups, NGO’s, workers, slum-dwellers and even the middle class organized public meetings in protest. Concerted effort to build public opinion forced the government to recall the plan and start the process all over again. Earlier appointed consultants for the preparation of the plan were terminated and the municipal corporation in charge of it is presently going through public hearings, evaluating over 50,000 suggestions and objections filed by individuals and organizations. Hopefully a more acceptable plan will emerge reflecting the development needs and demands of all the people.
Such participatory momentum needs to be sustained and expanded, not just in Mumbai, but also in all towns and cities across India, and today, there are such movements around the country. They are of vital importance.
Rights to concessions in a neo-liberalized world
From rights to concessions is yet another oppressive social and political trend that has come to prevail, particularly evident in the neo-liberalised world. Public freedom and rights over a wide array of issues that affect life in cities have been turned into matters of negotiation and concessions, leading to reductions in open space and little opportunity for public participation. Land deals are led by private agencies bargaining for concessions in monies and goods rather than engaging in issues of basic rights. It is only when there are people’s uprisings that the governments begin to grant fringe or peripheral benefits to the public under the guise of public largesse, without altering the very foundations upon which colonization, exclusivity and private empires are built across cities. Increasing commodification under expanding markets has engulfed basic social and human development needs, and has substantially eroded fundamental rights of most people.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel due to the innumerable rights struggles the world over. People’s collective’s are intervening and participating in the development and governance of public spaces, for example in movements to reclaim Mumbai’s waterfronts, led by various citizens groups along with this author. For management and governance of these waterfronts, a tri-partite between citizens, government and private agencies has been established with the residents association at the top of the pyramid.
Similarly, housing rights movements by Nivara Hakk has forced governments to reluctantly recognize land rights of the poor. But, policy after policy continues to doll out concessions to regulate people’s demands in measured doses, without altering the fundamental premise of permitting land grabs for real estate business interests by private agencies.
The way forward
Considering neighborhoods as the base for organising movements for effective democratization of UP&D is key. Such an approach facilitates local people’s active participation in matters concerning their area, which they know best, while influencing the city’s planning and development decisions.
Through a neighborhood-based development approach it would be possible to decentralize and localize projects and their designs, breaking away from mega-monolithic planning and design ideas with enormous investments that impose unbearable burdens on the lives of most people. Neighborhood based UP&D approaches would also facilitate closer interaction between people and their elected representatives. Importantly, neighborhood work creates a more collaborative approach to city and place making. The various movements reclaiming public spaces in Mumbai — the seafront development in Bandra; the Juhu beach redevelopment work; and the “Juhu Vision” plan with work along the watercourses called Irla Nullah — have amply demonstrated the gains of neighborhood based approaches to city development. For citizens, these projects have allowed the immediate reclamation, redesign and re-programming of public space.
With public space being the main planning criteria, we hope to bring about a social change: promoting collective culture and rooting out alienation and false sense of individual gratification promoted by the market. Our experience of neighborhood actions in Mumbai has come to confirm that such initiatives can influence long- term change in ways cities development is understood. Interventions by citizens, as in Bandra, Juhu and other areas of Mumbai, would have never been anticipated by a ‘master plan’ for the city.
Conclusion
Urban Planning & Design can be oppressive. But on the other hand it can be progressive and liberating. As city spaces have been fragmented and colonized, reflected in the growth of gated communities and other exclusive spaces, it is our challenge to use UP&D tools to network the disparate spaces and people into a cohesive and accessible city. It is only through active dialogue and participatory programs that individual, family and community relationships can be nurtured.
Claiming ‘urban planning and design rights’ has to be understood as part of larger movement for claiming “right to the city,” as much as other democratic rights movements, enshrined in law. To claim Urban Planning and Design rights is to assert peoples’ power over the ways in which our cities are created, with a determination to build socially and environmentally just and democratic cities.
One of the root causes of inequity is urban and rural differentiation
China is experiencing a massive migration to the cities, mostly due to the availability of jobs and better facilities. But the way the government administers citizenship also creates inequity and poverty. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the country has adopted an administrative system of dualistic rural and urban structure in order to promote industrial development and to guarantee food security of what was then a poor nation. The Chinese central government prioritizes urban development over rural development. Rural and urban areas carry out and implement different mechanisms of land ownership, housing, household registration and social welfare policies. Compared to the rural areas, many more resources are concentrated into urban districts, including public services, investment and labor forces. This drives huge disparities of employment and well-being, and results in the relative poverty of non-urban areas.
Millions of farmers leave the land each year for urban jobs, but they are not allowed to have registered permanent urban residence status and so can’t enjoy the facilities and services that non-migrant urbanites do.
With the rapid urbanization in China, millions of farmers leave the land each year for urban jobs. But because they are not allowed to have registered permanent urban residence status—called HUKOU—their residency remains in their original territory; these migrant workers and their families can’t enjoy facilities and services as the non-migrant urbanites do, including social insurance and health care. This has caused inequity, poverty and the potential for social instability in many Chinese cities. Migrant rural children in urban areas do enjoy free schooling, in theory. But the opportunity costs for attending school for rural children are higher than for urban children. For example, the price of rent for an urban house rent and living expenses are usually unaffordable for them.
Disposable per capita income differences 2003 to 2012: urban in blue; rural in red; Unit: CNY. Source: China Statistical Year Book 2014
“Citizenization” of migrant workers is critical to address the Chinese urban justice problem. It is, in essence, the equalization of basic public services for migrant workers, which include stable employment opportunities, full coverage of social insurance and medicare, education, municipal services, affordable housing and ecological and environmental safeguards. Only by achieving this can migrant workers enjoy the same facilities and services as their urban counterparts do, and thus become actual citizens of the city. This is a big challenge given the huge amount of money needed and the enormous population involved. The Chinese central government realizes this issue and puts citizenization at the top of its agenda in its New-Type of Urbanization Plan, which requires local governments to solve the problem through innovative practice. Chongqing municipality demonstrates a good case of citizenization of migrant workers.
Innovation and reform of supporting policies
There’s a whole set of issues related to citizenization of migrant workers. How to solve the financing problem? Where to accommodate them? And so on. It is estimated that the citizenization cost for one-household migrant workers in Chongqing is 80,000CNY (12,600US$), and each year, thousands of farmers move into the city. This means huge amounts of capital demand and housing needs. To solve these problems, Chongqing has taken creative actions in reforming supporting policies.
Creation of a Land Ticket system and household registration reform: In China, rural property belongs to farmers collectively, while urban property is owned by the state. Rural land transactions between farmers and urbanites is prohibited. Nowadays, rapid urbanization has created new demands: the government needs money and land to citizenize migrant workers; farmers want to take full advantage of their only asset: the land; and food security should be guaranteed for a growing urban population.
In response to the new situation, Chongqing government created a system called Land Ticket, or DiPiao in Chinese, allowing proper rural land to be sold on the market. Vacant rural collective land can be reclaimed and reclassified as arable land. Such arable land (“proper land”) can be sold on the market. For this arable land, farmers receive a Land Ticket for the same land size, which can be sold in the primary land market. Property developers buy the Land Ticket (and its land quota) and certain construction is allotted to them within the urban construction areas. Farmers get 85 percent of the land sales revenue [1]. This system is beneficial to both the government and the farmers. In the last three years, Land Tickets worth 17.5 billion CNY (2.78 billion US$) have been transacted in Chongqing.
Chongqing’s household registration reform is China’s largest in scale, influencing over 10 million people [2]. Its features are: (i) lower requirements to become registered permanent urban residents, and (ii) a comprehensive package of social benefits. In addition to HUKOU, the government offers social welfare, medicare, education, affordable housing and vocational training for the migrant workers; this reform effort also (iii) safeguards farmers’ rights by retaining their homestead in the country, so that they can return home if they no longer want to stay in town; (iv) and gives consideration to urban carrying capacity by promoting the reform incrementally, and with a spatial balance (migrants are guided to distribute in new towns/districts, county towns and central urban areas)[3]. From 2010 to 2014, 4.09 million migrant workers became registered urban residents [4] in Chongqing.
Migrant workers get their social security cards in Dazu District, Chongqing. Source
Affordable housing and regulation:In most Chinese cities, housing is one of the main influencing factors of urban justice. Due to unsuccessful regulation policies, the housing price to income ratio has reached high levels. It is difficult for low-income groups to meet housing demands through market means. In recent years, Chinese local governments began to push affordable housing programs required by the central authority. Chongqing is a good example of how to control soaring prices and offer affordable housing to those in need.
Hua Fu Jia Yuan-Chongqing’s largest low-rent housing projects. Source
Among the four municipalities directly under the central government (the other ones are Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin), Chongqing’s housing prices are the lowest, thanks to its successful regulation policies. Chongqing’s program is: (i) Real estate investment is controlled below 25 percent of the total fixed-assets investment every year; (ii) Land prices are strictly managed so as not to exceed one-third of the housing price; (iii) Property tax is only introduced for larger houses; (iv) Examine and approve urban planning in accordance with the national standard for housing area of 30m2 per person; (v) Each year, affordable housing areas must be about 30 percent of the total floor space completed [5]. Because of these policies, Chongqing is able to keep the housing price to income ratio at about 6.5:1, which can be affordable for ordinary Chongqingners.
Creation of a compact city and walkable communities
Physical planning can promote spatial distribution of resources in a fairer manner through even and compact distribution of public facilities and services, convenient living and working environments, and walking-friendly communities. This is not always available to all in Chinese cities, especially to the low-income groups.
Clustered development and compact urban form: Chongqing’s urban layout features clustered development with multiple centers, which is determined by its mountainous location. Compact and mixed land use strategy is applied within each growth center. Compared to scattered layouts, compact urban forms reduce development costs, promote fair and efficient use of facilities, minimize energy use, decrease greenhouse gas emissions, and reduce urban sprawl.
In Chongqing, clusters are divided by impenetrable natural barriers or mandatory natural protection areas, or green belts. (i) Construction within green belts between clusters is strictly prohibited by law and urban planning regulations; (ii) Rules promote high density development surrounding each cluster center, and strengthen its service functions, so as to form a centripetal development force [6]; (iii) The form arranges mixed functions of residential, business and office facilities within walking distance from dwelling places to public transit, reducing repetitive transportation needs; (iv) Business, work and frequently used areas are arranged in the surroundings of public transit [7]; (v) Centers focus on public transit centers as hubs to carry out the organization of urban clusters and community layout, taking comprehensive consideration of the integral spatial layout of transportation, work and living facilities.
Compact Chongqing-downtown of Yuzhong district. Source: http://www.cqyz.gov.cn/web1/info/view.asp?id=3888
Walkability [8] and equity: As a way of transportation, walking has social, economic, environmental and public health implications. The relationship between walkability and urban equity reflects in three aspects: (i) walkable communities strengthen interpersonal communications, and cultivate common sense of belonging [9]; (ii) public amenities of walkable communities are accessible to people from all walks of life; (iii) walking reduces private motorized transport, prevent unchecked urban sprawl and decrease social segregation.
In a mountainous region such as Chongqing, the task of building walkable communities becomes all the more difficult. Chongqing has undertaken the following efforts: (i) Integrating the walking/non-motorized transport facility construction/renovation projects with other larger projects like urban renewal, new town/district building, environmental improvement, ecological reconstruction and historical preservation; (ii) Small blocks and narrow road networks are planned within the communities, to form a highly social space of human scale, enhance urban vitality and diversity, and promote walking friendliness; (iii) Active engagement of the general public/relevant stakeholders in the renovation process by conducting field survey to understand the pedestrian behavior, interviewing local residents to know their real needs, and monitoring the after-renovation usage to evaluate the implementation effect; (iv) Exploring low cost and small scale renovation patterns, such as adding street furniture along the sidewalks, coloring the pavement as safety reminder, and improving sidewalk paving to increase connectivity.
Dynamic walking space in Chongqing. Photo: Pengfei Xie
Towards a just city: suggestions
In the rapid development of urbanization, Chinese cities, in particular, need to successfully deal with the relationship between efficiency and equity. The above paragraphs show Chongqing’s efforts in tackling urban equity problems from institutional and spatial perspectives. Building a just city is a long and complicated process.
From my personal observation of Chinese cites, I would like to give two more suggestions:
Professionals from NGOs or other civil organizations should participate in the examination and approval, and supervision of urban plans. In Chinese cities, investors/developers and government officials usually have the power to influence urban plans. In order to protect public interest, professionals (such as urban planners, architects and engineers) from recognized third-party organizations, who have no personal interest, should be involved in the making, amendment, and supervision of urban plans.
New towns and new urban districts should be built on demand, and provide accommodation for migrant workers. A just city is one in which everyone has access to affordable housing, in China’s urban migrant communities this is not the case. Developing new towns and new urban districts is very popular in today’s China: 92.9 percent of the prefectural level cities have proposed plans to build such. Local governments invest huge amounts of money in it. The current scale of new towns/new urban districts in China is already enough to accommodate 3.4 billion people!The problem is: some new towns/urban districts are only for the high-to-medium classes, as most residential buildings are luxury houses that affordable only to the rich. So on one hand, migrant workers can’t find proper accommodation in cities. On the other, many new towns/new urban districts become ‘ghost towns’ with very few residents.So in order to build a just city, I would like to strongly suggest that new towns/ new urban districts accept migrant workers as their formal residents.
Pengfei Xie
Beijing
Acknowledgements: I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. David Maddox (The Nature of Cities), Professor Toni Griffin (City College of New York) and Dr. You You (Institute of Economics of Education, Peking University) for their suggestions and help in drafting this essay.
[1] Luo wenjian and Liu Zhongyan. A probe into the value of Chongqing’s “land ticket” in balancing urban and rural development and reforming household registration system. Journal of Ningxia Communist Party Institute. 2012(5):78-80
[2] Li Yanchang. Household registration reform in Chongqing: feature and revelation. Administrative management reform. 2011(5):77-80
[3] Li Bo. Household registration reform promotes new type urbanization: the Chongqing case. China Economic Herald. 2013. 6.25
[4] Yang Shuhai. Household registration reform for migrant workers in Chongqing: practice and thinking. Study Times. 2015.5.25
[5] Sun liming and Ao Xiangfei. Discussion on Chongqing’s housing price regulation. Chongqing Commercial Daily. 2009.9.7
[6] Yi Zhen. The Evolvement and Development of the Clusters Urban Structure of Chongqing. Urban Planner. 2004(20): 33-36
[7] Yu Yin and Hu Wantai. Compact City: A Study on the Space Structure Pattern of Chongqing Urban Area. Urban Studies. 2004(4): 59-66
[8] Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) China Program is evaluating Chinese cities’ walking-friendliness by a City Walkability Index System, the first of its kind in China. The aim is to advocate green transportation and catalyze public awareness. By now, NRDC has evaluated 35 Chinese cities, and has released the first annual report on walkability evaluation in August, 2014. The report has extensive impact on media and government. NRDC will continue to evaluate more cities, and release the walkability report on an annual base.
[9] Jane Jacobs. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vantage Books. 1961: 117-119
“[A city where] everything comes together . . . subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the trans-disciplinary, everyday life and unending history.”—Edward Soja [1]
No other city that I know of piques the imagination quite like The African City, wherever in Africa that is. I live in Johannesburg; I grew up in Accra: two African cities that have as little—or as much—in common as Chicago or Shanghai, but whose broad geography binds them together in ways that are both entirely fictitious and entirely real. By their very nature, cities are both generic and astoundingly, endlessly specific.
An inclusive urbanism relies heavily on notions of shared values and a shared understanding of the public realm.
The same broad categories of infrastructure, environment, equality and access to amenities apply to all urban centres, almost irrespective of scale. Yet there’s something in—or of/about—The African City that defies easy categorisation. African cities, to paraphrase Soja above, are places where “everything comes together,” in an almost dizzying panoply of contradictory binaries. Black/white; rich/poor; chaotic/controlled; hi-tech/lo-tech, as though there is no space or appetite for the nuance, the in-between, or the subtleties that make up any urban narrative in which most citizens somehow locate, negotiate and recognise themselves.
When the invitation to contribute to The Just City essays project arrived in my email inbox, I was struck by its timing. It’s probably just over ten years ago that I met Max Bond in Accra, sadly for the last time, as it turned out. He was visiting the Ghanaian architect Joe Osae-Addo, and the three of us had dinner at the Golden Tulip Hotel on Independence Avenue whilst waiting for Accra’s terrible, gridlocked traffic to die down. I no longer recall our exact conversation, just its aura. Africa, the African diaspora, race, identity, architecture…the state (and not just in a physical sense) of African cities. What could African-American architects and urban designers bring to the table? What had Americans learned about race, class and culture that might prove useful to a new generation of African architects, planners, city-makers? Bond was better placed than most to answer the question: Ghana had been his home in the 1960s, in the first heady decade after independence. He’d seen more of the country than many Ghanaians, myself included, and his views were wide-ranging and broadly cosmopolitan, yet at the same time deeply personal and intuitive. We were joined a little later by another African-American architect, Jack Travis, also a close friend of Bond’s. Four architects, two continents, one and a half generations between us and many, many questions, though perhaps fewer answers.
Today, I’m sitting at my desk in Johannesburg with half an eye on the American sociologist Richard Sennett’s recent book, “Together,” a fascinating examination of the cooperative skills people need to sustain everyday life, and half an eye on the television. BBC World News has been screening a series on American cities post-Ferguson, “Summer in the City.” There’s a sense of déjà-vu: race, class, culture and the city. Plus ça change. But the blurb on the back of Sennett’s book suddenly jumps out at me. “Living with people who differ—racially, ethnically, religiously or economically—is one of the most urgent challenges facing civil society today.”[2] Both the book and the television screen provide a surprisingly neat framework for this essay, In It Together, given that so many other things have coalesced around its writing.
I teach architecture, the science of space, one might call it. More than any other discipline (and perhaps contradictory to its finished product), architecture is fluid, concerned with an endless series of translations—from idea to drawing; drawing to building; building to city; city to society; and so on. Every single one of my students at the University of Johannesburg is multilingual, sometimes in as many as four languages. It seems to me that there’s an interesting parallel between these students for whom the fluidity of daily life, moving between languages and locales, sometimes even whole worlds, mirrors the essential nature not only of their practices (as budding architects), but the daily reality of the multiple worlds they inhabit, contained uneasily within the city, in the same space and time.
For African city-dwellers—cityzens, we might call ourselves—there’s an added dimension to what it means to live in Kumasi, Kigali or Kinshasa, and it has to do with speed: of change, of movement, quite literally: from the slow-death speed of traffic to the speed of information flows, capital and stock…mineral or human, in itself a cruel comparison. For quite some time now, African cities seem perpetually to be described ‘in transition’, though it’s not always entirely clear where we’ve come from or where we’re heading. In Yorgos Simeoforidis’ 1997 essay, ‘Notes for a Cultural History Between Uncertainty and the Contemporary Urban Condition,’[3] he describes ‘the anxiety of the present,’ a new landscape of urban and architectural discourse that has sprung up in ‘an attempt to grasp a perpetually shifting reality, to describe and interpret contemporary urban phenomena.’ For anyone who has spent time in any of the continent’s cities, the terms ‘anxiety,’ ‘shifting’ and ‘uncertainty’ seem to accurately sum up their edgy, urban zeitgeist. African cities are, quite literally, hard to grasp. In the same essay, Simeoforidis makes another interesting observation that finds resonance today: “the anxious desire to understand the present shows through the most official manifestations on architectural culture, Cities and the urban condition now constitute the privileged theme of international exhibitions.[4]
Simeoforidis’ essay was penned almost twenty years ago. Between 2013 and 2016, no less than eight major global exhibitions have featured the ‘African City’ as a major theme, most taking place in locations as diverse (and un-African) as Denmark, Chicago, New York and Munich, to name a few. In each, the notion of ‘justice’, although usually writ large, is often a subliminal, only partially articulated desire: beneath the statistics (woeful); the chaos (bewildering); the infrastructural under-development (paralysing) or the resilience-in-the-face-of-it (heartwarming) that the inhabitants invariably display, there is a genuine desire to create a more just, equitable, inclusive, resilient city, mirroring the larger-scale society in which such a city might stand. But it’s a complex, difficult and at times seemingly impossible task. The “The Sound of Music” suddenly springs to mind: “how do you catch a cloud and pin it down?”[4]
Contemporary architectural and urban discourses over the past decade have been profoundly influenced by events that introduce a new level of questioning. The terminology now centres around a new spatiocultural politics [of] ‘rights to the city,’ civil rights’ and ‘spatial justice,’ which theorists (like Edward Soja, quoted at the top here) believe will ultimately transform architecture and urbanism.
So what exactly is a ‘just’ city? Is it the same as a ‘city of justice’? How would we recognise and assess it? How might one go about creating it and are there rules governing its framework? The American urban theorist and architect Michael Stanton writes of the way “a city divides into forms and attitudes . . . into grand narratives and great collective generalisations. Cities are collaborative works . . . conceived passionately, formed imperfectly, understood and misread by a continually transforming and distracted collective.” If cities really are “collaborative works,” places where people of differing racial, linguistic, religious and economic backgrounds and persuasions come together to enact some form of public (and private) life, then it stands to reason that one place where we might begin the difficult task of building a ‘just’ city is with our definitions of ‘collaborative’, of ‘cooperation’ and ‘collective.’
If I said earlier that no city piques the imagination quite like the African city, then I should also add that no city destabilises the idea of the ‘collective’ quite like Johannesburg. It is at once a city of anti-collectives and hyper-collectives; endless satellites of tightly-knit, tightly-policed enclaves that sit uneasily together, bound by a network of freeways, roads, taxi-routes and railway lines. For the most part, the enclaves remain intact, policed along class- rather than race-lines, although there are three or four pockets of genuinely mixed occupation (and here I invoke race not class) that have sprung up in the past decade. Within these enclaves, an exaggerated sense of community persists; an ‘us vs. them’ attitude where the terms are interchangeable—one man’s ‘us’ is another’s ‘them’, and so on. As a Jo’burger, the temptation to wallow in the city’s dystopian self-image is all too tempting. Disconnected, segregated, dysfunctional, dangerous . . . these are readily accessible, perniciously familiar tropes. Yet, thumbing through Sennett, it’s comforting (if that’s the right word) to recognise another truth: it was ever thus.
The French philosopher, Henri Lefebvre, whose work has influenced architects and urbanists for half a century, famously offered three definitions of spatial practice — space as it is perceived, represented and lived. These differences find easy resonance across this continent. Most African cities are perceived (by outsiders, at least) to be chaotic and maddeningly unpredictable. They are often represented as such, from Neill Blomkamp’s dystopic District 9 and Chappie to Mad Max 4: The Road to Fury, shot on location in Namibia. However, there’s another side to the question of perception and representation, where the lived experience makes it past the outsider’s disapproving gaze and bursts onto the screen. Nollywood, the $US 5billion industry that originated in the 1960s in Nigeria, is the second-largest film industry in the world, behind the United States and ahead of India. With thousands of films released every year, a quick Google search reveals an interesting glimpse into the way the city, in the African imaginary, is portrayed. Burning City, Who Owns the City?, King of the City, City of War, City of Sin, City of Dragons. Without pressing play, a paradigm emerges of the city as a contested space, at once feared and admired. “An African City”, the new, much-hyped web series conceived, created and directed by a young Ghanaian, Nicole Amarteifio, is billed as “Africa’s ‘answer’ to Sex & the City.” Executive Producer Millie Monyo embraces the connection to Carrie Bradshaw. “It was absolutely an inspiration, and we welcome the comparison. Why can’t we have [that] on our continent?”
Tau’s use of the word together, spoken as an aside halfway through the conversation, took me straight back to Sennett. In the introduction to Together [7], he lays bare the reason behind his decision to write a trio of books about “the skills people need to sustain everyday life.” The Craftsman, the first in the trilogy, examines craftsmanship, the quest “to make physical things well.” Together, his second book, is an examination of our responsiveness to others, to “the practical application of responsiveness at work, or in the community.” In his last book, as yet unwritten, he turns his attention to cities, to the “task or skill of making cities,” which, in his opinion, we don’t “[do] very well.” In his own words, his task “is to relate how people shape personal effort, social relations and the built environment.” Although Together wasn’t written specifically with cities or urban environments in mind, Tau’s description of an inclusive urbanism relies heavily on the same notions of shared values, understandings and—perhaps most importantly—a shared understanding of the public realm which allows and encourages us to appreciate our common values and at the same time, to tolerate ‘difference,’ however it is expressed.
This notion of an ‘inclusive’ form of urbanity is appealing for all sorts of reasons, but the question of what that might be, how one might construct both a curriculum and a disciplinary framework around such a notion is unclear. In a city like Johannesburg, where the very idea of the collective, collaborative citizen remains a lofty aspiration rather than a daily fact, Sennett’s task seems improbable, even impossible. But somewhere between Tau’s comment and Sennett’s astute observations on the term ‘rehearsal’ lies a glimmer of hope. Sennett talks of rehearsals “of the professional sort, the kind necessary in the performing arts. There is a basic distinction between practising and rehearsing; the one is a solitary experience, the other is collective.” The same distinction can be made between those of us for whom ‘the city’ is both a professional and personal endeavour. We practice our craft: designing, shaping, building our built environments. We also inhabit the results of our endeavour: as citizens, city-dwellers, whether as newly-arrived migrants or natives-of-this-patch. In coming together, we rehearse a collective script that’s been around for centuries: the script of the city, the ‘play’ of urban life.
Is Johannesburg a ‘just’ city?
We’re trying to be. I believe it’s the first time I’ve ever said “we.”
[1] Soja, E. ‘Lessons in Spatial Justice’, in Thirdspace–Journeys to Los Angeles & Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996
[2] Taken from the jacket of Together, Sennett, R., Penguin: London, 2012
Simeoforidis, Y. ‘Notes for a Cultural History Between Uncertainty and the Contemporary Urban Condition’, in Koolhaas, R. et al., Mutations, Barcelona: ACTAR, 1999
[3] ibid., p.415
[4] “Maria,” from the motion picture The Sound of Music, lyrics by O. Hammerstein and R. Rodgers
[5] Retrieved 6 August 2015. Image: Emmanuel Bobbie/Bob Pixel Studios
[6] From a conversation between the author and the Executive Mayor of the City of Johannesburg, at Civic Centre, Braamfontein, Johannesburg on 4 September 2015
[7] Sennett, R., Together, Penguin: London, 2012
However complex the urban sustainability question is, the facts are clear to all. Over the next four decades, the global urban population is expected to nearly double, with the vast majority of this happening in Asian and African cities; if we do not rethink and coalesce our approaches and practices, there will be rising urban inequality and conflicts, underpinned by accelerated resource scarcity and uncontainable environmental impacts.
What modes of urban governance are emerging across the developed and developing world that demonstrate that it is possible to tackle the underlying challenges of urban growth, urban poverty, and environmental unsustainability?
This was the question that brought the authors of this essay together. We write as a group of 18 world social science fellows on urban governance, gathered by the International Social Science Council (ISSC) and Cities Alliance, from Sept. 8-13, 2015 the in Durban, South Africa, hosted by the University of KwaZulu Natal and the Municipal Institute of Learning of eThekwini Municipality, under the professorial guidance of Mark Swilling (Sustainability Institute-Stellenbosch University South Africa) and Etienne Nel (Comparative Research Programme on Poverty, CROP), University of Otago-New Zealand.
Extreme weather and flooding are risks that cities face from climate change.
The task at hand was not to formulate a mode of urbanization governance for urban sustainability, but rather to draw on our differing disciplines—sociology, land management, architecture, political science, social and environmental justice, gender studies, urban geography, anthropology, spatial planning, economics, and environmental science—to generate insights around one question that knitted our case studies: the question delineated above.
Firstly, the question enabled us to realize that demonstrating the type(s) of urban governance that would potentially lead cities into a sustainable future is a task that no single theory or approach can claim to have researched extensively and infinitively, and therefore what works at multiple scales and in different contexts is something that is yet to be established. We reasoned that transformation via adapting to pressures such as climate change, globalization, social fluidity, or relocation projects is not a linear process that would necessarily be inscribed into a model to ultimately have a technical fix.
Therefore we all had, and continue to have, a mutual responsibility to break the disciplinary walls and become transdiciplinarians who can provide useful leads to tackling today’s global urban challenges, majorly: urban poverty, climate change, inequality, social injustice, infectious disease, violence, informal settlement, and the gradual extinction of urban biodiversity.
The case studies
Our case studies were structured around six themes, including: 1) climate change and governance; 2) environmental justice and sustainability; 3) land use, agriculture, and governance; 4) inclusive urban development; 5) urban poverty; and 6) urban environmental sustainability and housing. Although these themes shed light on the nature, extent, and dimensions of sustainability challenges and the implication for urban governance, the general observation was that these consisted of same script, but with different casts. What cut across the different themes is that urban environmental and socio-economic challenges are not site-specific (a feature that the case studies attempted to indicate) and, therefore, are global in nature, thus generating the term glocalities—meaning local examples and evidence that reflect global realities.
The urban heat island effect is most powerful in the densest parts of cities.
Climate change and governance: The overarching concern under this theme was to explore, with data and examples from Delhi, India; Cape Town, South Africa; and Dhaka, Bangladesh, the role of national governments and municipal authorities in tackling climate change in cities. In Delhi, the inter-linkages between land use/cover, air pollution, urban heat island, and human health have become a clear threat to urban health, which requires enhancing disaster management capabilities within government.
This can be realized through complementing the traditional role of regulating and taxing carbon-intensive activities with data-based pathways to draw the attention and influence of decision-makers and by investment in waste recycling and re-use to avert the impending ecological crisis. This discussion was followed by the case from Cape Town, which sought to understand what enables local governments to initiate and follow through with the process of mainstreaming climate change adaptation. In Cape Town, the author found that the enabling factors included: access to a knowledge base, the availability of resources, political stability, and the presence of dense social networks, which all positively affect adaptation mainstreaming (Lorena Pasquini, 2014). On the one hand, it is such factors that different levels of government and stakeholders need to support with a varied set of interventions, while acknowledging the effects of social network characteristics on facilitating institutional change.
On the other hand, the case on Bangladeshi cities pondered the ways through which urban governance systems make resilience to climate change possible. The evidence presented suggested that a city’s ability to conceive and implement resilience plans is dependent on circumventing cyclical political stalemates, with the purpose of creating situations where national, state and city ruling parties can work together quickly and effectively to implement policies and programmes.
Environmental justice and sustainability: Environmental justice for urban sustainability is context-dependent, but this theme focused on: i) transformative urban politics in the megacities of the global south; ii) inclusive approaches to urban climate adaptation planning and implementation; and iii) evaluating equity and governance in sustainable cities. The initial presentation centered on the environmental justice movement in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the series of statist endeavors to use a deeply militant police force to stall the advocacy agendas of metropolitan solidarities. The evidence illustrated that civic environmentalism is a form of urban politics characterized by social discontent, and that it is often perceived as a facilitator of urban crime and insecurity, thus requiring state intervention.
On one hand, the social and political landscape is one characterized by formally elected city councilors and a metropolitan police force that is accountable to parliament, whereas, on the other, there is continued statist control over environmental civil society groups through the use of strict legislations and intelligence services, thus making cities areas where people’s options are constrained by fear and intolerance for popular movements. By drawing on experiences from Quito (Ecuador) and Surat (India), the next case study laid emphasis on the participation of experts, affected communities, and a wide array of citizens to sustain inclusivity in programmes that incorporate local needs and concerns into adaptation processes and outcomes.
The other approach offered by the discussant was on building targeted partnerships between key government, private, and civil society actors to institutionalize robust decision-making structures, enhance abilities to raise funds, and increase means to directly engage with local community and international actors (Eric Chua, 2015). The presentation that followed gave insight on the importance of institutional synergies in delivering on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11: make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Achieving this goal depends heavily on how coherent national and international efforts are in designing criteria for evaluating equity and governance for city sustainability, meaning that indicators for SDG 11 ought to enable countries to adapt global urban targets to their own national contexts.
Land use, agriculture and governance: Urban land use planning, if based on sustainable development principles, can help address the challenge of informal settlement, tenure insecurity, and—ultimately—urban poverty. This is the premise from which discussants emerged to talk about three topics: i) relocation or renewal? The case of Mona Commons, Jamaica; ii) collaborative sub-urban transformation for land use compatibility in Kampala city; and iii) tackling the challenges of urban poverty through “land-use planning for tenure security”: steps and activities for action in Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
Evidence across the three case studies provided participants with an integrated understanding of the dynamics in urban land use and demonstrated how to effectively utilize policies and planning instruments to manage urban growth and achieve sustainable, equitable, and efficient development outcomes. It was acknowledged, however, that sustainable land use planning for tenure security and poverty reduction is frequently a political act characterized by material interests amongst land administrators in national and municipal offices, land lords, and tenants, with forces that operate not only at different geographical and institutional levels but that are also interlocked in nature. The availability of spatial information is often an obstacle, alongside widespread corruption and an inadequate skills, which pose institutional challenges for planning, forecasting, modelling and monitoring land use change and supporting land use decisions, especially in developing countries (Chigbu, 2015).
Urban development strategies must address urban poverty
Inclusive urban development: Due to global capital flows for infrastructure development, economic productivity and affluence have become the manifestations of urban development: special economic zones, office towers, rapid transport corridors, transport terminals, shopping malls, luxury and storied housing projects. Although urbanites at the lowest income scales may seem to have benefited from the economic opportunities that have accompany such growth agendas, the evidence presented by the fellows showed that wealth production in cities has not necessarily contributed to improved living conditions for the vast majority of the urban population.
This urban trend was illustrated across four case studies including: i) avenues in the tropics: trans-disciplinary tools for emerging cities; ii) retrospection of private-state-citizen spatial planning financing model in the global South: potentials and limitations; iii) trajectories of peri-urban futures: mapping spaces of inequality, social justice and sustainability in Manila’s Peri-Urban Fringe; iv) challenges of china’s urbanization and the promise of new-type urbanization. The governance challenge posed by the discussants was how to provide infrastructure and services for rapidly growing populations, how to address multiple issues relating to slums and squatter settlements, and how to deal with the adverse impacts of climate change.
Addressing urban issues, according to the fellows, requires an integrated approach that specifically targets the poor, promotes economic development, treats cities as living ecosystems, and fosters the participation of the private sector and civil society. The role of research and researchers was also questioned in terms of fostering transdisciplinary approaches to generate the knowledge needed to solve urban poverty and to improve the social and environmental living conditions of the vulnerable. The possibilities and benefits of putting the transdisciplinary approach into operation were discussed extensively as a way of enabling researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and urbanites to come together and coproduce knowledge that leads to more collaborative and effective interventions, all in a bid to confront the complexity of solving urban problems.
Urban poverty and governance: What institutions of city governance do impacts poverty, and the fellows under this theme were not referring only to municipal government, but to all agencies of the state that have an interest in the city, as well as private businesses and NGOs. The session illustrated this by centering on two cases: i) urban poverty, neighborhood, and social capital in NYC; and ii) from dumpsite scavenging to waste management systems: political implications for urban governance in the interior of Argentina. In NYC, the evidence indicated that disadvantaged neigbourhoods are characterized by lack of safety and limited resources (low quality housing, low level of trust in neighbors, abandoned public space, limited food resources, limited access to health services and education), which has led to a break down in social capital in three ways: i) bonding (limited contact with neighbors due to lack of trust); iii) bridging (limited contact with persons not experiencing poverty); and linking (limited contact with persons in power). The discussant noted that success in addressing this neigbourhood challenge depends on context, but largely requires anti-poverty interventions that diagnose and act on the three levels of social capital (bridging, bonding, and linking).
Waste management is a challenge for urban governance.
Conversely, the Argentina case, featuring the cities of Mendoza, Cordoba, and La Plata, focused on the different strategies for the inclusion of informal scavengers into formalized waste management systems. In the presentation, several factors were identified as improving the chances of producing effective, sustainable inclusion, namely: political credibility of the leaders, program stability, and step-by-step formal entitlement of the scavengers and their organizations. At the level of program implementation, evidence stressed the need to articulate public and private interests if the value chain of different materials (plastic, glass, cardboard, etc.) are to be streamlined (Zapata et al. 2013). We used the discussant’s example of waste management to delve into the relationship between the state and suburban governments and capital. Fellows were concerned about whose interests are advanced in city sustainability agendas, and whether the power of capital encourages the state to flout agenda setting and policy making to the disadvantage of the poor.
Urban environmental sustainability and housing:Attention under this theme was drawn to: i) reducing inequality, ramping up environmental quality: Just sustainability in coproduced informal settlement upgrading in Johannesburg; ii) Towards environmental sustainability in African cities: addressing the governance inefficiencies on urban green spaces in Kumasi, Ghana; and iii) Local authority responses to climate change and urban challenges in South Africa – transcending administrative boundaries. Key emphasis in this discussion was on exploring governance modes through which cities can deliver and support environmentally sustainable and equitable housing, as well as the attendant services. The discussants noted that housing and the environmental impact on each other in a number of significant ways, including in terms of water usage, biophysical impacts, sewerage, and flooding.
A major dilemma is how responses to the increasing demand for housing, due to rapidly growing urban populations, can be achieved in an environmentally sustainable and just manner. Policy and planning frameworks, according to one of the fellows, should deliver assistance to low-income households on improving the environmental performance of their homes, and also engaging communities in greening projects at neigbourhood to city levels. In particular, the fellows concluded that city visions and policies for more environmentally sustainable housing have to work with—and not seek to displace—poor households. During this session, the multi-level governance approaches and the growing interest in the role that local governments can play in transformative development and climate change adaptation was also considered by one of the fellows. Particular attention was drawn to the role of collaboration between local governments, especially across urban and rural regions for developing and implementing climate change actions, land use planning, and other elements that are central to achieving sustainable development goals (Leck and Simon, 2014).
Transforming urban governance requires experts to become transdiciplinarians
Concluding reflections
After presenting the case studies, the concluding reflection for the urban sustainability question was to search for appropriate governance modes that use an incremental approach and that create relationships that facilitate the coproduction of knowledge through joint work with academics of different disciplines in collaboration with policy makers, practitioners and urbanites of different socio-economic backgrounds. In order to provide more insight to this concluding reflection, three questions emerged:
How can urban theory from the Global South shine light on urban transformation? This is a question that needs answers from different fields of urban studies and, therefore, requires a transdisciplinary approach.
Within a number of complex urban crises, what emerging processes can we identify across our case studies?
Rethinking truth to power: what role/position is there for the researcher within urban transformation? What models of coproduction of knowledge are emerging and how effective are they? How can we enhance/measure coproduction of knowledge?
Chigbu, U.E., Masum, F., Leitmeier, A., Mabikke, S., Antonio, D., Espinoza, J. and Hernig, A. (2015). Securing tenure through land use planning: conceptual framework, evidences and experiences from selected countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Presented at the World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, March 23-27, Washington DC.
Eric Chua, I. A. (2015). Inclusive approaches to urban climate adaptation planning and implementation in the Global South. Climate Policy.
Lorena Pasquini, G. Z. (2014). What enables local governments to mainstream climate change adaptation? Lessons learned from two municipal case studies in the Western Cape, South Africa. Climate and Development.
Simon, D. & Leck, H. (2014) Understanding urban adaptation challenges in diverse contexts: Editorial introduction: Special issue on Urban Adaptation to Climate/Environmental Change : Urban Climate. 7, p. 1-5
Zapata C., María J., and Patrik Z., (2013). Switching Managua on! Connecting informal settlements to the formal city through household waste collection. Environment and Urbanization 2013 25: 225.
Olumuyiwa Adegun is presently writing up his PhD thesis at the School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The thesis is based on his exploration of just sustainability in informal settlement intervention and green infrastructure in Johannesburg.
Collins Adjei Mensah is a Principal Research Assistant at the Department of Geography and Regional Planning, University of Cape Coast (UCC), Ghana. He is a strong advocate for sustainable urban development, especially integrating natural vegetation into the physical landscape of cities.
Isabelle Anguelovski is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is a social scientist trained in urban and environmental planning and coordinator of the research line Cities and Environmental Justice.
Ruishan Chen is an associate professor of geography at School of Geographic Sciences of East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai, China. He examines how urbanization and climate change results in inequalities in urban China and how to achieve urban sustainability.
Uchendu Eugene Chigbu is a multidisciplinary researcher in land management at the Technical University of Munich. Specific areas of his research are in land governance, policies and actions for transformations in urban, peri-urban and rural settlements.
Aakriti Grover, a young geographer, is research scholar at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India. She specializes in urban remote sensing, microclimate, urban health and disaster management.
Alice Hertzog is an urban anthropologist working at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Her main research interests are in urban migration – exploring how migrants contribute to and transform the city.
Tracy-Ann Hyman is a recipient of a Japanese Government scholarship where she pursued a Masters in Sustainability Science in Environment Systems. She is currently pursuing a PhD on Debris Floods and their impact on communities with no early warning systems.
George Frank Kinyashi is a Lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning at the Institute of Rural Development Planning in Tanzania. He is currently working on urban economic development focusing on sustainable urbanization in developing countries.
Hayley Leck is a Research Associate in the Geography Department at King’s College London. She is particularly interested in understanding how individuals and societies in diverse contexts perceive and respond to environmental change and disasters.
Karolina Lukasiewicz is a sociologist specialized in migration studies, urban poverty and policy analysis. Lukasiewicz has nearly ten years’ research experience in analyzing public policies.
Martin Maldonado is Assistant Researcher at the Argentine National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research, where he focuses his research on the different measurements of poverty and on the mechanisms that produce and reproduce marginality among the argentine youth.
André Ortega is a spatial demographer and urban geographer with research interests on spatial politics of peri-urban transformations, dispossession and gentrification, transnational migration, and critical demography.
Lorena Pasquini works at the University of Cape Town, where she is a Lecturer for the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences and the Research Coordinator for the African Climate & Development Initiative.
Alisa Zomer is a Research Fellow at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. Her research focuses on urban climate change governance and sustainability policy at both local and international scales.
It is now coming to the end of the rainy season—the point in the year at which the reservoirs across Thailand should be approaching maximum storage levels in order to provide the water resources that are needed for the full range of water uses through the dry season. But as we write this blog, it is difficult to see how the next few months will unfold, and how water needs will be met.
The situation in Udon Thani in Northeast Thailand could well be particularly severe. Water levels in the main reservoir for the province have increased substantially within the last few weeks as tropical storms have moved across the country, but have only risen from 15 to 24 percent. Normally at this time of year, storage capacity should be at least 80 percent. At current levels, Udon is once again facing a major water resource crisis.
This is not the first time that such a crisis has occurred in Udon Thani. Recent years have seen more variable and unpredictable patterns of rainfall that pose monumental challenges for the various institutions with responsibility for water supply and distribution, as well as for the farmers, households, and industries that depend on regular water supply. Udon Thani exemplifies many of the problems of climate change and water resources; a changing agricultural landscape alongside urban development; and the political, technical, and institutional challenges of dealing with greater uncertainty and heightened risk.
Once again, places like Udon Thani, with ambitions to take advantage of regional economic integration, appear to be threatened by the combination of climate uncertainty and weaknesses in governance and planning.
The experience of Udon Thani illustrates the importance of governance institutions and processes that can better accommodate changing patterns of uncertainty and risk and the dynamics of an urbanizing region. But building the kinds of adaptive, learning-oriented institutions that can cope with uncertainty and risk is a major challenge. In many ways, these kinds of calls for institutional change do not fit easily with the ways that bureaucracies operate. Yet, through a combination of engaging citizen scientists and opening space for informed public dialogue, local stakeholders have begun to put the challenges of a climate resilient urban future on the policy agenda, and have begun taking actions to reimagine their urban visions.
Urbanization of Udon Thani
Part of the problem lies in the history of urbanization that Udon Thani has experienced. As the city has expanded, demand for water has increased, while precipitation has become more variable and less predictable. The city is now facing problems with water availability and quality. The city is dependent on one main water source—the Houay Louang reservoir—that was built over 40 years ago and designed to meet the largely rural irrigation needs of small-scale rice farmers. The reservoir has a capacity of 135 million cubic meters, but agriculture requires 138 cubic metres per year, and the combined demand from urban areas and industry is already at 22 million cubic metres per year.
The pressures on the Huay Luang have intensified, with the expansion of irrigated rice and other crops across the province and increasing need to meet domestic water demands of the growing urban population. This demand is only set to rise again as urban populations increase further and as industry becomes more established in the area. Udon Thani is well situated in the Greater Mekong Subregion and is positioning itself as a gateway for trade and commerce with expectations of doubling population and urbanized area within the next decade. This also involves building a second ringroad around the city to accommodate the growth in road traffic that has already occurred and that is anticipated to increase further. Public transport is limited, and there are few efforts to address public transport other than through the expansion of the road network. Future climate concerns are distant thoughts in current planning.
As the urbanized area expands there are growing pressures on land and water resources. Udon Thani has one of the highest rates of land price increase in the country. As with other parts of Thailand, much of the land that is targeted for expansion is low value land that offers the highest returns on speculation and conversion. Much of this land is agricultural or public wetland areas. While such land conversion generates enormous profits that might be hard to resist, the implications for the broader waterscape are significant.
The large wetland of Nong Dae ling to the north of the city on the road to Lao border encapsulates many of these threats and challenges. The 900 rai (355 acres) wetland has been targeted for a series of public and private developments. The natural drainage streams and canals have been much reduced in size and capacity as the road system has expanded, and as warehouses and shopping centres have been built along the highway. Private housing estates have been built on its edges—close to the main road—and are already impacting drainage and flood patterns. Additionally, state plans to fill in 90 percent of the wetland and use the site for an international convention hall, a sports hall, and as parking space for the planned nearby high-speed railway station pose even greater threats.
As well as the threats to natural storage and drainage, demand has increased as water availability has become more variable. Recent conditions appear to be consistent with climate projections that suggest dry seasons will become longer and drier, with precipitation in the rainy season becoming less predictable, and with more intense rainfall falling, often in a shorter space of time. These shifts in precipitation also raise the risk of flooding, which has been further compounded by the expansion of built-up areas across natural floodplains that in turn have altered the natural hydrology.
Recent years have demonstrated the increasing variability in rainfall from year to year, and the cumulative impacts across the years. In 2011, the main pressure on water managers was to manage the dramatic floods that affected many parts of the country. In 2012, reservoir managers released water several times during the rainy season to avoid repeating the 2011 flood crisis. By the release of water meant that at the end of 2012, as they moved into the dry season, Udon was facing a severe water shortage.
In 2013, the main pressure on reservoir managers was to ensure that the reservoir reached sufficient capacity to meet dry season demand. Early in the rainy season, the reservoir had already reached 70 percent of storage capacity when a tropical storm and the threat of intense rainfall moved towards Udon. This led the central department in Bangkok to order pre-emptive release from the reservoir to avoid the risk of flooding downstream of the reservoir and in the city. However, the storm passed without any rainfall, leaving the reservoir well below capacity. It was again a matter of luck that a subsequent but unexpected storm did actually pass through Udon with enough rainfall to refill the reservoir. Even so, in 2014, due to water shortages in the dry season, there were restrictions on allocation of water for irrigation. The levels in the reservoir dropped so low that the Royal Irrigation Department (RID) was obliged to pump the water out of the reservoir to the outflow canals. Fortunately, domestic water supply to the city could be maintained, but at a cost borne by farmers requiring irrigation. After such an intense dry season, RID reservoir managers were keen to ensure that they were able to store enough water in the rainy season to meet the demand of the following dry season.
This year has been even more problematic. With the influence of El Niño, the dry season has been far longer and drier than previously, and rainfall in the rainy season has been far lower than expected. At the beginning of September, when storage is expected to be 80 percent, the reservoir was only at 15 percent of capacity. Precipitation patterns are also proving less reliable than historical trends, making it all the more difficult for reservoir managers to plan when to store and release water.
Facing the challenge of urbanization and climate change
The main challenge has been in putting these issues on the political agenda. Despite a history of increased urbanization and despite reaching the status of a Newly Industrialized Country (NIC) in 1988, Thailand still does not have an effective national strategy or policy framework for urban development. Land use planning has been notoriously weak.
These weaknesses were revealed in glaring detail in the 2011 floods that struck most of the country, but that caused devastation in the Chao Praya basin and Bangkok. Many parts of the basin around Bangkok had been built-up from the early 1990s—agricultural land and land designated as floodways according to earlier land use plans was converted to industrial parks and housing estates with a network of roads cutting across the landscape. The flood risk was certainly well known, but was ignored as the color-coding of land use plans was changed to accommodate commercial interests. The international airport that opened in 2005 is located in King Cobra Swamp—a low-lying wetland area that provides drainage for a city that is built in the delta. As the floods approached Bangkok, there was a desperate attempt to divert the water from its natural flow as it targeted critical economic infrastructure and to steer it towards areas that would not normally flood. After the floods receded, the pressure was on to put floodwalls in place to protect industrial parks, to build walls higher, thereby shifting flood risk elsewhere. The lessons of this experience do not appear to have been learned.
The experience in Bangkok and the Chao Praya basin brought the risks home in other parts of the country. In Udon Thani, local stakeholders are assessing options for managing local water sources. The expansion of the urban area is leading to encroachment and degradation of local water bodies that have traditionally been sources for domestic water supply and that provide important drainage for the city.
Collaborations between ISET, Thailand Environment Institute, the Municipality of Udon Thani, the local Rajabhat University, and the Thai Research Fund (TRF), along with local people across 18 villages, led to participatory action research, mapping, and assessing local water systems—including the flow, areas of flood risk—and identifying the water bodies and wetlands that contribute to urban flood drainage and provide domestic water sources. Traditionally these water bodies provided domestic water (and some irrigation) to local rural communities. However, with limited state funds, these have often been poorly maintained, leading to declines in water quality. At the same time, as the city area has expanded, these formerly rural communities are more directly linked to the urban areas. Many of these small water bodies are being targeted as sites for development of housing estates, often with wastewater discharged from the estates directly into these waterways without adequate treatment. The combination of these pressures has further reduced the water quality. With poor and unreliable water quality, the demand for water from these sources declines, pushing demand towards the piped sources from the Houay Louang.
Participatory research has pointed to options for rehabilitating and maintaining these bodies in ways that would improve natural drainage for all of the expanding urban areas, as well as providing additional water sources in a more decentralized, modular water supply, thus contributing to the flexibility, diversity, and redundancy of the urban water systems. By bringing different communities across the basin together, this research has built up a more holistic understanding of the broader landscape, and also created a platform for learning and dialogue.
Alongside this citizen science, a partnership with the Institute for Water Resources (IWR) of the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has helped introduce shared vision planning: the application of scenario-based models to shared learning dialogues. Through a participatory process, local stakeholders have developed their own scenario-based models that consider the implications of different development and land use scenarios and analyze their implications. This tool has helped bring different stakeholders to the dialogue table and to consider specific actions. One of the core challenges with urbanization in Thailand is the need for different administrative organizations in the urbanizing area to collaborate on plans for land use and water resource management. This is largely an institutional challenge—there are few incentives for local administrations to contribute their own budgets or to place restrictions on their development ambitions. It is also a technical challenge—there are limited tools to assist the analysis of future development scenarios and options.
An additional challenge is being able to imagine an urban future that might be different from the experience of other large cities, and that might be able to steer Udon Thani away from current trajectories of urbanization. While people in Udon Thani frequently remark that they do not want their city to be like Bangkok, much of the development that is occurring is merely repeating Bangkok’s history. Poor land use planning and investment creates a path dependency; once critical economic assets are located in hazardous locations, the only way out seems to be through further construction of flood defenses that shift flood risk, and ultimately exacerbate the problem further.
With support from local and international architects, Udon Thani has been considering immediate steps to redesign their urbanizing future by establishing green infrastructure that could take advantage of natural wetlands and water bodies. With an interest in promoting bicycling as a viable transport option, there is also the potential for rehabilitating the networks of canals in the urbanizing area as both waterways and cycle paths, addressing some of the region’s water management and transport challenges.
Udon Thani is currently dependent on infrastructure built over 40 years ago and designed for different needs and for a different climate regime. The institutions responsible for policy, planning, and management are similarly structured for different challenges; they are less able to cope with emerging uncertainty and risk, or the need to operate across administrative boundaries. This kind of partnership between citizens, research centres, and government agencies, in which they take the lead in assessing and mapping water sources, is important for the information that it generates. Additionally, such a collaborative research process that involves both citizen and expert-led science contributes to opening arenas for more broadly informed public policy dialogue. These processes lie at the heart of building resilience—creating new arenas for the state and its citizens to enter into informed public dialogues to assess vulnerability and to identify innovative options for action. At the heart of this is the need for reimagining an urban future.
Acknowledgements: This article has been prepared with funding under the IDRC/SSHRC Urban Climate Resilience in Southeast Asia (UCRSEA) partnership, an action-research and capacity building program that operates in Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam.
The original action research in Udon Thani was part of the Mekong-Building Climate Resilience in Asian Cities (M-BRACE). M-BRACE is a four–year program funded by USAID that aimed to strengthen the capacity of stakeholders in medium-sized cities in the Thailand and Vietnam region to deal with the challenges of urbanization and climate change. The program was implemented by ISET-International, in partnership with the Thailand Environment Institute and Vietnam’s National Institute for Science and Technology Policy and Strategy Studies. This blog article draws on original research being conducted under the M-BRACE program led by Dr. Santipab Siriwattanapiboon (Rajabhat University, Udon Thani) and Ms. Pattcharin Chairob (Thai Research Fund), as well as the M-BRACE Vulnerability Assessments.
Pakamas has a technical background in biological sciences and coastal ecology with a Ph.D. from James Cook University, Australia and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oxford. She joined TEI in late 2008.
This is a book that seeks to highlight the heroic efforts of individuals to make a difference in the quality of life of their neighborhoods and to advance sustainability-oriented activities. It shows the importance of dedicated leadership and extraordinary people stepping in to address environmental problems. It assumes, for the U.S., that the Tocquevillean impression of the U.S. of civic engagement is a useful compass, especially if based in a Leopoldian ethic of nature. However, the authors go beyond the U.S. to also include examples from across the world.
Civic ecology, for these authors, focuses on hands-on stewardship practices that integrate civic and environmental values (from the introduction). They argue for the importance of people acting as stewards within a social-ecological systems framework, putting the human and nonhuman pieces back together. Their emphasis is on volunteers who perceive problems and who set about trying to repair the damage — both to the people and the environment. Not entirely naïve, the authors acknowledge that civic ecology fills gaps left by the state, that it can be problematic that unpaid volunteers end up working to address the voids, and that these activities can accelerate neighborhood gentrification. Still, Krasny and Tidball wish to celebrate and honor people who defy harsh realities of poor and blighted cities, and who do so out of a sense of civic commitment to fellow residents and the planet.
The book has 10 chapters that showcase people’s work across the globe. I found the organization of the chapters and themes a bit confusing because they alternated between thematic chapters (Stewardship, Health, and Well-Being), which provided a discussion of the topic, examples from different places, and then a specific Steward Story of an individual. I could not tell how the examples were chosen among the many initiatives globally. Were these the most representative? The most transformative? Still, the point of the book is that people care and are committed to doing things to make their communities better, often on a shoestring or volunteer basis.
The book does not provide insight into the scalability of these initiatives and efforts, nor their relative impact. Herein lies the deeper set of questions. Can individual, ground-up efforts, distributed throughout cities, lead to more fundamental transformations? The authors seem to think so and point to the policy entrepreneur as a key element, a person who navigates between expert knowledge and the community, to make more substantive regulatory or institutional change. This is an optimistic message — the individuals and groups exist; they are effective. Yet those persons are rare, and the role is challenging and difficult to sustain.
For me, what was missing in the conversation was a frontal discussion of power and politics. How do these efforts coalesce into social movements that demand changes in cities, changes that offer people paid and meaningful work in creating livable cities that make space for nature throughout? How do we create real funding streams that change infrastructure and enable new work that is rewarding and restorative to the neighborhood and to the locality?
I have recently started working on a new project that will explore how reconnecting people with nature can help transform society towards sustainability (see http://leveragepoints.org). ‘Connectedness with nature’ has recently become a buzz phrase, with scientists, journalists and practitioners talking about the problems of disconnection, the benefits of reconnection, and the ways that we can become more connected with nature in our day-to-day lives. (See Tim Beatley’s TNOC blog on the nature pyramid).
(1) Disconnection from nature and the broader sustainability problem
Much of the discussion has been about the implications of connectedness with nature for human health and wellbeing outcomes. And for good reason! There is a growing evidence base that highlights the substantial physical and mental health benefits of interaction with green and natural environments (Keniger et al., 2013). In fact, some experts are now arguing that health outcomes of nature exposure should be considered in terms of dose-response relationships as in traditional medical research (Shanahan et al., 2015). Yet other commentators have flagged society’s disconnection from nature as underpinning broader global environmental and sustainability problems (Folke et al., 2011). If reconnecting people with nature is key to tackling major sustainability problems, what is the role of the city? Are cities part of the problem, or central to the solution?
(2) Are cities the problem or the solution?
Urban living has been cited as a key driver of people’s disconnection from natural environments (Miller, 2005). The ‘extinction of experience’ has been said to be most acute in cities, and is increasing. Children in particular are spending less and less time outdoors engaging in nature-based activities. This disconnection has been highlighted by Richard Louv in his book “Last child in the woods” (2005). His message has struck a chord with the general public, with the book receiving much attention and popular media coverage. There has also been research showing that the time children spend indoors using electronic devices has increased over time. These indoor activities have been related to a downward trend in national park visitation (Pergams & Zaradic, 2006). Cities have even been blamed for luring tourists away from wild and natural areas. The relationship between urban lifestyles and experiential disconnection from nature has been an impetus for the burgeoning growth in urban greening movements in urban planning (e.g. the Biophilic Cities movement). According to this thinking, promoting nature experiences in urban environments is key to tackling broader environmental challenges because cities are home to most people on the planet.
City children are engaging in these kinds of nature experiences less frequently. Image: Crystal E Zobel
While urban landscapes are generally seen as presenting significant challenges to human-nature connections, some commentators consider this disconnection from nature as being positive for environmental outcomes because it concentrates impacts in a small spatial area (e.g. ecomodernist manifesto). Indeed, while local green environments are key for urban dwellers’ experiences of the natural world, low-density cities with many green open spaces may be bad for regional biodiversity (Soga et al 2015).
Therefore, a trade-off potentially exists between cities designed for human-nature experiences and those that minimise broader environmental impacts. In order to explore whether cities are the problem or solution, it’s necessary to unpack the types of human-nature connections that may be important and how these relate to sustainability outcomes.
(3) Types of disconnection
Connection with nature can be considered as encompassing multiple dimensions. Here, I consider four dimensions of nature connection—material connections, experiential connections, cognitive/psychological connections and philosophical connections—and assess the role of cities in fostering or undermining these.
A city is defined as an area of high human population density. For this reason, cities naturally consume lots of resources, ‘metabolise’ them through various socioeconomic activities, and produce waste. This way of looking at cities is often referred to as ‘urban metabolism’. Cities are therefore hugely reliant upon (and materially connected to) natural ecosystems that provide the goods and services that sustain them. However, over the past century, cities have increased in size and number, and the nature of these connections has changed. As seen in Fig. 1, globalisation has led to cities being increasingly “tele-connected” to distant ecosystems in various parts of the globe, rather than intimately reliant upon local ecosystems that provide direct feedbacks.
Figure 1. The change over time in the material connections between cities and the ecosystems that sustain them. Image: Ch 2 of CBO Outlook book (www.cbobook.org)
As I touched on already, people’s experiential connections with urban nature characterise their day-to-day life. Experiential connections can be hampered through urban planning decisions that squeeze out green environments from the urban matrix (particularly in response to densification pressures), poor accessibility as a result of transport infrastructure (this is particularly problematic in large cities where it can be difficult to access hinterland environments), or individual behavioural decisions (often as a result of people being disinterested in nature or leading increasingly busy lives).
Cognitive connections with nature relate in part to the information people receive about their choices and behaviours. As Andersson et al. (2014) said in their recent article “[t]he physical and mental distance between urban consumers and the ecosystems supporting them mask the ecological implications of choices made”. These cognitive connections extend from knowing where food products come from through to understanding the ecology of local nature reserves. However, there’s evidence that experiential connections are related closely to environmental knowledge and psychological orientations towards the natural world. For example, a study of an urban park in Germany showed that park visitors who visited more frequently had better knowledge of animal species found in the reserve (Randler et al., 2007). In addition, research from Brisbane has shown that green space visitation rates are more greatly influenced by people’s ‘nature relatedness’ (a psychological measure of a person’s affinity with the natural world) than their proximity to a green space (Lin et al., 2014). This suggests therefore that a positive feedback may exist between people’s psychological orientation towards nature and their experience of nature: the more people experience natural environments (particularly as children), the more they will feel a connection to the natural world, and the more they will continue to visit. Conversely, the less people experience natural environments, the less they may care about them.
The final type of connection with nature might be termed ‘philosophical’ connection, or environmental worldview. Scholars are increasingly noting that different people and societies hold different perspectives on how humans relate to the natural world. The dominant philosophy underpinning modern western society is that of humans controlling nature and valuing the natural world primarily for the instrumental goods and services it can provide. This contrasts with alternative metaphors such as people as ‘stewards’ of the natural world, or as part of a broader ‘web of life’ (Raymond et al 2013). These philosophical perspectives imbue individuals, communities, and corporations and therefore have far reaching implications for sustainability. Because philosophical perspectives are passed between people within specific social contexts, cities are places where these are naturally shaped, developed and communicated.
(4) A new reconnection agenda
Cities are key to global sustainability outcomes. Urbanisation has undoubtedly contributed to the environmental crisis through the consumption of resources and disconnection of people from local environments. Yet cities are also the solution. There is a vital need to reconnect urban populations with nature, but we must also move beyond superficial connections to those connections that will contribute to systemic change. Climate change, species extinction, global poverty, natural resource depletion; these are the big issues that are facing our world today that require huge shifts in how humanity relates to the natural world. Promoting more frequent visits to the local park will not achieve this change. What we need is a wholesale shift in personal and societal orientation towards nature that results in individual and collective behaviour change.
Could focusing on connections with nature in a broader sense provide a key to the type of transformation needed? We need a reconnection agenda that focuses on reconnecting people with the natural world experientially (increased interaction with natural environments), materially (strengthening ties with local ecosystems), cognitively (increasing knowledge of our reliance on nature), and philosophically (engendering respect for the planet). As areas of high population density, cities are ideally placed to drive this reconnection agenda, particularly in regards to cognitive and philosophical reconnection. As cultural hubs, cities promote community interaction and development and ideas are spread quickly in them. Cities are also centres of economic activity and home to corporation headquarters. Institutions that may be instrumental in effecting change for sustainability are based in cities. Cities are even critical to promoting moral and religious messages related to sustainability, as highlighted by the Pope’s recent tour of the US, where he reiterated humanity’s responsibility to steward the environment. If it is value shift that’s needed, then this is most possible in cities.
Zealandia nature sanctuary from air. Image: Rob Suisted
So what would this reconnection agenda look like in practical terms? There is not enough space in this blog post to explore it in detail, but I present a few initial ideas here. To increase the value of experiential connections, urban planners and designers should look to enhance biodiversity in green spaces as a way of increasing the ‘intensity’ of the nature experience in what are often quite ecologically sterile landscapes (see Ikin et al., 2015, for ideas). Wellington’s ‘Zealandia’ wildlife sanctuary is a good example of a well managed and popular nature reserve close to the urban centre. In addition to this, there’s a need for cities to promote sustainability initiatives that emerge through grassroots or non-government organisations. Relevant examples include the recent ‘car free day’ in Paris, or WWF’s ‘Earth Hour City Challenge’. These initiatives can be powerful tools for generating attitudinal and behavioural change in individuals and institutions that go far beyond the single event.
A car free day in Paris. Image: Maxime Lathuilière
Cities are key places for reconnecting people with nature. Yet it is time for cities to take nature connections to the next level: to go beyond making urban landscapes pleasant for their inhabitants to become places that drive transformation.
In Chile, over recent years, there has been increasing attention to the concept of community resilience, especially in facing natural disasters. Community resilience is the capacity of a community to adapt to changes that occur after natural disasters. Such adaptation capacity is vital for satisfying survival needs (e.g. food and water), as well as for maintaining local identity (e.g. fishermen community) and economic roles for the development of the territory (e.g. tourism). Several studies have been carried out in areas affected by the 2010 earthquake and tsunami on how to measure community resilience and how to increase it (MINVU, 2010; Franco & Siembieda, 2010; Platt, 2011; Rahman & Kausel, 2013; Cartes Siade, 2013).
But little of this research on resilience has been incorporated in the development of cities. This is most probably because this information came too late after the reconstruction process. Besides, resilience involves a variety of detailed quantitative and qualitative indicators which may be quite difficult to measure, evaluate and include in the local planning instruments. These demand extra funding and human capital, increasing the cost of reconstruction considerably. After a disaster, funds are allocated to those needs which are considered most urgent, such as refuge and food. What’s more, these indicators usually come in numbers and textual data instead of maps and specific cartography, which can facilitate the complementation of urban plans.
In facing this problem and following the discussion of the round table on resilience months ago, an interesting question came about in our research group (Laboratorio de Paisaje y Resiliencia Urbana: PRULAB): To what extent does the application of planning tools in cities increase community resilience? This question seems more important than measuring resilience in the context of Chile, which is prone to different natural disturbances, and in which, as in many other developing countries, it is very difficult to measure resilience due to the lack of information required in well-known resiliency checklists (e.g. Cutter et al., 2014). For example, in Chile, most social and economic databases are developed at the regional scale, hence no data is available at the community level. Therefore, it seems interesting to explore whether planning decisions are developed to support resilience enhancement, or otherwise.
This task becomes even more motivating in the local planning environment of the coastal town of Mehuin, in the south of Chile, in which the concept of resilience is not well known and is not directly mentioned in urban planning tools, even though the government of Chile committed to investing in building communities’ resilience to natural disasters and integrating this approach into urban planning tools after signing the Hyogo Framework of Action in 2005.
Location of Mehuin in Chile (left) and aspects of the city’s resilience, both positive (center) and negative (right).
Planning tools include, for example, the Regional Development Plans, Regulatory Plans, and Emergency and Action Plans, which define land use, urban density, balance between un-built and built areas, amount of green open spaces, urban sprawl patterns, the distribution of socio-economic groups, and economic development, which, among other aspects, are addressed in urban resilience measures. Our idea of measuring the contribution of the current planning tools to building community resilience instead of measuring the community resilience itself is derived from the availability of the tools listed above.
One study, undertaken by a master’s student, focused on developing a ‘resilient study framework’ of urban planning tools. It was developed based on a variety of resilience attributes and variables derived from different hazard management and urban planning literature ((Walker & Salt, 2006, Cutter et al., 2008; Ahern, 2011; Allan & Bryant, 2011; Cutter et al., 2014).). Community resilience is a broad concept and has several dimensions, attributes, and variables. Accordingly, even if the term resilience is not found in the current Chilean urban planning tools, we expected that there might be some aspects of community resilience addressed in these tools. For this reason, the study aimed to reveal attributes (such as diversity, redundancy, multi-functionality, modularity, and adaptability) and variables (such as organizational structure and coordination, local disaster training, evacuation potentials, transportation network and medical care capacity) of resilience embedded in urban planning tools. The framework we developed focused on the “institutional” and “housing and infrastructure” dimensions of resilience (which highly influence urban planning tools).
We found that although the term resilience is not directly mentioned in any of the studied planning tools, there are several aspects in the tools addressing resilience attributes and variables, positively or otherwise. This was a surprising finding because the overall idea in Chile is that, before the 2010 earthquake, there was no resilience approach to the development of cities. Hence, acknowledging that urban planning tools are influencing the resilience of cities is the first big step towards building community resilience. In this sense, it seems more relevant to improve and assure current planning actions that support resilience, and to modify those that restrict it, than to invest time and funds on creating new planning tools.
We also found that not every planning tool contributes to every attribute and variable of community resilience in the same manner. We actually think that this is a very good approach to building resilience. Two very well known premises under the concept of resilience are that we should diversify the system as well as add redundancies. Hence, the diversity of planning tools with different focuses is good for the resilience of cities, as is their redundancy in referring to the same topic (i.e. tourism in the case of Mehuin). If, for some reason (e.g. funding), a particular planning tool cannot develop a specific resilience variable, other tools can take its duty. Along the same lines, it is better that the development of resilience variables and attributes are included in different tools, taking care of assuring the appropriate coordination among them.
Distribution of resilient variables and attributes (x-axis) by planning tools (y-axis)
Overall, our study shows how planning tools are contributing to building community resilience to earthquakes and tsunamis in Mehuin and sheds light on the challenges for achieving resilient urban planning in this area. Moreover, the resilience study framework that we developed can be applied to other coastal communities, contributing to defining the government’s priorities as they follow through on a resilience planning approach. Although we acknowledge the importance and necessity of measuring resilience, we believe our approach represents a short cut for urban managers, allowing them to prioritize their interventions in areas where the planning tools have a weaker contribution to community resilience. This can prevent wasting of time and money associated with measuring and applying resilience actions that cannot be included in local planning tools.
Yet, there is no end for building community resilience, as resilience is a process, not an outcome. Besides, changes in the world, which may affect the equilibrium of a social system, are neither one hundred percent predictable or preventable. Accordingly, we believe there is no level of absolute community resilience to natural disasters; hence, measuring resilience is an approach, but not the solution. Tangible actions are applied through planning. In the case of the application of planning tools, the more the planning tools enhance any or every attribute or variable of resilience, the more resilient the community can be.
Ahern, J. (2011). From fail-safe to safe-to-fail: Sustainability and resilience in the new urban world. Landscape and Urban Planning, 100, 341–343.
Allan, P., & Bryant, M. (2011). Resilience as a framework for urbanism and recovery. Journal of Landscape Architecture, August, 34-45.Cutter et al., 2008
Cutter, S. L., Ash, K. D., & Emrich, C. T. (2014). The geographies of community disaster resilience. Global Environmental Change, 29, 65-77
Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2006). Resilience thinking: sustaining ecosystems and people in a changing world. Washington: Island Press.
Mina Fallahzadegan is an architect and regional planner. She has worked for several years with The Renovation Organization of Tehran and also Tehran Urban Planning & Research Center.
Like a dog with a bone, some of us just can’t let go of the notion of rail in cities. I’m certainly one of them. Since most cities dedicate more than 50 percent of their land area to transportation, and for 100 percent of contemporary cities, the majority of that space is dedicated to the almighty automobile, it is difficult to imagine how the nature of cities gets much better without dealing with the car. And it is easy to see electric rail systems as a compelling alternative, speeding us along green rights-of-way that lead to quiet, mixed-use, work/residential neighborhoods, with access to new spaces for playing and relaxing. One can see cities striving for these idyllic biophilic combinations in Europe and parts of South America, even in Asia, but the arguments put forth by numerous authors from diverse perspectives (myself included) have fallen on deaf ears for generations of Americans, who have found the combination of oil, cars, and suburbs more compelling still.
The most recent person to gnaw this particular femur is the New York City architect and light rail advocate, Roxanne Warren, in Rail and the City: Shrinking our Carbon Footprint While Reimagining Urban Space. Warren bites deep into what she calls the triple tyrannies: traffic congestion, dependency on petroleum, and paved environments. She shows that these three tyrants are mere henchmen at the beck and call of the American emperor pro temp: the automobile. Warren shuttles us through seven chapters that take on various aspects of why the car is bad (urban sprawl, pollution, space requirements, climate-changing pollution) and why trains are good (more space efficient, more energy efficient, better for healthy lifestyles, better for the disabled and elderly).
A long-time leader in “Vision42”, a fascinating proposal for a Manhattan light rail line extending across the island from river to river along 42nd Street (and possibly circling back via a loop along 34th Street), Warren knows well the pros and cons of what she writes. Reading her book, I feel like I can hear her in the offices of New York City politicians, or speaking before community groups, or honing the case with her rail friends at conferences, reinforcing her case emphatically and drawing the links between transportation and land use, land use and quality of life. The advantages for urban railways are manifold: less air pollution (including carbon dioxide, as suggested by the subtitle); more available space; less noise; complementarity with walking and bicycling; and the potential to encourage renewable energy. But still, most people don’t get it.
Warren argues that change is on its way, if incrementally, and we should not lose hope. She points out that streetcar mileage has actually been increasing in America over the last few decades (though not in New York City, where the rail du jour is the subway), and that there appears to be a shift in attitude as millennial Americans are opting for car-sharing schemes and urban lifestyles with greater appetite than previous generations. “Flexibility and mobility” [she quotes Richard Florida] “are key survival principles of the modern economy.” She sees what I see and what many others have seen before: that streetcars and light rail systems can provide exactly what’s required to maximize space and minimize energy consumption, as long as the cities around them are built with sufficient density and diversity to support rail travel.
Mixed use and density are not a problem in Warren’s New York. In fact, the main obstacle to light rail in cities, or indeed any form of shared transportation, is that Americans love their privacy and hate the additional governmental cost of public transportation. For all of us who appreciate the benefits of rail in cities, perhaps we need to adopt a new tactic that focuses on interests, not positions. Our interests are in shrinking our carbon footprint and making cities better, not the advocating for or against any one technology. In this light, the part of Warren’s book I found most thought-provoking was a short passage about autonomous cars.
Autonomous cars are not something I wrote about in Terra Nova: The New World Without Oil, Cars, and Suburbs (Abrams, 2013), which covers much the same ground as Warren’s book, nor something that Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl wrote about in Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil (New Society Publishers, 2010), another volume in this vein that I highly recommend. Warren dismisses self-driving cars as just the latest continuation of the space-hogging habits of the vehicles we drive ourselves, but I have begun to wonder if she, or the rest of us rail advocates, should be so hasty. If self-driving cars were electric, they would have the same benefits as light rail and other electrified rail systems, pushing the emissions out to the power plants where they could be replaced by renewable, non-polluting sources such as wind and solar. Warren points out, and autonomous car advocates are fond of telling, that most cars spend 96 percent of the time doing nothing, sitting around filling space that otherwise could be more profitably used. If urban Americans shifted from car ownership to car-sharing, on an “Uber” type model, with self-driving cars that we call up by app, then we would need many fewer cars (by some estimates 40 percent fewer). Fewer cars would mean fewer roads and parking lots and less traffic congestion. And if computers are doing the driving, autonomous cars could move closer together in platoons, perhaps even hitch together, without needing that psychological cushion space that human drivers require. Costs go down because there are no railways, just the streets we have today, and acceptance goes up because not only is it faster, quicker, quieter, cheaper (no car insurance required) and more fuel efficient, but also private.
In other words, is there a way to have all the benefits of rail in city without the rails? If so, then all of us who care about nature in the city should get ready for a ride.
Earlier this year I had the good fortune to be invited to speak at a remarkable ‘Global Conference’ in Chantilly, France. The title of the session I was to contribute to was translated into English as ‘An urbanism built on a priority for fauna and flora’. This, it seems, was a slight mistranslation of ‘Un urbanisme construit sur une préséance du vivant’ but it suggested an emphasis in design and planning that struck me as being just what is needed if we are to have any hope of rolling back the massive damage that urbanisation has inflicted on the biosphere over the last few hundred years.
It fitted well with my contention of the last ten years or so, documented sketchily in my ‘Ecopolis’ book and mentioned in my first TNOC blog that the creation of ecological cities requires the development of Design Guidelines for Non-Human Species. In that blog my example was to suggest that an urban fractal or neighbourhood should be able to provide sufficient viable habitat that it can support at least one key indicator species of fauna and a majority of the species of birds indigenous to the place.
This blog further explores why we need these kinds of design guidelines, and at the bottom, makes some specific suggestions.
Beyond the selfie
Cities are quintessentially human constructions, so it’s hardly surprising that reasons given for having ‘more nature in cities’ are almost invariably anthropocentric (think ‘nature-deficit disorder’ or biophilia). These reasons are typically to do with improving the quality of life for people, or even just their real estate values, but the bottom line for promoting urban nature is more profound; it is about human survival—without healthy natural environments our species cannot survive and cities make or break the natural environment. If cities fail to embrace nature in a demonstrably positive and sustaining way there can be little hope for the environment outside the city walls. Our reasons for valuing nature in cities needs to move beyond the ‘selfie’ view that puts a bit of greenery in the frame of urban portraiture and beyond the very reasonable proposition that integrating nature in our cities is good for livability, resilience, sustainability and human life generally. We need to simply accept that nature has needs of its own, and those needs may or may not be of benefit to human strands in the web of life.
This partly parallels ways of seeing the world found in a number of cultural forms, like Buddhism and Animism; it is close to the Daoist tradition in its acceptance of the natural world as ‘a self-generating, complex arrangement of elements that are continuously changing and interacting’ in which humans are a crucial component but one that should ‘follow the flow of nature’s rhythms’. It is specifically not about an enchanted view of nature and it is not about the worship of nature, not least because we are ultimately part of nature and any degree of self-reverence is dangerous.
No, it’s simply accepting that for natural systems to function certain requirements have to be met and understanding that conditions and pre-conditions for the successful operation of biological processes are set by the nature of the systems and not by the predilections of the human animal. Where human activities affect those systems there are identifiable areas of contact and interaction where we need clear indications as to how to allow or support natural system (ecosystem) function.
Responsive it may be, but Nature does not negotiate
Nature is fractal. Each part of it is a microcosm of the larger whole. An urbanism that gave priority to the needs of nature and the requirements of non-human species would itself need to be fractal and support and nurture the essential functions of natural systems. To some degree it would need to be codified, just as we codify the expectations we have of our artificial human habitat, and that means establishing appropriate design guidelines, rules and regulations. If this agenda is to be taken seriously (and why shouldn’t it?), every city and town on Earth will need to develop such guidelines—to be acted upon as a result of both sensible persuasion (through the political process) and as a response to non-negotiable demands (of ecological necessity). Nature may be astonishingly responsive and receptive, but it does not negotiate.
Life-affirming graffiti in Adelaide, South Australia. Image: Paul Downton
The rewards for human society of maintaining natural systems, apart from giving it additional capacity for long-term survival, includes the promise of a bold new urbanism, the aesthetics of which transcend the architectural fashions of the day and possess the gorgeous fractal messiness of nature—that messiness which confuses eyes and sensibilities trained by years of seeing orthogonal space and threatens minds crated up in cubicles, fed from cartons and boxed in by built environments. A radical urbanism, perhaps like that imagined by Street Farm over four decades ago as ‘alive rather than inert’, in which ‘a profusion of sprouting, breathing, photosynthesising, living things surround and entwine human dwellings’ (p.102 Stephen E Hunt in ‘The Revolutionary Urbanism of Street Farm’, Tangent Books, 2014).
‘Alive rather than inert’, Christie Walk in Adelaide, South Australia is a downtown ecocity development in which ‘a profusion of sprouting, breathing, photosynthesising, living things surround and entwine human dwellings’. Image: Paul Downton
Notwithstanding the variants of ‘the ecocity idea’ that jostle for attention in the modern designer’s conceptual mind-scape, it is a fundamental tenet of ecological urbanism that urban areas and their associated infrastructure must shrink and relinquish their hold on the landscape to reverse habitat loss and fragmentation. An urbanism that prioritised fauna and flora would give over far less of the planet’s surface to cities and their paraphernalia. It would minimize the extent of roads and all the other concrete, tarmac and steel spaghetti of dead infrastructure in favour of space for the myriad creatures and vegetation that weave the living tapestry of the planet. An intensely ecological urbanism would distill the human presence into socially, culturally and politically rich, dynamic and diverse cities and towns; it would increase the constraints on how human society housed itself, but enrich and expand the world in which that society might thrive.
Birds, flowers, dirt and fire
There are a number of guidelines in place in cities around the world and numerous efforts to embrace nature in the planning and design of built environments, some of which are mentioned below. But my proposition is that such guidelines should be a requirement for every town, city and region.
According to Andre Mader in his TNOC blog Peregrine Falcons have taken up residence in the Sagrada Familia. They love tall buildings and are the poster children of urban wilding, understandably so, but the successful reintroduction of fauna and flora into the urban environment will result in a lot of activity being out of the sight and awareness of most citizens and away from vidcams and tourist hotspots. Because of how we view and use media, if a city were to make itself falcon-friendly, for instance, and it worked, the chances are high that just one falcon pair taking up residence would be celebrated ad nauseam and the exercise would be celebrated as a success even if no other birds became city-dwellers. There needs to be a clear vision of what aspiring to be a city for nature really means. It has to move way beyond the tokenism of popular media and into an understanding that real life takes place whether or not it has a Facebook page.
Peregrine Falcons have found sanctuary in Gaudi’s Sagradia Familia in Barcelona. Image: Paul Downton
Guidelines and regulation can be vital in protecting other species. Wind power is shaping up as a major source of energy and ecocities cannot reasonably be imagined or planned without it. The transition to an ecological society requires a move to renewable energy, but also requires that there be safeguards for natural systems in the process. Although far fewer birds are killed by wind turbines than are killed by flying into windows, the numbers can be minimised by not siting turbines in migration corridors. Accordingly, the American Bird Conservancy, which supports wind energy, has petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect migratory birds from the negative impacts of wind energy, asking for regulations to safeguard wildlife and reward responsible wind energy development. Such initiatives need to be a typical part of regional planning.
Vancouver provides a good example of what design guidelines for non-human species might look like in its Bird Friendly Design Guidelines Explanatory Note. The American Bird Conservancy publishes an excellent guide to bird-friendly design. Gaining even a passing familiarity with this document makes it hard to see how any architect or urban planner could condone the large expanses of glass on building façades that are known to kill between 100 million and one billion birds a year in the US alone. According to The Expanded Environment these guidelines have been adopted, edited and rewritten by several municipalities around the US and Canada, one presumes Vancouver is one of them. The facts and figures and known solutions are well established, yet glass boxes continue to be built. If we are serious about evolving our environments to be other-species friendly we must raise our game—and architects have to avoid deadly aesthetic fripperies like mirrored glass.
A murderous façade of mirror glass sheaths a downtown skyscraper; ironically, this building is located in Vancouver, a city with an excellent set of guidelines for supporting birdlife in the city. Image: Paul Downton
VicRoads, the transport agency of the state of Victoria in Australia, shows what design guidelines might look like when applied to road building with its Fauna Sensitive Road Design Guidelines (go to <https://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au> and search for ‘fauna sensitive road design guidelines’, which will automatically download).
Wildlife bridge over highway, Queensland, Australia. Image: Richard Regsiter
We might expect green walls and green roofs to feature prominently in a fauna-and-flora-friendly city, but if the design guidelines for non-human species were thorough, then the green roofs would have to be intensive, containing viable soil able to support micro-organisms and sequester carbon.
Wild flower meadows have been introduced in cities around the world and there are examples of ‘pieces of nature’ being encouraged as a direct intervention in existing urban fabrics. This requires an understanding of the appropriate conditions for these interventions. For example, to encourage wild flowers on the grasslands of Hampstead Heath, the City of London had to invert or remove existing soils made nutrient-rich by past agricultural practices.
A flower meadow has been created in the city of Melbourne. It’s not comprised of native vegetation but is, nevertheless, intended to increase biodiversity and represents a lower fire risk than native vegetation. Not all vegetation is created equal. In many parts of Australia people are encouraged to remove vegetation around houses in bushfire-prone areas although mown lawns are acceptable because they can help to reduce fire intensity. Planning for ‘wild’ green ‘open space’ may appear problematic in a landscape prone to wildfires, but if the totality of the urban/wild space system is an artificial construct in any case, it should be designed to incorporate fire management.
Aliens, domestication and buildings that create habitat
It can be difficult to pursue nativism in cities, but if Fred Pearce is right, it doesn’t matter too much whether the ecosystem that is brought into the urban system is ‘pure’ as long as it works. Allowing the inclusion of alien, i.e., non-indigenous, species in the mix makes the job of putting nature at the core of the city easier—though no less controversial to those who doubt the wisdom of embracing the wild as part of urban planning and design.
Creating built form that accommodates nature is not new; dovecotes, after all, have been around for centuries, although their purpose was not to provide bird habitat for its own sake, but to domesticate a source of food and fertiliser. The primary reason to accommodate fauna and flora in otherwise human environments has been to domesticate a species because it is useful for companionship, food, other products (e.g. dung) and services (e.g. guard duty).
Non-human and well catered for as a productive member of the urban system of metropolitan Adelaide. Image: Paul Downton
Some building rating tools, such as the Australian ‘Green Star’ building rating system give, credit for increases in potential habitat. The credit is a small part of the total green building assessment but is significant for its inclusion. This rating system is an extant example of tools that measure aspects of the built environment which relate directly to the welfare of non-human species. As such, it may inform the development of appropriate design guidelines.
A brief trawl of the Internet indicates that most design education has yet to respond significantly to the challenges nature is confronted with in sharing the world with people. One small exception is a two week design program in Norway titled ‘Designing for non-human clients’ that asked “How would you create a design if your client was a native wetland plant species? What are its wants, needs and desires, and how does it connect to the humans which utilize its services?”.
Thinking like an earthworm: communicating species’ requirements and restoring creeks and meadows
Designers may thus think in terms of briefs being provided by non-human clients and legislators may think in terms of consulting with representatives of non-human species. This idea goes back decades. John Seed’s influential 1988 book ‘Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings’ put forward the concept for representatives of non-human beings to be given an opportunity to put their views in a general council. This idea has been adopted by a number of groups over the years and, inspired by the concept, I trialled a version of it as an urban design workshop for children as part of the Whyalla EcoCity Development design program in South Australia, 1996. It was conceived of as a way to raise awareness of the needs of non-human species and to engage the community with its urban ecosystem through the design program of an ecocity project. Children adopted personas as various species—fauna and flora—ranging from earthworms to kangaroos and through the ‘Council’ voiced their concerns for their character’s environment. It was a way of discovering parameters for non-human species that could guide the design of an ecocity.
Snapshots of the 1996 ‘Council of All Beings’ ecocity workshop in Whyalla, South Australia. Images: Paul Downton
There are some wonderful examples of redeveloping bits of the city around the idea of ‘releasing nature’—such as creek restoration and the revival of meadowlands in city parks, but my proposition is simple. Rather than be content with a scatter-gun approach to reintroducing nature to our cities we should be seeking systematic ways of embedding the requirements for nature to flourish in, around and between every development in every city and town on the planet. Rather than being integrated as part of occasional special events, urban nature should be routinely integral to every planning process because nature requires it, not because of marketplace demands.
Ecocity pioneer and creek restoration advocate Richard Register by restored Strawberry Creek, Berkeley circa 1996. Image: Paul Downton
Pulling petals off a daisy and illiterate biomimicry
The commodification of nature is dangerous and devalues its real worth, as I argued in my TNOC blog of March 2013. Natural systems have to be recognised, formally and spontaneously, as having intrinsic value that trumps all other measures of their worth such as their capacity to provide ecosystem services, not because such services are not valuable in a real sense, but because the valuations being made are the result of pseudo-rationalist reductionism and amount to laying out the stem and petals of a daisy on an economist’s desk and claiming to have measured the worth of a flower.
An economist’s view of a Nasturtium flower. Image: Paul Downton
Economic analyses of ecosystem services are inherently inadequate because they are unable to predict, and therefore measure and value, synergistic benefits that arise from those services. In the same way that reticulated sewage had impacts beyond healthier streets that could only be guessed at prior to its provision as a service, the synergistic benefits of natural systems are often unpredictable and not accounted for. Ecosystem services are valued in relation to a perception of their financial worth which depends on identifying the ‘service’ that’s provided. As a corollary, if a service isn’t, or can’t be identified, it will not, or cannot, be valued. This is the path to blind spots and selectivity based on partial knowledge. This pits butterflies against oak trees, slugs against daisies, worms against wolves. It presumes that nature can be assessed on a spreadsheet like a business, with profit and loss and monetary value overriding all other notions of value. There are those who say this is just a tool, a mechanism, a device for giving natural systems some value in a world that views all values in monetary terms, but that view is culture-bound to a particular world-view (consumer capitalist). It is one-eyed and reductionist—it is pulling petals off a daisy and then calling the pile of flower parts ‘more or less a daisy’.
There are two reasons for acknowledging the intrinsic value of natural systems: 1. because of its holistic beauty, 2. because no matter how hard we try we will never fully comprehend all the elements and their interactions in a natural system and can never be entirely sure that we do understand how it ‘works’.
In an era of accelerated climate change and ecological collapse it can be argued that many, if not all, natural systems are now so compromised and distorted by human intervention that their original intrinsic value and wholeness no longer hold—but that would be going down the slippery slope of pointless nihilism. As our tracks across the planet take us through ever more degraded landscapes, not only has nature dropped into the rear-view mirror, it is often behind the last bend in the road, invisible. If it ever does come into sight our children barely know how to describe it, as the language to describe nature is itself being lost in a world where authoritative publications such as the Oxford Junior Dictionary have decreed that words like ‘buttercup’ be usurped by ‘broadband’. The ability to see the world and understand what is being seen has to be practised and practiced. How can we develop biomimicry in a world where people don’t know the words to describe what they’re hoping to mimic?
Redacting the Buttercup. Image scanned from p.56-57 of Britain’s Wonderland of Nature, John R Crossland & J M Parrish, eds. Odhams Press 1934. Image: Paul Downton
Guidelines for not building
Effective design guidelines for non-human species may result in things not being built, or in them being demolished. As an example, recent research has established that 70 percent of remaining forest is within 1 km of the forest’s edge and subject to the degrading effects of fragmentation. Forest edges need to be retired. Considerably. If re-wilding advocates like George Monbiot are correct in their approach to wilderness restoration we will need to re-introduce species to regions that lost them hundreds, or even thousands of years ago. Some of these re-introductions may be by stand-in species when the original species has been made extinct—like the elephants that roamed Northern Europe and the British Isles.
For natural systems to operate optimally they generally need minimal human intervention. Restoring ecological health to the wilderness may require that it is maintained as wilderness, i.e. a place that is off-limits to most humans and their activities. Design guidelines for non-human species are likely to specify no-go zones. In order to thrive on this planet we need to occupy much less of it. The advent of virtual reality and the growth of vicarious experience through simulation may be increasing human alienation from the environment and from one another, but the upside may be that the perceived need to physically go into real wilderness will diminish, with positive consequences for real wilderness and the survival of a livable planet. Urban design guidelines for non-human species would almost certainly demand compact urban forms that released as much of the landscape as possible for non-human use.
Ecocity pioneer Paolo Soleri proposed cities of extreme density and zero sprawl, set in a more-or-less ‘undeveloped’ wild landscape. He may yet turn out to be prescient in this regard, along with the science fiction writers who described future cities like the dome enclaves in the movie version of Logan’s Run where the world outside the city walls had returned to wilderness and very few humans ever had cause to enter it. The domed city of Logan’s run was supposedly ecologically self-contained, an idea that has been visited a number of times in fiction. For example, in ‘This Other Eden’, inspired by Biosphere 2, Ben Elton takes the domed biosphere concept to one of its potential logically absurd conclusions as bespoke personal ecosystems where, as in Logan’s Run, the domes contain a closed ecosystem for humans to insulate them from a collapsing global ecosystem.
Looking out from an apartment through the apse of the bell foundry to a view of Arizona wilderness in Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, 1990. Image: Paul Downton
Buckminster Fuller was the pioneer of the modern domed city concept as something genuinely feasible when, in 1960, he proposed the first use of a dome to cover an entire city, or at least most of it, in his proposal for placing Manhattan under cover. Stretching from 62nd Street to 22nd, 1.6 km high and nearly 3 km across, his idea was that the dome would regulate the weather, reduce air pollution and make most of the existing air-conditioning systems in the city’s buildings redundant. Meanwhile, with similar ideas in mind Dubai is planning to build an entire city under a glass dome.
The idea of constructing sanctuaries that contain and protect biomes in microcosm, securing their survival against global environmental degradation, is almost noble. It is the concept of the zoo or giant greenhouse being able to act as a kind of insurance policy by providing a repository of species and natural environments under threat. The Eden Project in Cornwall, England, is a powerful and beautiful expression of this idea. The Eden Project also provides a vivid example of regenerative and transformative development, in which a built environment development has facilitated the restorative use of nature without pretending to restore exactly what was on the (heavily degraded) site in the past.
A tropical rainforest in the English countryside—The Eden Project in Cornwall. Image: Paul Downton
We know, however, that containing nature in order to protect it is very unlikely to work. Evidence from experiments such as Biosphere 2 suggests that containing nature successfully in entirely closed systems may be beyond our abilities, at least for the forseeable future. The project has demonstrated in detail how hard it is to bottle ecosystems and provides, if nothing else, a salutary lesson in how difficult it will be to establish habitats in space or on other planets. Putting aside the problems of livability and equity, containing humans is relatively easy (think prisons, walled cities…). The logical solution to retaining the integrity of the natural world into the future is not to try and package pieces of that world to protect them from larger environmental stresses, but to quarantine the human activities that are generating those stresses. Rather than incarcerate fragments of biosphere perhaps we should incarcerate the perpetrators of global damage within the walls of their primary engines of destruction, the city. This wouldn’t require domes so much as walls and policeable borders. It would be doable… except that urban systems are entirely interknit with the global biosphere, and without livability and equity in our cities we can kiss goodbye to any real hope of sustainability.
Conclusion
Guidelines can work at any scale, from city-wide to backyard, front garden, or apartment balcony, but may be most readily conceived and applied at the precinct or neighbourhood level where their influence on the larger urban system can, perhaps, be most effective—as a fractal of the system’s larger potential. Every city, every town and human settlement, should have a set of urban design guidelines for non-human species. The development and application of these guidelines would form the core of a new adventure in urbanism that has transformative potential and the capacity to lay the groundwork for a truly ecological civilisation—in which taking care of non-human species will, in turn, enhance the capabilities and conditions of the human animal.
Building rating tools and planning assessments should give credits for increases in potential habitat for non-human species
Green Building Council of Australia ‘Green Star’ ‘Land use and ecology’ credits
Built form, particularly at the level of individual buildings, precincts or neighbourhoods, should be designed specifically to accommodate nature and natural processes
All areas of vegetation be they parks, green walls or green roofs, should use substrates and soils that support the proliferation of healthy, ecologically healthy micro-organisms and sequester carbon
All road building must follow fauna-sensitive design guidelines
Nothing should be built that damages the health of natural ecosystems
Nothing should be built that damages the health of artificial ecosystems which support desirable urban non-human populations
Consideration should be given to demolishing, removing or adjusting elements of the built environment that compromise the health of natural ecosystems
Creek restoration projects
Consideration should be given to demolishing, removing or adjusting elements of the built environment that compromise the health of artificial ecosystems which support desirable urban non-human populations
Creek restoration projects
Human spatial occupation of terrestrial, maritime and fresh water environments should be minimised to a level compatible with the achievement of a ‘one planet’ ecological footprint
A guiding principle of all urban development must be to minimise, and eventually eliminate, urban sprawl
No-go zones should be instituted to limit human intrusion into natural ecosystems such as wilderness or near-wilderness areas
Wilderness Act (not quite ‘no-go’, but a start), USA 1964
Restoration and creation of environments for urban non-humans should proceed in parallel and integrated with the building of human environments
Berlin – 44% of the city’s surface area is made up of woods, farmland, water, allotment gardens, parks and sports gardens
Wilderness restoration should be considered to re-introduce species to regions from which they have been lost in the recent or distant past. Some of these re-introductions may be by stand-in species when the original species has been made extinct
Efforts being made to reintroduce wolves, bears and lynxes to the UK
Compact urban forms should be favoured that accommodate humans but protect as much of the landscape as possible for non-human use
Green belts and urban growth boundaries
Existing urban non-human species should be identified and, where appropriate, sustained and protected
Urban planning programs should consult widely and include a Council of All Beings, or similar, to raise awareness of the needs of urban non-humans and to engage the community with its urban ecosystem through the planning process
A reading of names. A procession. Placing flowers on memorials. Music. Moments of silence. Tolling of bells.
Certain abiding symbols and gestures give structure to our memorial remembrances. In particular, we have come to expect a ritual formality and consistency at the World Trade Center site for remembering September 11, 2001. But how do we mark the day at the hundreds of smaller, community-based memorials across the region and the country? These memorials are set in town parks, beaches, waterfronts, and civic grounds. They typically feature etched stones and evoke the healing power of nature with trees, shrubs, and flowers; each of the sites described below has had an event every year since 2001.
This work is part of our longitudinal research through the Living Memorials Project, which seeks to understand how people use nature and shape landscapes as restorative and reflective symbols and practices in remembrance of September 11, 2001. (To read more about the ongoing national research, see a prior TNOC blog post). A team of researchers conducted a collaborative ‘event ethnography’ of anniversary remembrances at six different community-based memorials throughout the New York City region on September 11, 2015. Event ethnographies are research efforts to document and analyze events; they are often used to cover large-scale, global meetings such as UN negotiations or conventions. But in this case, we conducted a dispersed event ethnography at local memorial remembrances throughout the region. We attended memorial events as participant observers documenting who attended, what the program was, what narratives framed the event, and how plants were used on the site. We wrote field notes, took photographs, and conducted a group debrief about our impressions and reflections, including notable patterns and exceptions.
Overall, we find that these memorial spaces are serving as sites of social meaning for local communities of friends, neighbors, and co-workers that are animated through formal events and everyday use. While many of the same rituals that are used at the national memorials are used at these locales, we find that activities and narratives vary with the creators of and audience for the site. Some are patriotic in tone, some call for peace, some call for a “war on terror”, some center on the emergency responders, and some focus on the local community.
Presented in chronological order of the time of the event (below), we offer a series of brief snapshots of how these memorial events occurred.
As night fell on September 11th at many of these local, hometown memorials distributed throughout the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, they were united under a common sky that, for a brief time, was aglow with Tribute in Light, two solid streams of light emanating from the September 11th Memorial and the former site of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan.
As researchers, we reflect on our own experiences traveling through smaller towns and communities over the years. Sharing stories with our families and friends. Listening and learning as others recount their successes and setbacks in creating these special spaces in their own communities. We find that the light continues to shine in many places throughout the region as people come together in their own time and fashion to remember, to reflect, to continue on, and to pass on traditions to future generations.
We find that nature’s elements—such as an ocean view, a grove of trees, a symbolic ‘survivor tree,’ or a single rose—accompany us and serve as touchstones on a journey of land-marking and remembrance.
* * *
Connecticut’s Living Memorial, Sherwood Island State Park, Westport, CT: September 10, 5:30pm
Approximately 150 people gathered on the shore of the Long Island Sound to pay respects and remember residents of Connecticut who perished on September 11, 2001. Created just six months after the event occurred, this site is the state’s memorial to September 11th; as such, state officials, including the Governor and Lieutenant Governor, were in attendance, as well as representatives from the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and the former Office of Family Support. In addition to patriotic songs and a color guard, the event featured a glee club performance of the song “Bridge Over Troubled Water” as requested by one of the organizers who is a September 11 family member. The organizers noted the therapeutic nature of creating the memorial and organizing this event. There has been a passing of the torch among several different project leaders who oversee the stewardship of the memorial and the event with continuity.
Nature symbolism is incorporated into the “Tree of Serenity”, a large sculpture of leaves, blossoms, and vines made from the cladding of the former World Trade Center and mounted on the park pavilion wall. During the ceremony, we were all invited to lay white roses on the etched marble memorial abutting the water’s edge. The site manager noted the challenges with maintaining a memorial situated so directly in the path of salt spray and tidal incursions, but the ongoing maintenance of the trees and plaques at sacred space is something to which the park remains committed.
Jacobi Medical Center, Bronx, NY: September 11, 8:30 am
Set on the hospital grounds and nestled into a wooded hillside, this site serves as a memorial to all victims from the Bronx, NY. It reflects Jacobi Medical Center’s ethos as a place that serves the community and promotes health and well-being. On September 11, the trauma center was prepared to receive survivors who, sadly, never arrived. But the hospital played a role in treating emergency responders. The event was attended by local hospital staff and administration—in lab coats, scrubs, and suits—many of whom were involved in the creation of the memorial. They were joined by their Community Advisory Board and numerous representatives of local public officials. The staff and advisory board provided the introductory remarks, the musical program (including Jacobi choir members singing Amazing Grace), the benediction, and a poem. Although public officials were acknowledge and thanked, they were not invited to speak.
A brief 30 minute ceremony included a moment of silence when the first plane hit; during that time you could hear the wind rustling, observe dappled sunlight through the trees, and watch commercial planes flying overhead. Being immersed in the natural setting was the goal of the site’s architect, who is retiring this year but noted that this memorial was the most meaningful project that she ever designed. The ceremony closed with everyone placing white carnations on the memorial. Though memories fade with time, one of the speakers noted that as long as she is alive, she is committed to continuing the tradition of holding September 11th remembrances.
Rockaway Tribute Park, Queens, NY: September 11, 8:30am
Approximately 200 people gathered in and around a small, triangular-shaped waterfront parcel on Jamaica Bay, including an array of FDNY and NYPD members, so many of whom live on the Rockaway Peninsula. Across the bay, the changed skyline of Lower Manhattan is visible from this memorial, which was created where people stood and witnessed the events of that day 14 years ago. The ceremony had few speeches, and focused on music, tolling bells, and reading of names. A procession of bagpipes was lead into the park by a four-man color guard, a new addition to the ceremony this year. Family and community members placed red roses at the memorial mosaic and steel relic from the World Trade Center site. Previously, the site had been flooded and damaged by Hurricane Sandy and was quickly repaired. Building upon this historical commitment, a NYC Parks Department administrator spoke about future repairs and improvements to the site. Stewardship of the site is also an ongoing act of care; every Tuesday morning, volunteers gather to weed, clean, and plant the site, marking the time when the planes hit the Twin Towers.
September 11 Family Group Memorial, Brooklyn, NY: Sept 11, 4:00pm
This fully bilingual service honored the memories of those of Russian descent who perished on September 11, 2001. Set in Asser Levy Park in Coney Island, the memorial features an inscribed plaque, benches, weeping willow—and a recently-planted ‘survivor tree’ that was grown from the surviving callery pear rescued from and returned to the World Trade Center site. It was clear that many in attendance had participated in prior years, as we observed that the procession “worked like clockwork”, with attendees lining up to place their flowers at the monument. The lead site steward seemed to be known and greeted by all of the hundreds in attendance—primarily adult and elderly residents of Russian descent as well as a number of local elected officials. The speeches called upon those assembled to “never forget” the memory of September 11, 2001, making parallels to the moral imperative never to forget what transpired in the Holocaust.
Glen Rock Assistance Council and Endowment (GRACE) Memorial at Veterans Park, Glen Rock, NJ: September 11, 6:30pm
For just a bit longer than usual, the NJ Transit commuter train lingered with its doors open as the train operators observed and paid respects to the town memorial service at the park directly adjacent to the train station. On a warm, late-summer Friday night, about 200 town residents—young and old—took time to reflect and remember. We gathered in front of a semi-circle of 11 plum trees that were planted in memory of the 11 victims from Glen Rock. GRACE always holds their event at this same time to allow family members who attend the service at the former World Trade Center site to then return home and participate in the Glen Rock service. Every victim’s name on the monument was adorned with bouquets of yellow flowers, a color that organizers chose because it symbolizes remembrance and being reunited. We were invited to process through the monument, holding white candles that were handed out and lit by the Boy Scouts.
The overarching theme of all the speeches and remarks focused on one word: community. In their brief and humble remarks, the Trustees invoked the Native American tradition of ‘wampum,’ which was originally used not as currency but to record and narrate history. Offering the ceremony as a gift, they joined together to retell the story of that day and related events in their community. This space was created by, for, and with the Glen Rock community by a committed set of nonprofit trustees focused on support for the September 11 family members, the survivors, and others in the Glen Rock community who experienced grave loss through acts of terrorism.
Babylon Hometown Memorial, Babylon, NY: September 11, 6:45pm
Much like the Rockaways, this coastal town in the middle of Long Island is home to many firefighters and first responders, over 100 of whom filled the walkways and sidewalks in full dress regalia. Bagpipes, patriotic music, and invocations from a Protestant minister and a Catholic priest shaped the program. This memorial is situated directly on the coastal dunes of the town beach, a setting that all the September 11 family members—and town residents in general—remember fondly. In addition to honoring each of the 48 victims from the town of Babylon, the memorial was designed to re-vegetate and enhance the dune ecosystem to support native flora and fauna to be more resilient to future floods. The site is dotted with native grasses, goldenrod, cedars, Rosa rugosa, and other hardy plants for the coastal setting. During the event, so many yellow sunflowers had already been handed out and placed at the memorial plaques that they had run out by the time we reached the front of the procession line. As the sun set, the fire trucks drove away, and beach goers strolled the sand to enjoy the last few hours of their Friday night.
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Lindsay K. Campbell, Erika S. Svendsen, Heather McMillen, Novem Auyeung, Rachel Holmes, Michelle Johnson, & Renae Reynolds New York City
Dr. Erika Svendsen is a social scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station and is based in New York City. Erika studies environmental stewardship and issues related to hybrid governance, collective resilience and human well-being.
Novem Auyeung is a Senior Scientist, Division of Forestry Horticulture & Natural Resources, NYC Parks. Novem guides conservation, research, and monitoring priorities for the Division.
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.
Victor Beumer, DelftUrban ecosystems have no insurance value, but that does’t mean the industry can’t have an impact on ecosystem services.
Henry Booth, West ChesterResearch demonstrates that it would behoove the insurance industry to back urban decision making that promotes natural ecosystem solutions and enhanced resilience. Yet, insurers are hesitant. Why?
Mitch Chester, MiamiOur maturing century of an evolving new environmental reality demands more proactive community involvement by casualty and property companies and re-insurers, which assess and thrive on hazard exposures.
Thomas Elmqvist, StockholmThere is an urgent need to scientifically explore methodologies and conceptual frameworks for assessing the insurance value of nature and to integrate this into the disaster risk management agenda.
Alexandros Gasparatos, TokyoDespite certain benefits, I am skeptical about the final acceptability of nature-based solutions in disaster-prone environments such as Japan.
Jaroslav Mysiak, VenicePublic authorities and private insurers should liaise to explore mutually beneficial partnerships. If nothing else, an open public debate about the ‘insurance value of ecosystem services’ may contribute to exploring synergies between ecosystem preservation and disaster risk reduction.
Rob Tinch, BrusselsInsurance values of green infrastructure should be thought of as precautionary and adaptive, not in expected present value terms.
Frank Vorhies, Divonne-les-BainsHow do we articulate the environmental and social co-benefits of disaster risk reduction so that it is clearly understood by the insurance industry and its customers?
Henrik von Wehrden, LüneburgRecognizing trade-offs is, in my opinion, one strongpoint of the ecosystem service concept. Understanding the interplay between a variety of services and their temporal long-term dynamics can help us to build a better system-level understanding.
Koko Warner, BonnResources to protect and restore ecosystems can be generated through a variety of insurance tools, such as parametric insurance approaches (trigger-based insurance payouts happen when a parameter like rainfall or wind speed reaches a certain threshold).
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
Insurance is the common modern hedge against risk. We pay in advance as a bet against later uncertain, but potentially larger, costs. The insurance industry (and sometimes society) helps mediate this risk mitigation strategy for us.
Urban life in a climate changed world presents risks to life, livelihood, and property. These risks, when they materialize, are costly, and sometimes catastrophic. When should they be borne? By whom? How much should be invested in risk reduction in advance? These are questions for our societies and for the organizations that contemplate and mediate risk, including the insurance industry.
Nature-based solutions and urban ecosystems (through the services they can provide) mitigate some of these risks. So, it is logical to ask: if nature-based infrastructure — such as wetland buffers, storm water catching bioswales, etc. — are effective mitigations for ocean surges and storms, what is their insurance value?
As an example, in the New York metropolitan region, Hurricane Sandy caused approximately 50 billion $US in damage, much of which was paid as claims to insurance (or lost altogether). What if we paid some of the costs of risk mitigation in advance by building on green infrastructure that provide protective ecosystem services? This is what insurance underwriters require of us when we insure our homes against, say, fire—that we reduce the chance of risk in advance. Should we not take the same strategy for resilience?
Or is the construction of nature-based mitigations and adaptations to climate change, in the form of large green infrastructure, solely a issue for government?
The insurance industry surely has a stake in this topic. What is it? What role can or does the industry take, either in a formal way, or to propel policy discussions?
Victor Beumer works at Deltares, where he is coordinator of the working group Green Infrastructure of the EU Water Platform.
Victor Beumer
Urban ecosystems have no insurance value. Let me elaborate this statement with an example of the application of ecosystem restoration for the purpose of climate adaptation in urban riverine systems.
In the region of Rotterdam, The Netherlands, we are active in a consortium whose ambition is to make urban river shores more natural. It concerns the river Meuse that flows through the city and has a tidal dynamic. The different partners have different goals — the city itself is trying to find ways to the increase livability in the city, especially in their water system, but also to create awareness among its citizens of living in a tidal water system. The Port of Rotterdam has the interest of balancing its portal growth with environmental quality and practicing circular economy. Worldwide Fund for Nature has set their goal to increase natural value in the tidal river system in and around Rotterdam, while the Dutch State water service (RWS) has requirements to generate a certain amount of natural shores to reach the criteria of Water Framework Directives (WFD). Deltares is developing knowledge that is combining these ambitions in nature-based solutions and strategies to implement them.
Examples of restoring tidal ecosystems in the city (artist impression)
You may notice that no partner is committing itself to the ambition of climate adaptation, while it would perfectly fit in the program. I think two reasons may have resulted in this. First, it might be unclear who is responsible for climate adaptation, not only because measures toward climate adaptation are extremely complicated and expensive but also because of the complex governance behind it. In the Netherlands we deal with water boards, provinces, municipalities, and the state itself regarding these issues. I can imagine some countries may have even more complex structures, or an absence of structure at all. Second, despite the extensive research on climate adaptation and accompanying solutions, it is very hard to pinpoint the effectiveness of riverine ecosystems on the mitigation of climate change effects in urban settings.
Now back to my statement: urban ecosystems have no insurance value. I think there are three clear reasons that underlie my statement:
It is rather uncertain how much the restoration of an urban ecosystem will provide in the mitigation of climate change effects; for example, to what extent restoration would prevent unwanted flooding. Top-end research institutes already have trouble making a quantitative correlation between restoration measures and mitigation benefits; therefore, an insurance company will never invest in such measures.
You must consider that an insurance company works with a proven business model. If it were not for highly extreme weather events (of which most are excluded from the insurance contract), damage costs are consumable. After a season of high damage costs, the insurance company will simply increase the yearly insurance premium to their clients in order to balance the business model again.
If measures for the mitigation of climate change effects would have an insurance value, why isn’t it that dikes and drainage measures with a civil-engineered character are financed with insurance capital? In such cases, it is much clearer what the exact quantitative benefits are from building a dike or setting up a drainage system than in cases of restored ecosystem services.
It may seem I have no faith in the potential impact of the insurance industry in the restoration of ecosystems for the purpose of mitigating climate change effects. But it is the opposite — I think the insurance industry is a major stakeholder in these situations. They have the ability to initiate processes of spatial change because of their position in a society: their lobby-power and their indirect effect on the attractiveness for citizens to live in a city where insurance costs are rising.
Henry Booth has worked for over 31 years as an insurance archaeologist. He specializes in the reconstruction and analysis of historical liability insurance coverage for US policyholders.
Henry Booth
The insurance industry has experienced, and counted the cost of, severe hurricane damage, protracted drought, and other natural catastrophes and has been described as “being on the front line” of climate risks. It would seem axiomatic that those working in insurance have an interest in supporting efforts to mitigate the consequences of disasters exacerbated by, or even wholly attributable to climate change. Readily available statistics (see, for example, National Association of Insurance Commissioners & The Center for Insurance Policy & Research on climate risk) regarding losses incurred since the turn of the 21st century provide further evidence that it would behoove the insurance industry to back urban decision making that promotes natural ecosystem solutions and enhanced resilience.
In the course of considering this question, I came upon various analyses in which the value of ecosystem benefits and initiatives was quantified. The cities involved were geographically diverse and included Toronto, Canada (greenbelt benefits, annual value $2.7 billion CDN) and Canberra, Australia (tree planting initiative, value over 4 years $20-67 million US). Belgian and Chinese ecosystem value assessments, sponsored by ICLEI-Global.org, were also detailed. These reports described the insurance value for ecosystem services as the contribution of green infrastructure and ecosystem services to increased resilience and reduced vulnerability to shock.
I also saw a treatise titled “Estimating the insurance value of ecosystem resilience” which analysis included calculations leading to the actual quantifying of the insurance value. The subject of the study was an area of farmland north of Melbourne, Australia, that is threatened by salinization due to rising water tables. The authors concluded that ecosystem resilience provides a sizeable economic insurance value. Here, at least theoretically, was some kind of hard data to support a discernible value that should be recognized by the insurance industry, who can underwrite accordingly.
It seems, however, from various studies by organizations such as Ceres, a non-profit advocating sustainability leadership, as well as by reference to articles in the news media, that the insurance industry is not exactly hurtling into the leadership role that might have been expected of them in this area. As a practical matter, for there to be a real insurance value of urban ecosystems and their services, I suppose that the industry has to be engaged in a way that, at least thus far, they are not.
Why not?
I have seen the phrase “ecological threshold” (ET) used in this connection and I think it provides one reason as to why most insurers in the US marketplace have provided a poor response in terms of leadership in the face of the worsening global impact of climate change . The ET is defined as “the point at which a relatively small change in external conditions causes a rapid change in an ecosystem”—in this sense, the ET is a measure of resilience. To the extent that the ability to quantify the insurance value of ecosystem servicesis affected by the distance to the ET (i.e. the closer the distance to the ET, the more susceptible to error any such valuation is), the riskier the underwriting of insurance for entities, such as cities, that may be at the margins of the ET, becomes.
Another reason that the insurance industry doesn’t want to engage natural solutions may be found in the evaluation of their exposure to underwriting losses by the Association of American Insurers (AIA). The AIA has said that most of their property/casualty product lines have limited or no exposure to climate-change-related losses. For the lines that do have exposure, weather is only one among a number of covered perils bringing in premium. This spread of product lines allows for stability, at least for the insurers, who can offset a possible loss-making line by multiple lines bringing in premium revenue. In addition, it is worth remembering that in the USA, flood and crop insurance are federal programs in which the insurance industry participates through administration—including policy issuance and claims handling—but not in terms of any negative financial exposure. This calls into question their incentive (at least financially) to support urban ecosystems as a means of mitigating risk.
Still, the AIA talks up its ability to respond and adapt in the face of changing conditions and generally supports sustainable development initiatives, provided they have been thoroughly examined and determined not to have the potential to create new hazards. The Ceres’ survey I mentioned above quotes the NAIC as encouraging insurance industry leaders to take the challenge presented by climate change more seriously. Couched in terms of relieving possible financial insolvency and protecting the insurance consumer, they say that insurance industry is uniquely positioned as a risk-bearer to reduce the impending impact of climate change.
Based on what I have seen, the “talk has been talked” by insurance industry regulators and commentators and the potential insurance value of ecosystem services has been ‘actuarialized’. But, for the reasons discussed above, so far this has not yet convinced the US insurance industry to “walk the walk.”
This may also be due to fear of the unknown and a desire not to let history repeat itself. My work is concerned with latent injury claims such as may arise through exposure to asbestos or as a result of environmental contamination. In this world, case facts and appropriate proof of coverage permitting, Comprehensive General Liability (CGL) insurance policies written as far back as the 1930s may respond to a modern claim. Because the insurance industry was marketing its new CGL product in the late 1930s (as well as related coverages over time), it was keen to point out that CGL covered everything that was not expressly excluded. The greed of the marketplace and breadth of coverage written caused massive insurer insolvency from the 1980s forward, including (almost) bringing down Lloyd’s of London.
Likewise, in 2004/2005 I worked on behalf of a large mid-western city whose liability insurance included coverage for their airports. After a convoluted process, the case—involving environmental property damage at, and adjacent to, the airport—settled for cents on the dollar relative to the actual limits of liability purchased by the city. There were some solid reasons for this, but also some knee jerk insurer activity designed to reduce their dollar exposure which, in order to get out from under the case with some not trivial money, the city accepted. This illustrates several things which a city seeking “insurance value”—e.g. a reduction in premium—on account of systems put in place to mitigate possible future losses from climate change-related events would do well to remember.
As a result of cases like these, claims are picked through in the utmost detail before any payment is made. And new frontiers, such as the evaluation of ecosystem for insurance purposes, are a long time in the reaching.
Mitchell A. Chester, Esq. is a trial attorney licensed in the State of Florida. In practice for 37 years, he is focused on identifying and seeking solutions to emerging legal and financial issues created by sea level rise (SLR) and climate impacts.
Mitchell Chester
Insurers, bond rating companies, and local governments as proponents of natural fortifications in vulnerable communities
As Naomi Klein points out in her excellent work, This Changes Everything, some insurance industry giants have been very vocal about climate risks, but have not done much to promote proactive climate policies to assist local communities.
Our maturing century of an evolving new environmental reality demands a more proactive community involvement by casualty and property companies and re-insurers, which assess and thrive on hazard exposures. Should they fail to take a more active public stance to deal with rising seas, significant opportunities to insure will soon be lost to the industry, insurance consumers will suffer, and society will fall further behind in needed adaptation and mitigation measures. The end result of such neglect may hasten the day when “retreat” strategies are utilized with more urgency than would be necessary if we had started to connect seemingly unrelated tools.
A curious opportunity thus presents itself. How can the risk industry use natural systems to prepare our towns and cities to maintain public and private economic resources, jobs, and infrastructure? Can a link be made between nature based coastal defense systems and insurance boardrooms? How can large insurers promote utilization of coastal forests, beach and dune restorations, fortified berms, wetlands, coral reefs, mangroves, oyster formations, and reforestation efforts to shore up their premium providing markets?
What stakeholders can be recruited to forge a financial nexus that will empower a partnership between political leaders and insurers to facilitate the public good? In the multiverse of climate change psychology, we can start thinking differently.
Let’s connect some major players.
Insurers depend on the need of local communities to have financial security so that underwriters can continue to provide their varied products. When those markets are challenged by climatic events such as progressive sea level rise, underwriters need to extend their current horizons beyond their usual annual financial risk analysis and partner with communities in natural and urban eco-system fortification strategies. The stakes are very high; the need for new economic strategies to prepare is urgent. According to RiskyBusiness.org, in the United States, “by 2050 between $66 billion worth of existing coastal property will likely be below sea level nationwide.” That’s just the beginning, and probably a conservative estimate at that. Mid-century is not that far away.
The goal is to extend the insurability of the very same risk-vulnerable communities that create yearly premium revenues for insurers. A successful enterprise-level public initiative joining insurance-oriented public-private partnerships with other financial stakeholders is a key opportunity. For example, bond rating companies which team up with insurance industry stakeholders to support nature-based protection solutions can forge an intelligent strategy to help local and regional governments answer tough questions about readiness for some climate events.
This formula would be a positive for both the insurers (by promoting the opportunity to retain insureds as customers for as long as possible in communities threatened by encroaching waters) and political leaders (who need solid bond ratings for public infrastructure). An important by-product of this type of teamwork would be a more durable coastline that protects the “built environment.”
There are historical examples of the insurance industry acting beyond current modes of insurer operations. According to Dr. Evan Mills, Staff Scientist for the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, insurers were a motivating force in the creation of early fire departments and acted as advocates for building codes. Now there are new opportunities. Dr. Mills adds, “While the primary focus in recent years has been on financially managing risks, physical risk management is receiving renewed attention and could play a large role in helping to preserve the insurability of coastal and other high risk areas.”
A new partnership: Coastal Defense Allies
How can we move insurers beyond improving building codes and into nature-based risk reduction? Insurers can structure their proactivity to support construction of natural coastal defense systems through these strategies:
Education of vulnerable insurance consumers about how adapting to climate events using nature-based defense strategies is a good place to start to create public support for the innovative solutions that can be employed by public officials. Grassroots endorsements of such programs, combined with public advocacy for the use of natural systems to protect regions, is a way to spark political will currently lacking in many public officials. According to the Insurance Information Institute, in September 2014, there were already examples of insurance industry advocacy for revised building codes. For example, in some parts of Southeastern Florida, new structure standards are being proposed and implemented in reaction to scientifically peer-reviewed studies about sea level rise. Beyond such efforts, promoting the use and construction of natural coastal defenses should be added to the list of insurer tools to reduce risk and to promote mitigation.
Large insurers can agree to insure multi-million dollar (or more) coastal developments with certain criteria as pre-conditions. For example, large projects on estuaries, inlets, and other coastal areas can be required to construct substantial wetland protection zones to help safeguard the insured’s investments and the risks assumed by the carriers. In locations where wetlands and other coastal defenses cannot be built or properly restored (and meaningful set backs are not physically possible), insurers can decline to accept the mounting risks that will be associated with such construction, while at the same time inducing potential insureds with financial incentives if they move their projects to more sustainable locations. Such incentives can be a major factor in motivating strategic, climate-smart placement of new hotels, office buildings, other commercial properties, and private residences in areas which are less susceptible to sea level rise and more affordable to insure when losses occur. The lesson is clear: Natural systems for coastal areas equals reduced risk. This approach takes insurers beyond the important but limited “green building” approach, such as LEED Certification, to what can be called a “green footprint” policy, which advocates environmental responsibility beyond the walls of built structures and into their surrounding neighborhoods.
Insurers can partner with municipal bond rating agencies to induce responsible governmental and insurance consumer action in promoting natural system defenses in coastal areas. This relationship can help identify needed infrastructure improvements at the “micro” level. “Local government credit quality,” which is measured by the health of municipal bond ratings when viewed from the perspective of climate threats, is already being watched by powerful entities such as Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investor Service, and Fitch Ratings. If local governments are not proactively able on their own to handle climate risks such as swelling oceans, they will ultimately receive lower credit ratings. Ignoring this naturally symbiotic fiscal relationship will produce a cycle of lower willingness to insure in areas that are suffering from lower bond scores. However, by enthusiastically working with municipal rating agencies to prevent credit downgrades, property and casualty and re-insurers can help consumers and local governments act stronger with regard to the risks they face. Intelligently slowing advancing waters can also fortify bond ratings so local governments can entice continued investments for public infrastructure needs.
Insurers can direct their investment dollars toward sea level rise adaptation projects in exchange for user fees. Public-private partnerships are great at such relationships. Just as Dragados USA invested in the expansion of Interstate 595 in Southeastern Florida in return for user fees on express lanes, insurers can infuse dollars into construction of natural defense systems in exchange for receiving neighborhood impact fees paid by local beneficiaries such as businesses, municipal governments, and homeowners.
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Government has limited financial resources. The same is true for private sector stakeholders. Each is interdependent with the other in the fight to fortify, for as long as possible, threatened coastal areas. They have an emerging role to play in supporting natural systems to reduce the risk in advance of storm surge, progressive sea level rise, saltwater intrusion, and tidal flooding. As the science of sea level rise advances, so too must our collective economic psychology to bring new players to the adaptation and mitigation fight.
Thomas Elmqvist is a professor in Natural Resource Management at Stockholm University and Theme Leader at the Stockholm Resilience Center. His research is on ecosystem services, land use change, natural disturbances and components of resilience including the role of social institutions.
Thomas Elmqvist
To date, the insurance value of ecosystems has been largely overlooked in research and practice and mostly discussed in relation to its role as a metaphor for the value of resilience. However, the concept has recently gained a lot of interest. The latest is an initiative within the EU to base economic development in Europe on nature-based solutions, where maintaining and strengthening the insurance value of ecosystems is a cornerstone.
The reason for this interest is partly that global natural disasters have shown a clear increasing trend. The annual reported economic damages from natural disasters have risen from less than 100 billion $US in 2000 to above 300 billion in 2011 and, between 2002 and 2013, natural disasters led to more than 80,000 fatalities and several hundreds of billions euros of damages in the European Union alone (European Commission, 2014). At the same time, studies have demonstrated the benefit of investment in natural capital and green infrastructure to reduce risks of disasters. For example, according to Korea Environment Institute (2011) for the year 2010, a 1 percent increase in size of green infrastructure, which includes parks, urban forests, and green roofs, is estimated to bring 6.4 percent reduction in economic loss caused by flooding in the cities of Korea.
So how do we include these values in development and urban planning?
Several attempts are now made to develop and operationalize the concept of insurance value of ecosystems. Currently, there are two definitions of the insurance value of ecosystems. The first emphasizes the capacity to generate ecosystem service benefits by maintaining a system within a given regime, despite disturbance and management uncertainty. This definition is closely linked to definitions of resilience and includes a more explicit economic approach. The second definition puts more emphasis on the value of the sustained capacity of ecosystems to reduce risks to human society caused by, for example, climate change-related excess precipitation, temperature, or by natural disasters (Expert group DG Research 2015); it more specifically targets disaster risk reduction.
A combination of the two seems like a way forward: where the insurance value of an ecosystem results from the system itself having the capacity to cope with external disturbances, and includes both an estimate of the risk reduction due to the physical presence of an ecosystem (e.g., the area of upstream land/number of downstream properties protected) and the capacity to sustain risk reduction (i.e., the resilience of the system).
Recognizing the effect of green infrastructure, the European Commission (EC) has initiated EC Green Infrastructure Strategy to promote green infrastructure in the EU. In fact, Target 2 of the EU 2020 Biodiversity Strategy requires that “by 2020, ecosystems and their services are maintained and enhanced by establishing green infrastructure and restoring at least 15 percent of degraded ecosystems.” This project aims to enhance quantity and diversity of urban green areas to increases security against natural disasters, which are projected to increase with climate change.
There is an urgent need to scientifically explore methodologies and conceptual frameworks for assessing the insurance value of nature and to integrate this into the disaster risk management agenda. This could be done, for example, by working with financial institutions and insurance companies to develop innovative ways for promoting nature-based solutions for risk management.
One strategy could be to translate risk reduction capacity into value through calculating benefit/investment ratios in landscape management and restoration. Here, the benefits would represent the reduced risk and potential lower premiums of land and property insurance policies. A new legal framework that serves to create incentives for maintaining or enhancing the insurance capacity of ecosystems should be explored. It would be important to first develop a framework where the models and data (including downscaled climate change scenarios) capturing the capacity of ecosystems to reduce risks are made compatible and harmonised with the risk assessment models and data used by the private insurance sector.
A complementary strategy would be to develop an economic approach to understanding ecosystems as representing the stock that generates the flow of services and to explore how to capture the long-term benefits of maintaining and enhancing that stock.
Thirdly, we should explore the cultural dimension of the insurance value of ecosystems and people’s perceptions of risks and insurance.
Alexandros Gasparatos is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at the University of Tokyo. As an ecological economist, he is interested in the development, refinement, and application of sustainability assessment and ecosystem services valuation tools.
Alexandros Gasparatos
Living in Tokyo, you become no stranger to the occasional typhoon or earthquake. And you can’t help but notice how the natural environment has been completely shaped throughout Japan, partly to reduce the risk of such events. Indeed, the need to ensure the safety of the population and the resilience of the socioeconomic system does not need to be overemphasized in a metropolis which is both the home of over 35 million people and the economic heart of the world’s 3rd largest economy.
As an ecological economist, I have been trying for several years to persuade others about the multiple benefits that we derive from nature. I whole-heartedly believe that urban ecosystems can indeed insure against certain environmental risks and offer co-benefits such as biodiversity conservation and cultural ecosystem services (e.g. recreation).
However, I also see three highly interconnected reasons that will make it very challenging to adopt such solutions, at least in the short-to-medium term. This is especially true in highly disaster-prone countries such as Japan, where the safety of the population following the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake sometimes overrides economic rationalities.
The first reason that urban ecosystem-based insurance solutions will be difficult to implement has to do simply with the several unknowns surrounding the feasibility and effectiveness of urban ecosystems to insure against different natural hazards, let alone the “reproducibility” of nature-based solutions, especially if we aim for their widespread adoption. More importantly, are there certain thresholds over which ecosystems cannot insure against these risks? And what are these thresholds?
Engineered mitigation strategies usually undergo a series of tests and refinements, both under laboratory and real-life conditions. So there is usually a threshold of (un)certainty about what these strategies can achieve and under what conditions. Undertaking this process with ecosystems (particularly undisturbed ecosystems) is a much more complicated task that is highly reliant on natural experiments. As a result, it can be subject to longer and more difficult verification processes.
The second reason has to do with public acceptability of mitigation solutions and how it can vary not only between different types of natural hazards (and severity levels), but also between cultural and socioeconomic settings. In some settings, “using nature to guard against disasters” equals “taking no mitigation action”. While I do not subscribe to this viewpoint, I cannot help but acknowledge that in such contexts it would be next to impossible to adopt nature-based solutions for disaster risk mitigation. This is because a decrease in the intended benefit of nature-based solutions, i.e. disaster mitigation to ensure the safety of the population at risk, will trample the provision of any other co-benefit that could be added in the equation.
The third reason has to do with assigning (and accepting) responsibility in the event of failure. Even if a nature-based solution is acceptable to the public, it is the decision maker adopting it that will ultimately be scrutinized in the event of a failure. I tend to believe that a nature-based solution will not be preferred over an engineered solution even if it was acceptable by the public, in part because a line of responsibility can be traced from the decision maker to the provider of this solution. A level of “quality” could be assured for an engineered solution, but would it be feasible to assure a level of “quality” in a disaster mitigation service offered by an ecosystem? Who would make such an assessment? An academic or a consultant could quantify (one way or another) the monetary benefits delivered from such an ecosystem service, but could they put their reputation on the line and “vouch” for the level of quality of the service that was ultimately delivered by an ecosystem?
I strongly believe that research could bridge several of the current knowledge gaps and possibly allow for the assurance if the “quality” of risk mitigation ecosystem services. Ultimately, I am highly skeptical that it will be easy to enhance the acceptability of ecosystem-based solutions for the public and decision makers. This might prove to be a too difficult hurdle in high disaster-prone environments such as Japan.
Dr. Jaroslav Mysiak is the director of the research division ‘Risk assessment and adaptation strategies’ at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change and senior scientist at the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei. His research concentrates on environmental economics and governance, and climate risk and adaptation.
Jaroslav Mysiak
Disaster insurance and nature-based solutions
The recent upswing of interest in disaster insurance from European policy makers and the revitalised appreciation of ecosystem services and nature-based solutions has coalesced into a notion of insurance value of ecosystem services. This term should not be understood as implying that insurers gain from or make a profit out of ecosystem services. Rather, it should be explored what role disaster insurance can (or should) play for conservation and restoration of environment.
In many places, ecosystem services (ESSs) attenuate natural hazard risks, locally or regionally, and hence have an economic value in the context of natural disaster insurance, even if no price actually is paid for their provision and/or maintenance. The implicit value of ESSs is the price difference of insurance under marginal changes of ESSs provision. In other words, it is the price differential for risk premiums homeowners pay for having their property insured, and what they would have to pay if the existing risk-mitigating ecosystem services were somehow eroded. Where, for example, ecosystems such as forests or wetlands in the upstream basin area do reduce or delay peak flow discharges, the flood risk and hence insurance prices are lower than in other places where no similar risk-mitigating ecosystem service is available.
Insurers do not trade with the ecosystem services; the latter are a part of the baseline risk calculations. ESSs are a public good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Their implicit utilisation does not distort the market and competition because all insurance undertakings have equal access to ESSs. The question is whether insurance prices can be used as an incentive for ecosystem conservation or an instrument (one of many) for recovering the ensuing costs?
Individual commercial insurance contracts are perhaps less suitable as incentives to this end, but other forms of insurance, including mutual and community-based schemes, may foster reduction of negative environmental externalities such as surface water drainage discharges. Because flood risk increases as a result of collective externalities, co-operative insurance can reward individual efforts to reduce surface runoff from one’s own property. Whether insurance is a better way that land or property taxes or rainwater collection charges should be explored by targeted research and policy trials.
Using insurance contracts for recovering costs of ecosystem restoration and maintenance is more prone to controversies. Whereas the ‘polluter-pay-principle’ (PPP) is firmly rooted in the European Treaty and secondary environmental legislation, the ‘beneficiary-pays-principle’ (BPP) is not. The European Commission (EC) does consider flood protection as a water service, the costs of which are to be recovered by water prices. But the sentence of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in the case Commission against Germany did not back-up the position of the EC, and the ECJ ruled that, as long as the (environmental) objectives are met, it is at the discretion of the national governments to choose the best suited policy instrument. But even in this case, the ecosystem services were not at the heart of the dispute.
There are practical and ethical aspects in the application of BPP. From a practical point of view, it is difficult to trace the individual benefits of ecosystem services. Hence, any attempt to apply BPP in practice will result in burdensome evidence collection and high transaction costs. Because those property owners who benefit most from existing ecosystem services are those who see the largest saving in risk premiums, the BPP would possibly need to use inverse proportional charges and transfer of collected revenues to areas where the ecosystems are degraded and need to be restored. From an ethical point of view, the BPP clashes against arguments related to social justice and historical responsibility for environmental changes. It is worthwhile, however, for public authorities and private insurers to liaise to explore mutually beneficial partnerships. If nothing else, an open public debate about the ‘insurance value of ecosystem services’ may contribute to exploring synergies between ecosystem preservation and disaster risk reduction.
Dr. Rob Tinch has 20 years' experience in environmental/ecological economics. Based in Brussels, he works mainly on European research projects.
Rob Tinch
Should we value the insurance services of urban green infrastructure?
Resilience of urban systems is an increasing concern, and urban green infrastructure has an important role to play in providing services and enhancing resilience. It may seem logical that we should attempt to value this ‘insurance value’, to incorporate these values in decision support and urban planning. And there is excellent research being carried out into this issue, on both theoretical and practical levels.
McPhearson et al. (2014) argue that insurance value reflects “the maintenance of ecosystem service benefits despite variability, disturbance and management uncertainty”. Pascual et al. (2015) make space for ‘natural insurance value’ (NIV) as a component of ‘total economic value’, with the more conventional components (use and non-use values) being classified as ‘total output value’ (TOV). Pascual et al. further divide NIV into ‘self-protection’ (lowering the risk of a disturbance event) and ‘self-insurance’ (reducing the size of loss from an event). NIV is quite a specific concept relating to “the value of one very specific function of resilience: to reduce an ecosystem user’s income risk from using ecosystem services under uncertainty” (Baumgärtner and Strunz, 2014:22).
Source: Pascual et al 2015
There are problems in operationalising this framework in valuation. Private discount rates are high, so private decisions about green infrastructure and insurance are likely to be socially sub-optimal. Non-linear relationships (edge effects, minimum viable areas, network effects…) will play an important role, making marginal valuation challenging and reducing scope for value transfer.
But these problems are not insurmountable, and valuation can be attempted. For certain types of infrastructure (e.g. natural flood defences) this could be done via expected damages and/or conventional prevention costs avoided. NIV can also form the basis of a stated preference instrument. For example, Figueroa and Pasten (2015) value local climate regulation services of forests via the change in insurance premium that risk-averse individuals are willing to pay when forest cover changes.
If, however, we’re thinking about long-term resilience to extreme scenarios and threats—as in adaptation to high-end scenarios of climate change—then conventional valuation faces serious limitations. We’re talking about different people, preferences, social-economic structures, technologies. There is high uncertainty about risks of disturbances, extrapolation well beyond current experience, unknown tipping-points/thresholds, irreversibilities and feedbacks. Under these circumstances, conventional valuation and CBA break down: their numerical ‘clarity’ becomes “especially and unusually misleading” (Weitzman, 2007). Standard welfare functions work for stable/increasing consumption paths but fail to reflect views on overshoots, fluctuations, and long-term threats to existence. Reducing complex, uncertain paths to expected present values destroys information on distribution across generations, on uncertainty regarding outcomes, and on risks of catastrophic/unacceptable outcomes.
Within a decision support context, therefore, the question of the ‘value’ of insurance might be of rather less interest than the question of the range of scenarios for which green infrastructure provides resilience, either in terms of security of a particular service, or more generally in terms of flexible natural capital stocks that could be designed to buffer against a wide range of possible scenarios. Aiming to pass flexible stocks and opportunities to future generations may be a much more useful goal than aiming to optimise expected present values given huge uncertainties. Attempting to value insurance from green infrastructure runs a risk of bringing a short-term, expected value focus to inherently long-term, resilience-providing investments. While attempts to value natural insurance are academically interesting, the insurance role of urban GI should be considered in the light of precaution, flexibility, adaptation and resilience-enhancing criteria, not expected values.
Acknowledgement: The ideas presented in this note have been prepared during work under European Commission contracts n° 603416 IMPRESSIONS (http://www.impressions-project.eu/) and n° 308393 OPERAs (http://www.operas-project.eu/ )
References:
Baumgärtner, S., Strunz, S., 2014. The economic insurance value of ecosystem resilience. Ecol. Econ. 101, 21–32.
Figueroa, E., & Pasten, R. (2015). The economic value of forests in supplying local climate regulation. Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics.
McPhearson, T., et al., Resilience of and through urban ecosystem services. Ecosystem Services (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2014.07.012i
Pascual, Unai, Mette Termansen, Katarina Hedlund, Lijbert Brussaard, Jack H. Faber, Sébastien Foudi, Philippe Lemanceau, and Sisse Liv Jørgensen. “On the value of soil biodiversity and ecosystem services.” Ecosystem Services 15 (2015): 11-18.
Weitzman, M.L. (2007). A review of the Stern Review on the economics of climate change. Journal of Economic Literature, 45:3, 703–724.
Francis Vorhies, the executive director of Earthmind, works on the interface between biodiversity, business, and the economy.
Francis Vorhies
Yes, we can mitigate disaster risk by investing in nature-based protection scheme areas. This includes natural areas set aside and managed for storms and floods. Such measures will reduce the costs of insuring for disasters, and the industry is capable of estimating cost reductions and adjusting insurance rates accordingly.
Importantly, investing in urban disaster risk mitigation can also have important economic and social co-benefits. Natural areas managed for risk mitigation can also be important areas for conserving biodiversity. The management programmes for these areas can also engage local communities, raise awareness on environmental protection, and provide learning opportunities for young and old alike. And, of course, natural areas can be important areas for recreation and relaxation.
Thus, investments in nature-based risk mitigation can strengthen environmental and social resilience within an urban area. In so doing, these investments further enhance the capacity of the area to mitigate disasters when they do occur. This in turn further reduces the potential costs of disasters and hence should lower the rates for insuring against these disasters. Do insurance companies recognize these savings?
This implies that there is both a public and a private benefit to more clearly articulating the co-benefits of disaster risk reduction.
But who will undertake the work needed to make these benefits transparent to the local policy makers and to the insurance industry? Perhaps this is a task for university researchers or for civil society organisations. Or perhaps the information scientists are providing is somehow not of the right form and this is a task for communicators.
How do we articulate the environmental and social co-benefits of disaster risk reduction so that it clearly understood by the insurance industry and its customers?
Henrik von Wehrden isa professor of natural science methods at Leuphana University in Lueneburg, Germany.
von Wehrden
What is the optimal sustainable size and management strategy of a city? Adding to the rising debate on optimal city sizes, the ecosystem service concept is increasingly recognized in urban planning. However, much of the literature to date focuses on biophysical entities of ecosystem services. Of course, planning of biophysical aspects of ecosystem services such as climate regulation or flood protection are surely necessary and helpful, but recognition of the perceptions and needs of citizens is also important. More research is needed that considers both normative perceptions and engages in transformation towards a more sustainable state of the given system.
Normative perceptions demand recognition of stakeholders, a labor intensive and often context-dependent task. However, recognition of stakeholders and their perception is crucial when it comes to recognition of the insurance risk, as it is stakeholders who will ultimately endure potential risks and claim compensation. Many urban settings are designed for the people, when they should be designed by the people. When cities started to grow massively, urban planners attempted to separate living from working, and commuting drastically increased. This potentially also led to higher disparities of risks between different neighborhoods, where some areas are at higher risk of catastrophic events than others. This concept was dramatically illustrated by the effects of Hurricane Katrina, where some neighborhoods suffered higher impacts than others.
Today, there is a global trend towards a recognition of functional diversity within cities, meaning that separation of different functions in urban settings often decreases. Neighborhoods with a higher diversity in function and ecosystem services may support a higher quality of life for citizens and a better resilience against drastic changes or catastrophes we face today. The concept of ecosystem services should therefore enable a diverse and resilient setting of services.
Urban planners should, in my opinion, not make the mistake of focusing on short-term optimization by using the ecosystem service approach. In contrast, planners need to include long-term effects of different ecosystem services signatures into their planning process. Costs that protect urban setting from rare catastrophes, especially, may only pay off on a long-term perspective. Planners and citizens need to recognize the value of these long-term services, where settings that are tightly planned may not allow for systems to tackle extremes, and may fail to deliver a just urban setting. Many stressors of urban environments are extreme by nature. Calculation of average system entities is relevant, but current challenges also demand the integration of extremes, including the interplay of extremes. For example, if heatwaves alter soil infiltration capacities, torrential rainfalls later in the year then create devastating floods. Recognizing trade-offs is, in my opinion, one strongpoint of the ecosystem service concept. Understanding the interplay between a variety of services and their temporal long-term dynamics can help us to build a better system understanding. While this is, in part, context dependent, many solutions are also transferable across different neighborhoods and economies.
Disparities are not only found within cities, but also between different economies. While insurance risks are comparably well accounted for in parts of Europe and North America, urban environments in most of the world are not covered by insurance, but are often threatened by risks. Insurance often focusses on individuals, but risks can threaten whole neighborhoods or even cities. Insurance can thus increase injustice within cities, where only those people that can afford insurance are protected. The costs of long term planning endeavors need to be added to the costs of urban settings, both for urban planners and citizens. While urban living would thus become more expensive, it may create a more just setting for all citizens. This may enable more sustainable planning for future cities by increasing equity and justice in cost calculation of urban areas. If this price is too high for citizens and planners, then we will continue to rely on insurances and tackling catastrophes only after they hit us.
Dr. Koko Warner is a Senior Scientist at the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security, where she leads the Environmental Migration, Social Vulnerability & Adaptation Section.
Koko Warner
Cities, climate change, and risk
People living in growing urban centers around the world face a variety of risks today related to climate change — storms and extreme weather, sea level rise, water availability are a few of the kinds of risks to people’s lives, livelihoods, and property. When these risks materialize they can be costly. For example, Hurricane Katrina caused around $US 125 billion in the wider New Orleans area when it made landfall in August 2005. Today, we primarily manage risk through insurance. We pay in advance to receive financial protection against future uncertain and potentially larger costs. The insurance industry (and sometimes society) offers us this financial protection.
Urban ecosystems and risk management
In some cities, trees, water systems, and other ecosystem services are increasingly viewed as resources for managing risks of climate change. For example, in coastal areas in tropical zones, mangroves reduce the overall impact of storm surges, reduce coastal erosion, and other risk factors to cities. Coral reefs play a similar role of buffering strong wave action and protecting vulnerable coastal settlements. Such ecosystems provide an important source of buffering and risk reduction.
These ecosystem services are also vulnerable to damage, however. In part because of the public goods nature of ecosystem services, innovative risk management solutions have begun to think about managing risks to them like public infrastructure using tools like insurance. Such infrastructures—natural or man-made—can be insured against damage.
Urban ecosystems and insurance
Resources to protect and restore ecosystems can be generated through a variety of insurance tools, such as parametric insurance approaches (trigger-based insurance payouts happen when a parameter like rainfall or wind speed reaches a certain threshold). Such tools can be combined with early warning systems linked with special training for urban populations on reducing risk to property and life. In case of an approaching storm, affected people would receive a prior warning and by applying knowledge gained through their training, secure their belongings effectively and relocate to a safe area. This scenario would reduce the overall damage to their livelihoods, while ensuring their eligibility for a payout if the storm crossed the predefined thresholds.
Especially in the case of ecosystem services in urban areas, the underlying risk can be ameliorated if the provision of such services is managed comprehensively. For example, in dense low-lying delta regions such as the Mekong Delta that are flood prone, insurance against damages caused by flooding is crucial. However, this insurance must operate hand in hand with the development of more climate resilient infrastructure, the application of building codes, or zoning regulations and other forms of adaptive planning that reduce the potential damage as much as possible.
The insurers we talk to emphasize the importance of risk reduction. By already reducing your risk through early warning systems and climate proofing infrastructure, you can better withstand the medium-frequency impacts and still get a payout from insurance in cases where damage exceeds what individuals can cope with. Some insurers even apply clauses in their policies that require insurance holders to exercise risk reduction. This way, a track record of effective risk reduction action could also lead to a reduction of insurance premiums in the long run. Our research shows that it’s not enough for people to just receive payouts; rather, the support they receive needs to be more holistic for them to be resilient in the face of climate change and other challenges.
Insurance basics. How does one best approach risks of different magnitudes and frequencies? The very frequent and less severe risks (25 years). These risks can only be addressed through insurance and other forms of risk transfer because they usually far exceed the coping capacities of the individuals at risk. However, insurance alone is not enough.
In the case of extreme but infrequently occurring risks, insurance approaches that are organized as public-private-partnerships, such as an insurance solution connected to a social safety net programme, might be able to provide better and more comprehensive protection. Such a solution would combine the strengths of all actors and divide the risks among many stakeholders. However, the important issue to keep in mind is to always link whatever insurance approach is selected to a comprehensive risk management approach.
Stormwater is a topic of great interest, especially now that the plight of water has been heightened by environmental pollution, dwindling resources, and growing frequency of severe storm events. What was once considered to be a nuisance or of little consequence has become the focus of city leaders around the world, triggering a call to action to support the better management of the critical, life giving natural resource: water. Artful Rainwater Design: Creative Ways to Manage Stormwater is a timely book that provides insight into the strategies, implementation methods, design parameters, and amenities that creative stormwater design can yield.
The discussion of stormwater management has evolved over the past twenties years and with the emergence of Artful Rainwater Design (ARD), a rebranded, specialty focus of stormwater infrastructure, suggests that not only can we achieve improved utilitarian benefits from this form of engineering, but when integrated as a feature design element of open space, can provide an added amenity with a multitude of benefits to the community. To this point, the book looks at these two overarching themes of rainwater design—amenity and utility—as a means to isolate and reflect on the virtues of ARD within both pragmatic and social realms. Separating these two realms thereby allows the audience, whom the authors describe as “rainwater management designers”, to understand the information and become inspired by these implementable solutions, which are illustrated and explained through the collection of built project references.
Before diving into particular projects, the authors are careful to define the word ‘amenity’ as well as how it can be understood in context of ARD. For the sake of the book, they note that the definition has two “inherent limitations” based on 1) that attractiveness or value is based on human appreciation (as opposed to “wildlife”) and 2) the measure of attractiveness is based on our understanding of mainstream United States of America’s tastes in landscape beauty. This comment reveals that the target audience is not “rainwater management designers” generally, but those designers specifically practicing in the United States.
In this way, the book provokes the question–what are the aesthetic choices and values placed on working in the certain context of the United States vs. other places throughout the world? How do cultural values directly or indirectly identify a ‘sense of water’ through choices of design expression (form, material, texture, color, etc.)? In the case of ‘green infrastructure’, the added layer of plant material, as a designed ecology or part of a larger environmental restoration effort, has the opportunity to portray the intent of ARD and to suggest its belonging to a particular biome (riparian, coastal, wetland, dry wash, etc.) While the book provides a ‘toolkit’ of ideas to achieve amenity and utility driven goals, the challenge relies on the designer to recognize the importance of choosing the appropriate design solution and plant material(s) that are compatible with the frequency and volume of stormwater that the system is designed to manage. Additionally, the designer will need to make an aesthetic decision based on the client/owner’s cultural acceptance of ‘landscape’, and within that, the sense of beauty found within landscape which are designed to be ‘natural’ vs. ‘built’. While amenity is framed in a particular way related to ARDs, the more significant value is triggering one’s awareness that the ARD is intended to improve the management of stormwater and potentially create a reference for the user to engage with.
The book, which has the look and feel of a textbook (in a helpful reference sense), is divided into four parts—Part 1) History and Background, Part 2) Achieving Amenity, Part 3) Achieving Utility, and Part 4) Case Studies. The projects described in Artful Rainwater Design are repeatedly referred to throughout the various parts of the book, which serves the authors’ purpose: to reveal the multi-beneficial nature of ARD as well as to express how goals and objectives can be met through various stormwater management techniques. Midway through the book, the authors present a means to identify and cross correlate the goals, objectives, and techniques through a diagram (Table 3.1 The complex web of ARD utility goals, objectives, and techniques on page 103) which becomes the basis for explaining the assortment of techniques found in Part Three. I found this diagram to be particularly intriguing; it has the potential to serve as a key organizational feature for the book, suggesting a sense of decision making based on values from both amenities and utilities that the book offers.
Part 1: The History of Stormwater Management and Background for Artful Rainwater Design is an important beginning for readers to place stormwater management into a historical context. The authors trace the original aim of stormwater management, which was driven by basic engineering aims (drain water as efficiently as possible; protect from flooding) and narrate how the practice is moving towards a more holistic and less infrastructure-dependent practice. Motivated by early practices of “defensive planning”, stormwater management was formerly considered a means of protection against nature, delineating a defensive boundary to protect from flooding and, as a result, creating a hermetic seal around development. Echols and Pennypacker point to the change in attitude towards stormwater management that was triggered by the environmental movement of the 1960s, and that reached new heights with the release of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature (1969), both of which cast a greater awareness that water quality and environmental pollution were interconnected. The authors explain that this awareness by the science community and federal oversight by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which led to the Clean Water Act in 1972, represented the initial steps to more widespread acknowledgement of and the development of a regulatory framework for non-point pollution. Non-point pollution would become the operative lens through which ARD approaches would unfold—finding a means to “green” more urbanized areas and to capture and treat the “first flush” (or first ½ inch to 1 ½ inches of rainfall) of pollutants before they made their way into the tributary system. With better environmental analysis and understanding of non-point pollution, ‘stormwater management’ came to include quality in addition to (flood) control, necessitating the rethinking of conventional stormwater management systems.
Towards the end of Part 1, the authors indirectly define Artful Rainwater Design (ARD) as a strategy that conceives of “…sustainable stormwater management that is not only visually appealing but also informative about the way it manages rain.” This strategy became a movement in the 1990s as the cities of Portland and Seattle sought to make their stormwater infrastructural systems more adept at achieving higher water quality for the sake of threatened environmental species, as well as to allow people to better understand and appreciate how water is handled in urban and suburban areas. While the word ‘artful’ may be subjective, the term “Artful Rainwater Design” provides a non-technical means of packaging the virtues of this new form of infrastructure, which can bring such amenities as community and social benefits. The term encapsulates the multi-beneficial aspects that Artful Rainwater Design can bring and the ideas it promotes, which readers can explore in their own work.
Amenity, expressed through Artful Rainwater Design. Image: Echols
Within Part 2:Achieving Amenity with Artful Rainwater Design, the authors discuss many so-called “amenity” goals found within the practice of landscape design. For the purposes of the book, the goals are specific to the ARD projects featured therein, including: Education, Recreation, Safety, Public Relations (PR), and Aesthetic Richness. Based on these goals, the authors gleaned specific objectives and associated them with the various techniques deployed in the ARD designs. For each goal, the authors provide a table breaking down the various objectives and coupling them with various design techniques, yielding a helpful quick reference for the reader. This design palette of techniques is subsequently translated through the case study projects, which illuminate the possible variation in creating amenities that transcend traditional realms of site design and move into realms of architecture, art, and street design.
Utility, diagrammatically portraying Artful Rainwater Design. Image: Echols and Maurer
Part 3:Achieving Utility with Artful Rainwater Design, begins with an overview of utility and how to distinguish stormwater management from stormwater treatment. Treatment is “a subset of management that addresses water quality.” I appreciated the author’s note that “..the utility strategies used in ARD are ones that promote stormwater management that clearly celebrates rain.” This is fundamental to their objective of creating awareness about water as a resource on which we depend; such awareness is greatly needed within our communities, particularly in our more urbanized neighborhoods. I would urge that ARD utility strategies are a celebration of water ; they promote and instill a sense of stewardship and a means of direct/indirect learning about how to support a healthier environment.
Part 4: Case Studies of Artful Rainwater Design, the appendix section, provides a helpful profile for each project included in the book. These profiles comprise: the background story (basis for the project, owner/client discussion, funding), both amenity and utility goals are identified as easily readable graphic icons, an in-depth description of both amenity and utility attributes of the project, concluding notes, and the sources for each case study. Information on the project site’s related climate data as well as the construction costs would be greatly appreciated addition for the book’s next edition. As a Southern California native,living with multi-year periods of prolonged drought, I would have found it interesting and beneficial for the authors to have included information on each project’s climate—particularly rainfall—and implementation costs. It is without question that water is everyone’s concern. However, for areas that see very little rainfall whatsoever, it is even more important to illuminate to the public and to convince landowners that every drop of water that lands on a site area needs to be accounted for. Any storm water management design should allow for the value of that water to be maximized.
This book achieves its goal—to explain and express the opportunities that are afforded by Artful Rainwater Design. As a landscape architect and urban designer, I hope that the authors return to this topic and take a deeper look at questions that arise in the (professional) industry, including performance metrics, cost-benefit analyses, and challenges placed on these systems over time. As many cities are faced with rising costs for maintenance and capital expenditures, providing both direct and indirect cost benefits (or means of describing these benefits in terms of their monetary value) to the policy makers along with a description of anticipated costs over the life of a project would provide the incentive to include these exciting advancements in stormwater infrastructure early on, enabling more creative design expressions while securing a healthier environment.
Overall, this book is a worthwhile read and a useful reference for “rainwater management designers”, including professional (and student) landscape architects, engineers, and architects. I am also hopeful that, given the book’s open-ended title, it will find its way into the hands of policy makers, city managers, and community builders at large here in the U.S.A. and abroad, providing more creative means to achieve a healthier, visually rich, water-responsive landscape.
At the end of my last post, Unintended Consequences: When Environmental “Goods” Turn Bad, I raised the idea that sometimes environmental “bads” can also turn good, and that it usually works better when nobody “looks”. I mean that this process works better when the inhabitants take ownership of their living environment and transform it outside of any legal framework or official urban project, as the remarkable history of La Fournillère illustrates: there, inhabitants of the area turned a wasteland for squatters into a very popular park, combining leisure amenities and urban agriculture by the will of the people and with their own priorities. In the end, they manipulated the local authorities to enact their initiative—which was first reputed as “illegal”—into an official amenity.
Let’s start at the beginning and go back to the 19th century, when La Fournillère was just a village west of Nantes, in France. Indeed, La Fournillère was a small village, but it was on the verge of becoming an industrial suburb of fruit and vegetable canneries. Why did canneries decided to locate there? Well, the soil was rich, and the climate permitted cultivation of early vegetables with high added value, such as field peas, baby carrots, or asparagus. These canneries developed a policy of industrial paternalism and provided kitchen gardens to their workers. By 1908, La Fournillère was annexed to the city of Nantes; in the fifties, social housing complexes were built.
La Fournillère in 1962. Image: Archives de Nantes
The kitchen gardens were still there, and the plot where they were established finally took the name of La Fournillère, while the former village vanished from the collective memory. Now, in 2015, as all the other kitchen gardens of the agglomeration of Nantes disappeared under the growing pressure from real estate development, La Fournillère is still alive and kicking: the plot now covers 3 hectares (7.5 acres) and has become a natural and cultural landmark for Nantes and its region.
Situation Map Downtown Nantes. Image: Google Maps“Still Alive and Kicking”: The Jardins Potagers. Image: Google Maps
What happened? First, a fortunate conjunction of circumstances, then, local people’s initiative and creativity, converged to preserve this improbable greenery in the middle of the city. Together with the social housing complexes came successive infrastructure projects that were supposed to be built, in the spirit of the post-war boom, on the site of the kitchen gardens of La Fournillère; the first one planned was an access highway to downtown Nantes. But as soon as they were designed, they were abandoned one after the other due to local political turmoil. The workers had been evicted from their kitchen gardens, but nothing happened after and the place turned into wasteland.
But the people living nearby—especially those from the social housing, who didn’t have access to nature—had their eyes on this abandoned land and its rich soils. After enough time had elapsed, they made their move! In the mid-seventies and later, one after the other, first at night, next in broad daylight, they progressively occupied La Fournillère. By the end of the nineties, there were more than 70 squatting gardeners at La Fournillère. To get a piece of land there “you simply have to start digging the ground somewhere—a corner that looks vacant—and wait. If nobody’s coming at you, you keep digging and tending your future garden. A few days more, or a week, without any hostility from your neighbors, means that this piece of land is ostensibly yours: you can start fencing, sowing, and socializing with your neighbors, as mentioned by Elisabeth Pasquier, who wrote a seminal book about La Fournillère. Today, two categories of squatting gardeners coexist at La Fournillère.
On the one side, some of the former evicted gardeners—or their children—came back. They are locals, who descended from Brittany or Vendée (French regions). They are few and they stick together in La Fournillère. They keep closely connected via common emblematic activities, such as pétanque (bocce tournament), aperitif (before-dinner drinks), or barbecues. This category of gardeners is made of poor but not marginalized people. They live in substandard one-family houses: usually old people with a small retirement pension or younger poor workers. They know how to cultivate a small piece of land.
On the other side is a completely different category. These gardeners come from the disadvantaged social housing complexes around La Fournillère. The new ones have different origins and ethnic backgrounds, being mainly Portuguese and North Africans. They are usually unemployed and live on social benefits. For them, “owning” a piece of land at La Fournillère is a way of getting of keeping active: in these new gardens they can develop a social network inside, but also outside, their own community. It is not all about vegetables and fruits, really. These gardeners are called “les autres” (the others) by the “local” gardeners that form the first category, but they represent an overwhelming majority, with nearly 4 gardeners out of 5. For them, La Fournillère is a place were they can settle symbolically—a “circulatory area” (territoire circulatoire), within the meaning of Alain Tarrius, and a place where they can grow roots literally.
Usually, both groups ignore each other. But there is, nonetheless, an element of solidarity that brings them together: they all are fully aware of how precarious and uncertain the future of La Fournillère is. They are squatters and they can be expelled at any time. These gardens don’t exist officially. Both groups know they have to be united to respond effectively to any of the many menaces that threaten their plot—a new urban project, theft and vandalism in their gardens from people from outside, etc. Such a situation fosters social links.
In the early 90s, the new city council of Nantes took interest again in La Fournillère, but this time with the project of creating a neighborhood park there. First, the gardeners were in shock. Most of them went claiming that if the city were going to stick its nose in their gardens, they’d rather leave the garden. But then, something happened. In a sudden about-face, both groups of gardeners—the original and the new gardeners, the “locals” and the “others”—started uniting their forces and organizing themselves collectively to impose their view on this project: they wanted their seat at the decision-making table and went for it. They also knew that the game of illegally occupying pieces of land couldn’t go on forever: it was time for them to make their situation legal, preferably in their own terms. A form of collective intelligence emerged, and with it the seeds of a collective identity.
Rather than making demands and organizing protests, they decided to draw out an in-depth report on the actual situation at La Fournillère, providing an exact overview with maps of the different pieces of land, including the spatial pattern of the different gardens and their history, all of which was realized with the help of Elisabeth Pasquier. The report displayed the long work of clearing and planting that they had done as well the public goods they had created, and illustrated the social and ecological value of these gardens for the whole city. They demonstrated that La Fournillère worked quite well as it was, whereas the project developed by the municipality could very well fail and destroy the whole site, unless it took into account their experiences and included the organization of La Fournillère as it currently stood. And finally, they claimed that they wanted to be decision-making partners in the project.
This time, the planners of the city of Nantes played smart. They understood that the opposition of the gardeners to the project was not just a negative NIMBY reaction, but the expression of collective knowledge and skills. Once they saw that what was happening—the emergence of an alternative proposal with strong local community (and, therefore, elector) support, they agreed to discuss with the gardener’s collective. According to both parties, the negotiations were no picnic, but at the end of a long process—and against all odds—the city council decided to support the gardeners’ alternative project and to abandon its own proposal. The alternative project envisioned a park organized around the existing kitchen gardens and organized under the form of islets or patches. Paths for walkers and runners entwined with these islets, connecting them. In the very center of the park would be a venue for initiating visitors to the recycling of material and waste in urban gardening, including waste sorting and composting to enhance biomass and biodiversity. The gardeners determined themselves what would be the rules for living together in the park: more frugal and wiser water-management; a ban on cutting any tree in one’s own gardens, since trees are considered to be common resources; etc.
A shack and a garden at La Fournillère. Image: Miraorti
What was the outcome of such a mysterious alchemy?
Paths… Image: Miraorti
Let’s pay a visit to La Fournillère today. Placed in the middle of the city, La Fournillère is a particularly charming and unusually large urban greenspace. In essence, it is a weird farming plot that you can only reach by walking: to get there, one must take two narrow lanes that lead to a kind of huge clearing covered by gardens, scattered trees, and bushes. There, large, colored water tanks surround shacks made out of recycled materials, isolated or gathered in small patches. Plastic strips flapping in the wind form a strange parody of fencing. A maze of service alleys spreads around five key items: three wells, a pond, and an improvised pétanque court. Two larger paths cross the whole area. They were created by the footsteps of thousands of people: traversing La Fournillère is a shortcut for many men and women going to school, to work, or simply to the market in Nantes. And such a lovely shortcut it is, with flowers, trees, birds everywhere, wonderful scents, and friendly people. As a bonus, it gives the thrill of crossing a no man’s land without any official regulation, outside the world of master plans—a brief taste of freedom in an otherwise ordered life.
…And shortcuts. Image: Miraorti
La Fournillère is also a social theater, where the gardeners perpetually reinvent values and attitudes to live together, as well as learn new agricultural skills. These kitchen gardens—predominately maintained by men, though a bit less recently—give these grown-ups a place where they can get away from it all and become kids again, a gang of Tom Sawyers playing in the wild, a modest parenthesis in their ordinary lives, since at the end of the day they’ll go back home. At La Fournillère, they mimic their household environment to better subvert it: a painting is clamped to the wall of a shack, but outdoors; a former doormat is turned into a blackout curtain, while an old curtain becomes a doormat. They indulge themselves by putting things in the garden that wouldn’t be permitted anywhere else in the city: a doll’s head impaled on a pole, a teddy bear crucified on a picket fence, pinup posters stuck to the walls of the shacks with the mention “beware of the bitch” (“Attention pute méchante”), etc.
Recycling of material and waste. Image: MiraortiA scarecrow, or something else? Image: Aredius44Gateway Park (Huntington Station). Image: villagetattler.comWho will find the “kamkokola”? Image: Miraorti
Naturally, when you ask them why they do these things, the gardeners always have a rational explanation: the doll was found in a garbage can and is used to protect the tip of the stake; the teddy bear is used as a scarecrow; and so on. Sometimes the explanation is: “It is just fun”, as with the pinup posters. But hidden behind these simple explanations, developed so matter-of-factly, are some really weird and meaningful features: why are all these figures—the doll’s head, the teddy bear, the pinup—always positioned so as to look outwards, right in the eyes of the visitors? Why doesn’t the gardener cover all his stakes, if it is a matter of protection—especially considering that the tip of the unique covered pole protrudes from the doll’s head? Why is there such a proliferation of human and animal figures among the installations exhibited in the gardens (I previously spared you the description of a huge inflatable Casimir, an anthropomorphic orange dinosaur, which was the main character of a French kids’ TV show in the beginning of the 80s) or of big toy soldiers? Are these anthropomorphic setups there to protect the gardens when the gardeners are not there? Curiously enough, it appears that painted anthropomorphic figures are frequent at the entrance of the community gardens like in New York, for example at Gateway Park in Huntington Station. Are they some kind of kamkokolas? (The inhabitants of the Trobriand islands in Papua New Guinea fittedkamkokolas—vertical poles on which two smaller diagonal poles rest, where spirits are supposed to live and watch over the gardens— at every corner of their gardens). All these figures can be seen as attempts by the gardeners to take ownership of the gardens and protect them.
Apart from the magic of the place and its beauty, the gardens of La Fournillère also are kitchen gardens and have, as such, straightforward economic interests: cabbages, potatoes, and other vegetables are planted to feed the family year-round. Protecting this interest is a good reason to erect the gate-keepers discussed above, even though they are mostly symbolic.
One of the many merits of La Fournillère is surely that, in marginal lands, very different people found a way to build something really beautiful, to live together there and, finally, to stand up together to bring their views to the planners of the city in a very constructive way. As such, it is a symbol of what can be done when everybody gets involved in the planning procedures. La Fournillère is about the right to decide and the power to create, renewing and deepening what Henri Lefebvre calls Le Droit à la Ville (Lefebvre 1968).
The example of La Fournillère also gives us insight into how interstitial abandoned urban areas may be one of cities’ main seedbeds of creative innovation. To return to my opening point, it is about how environmental “bads” can be turned into environmental goods: in this case, an environmental that gives consistency to the whole urban fabric of Nantes emerged from what otherwise might have been a space of environmental bad. Though it may have been unwittingly, the gardeners’ actions contributed to the preservation of Nantes’s urban identity.
As I discussed in a recent paper (Mancebo 2015) a city does not arise from the sole will and skill of architects, planners, surveyors, and politicians. Like a golem, a city has to be nurtured and molded by its inhabitants, which finally put their values in its mouth to bring it to life. And such a process needs time. Quite differently from the frenetic timeline and knee-jerk reactions to any opposition that elected officials and planners, guided by their own short-term interests (the next election, compliance with construction deadlines etc.), impose on urban policies, La Fournillère is a wonderful example of the proper use of slowness (Le bon usage de la lenteur) in urban planning, as depicted by Pierre Sansot (Sansot 2000). Grasping what happened at La Fournillère eventually means deciphering the eternal game between what the authorities, whatever their form, try to impose on the social fabric, and what the social fabric—here, the gardeners—impose on the authorities, through deception or force, through confrontation or bargaining. It is all about how people take ownership over their own city.
1. Lefebvre H., 1968, Le droit à la ville, Editions Anthropos, Paris.
2. Mancebo F., 2015, “Insights for a Better Future in an Unfair World – Combining Social Justice with Sustainability”, in Transitions to Sustainability, Mancebo F., Sachs I. eds, pp. 105-116, Springer.
3. Sansot P., 2000, Du bon usage de la lenteur, Rivages Poche.
“We all know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?” says a famous Zen Koan. At first consideration, it seems impossible to conjecture about the “just city” without having already in mind what is an “unjust city,” and vice versa. But my opinion is that this is wrong: It is possible to define what a “just city” is per se. To give flesh and substance to this essay I will focus on Paris and sustainability. First, because they are my fields of expertise, but also because sustainability and justice are two alleged priorities cited lavishly by the planners and elected officials to promote their urban policies. Their doxa considers that these two priorities are perfectly synergistic, but they are not. Planning for one may produce redlines in the other: sustainable policies often increase social injustice, as shown by Elizabeth Burton in a large sample of UK cities, or by Neil Smith when he denounces the veil thrown over profoundly unfair environmental dynamics that involve the departure of socially vulnerable people out of newly gentrified ecological neighborhoods. In fact sustainability and justice are like two rival brothers, and combining them in urban policies is certainly challenging.
This means that fostering a just city is not about repairing previous mistakes to help people reduced to the status of “victims.” It is not about undoing what seems unjust. It never works. The expressions of injustice are exactly what they look like: expressions, representations, and symptoms that something has been going wrong. They are like the pipe in the famous painting of Magritte, called “The Treachery of Images.” It shows a pipe, and written under it are the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). This statement means that the painting itself is not a real pipe. You can’t smoke it. You can’t touch it. Similarly, the expressions of injustice are the result of complex dynamics. We cannot make things better only by opposing the expressions of injustice in the city. It would be like treating a disease only by addressing only the symptoms, or trying to smoke the pipe of Magritte.
Once upon a time the city was called the “marvelous” one: Rio de Janeiro, cidade maravilhosa. Rio was the birthplace of samba, chorinho and bossa nova; internationally famous for supposedly being a city of fun and carnival 365 days a year, it has been the capital city of Brazilian proverbial optimism. Austrian novelist, playwright and biographer Stefan Zweig regarded it as the symbol and epitome of the whole of Brazil in his book Brazil, Land of the Future, published in 1941. Sure, it was as an idealization, some would say an ideological invention. After all, there were dictatorships (between 1937 and 1945 and again between 1964 and 1985) and their cortege of atrocities; there were huge socio-economic disparities; and so on. But the idea of a “marvelous city” seemed at least plausible. No ideology survives if there is not at least a grain of truth in it.
Through the lens of this meeting, it was evident once again, that Latin American cities share great similarities in their cultural heritage, development history, planning tradition, and social structure, offering big opportunities to share successful experiences for a sustainable future. Following this spirit during the symposium, the Latin-America chapter of SURE was launched in order to exchange information and expertise in the coming future. At this point, we are delighted to invite TNOC’s readers and writers interested in joining SURE to become members of the society, with a special invitation to those from Latin America. Our understanding of urban ecosystems is already emerging, but with little explanation of how these ecosystems function. A collaborative exchange will bring a better understanding, allowing cities to build a harmonious society with Nature.
I believe that Urban Planning & Design (UP&D) should be considered a ‘Right’ and brought to public dialogue. The democratization of UP&D would be a significant step towards the achievement of just and equal cities. Exercising this right would be an effective means for bringing about much-needed socio-environmental change.
One of the root causes of inequity is urban and rural differentiation
![In It Together[Image 02][Lokko]](https://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/In-It-TogetherImage-02Lokko1-387x560.jpg)
If I said earlier that no city piques the imagination quite like the African city, then I should also add that no city destabilises the idea of the ‘collective’ quite like Johannesburg. It is at once a city of anti-collectives and hyper-collectives; endless satellites of tightly-knit, tightly-policed enclaves that sit uneasily together, bound by a network of freeways, roads, taxi-routes and railway lines. For the most part, the enclaves remain intact, policed along class- rather than race-lines, although there are three or four pockets of genuinely mixed occupation (and here I invoke race not class) that have sprung up in the past decade. Within these enclaves, an exaggerated sense of community persists; an ‘us vs. them’ attitude where the terms are interchangeable—one man’s ‘us’ is another’s ‘them’, and so on. As a Jo’burger, the temptation to wallow in the city’s dystopian self-image is all too tempting. Disconnected, segregated, dysfunctional, dangerous . . . these are readily accessible, perniciously familiar tropes. Yet, thumbing through Sennett, it’s comforting (if that’s the right word) to recognise another truth: it was ever thus.
The rewards for human society of maintaining natural systems, apart from giving it additional capacity for long-term survival, includes the promise of a bold new urbanism, the aesthetics of which transcend the architectural fashions of the day and possess the gorgeous fractal messiness of nature—that messiness which confuses eyes and sensibilities trained by years of seeing orthogonal space and threatens minds crated up in cubicles, fed from cartons and boxed in by built environments. A radical urbanism, perhaps like that imagined by Street Farm over four decades ago as ‘alive rather than inert’, in which ‘a profusion of sprouting, breathing, photosynthesising, living things surround and entwine human dwellings’ (p.102 Stephen E Hunt in 
Nature-based solutions and urban ecosystems (through the services they can provide) mitigate some of these risks. So, it is logical to ask: if nature-based infrastructure — such as wetland buffers, storm water catching bioswales, etc. — are effective mitigations for ocean surges and storms, what is their insurance value?
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