Pope Francis visits the United States in late September 2015. He will speak in Washington, D.C., New York, and Philadelphia, including an address at the United Nations and to a full Congress. His visit will be an opportunity for reflection and—who knows—might possibly be a turning point in the United States’ long, tortuous debate about climate change. The Pope’s recent Encyclical on the Environment and Climate Change, Laudato si, was certainly a welcome acknowledgement that an unimaginable crisis is upon us. His urgent appeal not only recognized the immensity of the sustainability challenge we face, but also called for immediate action.
By situating a duty to care about environmental degradation squarely within the Catholic religious tradition, Pope Francis may have shown us a path beyond the political and ideological thicket that has for too long stymied any genuine public conversation about climate change here in the United States. As Rob Verchick put it, Pope Francis has the power to “vouch” that climate change is real, that it is happening now, and that urgent action is required. With any luck, his visit to the United States will give him many opportunities to be the climate change “voucher” we so desperately need. Speaking directly to the likes of Oklahoma Senator Inhofe, the infamous “Senator with a snowball,” the earnest chemist turned priest might be able to open hearts and minds too long closed to the frightening changes going on, and to the deep injustice that climate change perpetrates against the most vulnerable among us. Barring unforeseen catastrophes, Pope Francis’s words will dominate the news cycle. That means that he has a unique opportunity to focus global and national attention on the looming ecological catastrophe that is climate change, and to bring its tragic consequences into the popular media’s 24/7 coverage of his visit.
Catholic Church England and Wales/Mazur-catholicnews.org.uk/flickr/cc
I was recently asked by Newsday to reflect on what I would say to Pope Francis. What came to mind immediately was a line from the New Union Prayer Book: “No longer can we tear the world apart to make our fire.” For me, this line from the prayer welcoming the Sabbath encapsulates the sustainability challenge—how to meet the needs and aspirations of 7.4 billion people while also keeping our impact on the earth within planetary boundaries.
As a species, we are failing miserably in this task. We poison our air, land, and water to “build our fire,” while pumping alarming amounts of carbon into our atmosphere in the process. Unchecked, human exploitation of the planet has created environmental “haves” and “have-nots”—permitting a “throwaway” lifestyle for the few, while leaving billions in abject poverty.
This disparity is as true within nations as it is between them. Looking more closely at how just one or two pollutants affect people in a single city can help make the distributional justice concerns clear. The New York metro region as a whole ranks unfavorably high for air pollution—the 12th worst metro area in the country. In 2014, Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island all received F grades from the American Lung Association for ozone pollution. The health impacts New Yorkers suffer because of these unacceptable levels of pollution are nothing short of disastrous. According to the New York Department of Mental Health and Hygiene, ozone and particulate matter, two common pollutants from combustion of fossil fuels, are directly responsible for 3,400 premature deaths in NYC each year. For perspective, that means that on average, eight to ten times as many New Yorkers are killed by just these two pollutants as are murdered in any given year.
The morbidity effects are even more striking. These pollutants are responsible for more than 2,000 asthma-related hospital admissions, and over 6,900 asthma-related emergency room visits, each year.
These statistics are grim and getting worse. And, the distribution of this environmental suffering is staggeringly unequal. Asthma rates rise dramatically as income goes down. In New York, asthma rates for those with annual household incomes below $15,000 is more than double the rates for households with annual incomes exceeding $75,000 (15 percent versus 6.8 percent). Over 17 percent of African-American children suffer from asthma, compared to 8.7 percent for white children and 11 percent for Latino/a children. Children under four years of age from low-income areas are more than four times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma than children from high-income areas. Here, in these few statistics about the relationship between one disease and one or two pollutants, we see the entire climate justice problem writ small.
The Pope has been an eloquent voice for the current and projected victims of climate change. Over the next few days, he will have the biggest possible platforms from which to try to turn that eloquence into action. Pope Francis will address the entire world as he opens the United Nations Sustainability Summit. He will then speak to the United States during an unprecedented address to a joint session of Congress. The Pope’s remarkable popularity with Catholics, non-Catholics, and, indeed, even with atheists, suggests that his words will matter.
Both addresses will give Pope Francis the opportunity to make real the crises of climate change. The ice is melting, the seas are rising, and we are on track for catastrophe. Those suffering first (and perhaps most) contributed least to the problem and benefited least from the development and exploitation that got us here. Pope Francis can help every-day Americans appreciate that climate change is far more than an esoteric scientific question—it is an immediate, moral one. He can breathe life into New York’s asthma statistics, and bring home the grave environmental inequalities our lifestyle creates.
I hope that Pope Francis will use his American visit to emphasize that while sustainability is a question of survival, it is also a question of justice—environmental justice. Billions of people live in penury, contributing virtually nothing to the planetary crisis, while we privileged few tear the world apart to make our fires. The children of New York deserve more; the children of the world deserve more!
“We need to re-establish the link between city and land.”
At the opening ceremony of the Economics of Happiness conference, we were happily greeted with this statement from the event’s director, Dr. Helena Norberg-Hodge, who called for everyone present (governments, NGOs, activists, and local citizens) to re-establish the link between city and land, and in turn, as we understand, to use this link as a basis for how we go about our economic and social activities.
Dr. Helena Norberg-Hodge gives the opening keynote at the Economics Of Happiness conference in Jeonju, South Korea.
Norberg-Hodge called for all activists to be “big picture” activists, united by a shared vision for social and ecological wellbeing. “How do we get there?” she asked the audience “re-connect to others and re-connect to nature.”
It’s a sentiment that we’ve all seen echoing not only through activist circles, but also through professions from architecture and urban design to politics and law. Bringing individuals from such professions together, the Economics of Happiness is a global initiative, bolstered by the success of the recent film of the same name. Through the film and the parent nonprofit organization Local Futures, which Norberg-Hodge directs, it would seem that a global cultural phenomenon is slowly taking root in cities and communities around the world.
Global though it may be, Economics of Happiness is perhaps more appropriately described as a global collection of local initiatives, all of which are united by a shared vision rooted in things like compassion and connection. The conference was uplifting—as you might expect a conference on the Economics of Happiness would be—and filled with advice and success stories presented by speakers from the USA, UK, Japan, and South Korea.
Of particular interest to The Nature of Cities readers, the conference was supported largely by Jeonju city’s Mayor Seong Su Kim, who wants to use it as a blueprint for building a happy, sustainable city, one that looks at a more “useful” measurement than GDP and per-capita income in order to gauge the wellbeing of its citizens. Speakers chimed in to this effect through multiple viewpoints including law, industry, public service, and—perhaps most pervasively—the subjects were sprouting directly from the social and ecological ground in which they are planted.
“The roots of all our major problems are intertwined” noted Keibo Oiwa, author of Slow is Beautiful, and founder of Japan’s Sloth Club, a movement for slow living amidst one of the most fast paced countries in the world. By the acknowledgment that all of our problems are intertwined, we also come to see that the solutions, too, are intertwined.
As in nature itself, sharing one success broadly and across disciplines and borders, will ultimately lead to more success.
A common theme at the conference, Oiwa asked us to look to nature, saying that “Nature seems to know where to stop its growth and progress… how to take just enough”, further suggesting that the major deficiency in the way we think of and carry out “progress” is that this process is fundamentally disconnected from nature, from reality, and often from other people.
Oiwa’s philosophy also pushes us to see how re-connecting to nature and each other as the basis of our design and building process does not necessarily mean stopping progress.
All we have to do is look at the progress of nature itself for a case study, at how fast nature grows and re-generates and innovates; we can have a sustainable progress that is connected to and informed by nature, giving us amazing progress and beauty side by side.
Speaker Janelle Orsi took the concept of ‘connection’ from a social angle, giving a sharp yet witty critique of the “sharing economy.” A highly contested term in urban areas, the “sharing economy” is most often identified, ironically, with highly lucrative business models like Uber and AirBnB, which claim “sharing” as their philosophy.
Orsi, who is co-founder of the Sustainable Economies Law Center in Oakland, California, gave the conference attendees a different take on the meaning of a sharing economy, calling for us to look more deeply at what sharing means, and whether we can morally justify profiting wildly from others and still call it sharing.
The “real sharing economy”, Orsi says, is seen in projects such as community gardens, worker-owned businesses, car shares, and collaborations. She gave a convincing argument for a new local economy, one based on four levels of increasing scale: relationships (such as borrowing and sharing on a temporary basis), agreements (such as co-owning and space sharing), organizations (such as a food co-op), and universal systems of support (public transit, basic income, universal healthcare).
Janelle Orsi explains her ‘legal wedge’ in altering legal structures to encourage local economic activity.
Being a lawyer by trade, Orsi is engaged with “fixing” the restrictive laws we find—perhaps most often at state and local levels—which prohibit a true sharing economy from emerging. “We need different laws and regulations”, said Orsi, suggesting a set of laws for what she calls “extractive” commercial entities, and a different set for “generative” entities like co-operatives and non profit organizations.
The intent is to be more restrictive on profit driven organizations, which tend to “extract” wealth from a local economy, and to be more encouraging for those organizations which generate wealth and wellbeing for the people.
Reflecting strongly the thoughts of the late economist E.F. Schumacher, another constant theme throughout most of the conference was the call to be small. Schumacher’s 1973 book, “Small is Beautiful”, continues to be a highly influential call for economic thinking which puts people and the environment as central concerns.
Smallness encourages better relationships between people and the environment, and better relationships between people and the environment give us a framework to take development actions that have sustainability and wellbeing built into their core. Schumacher’s concepts are statements of absolute simplicity and clarity at once.
Speaking to this point, Neil McInroy, from the U.K. based Centre for Local Economic Strategies, gave a plan to “bring the economy back home” by building out a full, diverse, and resilient local economy that merges “commercial, public, and social” economic sectors.
Perhaps most surprising was Jeonju’s Mayor Kim’s very sincere call to action for building a happy and sustainable city, much of it surrounding ecological and agriculture-related themes.
Mayor Kim, who was a huge champion of bringing the Economics of Happiness event to his city—and who insisted that the organizers make it an annual event going forward—gave a very daring strategy which, he noted, goes against the national agenda in South Korea. This is not easy territory for a South Korean mayor to tread, even in a mid-sized city like Jeonju.
One of Mayor Kim’s main points was ecology, where he highlighted efforts by the city to invest in local biodiversity, reforestation, and cutting river pollution. Of these, the call for biodiversity is one of the most critical, yet is only beginning to take form in public forums.
Mayor Kim might be happy to know, however, that such topics are well discussed here on TNOC:
It’s good to see that biodiversity is now a major target for Mayor Kim and Jeonju City.
In the area of food and agriculture, Kim noted that only 10 percent of food consumed in Jeonju city is from local sources, and he made a call for the city to aim for food sovereignty.
Food sovereignty!
Those are big words, and the Mayor backed them up at least in part, by highlighting the establishment of a city “food charter” which will mandate the use of locally-produced organic foods in schools and city-government organizations. This is only a small gesture compared to what would need to happen for food municipal sovereignty, but the momentum is moving in the right direction.
How will the Mayor go about true food sovereignty? Rather than focusing on urban agriculture, the Mayor primarily pointed to focusing on the broad areas of agricultural land that he is fortunate to have surrounding the city.
Mayor Kim has a year to get to work before the next Economics of Happiness conference, and though none of us reading this are likely strangers to empty promises from political figures, in his corner, the Mayor had a good few hundred citizens in attendance at the conference and related workshops.
One of the small community-oriented breakout sessions at the conference, which worked to engage more local voices.
Immediately following the conference, there were local workshops, and the Mayor implemented a distributed network of small neighborhood support centers to deal with social economy and urban regeneration, instead of just having a central development office. Small is Beautiful.
Small, local, connected to the environment and to each other: it’s an enviable framework that is taking root both here in Jeonju, and in cities around the world where local governments and citizens are mobilizing to take local actions.
All of that local legwork could add up to some big global changes.
Several years ago, Helle Søholt, CEO of Gehl Architects, said that New York would be the most sustainable city in the world if only it fixed its streets. Million Trees NYC is one effort in that direction, as is the CitiBike bike share programme and its corresponding—if slowly-expanding and inconsistently enforced—infrastructure of protected bike lanes. But it is New York’s overall design of ‘complete streets’ that has probably been the most impactful on its sustainability profile. For years, much of Manhattan’s open space was indisputably dominated by the private car. Nowhere epitomized this better than Times Square, where pedestrians famously had to weave in and out of active vehicular rights-of-way to avoid total stoppage on the narrow sidewalks. Then, in 2009, New York decided to experiment with the pedestrianization of the area. The 2010 decision to make this permanent vaulted NYC into the vanguard of sustainable streets.
New York’s Times Square before (left) and after (right) the replacement of a number of vehicular lanes with a pedestrian plaza.
In 2015, with the plaza paved and old problems solved, new controversies are on the front page: unscrupulous hucksters and unclothed demonstrators (a return of some of the louche elements suppressed by the previous mayor, Michael Bloomberg). With the final touches of the repaved pedestrian plaza barely in place, the current Mayor (Bill de Blasio) is calling for the plaza to be removed and cars returned. A number of officials, including the City Council Speaker; the Borough President; the New York Times architecture critic; the head of the NGO, Transportation Alternatives; and others in the field of urbanism have essentially asked whether the Mayor is out of his mind. Nevertheless, de Blasio still appears to be acquiescing to the lone voice of his Police Commissioner that the redeveloped space is simply ungovernable.
Times Square’s pedestrian plaza and an unexpected encounter with Las Desnudas.
Whence the drastic change? Since the installation of the plazas the empirical evidence boasts reduced pedestrian injuries and vehicle collisions (ironically, one of the aims of the current Mayor’s impressive Vision Zero), increased pedestrian traffic and increased sales and commercial rents. With such success, why would he throw it all away? Assuming that his position is not entirely capricious, we might also ask whether there is something deeper at issue. During his election campaign, Mayor de Blasio faced a right-wing critique that his pro-equity platform would return New York to the ‘bad old days’ of crime-ridden subways, drug addict-filled parks, and prostitute-frequented streets, and despite his virtual dismantling of the dreadful stop-and-frisk policy, his choice of police commissioner Bratton (and Bratton’s continuance of draconian ‘broken windows’ policing) suggest that he is still fighting the nemesis of the ‘soft on crime’ liberal label.
The problem is, that fight is getting in the way of one of the most empirically successful sustainable streets initiatives in New York’s history. For many New Yorkers, the specter of its sudden removal is unimaginable. At the same time, several years ago, many of us would never have dreamed of (as transformational a change as) the pedestrianization of Times Square. But then again, going back even further—two or three —few probably imagined a crime-free Times Square (Disney notwithstanding). Yet that, too, happened.
Taken as a whole, the various changes in and around Times Square begin to suggest a chronic pattern of reactionary responses to some of the most visible crises of the time. A series of high-profile pedestrian deaths preceded Mayor de Blasio’s Vision Zero, which since 2014 has led to lower speed limits and redesigned sidewalk curbs, including in Times Square. New York’s loss of the title of top ‘world commerce center’ to London and loss to the state government on instituting ‘congestion pricing’ (which London had successfully premiered) preceded ex-Mayor Bloomberg’s 2010 efforts to pedestrianize Times Square. And a violent crime peak while ex-Mayor Giuliani was District Attorney preceded his mayoral run, following which he cracked down on illicit activity in Times Square in 1994. The question is, could New York even dream of managing all of these challenges simultaneously? As Richard Sennett wrote earlier this year, ‘the way forward lies in urbanists stepping out of our professional confines, drawing on other disciplines, no matter how amateurishly.’
Let’s head to psychology for a moment.
2. Is it about us?
Psychologists refer us to the ‘miracle question’. It is usually phrased as ‘what would a state of perfection look like?’ and it prompts the subject to envision an ideal state of improvement that is disconnected from the status quo and any intervening impediments. However—and somewhat ironically—few subjects are motivated to ask the question unless they are acutely aware that they are already doing very badly. Behavior change often starts at the bottom. Before a subject reaches the lowest point he or she may be in a ‘purgatory of indifference’, from within which it may be difficult to recognize dysfunction. Realizing that one is seriously off course from one’s life vision, there is motivation to rediscover an internal sense of purpose. This, in turn, may provide the incentive for maintaining those improvements over time; a virtuous cycle, if you will, but not an automatic one.
New York, like many cities, does have a wavering uncertainty about how to manage public space and balance spontaneity and control, an uncertainty into which Times Square’s hucksters and Desnudas may have tapped. But perhaps they have not tapped deeply enough to motivate the city to do more than tackle its symptoms as they flare up. As a result, a fear of returning to the ‘bad old days’ seems to have subsumed the recently—if shallowly—solved problems of pedestrian injury. It is also not uncommon for a sitting mayor to erase the legacy project of his predecessor (megalomania, if you like). But does the sudden push to eliminate the pedestrian plaza also reflect a collective, self-destructive tendency? Decades ago, Rem Koolhaas suggested that Manhattan, the ‘capital of perpetual crisis’, had always been obsessed with destroying and remaking itself, in a form of collective delirium, and that it revels in its resulting ‘culture of congestion’. Does it reflect amnesia about the city’s recent past of heightened pedestrian hazards? Paranoia about its far past of runaway crime? Or just hysteria about topless women (perfectly legal in New York City, by the way) in general?
Perhaps, like so many New Yorkers, Times Square needs a shrink—that is, a psychiatrist. Its symptoms suggest the need for a paradigm shift toward a culture of sharing public space that, as city leadership changes, can be sustained over time.
3. How can we sustain behavior change?
The general principles of behavior change—what motivates, how to maintain it over time—also apply to more complex group situations. The city is a sociospatial construct, co-created between people and place, each shaping the other. Indeed, culture and behavior concretize and coalesce in public space like nowhere else. Do behavior change principles also apply to Times Square and New York: its residents, their values, the leaders they elect to represent them, the policies those leaders institute to address their priorities, the police they appoint to enforce them, the influence of the police on the behavior of people, and so on?
We believe so, but with two main differences. First, where there is hierarchy, there is a gap between decision making and those experiencing its consequences; this requires a correspondingly strong communication strategy. And second, more people means more divergent priorities; this requires a strategy for balancing them. Group therapy can help. It transforms one’s peers into ‘mirrors’ that provide increased clarity about one’s own and others’ values and priorities. The mutual vulnerability this generates often increases the intent of the group to learn and improve, rather than protect and regress. And this dynamic is key to effectively addressing deeper issues rather than superficially treating the symptoms of group dysfunction: this is the cultural paradigm shift we seek.
Over time, however, behavior change is vulnerable to relapse. The conflicting priorities and short-term electoral cycles of cities only exacerbate this tendency. A maintenance plan can help, particularly where earlier motivation has disappeared. The technique of motivational interviewing, developed by clinical psychologists William Miller and Stephen Rollnick, gives some guidance on sustaining behavior change over the long term. It works by eliminating conflicting motivations that are inconsistent with the subject’s deeper values. Unless such ambivalence is resolved, behavioral relapse remains a serious risk. Motivational interviewing has five stages: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance.
As change is a process rather than an outcome, progression through the stages is not always linear. In that sense, periodic maintenance may be the most critical stage. How does it work? Psychologists cite three key factors. First, social support, which carries the decision maker through the detours of the change process. Second, public announcement of the plan to change, which encourages accountability. And third, the creation of an escape plan early in the change process, which preemptively anticipates threats and prompts appropriate coping strategies, improving its long-term prognosis.
4. Three cities’ change trajectories
Can behavior change interventions positively influence sustainable urban improvement? And can they bring attention to invisible solved problems as much as visibly unsolved ones, particularly in light of electoral cycles and short-term memory? How does the experience of other cities speak to this? Let’s have a look.
Curitiba
That the city of Curitiba features very high on last year’s inaugural The Competitiveness of Cities, published by the World Economic Forum, will not surprise anyone. Curitiba also ranks at the top of the Latin America Green City Index sponsored by Siemens. For many, the city’s name is synonymous with sustainability. Less talked about is the significant obstacles the city overcame and whether its formerly dire sustainability situation might have motivated its current ‘best in class’ status. Four decades ago, Curitiba’s exceptionally high population growth and declining landfill capacity yielded an unmanageable non-organic waste surplus. (In motivational interviewing terms, one might call this the city’s precontemplation stage.) This was most acute in the city’s burgeoning hillside favelas. Here, there were so few streets that garbage vehicles could barely penetrate the built fabric to clear its growing refuse piles, the runoff from which was contaminating adjacent water bodies. As vermin and disease spread, the city debated how to act. (This suggests the contemplation stage.)
Curitiba’s ‘Lixo Que Não E Lixo’ (Garbage That Is Not Garbage) programme in which informal collectors exchange sorted recyclables for local produce.
These rock-bottom conditions prompted the city to take action that ultimately led to a low-cost, world-leading waste management system. Its communication strategy was to educate children to be the agents of change who would encourage other residents to separate their garbage (reasonably tagged as the preparation stage). This Garbage Purchase program encouraged neighborhood associations to manage waste collection containers at the peripheries of hard-to-access favelas, with the incentive that each bag of sorted garbage yielded one bus ticket (clearly the action stage). There were early complications with this arrangement, but the city levered a new challenge—in the form of the 1991 cholera epidemic and its agricultural surplus—to strengthen and sustain its original improvement in the form of the Cambio Verde program, which matches sorted recyclables with local produce (arguably part of the maintenance stage, even if unorthodox). To date, Curitiba has a nearly 100 percent recycling rate.
Kitakyushu
Kitakyushu is another high performer, but one that actively touts its dramatic rise from environmental catastrophe several decades ago. In the 1960s, the city developed into one of the largest industrial cities in Japan. Lacking environmental safeguards, its adjacent Dokai Bay became so contaminated from industrial wastewater that it was soon referred to as the ‘Bay of Death’ after one study showed that even the bacteria normally endemic to saltwater bodies could not survive there (perhaps the precontemplation stage). The air fared no better. Skies were said to be filled with coal dust and ‘seven colours of smoke’ from red iron oxide particles, which alerted the public to the gravity of the situation (contemplation). Today, however, Kitakyushu bills itself as the ‘world capital of sustainable development.’
Kitakyushu’s surreal-looking Dokai Bay in the 1960s, when the city had become an industrial powerhouse but before environmental safeguards had been put in place.A contemporary view of Kitakyushu’s Dokai Bay.
How did they do it? First, the city prepared for large-scale change by capitalizing on many residents’ firsthand experience of the pollution to motivate and align interest groups to a common goal then communicated their purpose to increase public understanding and support (preparation, clearly). Then it acted by instituting voluntary pollution agreements with the private sector, setting stringent new pollution reduction targets, dredging the bay, creating pollution surveillance centres and building a model eco-town (most certainly action). Kitakyushu maintained momentum over the long term with a second phase plan focused on the new goal of reaching zero-emissions/zero-waste status through improvements in renewable energy and green space (maintenance, in a variation from Curitiba).
Copenhagen
Copenhagen residents assembled in the 1970s to demand the return of protected bike lanes.
Also at the very top of the European Green City Index, Copenhagen is a model for non-motorized transit in cities worldwide. But its trajectory is more circuitous. By the mid-20th century, urban cycling culture was widespread. But as incomes and car ownership rose in the 1960s, the city experienced a sharp modal shift toward driving (precontemplation). Traffic worsened and car parks mushroomed; even Copenhagen’s Strøget, now famous as a completely pedestrian street, was filled with cars. Change had occurred over a sufficiently quick period that the marked increase in street collisions and air pollution were perceptible. A number of protests catalyzed the eventual reintroduction of the balanced streets of Copenhagen’s pre-car era (contemplation moving into preparation).
Cycling in Copenhagen in the 2000s, after its resurgence in the 1970s.
Copenhagen took advantage of the oil crisis of the 1970s to introduce Car-Free Sundays (preparation moving into action). In the 1980s, however, the city made a number of proposals to bisect its periurban lakes with arterials connecting the city centre to its suburbs. This clear danger had the effect of motivating continuous pro-cycling advocacy over the next several decades, during which time a permanent network of pedestrianized streets and protected bike lanes grew (action). This change, which has been sustained through today, is in large part the result of reawakening consciousness of and pride in a historical culture of sustainable urban transport. And the cultural reversion has been instilled as a daily commuting practice by half of its residents, across all social strata (maintenance). Recently, the city has even assigned 50 police to ensure that ‘cycle karma’ (courteous cycling behavior) is maintained (further maintenance).
5. What do we need to do in New York?
Can we apply these cities’ successful experiences to Times Square? All three show that doing badly is an excellent initial motivator and can vault a city to the top of the pack. All three have managed to maintain behavior change over time in ways that at least roughly validate Miller and Rollnick’s motivational interviewing model. And all three now enjoy visibility at the top of several high-profile urban sustainability and performance indices. To secure continuous improvement over many short-term electoral cycles, these cities actively anticipated future threats and mined their cultural memory for retrievable opportunities. All of the above could help New York actively address its conflicting priorities and shift its public space culture.
New York comes in third in the Siemens North American Green Cities Index; first in the subcategories of land use and transport (undoubtedly reflecting its density and public and non-motorized transit infrastructure). Density and transport infrastructure require the appropriate complement of public space, such as Times Square, to function viably, but the rankings may constitute a negative incentive if these are seen as ‘mission accomplished’ and attention shifts elsewhere. Indeed, the renewed focus on ‘broken windows’ policing of public space suggests that the design priorities of the last administration have taken a back seat to the policing priorities of the administration before that. It is as if Times Square has zig-zagged through the stages of behavior change with three short-circuited cycles of preparation into action, each lacking the necessary contemplation and maintenance stages.
Times Square is not a failure of planning and design, or lacking in sustainability metrics, and certainly not suffering from an underequipped police force. On the contrary, it is a failure to address the deeper conflicts that public space embodies. New York may agree to disagree on the small stuff—what Sennett refers to as ‘difference and indifference’—but it must come to a broad agreement on big values, values such as justice and obscenity, which underlie ‘the right to the street’. Unless it does, the over-reactionary behavior will continue and the physical fabric of Times Square will likely suffer anti-human consequences.
If Times Square were to get a shrink, s/he would undoubtedly first say ‘the answers are within you’. Within whom, though? The public, the mayor, and the police force represent a promising first step. The paradigm shift we seek will require all of them to undergo a behavior shift; one that would benefit from a motivational interviewing intervention if it is to last. What would that look like?
The public
The general New York public is most responsible for actively cultivating the values and priorities (i.e. resolving the ambivalence) underlying public space culture. Too much of New York has lazily acquiesced to increased security at the price of decreased freedom (e.g. stop-and-frisk), in part because most of the public doesn’t see such policies as the Faustian bargain they are until they are directly targeted in the street. Vision Zero has directly benefited a majority of New Yorkers as well as tourists; however, those benefits may not be obvious to those who commute in private cars (nor even to pedestrians once they step into a cab). These members of the public may see the Times Square pedestrian plazas as little more than an obstruction, and though their attitude and behavior is out of sync with the majority of the city, they are still part of—and have an outsized impact on—daily urban function.
These issues might be handled best through better precontemplation and contemplation, which would help the public understand that change is necessary and then help it resolve its ambivalence toward core public space issues. What might the public contemplate? For starters, why do we consider a bare female nipple obscene, but not a toddler killed by an SUV that fails to yield to it on a crosswalk? How is it just for 25 percent of those using the street (from within a car) to occupy 75 percent of its area? Do we really want to arrest people for actions that merely shock our sensibilities (and have we considered how that might that backfire)? As Sennett puts it, are ‘isolation and segregation better than the risks entailed in interaction?’ ‘[C]ommunities have to decide […] [b]ut this is a decision which…should result after the experience of…exposure to difference rather than flight from contact.’ Such a process must also proactively deal with the person who is paranoid about crime, hysteric about nudity and narcissistic about parking his SUV in a protected bike lane.
The Mayor
Mayors are heavily incentivized by the prospect of being reelected by the public. This is not inherently bad, but their zeal to prove themselves strong leaders should not necessarily mean erasing the successes of their predecessors. Mayoral priority setting would benefit from a strengthened process of contemplation. Much of the Times Square pedestrian plaza’s benefits contribute directly to reducing the risk of pedestrian injury and death, which are overarching aims of Mayor de Blasio’s own signature effort, Vision Zero (which even revived and won a decades-old battle with New York State to reduce the speed limit throughout New York City from nearly 50 km/to 40 km/hr [30 to 25 mph]). But Vision Zero needs to lead a wider, long-term cultural shift, rather than simply establishing a new law and set of design precedents. If it does not, it may die an early death in the hands of de Blasio’s successor.
De Blasio would also do well to contemplate New York’s long term cultural legacy. From its genesis, the city was the cosmopolitan, tolerant ‘New Netherland’. The continued viability of Times Square as ‘crossroads of the world’ may depend on de Blasio exercising his moral force to explain these values to visitors, many of whom may be less open to encountering the unexpected—Desnudas, for example—in public space. (Bloomberg, his predecessor, once dismissed criticism of a mosque being built near ground zero by saying ‘whether you like a mosque or don’t…you don’t have to go […] within four blocks of the World Trade Center…there’s [also] porno places…I mean it’s a vibrant community, it’s New York.’ Or, as Sennett puts it, ‘[c]osmopolitanism is stimulation by the presence of others but not identification with them.’) If cities anywhere have any hope of accommodating heterogeneous groups of people, then Times Square needs to continue transcribing the ideals contained in New York’s DNA.
The police
Rather than the Mayor, though, it is the police that regularly interact with the public. Though the NYPD advertises ‘courtesy, professionalism, respect’ as its motto, how many members of the police force share those values? Officer Frascatore’s recent body-slamming of James Blake—one of a long string of abuses that have gone unpunished by Bratton—suggests that the advertisement seeks to compensate for the very attributes the NYPD lacks. Though the police remain exempt from city residence requirements, they must still have respect for the values of those actually living here. Some form of group therapy might help them overcome their defensive posturing and to listen to what security and quality of life really mean for the resident public. But Police Commissioner Bratton and his force cannot be part of the change process until they start enforcing laws as they are: key aspects of Vision Zero, such as the right-of-way law, are still widely unenforced, while legal acts, such as toplessness, continue to be punished.
Bratton continues to argue that ‘broken windows’ policing preempts more serious crime down the line, but action without contemplation or preparation is rarely effective in the long term. Making something unpleasant illegal does not make it disappear, much less address its deeper causes. The NYPD also needs to reconsider the justice in catching all guilty at the price of harming many innocent and end its quota system, which incentivizes arrests. Though this may be difficult in a post-9/11 era, the appalling policing situation to which it has led in this country is another ‘rock bottom’ opportunity for 180-degree behavior change. To start with, the NYPD would benefit from contemplation of the values behind proposals by the City Council to decriminalize certain low-level public space offenses—such as drinking alcohol and riding a bicycle on the sidewalk—which they currently oppose. Finally, adequate preparation would help them enforce these progressive new laws once they are adopted.
Times Square must allow for the possibility of appropriation by an unintended use or it will never evolve as public space must. ‘It is possible to contrive places and spaces which allow for the gradual evolution and opening up of rituals of behavior, so that people experience both form and change.’ Opening up the rituals of behavior will not be easy (and it certainly won’t happen within cars), but until we do, the Times Square pedestrian plaza may not have sufficient cultural support to ultimately stick. And until the average New Yorker regards cars hitting pedestrians as (preventable) collisions rather than (unavoidable) accidents, Vision Zero may also be vulnerable.
Fixing Times Square’s underlying dysfunctions might appear to be daunting. But why can’t we handle them? Other cities have handled much more (and with smaller budgets). Why shouldn’t the public space of Times Square serve as a catalyst for solving multiple systemic dysfunctions? After all, Lefebvre wisely reminded us that all social relations are merely hypothetical until they are spatialized. It is not a question of whether New York can tackle its biggest issues through public space: it is an imperative that it must.
Can an urban garden help us remember what it means to be human?
Three months ago, we opened a slightly audacious restaurant and garden in a working-class suburb of Osaka, Japan with the intent of connecting people more deeply with food and nature in their neighborhood. Experimental and temporary in nature, the project was approached not as a business or social enterprise, but as what might be called a “social practice” artwork.
A parking lot does not make life worth living, nor does an apartment tower.
When this restaurant opened for dinner, we seated guests and took their orders as most any restaurant would. Then we kindly let them know that their dinner would be ready to eat in six weeks, explaining that we would first have to grow it in the garden down the street.
Final Straw co-director Suhee Kang serves wild herb tea to guets at the opening of our REALtimeFOOD restaurant. Image: Patrick Lydon, Final Straw
The project was called “REALtimeFOOD: the world’s slowest restaurant” (http://www.finalstraw.org/our-worlds-slowest-restaurant-serves-dinner-finally/) and although we were met with a few seriously raised eyebrows, most of the participants left that first night with smiles on their faces, almost all of them returning six weeks later to eat what they had ordered.
When the dinner finally arrived six weeks later, guests were treated to a rice dish made by friend and macrobiotic chef Kaori Tsuji, topped with greens, radish, and a spicy mixture of eggplant, onion, cucumer, and herbs from the garden, similar to Korean ‘bibmbap’, if you are familiar with it.
My personal favorite, though, was the dessert, a cool tomato jelly with whipped soy cream, garnished with mint. Surprisingly refreshing and delicious.
Our chef Kaori Tsuji serves desert to REALtimeFOOD customers in Osaka, after the six week wait. Image: Patrick Lydon, FinalStraw
So what was the point of making customers wait six weeks? And how did it help cultivate relationships between people and urban nature?
Cultivating compassion and relationships
Outside of the restaurant, most of the action happened during the weeks in between the ordering and serving of the food.
To grow the food, we built a garden in an unused dirt lot. This wasn’t a typical organic urban garden, however. It was based on the principal that our design and actions would be rooted in two key concepts 1) connection between people and nature and 2) compassion for all of nature. Whenever we had to make a decision about the direction, we referred back to this principal, asking ourselves: does it cultivate connection with nature, and does it build compassion for nature?
Final Straw co-director Suhee Kang works in the herb garden. Image: Patrick Lydon, FinalStraw
For those not familiar with how connection and compassion relate to a garden, this particular kind of garden takes its aim from the ‘natural farming’ tradition in Japan. No tilling, no weeding, no killing bugs, no externally produced fertilizers. Similar in action to permaculture or agroecological practices–which a recent U.N. study believes might be our only way to sustainably feed a growing population – natural farmers see themselves as equals with plants and the rest of the natural world. This relationship, and the compassion which comes from it, are the primary informants for every action in their farms.
Natural farmer Kristyn Leach at Namu Farm in the San Francisco Bay Area during an interview for our documentary film. Image: Patrick Lydon, FinalStraw
This is important for us, especially in urban social settings where compassion is sorely needed, yet often difficult to teach and apply. The kind of compassion learned by an individual on a natural farm will travel with them into their lives outside the farm or garden. It permeates their relationships with other people (our social relationships begin mending themselves), with other living things (human relationships to animals and plants become stronger), and even with the built structures of the city (leading to the city being cared for by its inhabitants).
Not only, then, is urban natural farming an ecologically regenerative practice, but the positive social effects are immense as well.
Working with art in the garden
One great difficulty is how to impart such an impossibly idealistic sounding mindset to the urban dweller, how to build and disseminate a deep and complex educational framework across the broad and diverse demographic range found in major urban centers.
In reality, we often make it sound more complex than it is.
What we have found in practice is that although the framework—and a sincere understanding and dedication to that framework—is required, there is not so much difficult ‘instruction’ as one might think. The process of developing such a mindset is largely one of giving people the place and permission to find this mindset of compassion and connection for themselves.
Kaori and Yasu taking part in one of our nature art workshops, using soil and plants as paint. Image: Suhee Kang, FinalStraw
In our little Osaka garden, tucked between half-century-old homes, warehouses, and small factories, we helped individuals cultivate relationships between themselves and the plants and living things in the soil. With these relationships in mind, they grew food and created artworks using natural materials, always with a base of connection and compassion in their actions.
Art making is a key for us here too, not only because it uses and reinforces myriad connections to the environment at its very root, but because it gives participants a personally expressive output and a record of their relationship with the soil, the plants, and the other natural living or growing things in their city.
Patrick’s workshop on painting with soil in the garden. Image: Suhee Kang, FinalStraw
By example, during one such “soil art” workshop, we began with exploring how there are millions of living things in each square inch of soil and how all of these living things work together to provide a nurturing home for other life to grow. Together with the participants, we then asked these living beings with a sincere respect—again, the instructor’s understanding, attitude, and sincerity is an absolute requirement here—to lend us their color and texture, so that we might share their beauty through our artwork.
At this point, paintbrushes were dipped directly into the moist soil, and some deeply expressive and meaningful artworks emerged.
Along with the artworks came new perspectives from participants. A visitor from Tokyo told us that she always had a fondness for flowers and for how beautiful they are…but that it was a kind of common or easy beauty to appreciate. “Now for the first time in my life” she said “I can finally see how amazingly beautiful the soil is, too.”
Mayu records soil and flower color samples during one of our garden workshops. Image: Suhee Kang, FinalStraw
Another participant, an undergraduate design student from Thailand, decided to change his thesis project after seeing how strongly nature could help direct his design. One also noticed, of her own accord, how the colors that the plants produce changed radically based on her intentions and how she approached using the plant. She demonstrated by gently and gracefully rubbing a white flower on paper, producing a beautiful ocean blue hue, and then again, more violently rubbing the same petal and watching as the hue started out blue and then quickly turned brown while the other stayed blue.
A workshop participant named Put creates a composition using color directly from flowers and plants. Image: Suhee Kang, FinalStraw
These kinds of discoveries and reactions weren’t prompted or dictated by us, but found by the individual participants as they more deeply connected with the garden itself. Nor are they uncommon reactions.
It seems that simply giving people the ‘permission’ to work with respect with nature, and to cultivate meaningful relationships, can offer such an amazing release for them. All of a sudden, their connectedness, acceptance, and creative mindsets blossom in ways they would each have thought were radical or impossible before.
Participants in Suhee’s flower workshop examine the works created by them and the children. Image: Suhee Kang, FinalStraw
We were lucky to have participants from the age of 5 to the age of 70, and most all of them had relatively little trouble flipping this mental switch to engage their surroundings in deeper ways.
Aiming for the long term
The REALtimeFOOD project was a hub for compassion, creativity, and well being for locals and visitors from around Japan and internationally. It was a project that we think created a positive ripple of compassion and well being in the small neighborhood of Kitakagaya and beyond.
That’s all warm and fuzzy.
The other reality is that this was a short-term project funded by the grant-making arm of a real estate firm that owns most of the land in this ailing neighborhood.
We know the reality of this situation is that the story typically ends in higher property values, higher rents, higher incomes, gentrification, and the removal of the creative class and the gardens which are on land that is suddenly far too ‘valuable’ for agriculture and silly creative deep ecology projects and the millions of tiny creatures in a square inch of soil.
The question is always, how do we make it economically viable? And ends with discussions along the lines of: how does a parking lot compare with an active community garden in terms of economic value?
It doesn’t, of course, and the first answer of those working in this space is generally something like “we need to get it through our thick heads that such projects offer value far beyond the economic. There’s social and ecological value too, and we must measure it!”
Let’s not stop the conversation here, though. The result of urban ecological features and programs which bring depth, relationships, and relevance to these natural features, offers value far beyond any social or ecological valuations that we can calculate and graph.
The value of a useless hole in the ground
What is the value when an office worker stops his stride and takes a deep breath while admiring a garden on his way home from work? What is the value when a gardener shares flowers with a local restaurant every week to brighten up the tables, or when a child stops by a garden to enthusiastically dig holes in the soil—even if they are not needed—with a smile so big it’s as if it’s the most joyful thing he’s ever done?
Not only do these values elude economic justification, they can not even be properly calculated with any type of measurement or categorization we might come up with, economic or not; yet, they are absolutely the kinds of values that make life true, beautiful, and good.
Our chef Kaori Tsuji helps one of our young neighbors, Qenji, dig holes without destroying too much of the garden. Iimage: Patrick Lydon, FinalStraw
The end result of an active urban garden is not a number, whether that number is reduction in crime or a point rise in the quality of life index. The end result is the re-connection of human beings with an immeasurable, intangible, essential part of what makes life worth living.
A parking lot does not make life worth living, nor does an apartment tower.
Does a relationship with the natural world make life worth living? Of course, a relationship with nature is life in no uncertain terms. Our personal understanding of this relationship is a part of being human which has been omnipresent in our species for millions of years not just for the nearly invisible space on our historical timeline occupied by the industrial age.
Patrick leads a workshop on ‘feeling’ nature with some of the project’s local team members. Image: Suhee Kang, FinalStraw
With respect to human and nature relationships, a few understandings about our current social attitude towards nature have come out of these workshops, including that:
Our connection to nature is a part of life that our culture has either lost or seriously devalued, and ironically much of this devaluation has recently come through our earnest efforts to put a value on it in the first place!
Our efforts to value nature are clear signs that we have no idea what the value of nature is.
Our rejection of a compassionate relationship with nature as an invaluable and integral part of life hurts us humans as much as it hurts the rest of our natural world.
Our mental and physical disconnection from nature hurts all of earth’s beings, socially and ecologically, without discrimination.
Establishing a new value system
It is important that active community gardens, and natural spaces in general, should be seen as long-term public services because they offer a foundation for social and ecological well-being which is necessary for strong, happy, and economically productive communities. Establishing such a mentality might sound impossible given today’s political and business climate, yet the secret is that we know it is not nearly as impossible as most people think.
Talking with an office worker who stopped by to let us know how much he appreciated the new use of the empty lot … and that he was looking forward to dinner! Iimage: Suhee Kang, FinalStraw
Even though our relationship with nature has been devalued and brushed away by most city dwellers, the surprising results of our own efforts to reignite this relationship indicate that human beings are quite easily able to connect with nature on some more meaningful level. We just need a little help.
From our perspective of doing REALtimeFOOD and other similar projects, the requirements are maddeningly simple.
We need to provide:
Ample opportunities (places) to connect with nature – these needn’t be big, but they must contain growing things that are easily accessible, where people are allowed to touch and interact with them, not just look at them from behind a wall
A bit of guidance and social permission – through a combination of sincerely led workshops, signage, and public education, guiding people to use their own capacity for connection and creativity and letting them know that yes, it’s okay to hug that tree, it’s okay to talk to that plant, it’s okay to say thank you to the soil.
Once we try it, we remember quite easily. We remember our part in the world. We remember the power of compassion and connection.
When we re-connect with nature—in the most remote mountains or in the most dense city—we can remember, in no uncertain terms, what it is to be human.
If we truly see ourselves as a part of nature, then the value of this understanding must be seen as a core value of life itself, and a value that no other interest, political, economic, or social, should be allowed to trump, and for which I would step out on a limb to say, the bulk of our human efforts at this point for our species and this planet must be given to fully and freely.
The New Wild is an intriguing book that looks at non-native species and nature in new light, challenging popular notions of ‘nativism,’ ‘wild’ and nature’s ‘fragility.’ Although the author, Fred Pearce, has taken on a controversial topic, his sources show that he is not alone as an increasing number of ecologists and scientists are questioning the “good natives, bad aliens,” narrative. As a seasoned journalist with years of experience reporting environmental and development issues, Pearce strengthens his arguments with plenty of examples—most of which he has personally observed. The book critically reviews the vilification of non-native species, common misconceptions in ecosystem restoration, and pitfalls in conventional conservation.
The first part of the book, ‘Alien empires,’ mainly deals with ‘horror stories’ of ‘alien invasive’ species. The aliens are often the subject of dislike for most of us conservative ecologists, invasive biologists and nature enthusiasts because of their stereotype portrayal as villains, both in literature and popular culture. With plenty of case studies, Pearce takes us through island habitats and the period of European conquests and colonization that facilitated transport of species across the world—some deliberately and some accidentally. Tales of the alien species that most of us fear—mutant mice that ate up eggs of ground-nesting birds and turtles on remote islands; weeds that choked up Lake Victoria; the zebra mussels that have extensively colonized waterways in North America; and more—are recounted here. Pearce elaborates on the cases that fueled the ‘good natives, bad aliens’ narrative. However, he points out that the aliens seem to be scapegoats in light of the larger (often real) problems that plague these habitats. Case-by-case, he argues how alien species “were simply taking advantage of ecosystems that had already been wrecked by humans.” Further, the introduced species seemed to be cleansing the degraded habitats they had colonized. Most aliens “keep nature going” where other species (mainly natives) falter.
In the second part, ‘Myths and demons,’ Pearce challenges many ill-informed theories about nature and aliens. To protect ‘natural’ ecosystems, he finds conservationists often take it upon themselves to “cleanse” nature of the ‘invaders’ since “alien species encourage myth-making” about wounded environments: the vilification of alien species is easier than dealing with larger problems, such as human-induced environmental degradation. Some examples include:
Britain’s efforts to eradicate muskrats with traps ended up slaughtering more than twice as many water voles.
Eradication of rodents on Macquarie Island (a remote island between Australia and Antarctica) by mass poisoning also killed hundreds of birds.
In Australia, the introduction of the poisonous cane toad as biocontrol for native beetles instead turned out to be lethal for local lizards, snakes, and even crocodiles.
Once declared a national park, the Florida Everglades was reclaimed mainly by non-native flora, which also turned out to offer refuge for the endangered Florida panther. However, eradication of the alien weeds lead to further decline of the panther population.
These expensive and often counter-productive efforts of ‘cleansing’ have had appalling non-target mortality. The consequences of eradications seem unpredictable and often counterproductive. Pearce adds that the efforts of ecological cleansing “fail because conservationists have indulged ill-founded myths about aliens, pristine ecosystems, and how nature works.”
He then moves on to question the studies that are generally quoted by a wide range of academics, government organizations and NGOs—including the United Nations—to support the claims of the negative impacts of introduced species. It turns out that most of these studies do not seem to have statistically significant results to justify their claims. Also, the studies include only “trouble maker” species (that account for a small proportion of all alien species), while the silent majority seems to be ignored by these studies with a gross exaggeration of numbers. Pearce points to many methodological errors by the scientific community in assessing the extent of damage caused by introduced species on ecosystems. The book encourages a neutral approach, giving alien species both credit and debit points. For instance, in the US, cats are considered aliens that cause bird kills. But cats kill more rats than birds. So why not give them credit points, too, while running a cost-benefit analysis of aliens on the American economy
Pearce then moves on to some myth busting about the native and the pristine. Many scientists are contesting the 19th century romantic notion of pristine nature. An increasing amount of archeological evidence of human activities in ‘pristine’ forests is surfacing. Examples include the Amazon and the rainforests of Congo, which are not ‘untouched old growth’ forests. Pearce adds, “nothing is pristine, but nature is resilient and resourceful”… “We have assaulted forests on a large scale. Yet where we have walked away, they have generally revived.” Many species seem to be more disturbance-tolerant than is widely assumed and that nature is not as ‘fragile’ as is often portrayed. Cultural and religious beliefs of ‘nature’s harmony and balance’ seem to encourage such misconceptions. ‘Nativism’ is believed to be an essential part of nature’s balance according to many religious beliefs
In the chapter, ‘Nativism in the garden of Eden,’ the book critically analyses some basic theories of ecology and evolution including nativism and co-evolution. The author stresses that disruption is essential for evolution and “nativeness is not a sign of evolutionary fitness.” Although aliens can sometimes be problematic, not all natives are harmless. For instance, brown rats and black rats are believed to have originated from the region of the Indian sub-continent and China. There is even a temple in India where rats are worshiped. However, their status as native species does not exclude them from being considered as pests in both India and China.
Nativism seems to be stemming from the theory of co-evolution, where every relationship in a ‘balanced’ ecosystem is believed to have co-evolved. However, the book illustrates numerous examples in which newcomers have often fit in well into ecosystems, filling in the gaps. Here, the concept of ‘ecological fitting’ is introduced, where species might not have evolved together but, with time, they learn how to cooperate and function together. There is a constant turnover of new species and this “renewal is almost at random.” Ecosystems are often not “optimum” or nearing “perfection,” “they are often a workable mishmash of species that are constantly reorganizing.” Pearce maintains that ecosystems are more adaptive and random than is assumed.
Finally, in part 3, ‘The new wild,’ Pearce explores the way forward. With the example of the endangered Coqui frog in Puerto Rico, the author introduces the concept of novel ecosystems—“composed of new combinations of native species and species introduced by humans.” The Coqui moved from the native forest fragments and now thrives in the new forests that took over abandoned fields and which include a mix of native and alien vegetation. As established earlier, nothing is pristine; nature’s disposition has probably been ‘novel’ for centuries. Although this assortment of species is often written off as “messed up” nature, it still has great conservation value. Getting back to the example of the Coqui frog, which is still part of the red list of endangered species since its native habitat is threatened; Pearce portrays the disjunction of conservationists who do not acknowledge the Coqui’s new novel habitat. The new forests have huge conservation value and this should be acknowledged.
As a unique and extreme form of novel ecosystems, Pearce urges conservationists to see the great potential in urban badlands/brownfields that nurture numerous rare species. The success of brownfields suggests that nature just needs places that are left alone, with little human intervention. Brownfields might not fit the conventional definition of nature, but they have a huge potential for conservation. Pearce quotes the case of the Chernobyl nuclear station as one of the most remarkable brownfields where nature is making a huge comeback, including the return of large mammals, rodents, birds, and so on. Although highly radioactive, Chernobyl is an extreme example of “nature’s salvation and resilience.” He adds, “nature doesn’t care about conservationists’ artificial divide between urban and rural or native and alien species” or pristine and badlands. This is a powerful statement that we, as conservationists, ecologists, and nature enthusiasts, need to bear in mind. Pearce suggests that conservationists should move on from conventional conservation and its two main aims—“saving threatened species” and restoring nature to its pristine state; and adapt to current environmental realities that include changes due to climate change, pollution, habitat loss, and intensive agriculture. Aliens seem to be “rapidly changing from being part of the problem to part of the solution.” And they are the ‘new wild.’
With the onset of climate change, which is giving rise to an increasing number of climate refugees, adopting a zero tolerance approach towards migrants seems problematic. Previous ice ages and extreme climatic events are testament to massive migrations of species and evolutionary changes. As Prof. Chris Thomas of the University of York is quoted, “A narrow preservationist agenda will reduce rather than increase the capacity of nature to respond to the environmental changes that we are inflicting on the world.”
In the last paragraphs, Pearce expresses that there is no harm in intervening to protect certain aspects of nature that we cherish, nor is there harm in defending against “pests, diseases and inconvenient invaders.” But, “we are serving our own desires and not nature’s needs.” Nature might organize differently than we would like it to. “Open up to evolutionary changes. Let go and let nature take its course.” “…Nature never goes back, it always moves on. Alien invasions will not always be convenient for us, but nature will re-wild in its own way. That is the new wild.”
Species migrations have often occurred in the past and have been driven by various forces, including extreme weather events and geomorphological changes. There is merit to the argument that the term ‘native’ is subjective and depends on the time scale that is being considered. However, there is also truth to the claim that there are species that are harmful to us. Nonetheless, species should be judged based on their merits and not their origin. Humans should learn some tolerance and respect towards aliens. After all, we are responsible for species transportation, most often. As cultures evolve, what was once an exotic garden delight can turn into an eyesore. The social damage caused by aliens often seems to be higher than the actual environmental damage. Nothing is pristine and permanent. Nature is dynamic and resourceful, constantly evolving and reorganizing itself, often not fitting our paradigm. It might seem radical to adopt a completely non-interventional approach towards nature, as Pearce suggests. However, there are an increasing number of ecologists/conservationists who are open to newcomers and are giving them a chance; that is a good start.
The New Wild is persuasive, with well-supported arguments that make for a good read. The simple language and case studies make it easy for even a non-ecologist to follow. This book should be a must-read at the university level for future scientists, researchers, and conservationists, to develop an open mind towards non-native species.
As an ecologist who works in cultural landscapes, this book is refreshing. ‘Wild,’ to me, means spontaneous and not domesticated or cultivated. In many big European cities that I have visited, the median strip along roadways, the small patches of green at road junctions and other nooks and crannies in the city are beautifully decorated with colourful flowers—almost nearing perfection. It was only when I moved to Berlin that I noticed something different. It is refreshing to see dandelions and daffodils appear and vanish on their own. There seems to be a deliberate attempt to bring back the urban wild and it seems to be popular. Yes, it differs drastically from my notions of ‘wild’ as a child who grew up reading encyclopedias and watching National Geographic Channel and Discovery Channel. But, there is something magical about seeing what nature has to offer. Many of the spontaneously growing plants, often considered weeds elsewhere, add character to the city. Some are natives, some aliens. It doesn’t matter. To me, these spontaneous species are the new wild.
September 18 is Park[ing] Day, a day when metered car parking spaces are transformed and reclaimed for other purposes. This annual event was first held in the USA in 2005, but has now grown to include Park[ing] Day events in cities around the world. In looking at the innovation and creativity that accompanies these and other parklet and pop-up park transformations, I am struck once again by the potential they offer as a massive experiment on a global scale. What do these temporary installations reveal about the social-ecological nature of cities?
Designed experiments are a relatively new approach to science and design that embeds a scientific experiment into a physical real-world design project. Landscape Architects and other practitioners collaborate with ecologists and other researchers in the development, establishment, and monitoring of the design project. Designed experiments offer scientists an opportunity to place scientifically rigorous studies into areas of the urban landscape where access would otherwise be problematic, and they offer practitioners an opportunity to improve their practice through assessing the performance of their built projecst. The process is iterative and, when done well, can deliver useful and relevant information to all of the parties involved.
Globally, there is increasing recognition of the importance of greenspaces and biodiversity to the ecosystem services that cities can provide. This has been accompanied by a strong and growing call for an effective evidence-base that will contribute to improved outcomes for people and nature. By incorporating designed experiments into our current investment in pop-up parks and other mobile and temporary greenspace interventions, there is an enormous potential to address some of these critical knowledge gaps. The remainder of this essay will explore this idea in more detail.
Mobile Biodiversity Boxes as experimental building blocks for cities
Parklets, pop-up parks, and other temporary greenspaces can take many forms. I am going to propose one form of temporary greenspace and then demonstrate how it can be used to address a raft of social and ecological research questions using a designed experiment approach. For simplicity, I am going to call my mobile greenspace element a “Biodiversity Box”.
What is a Biodiversity Box?
The best way to envision a Biodiversity Box is to imagine a giant piece of Lego turned upside-down, filled with soil (and perhaps a wicking bed), and planted to create an established garden that can be easily moved around a site and/or around the city.
Biodiversity Boxes as mobile experiments
Depending on your interest, the established garden could consist of a fruit tree, grassy meadow, sensory garden, vegetables and herbs, different forms of trees, shrubs and groundcovers, or it could represent a locally indigenous plant community. In reality, the Lego could be replaced with a wooden crate, a bathtub, a suitcase, weatherproof bags, or anything else that may be available or takes your fancy. The ideas I present related to designed experiments using Biodiversity Boxes can also be applied to more permanent features such as water sensitive urban design installations, although there will be some limitations in the scope of the questions that can be addressed using these established features, as they cannot be moved around a site.
The important thing is that we can take these Biodiversity Boxes and use them to find out more about cities as social-ecological systems and how we can build cities and towns with better outcomes for people and nature.
Opportunities for designed experiments using Biodiversity Boxes
Designed experiments can be used to inform research on both social and ecological aspects of greenspace. The ideas I present are illustrative rather than exhaustive, and I would be delighted to hear about other ideas and examples of projects in the comments section at the end of this essay.
Experimenting with design elements and sense of place
The recent diagnosis of nature-deficit disorder, our increasing connection with virtual worlds, and the implications for human health and wellbeing signal the urgent need to create greenspaces that inspire and motivate people to reconnect with nature. Design has a very important role to play in creating a sense of place and cultivating a meaningful connection between people and their environments. The styles and solutions that work in one context, such as a large park, may not work well in another situation, such as a small plaza.
There are also differences in the needs and wants of people living in different parts of the city which may be tied in with environmental justice, historical legacies, or trends associated with different development or planning approaches. In many cities, the impact of the public on the decisions that affect them is increasingly moving from education and consultation to collaboration and empowerment when it comes to addressing these issues.
In all of these cases, Biodiversity Boxes have the capacity to contribute to decision-making through designed experiments that allow the public to help identify the solution that would work best for their given situation. Biodiversity Boxes offer an opportunity for the public to participate in place-making activities by providing them with the resources that would allow them to configure a temporary space to suit their needs. Imagine an empty parking lot with Biodiversity Boxes on wheels or a track that allows them be moved to different locations in response to traffic, shade, or other local factors. Then add in mobile picnic tables, benches, sports equipment and other amenities, as well as chalk for adding new elements to the space. Wouldn’t it be fascinating to see the interplay between the configuration of these elements, the activities that are undertaken, and the perceptions people then have of that site? Now move these mobile elements from the empty parking lot into other spaces across the city and you suddenly have the tools to redesign your city in the real world! This is where the creativity and the flexibility come into play, the innovation and place-based solutions start to unfurl, and the idea of pop-up parks revealing the nature of cities really comes to life.
Experimenting with planting and management options in different contexts
The local extinction of indigenous biodiversity from urban areas and the prevalence of greenspace designs that rely heavily on supplemental additions of water, nutrients, and other resources into our urban landscapes all point to a need for revisiting human experiences of, and expectations for, greenspace in cities. Biodiversity Boxes offer an opportunity to explore how planting palettes and vegetation management options might impact people and nature in urban environments.
Vegetation structure, leaf litter, fallen branches, rocks, and bare soil are all habitat elements that influence which animals and other organisms are present in a landscape. For example, solitary native bees in south eastern Australia require a combination of bare soil for nesting and plants from the Myrtaceae family, which bear their nectar in open, shallow cups. The importance of different elements is also dependent on the landscape context within which they occur. Small, insectivorous woodland birds may be absent from areas where they can forage effectively and retreat from potential predators.
People also respond to these same habitat elements, as evidenced by the large field of studies investigating landscape preference in terms of aesthetics, recreational activity, perceptions of safety, and other cultural ecosystem services. Biodiversity Boxes offer an opportunity to explore these relationships in real-time in the real world.
By retrofitting habitat elements into existing parks and other areas within cities, Biodiversity Boxes allow us to experiment with the optimal sizes and shapes of habitat required for specific social and ecological outcomes. The mobile nature of the Biodiversity Boxes also means that the experiment can commence immediately and can be modified over time, offering the advantage of quicker, cheaper, and more flexible experiments when compared with in situ plantings.
By experimenting with planting and management options, we have the opportunity to develop more ecologically informed management and design outcomes that are also preferred or desired by people. The F3UES Experimental Meadows is an excellent example of an experimental approach to design that could easily be applied using a Biodiversity Box approach.
Sampling local biodiversity
Biodiversity Boxes also offer an opportunity to explore the relationship between urban habitats and biodiversity itself. One of the most basic questions we can ask using our Biodiversity Box is: which animals and micro-organisms are present in this landscape and visiting this Biodiversity Box?
This question can be addressed by incorporating passive ecological sampling techniques into the design of the Biodiversity Box. Track trapscan be used to sample terrestrial mammals and reptiles; hair snarescan be used to sample small mammals; pitfall traps, pan traps and sticky traps can be used to sample invertebrates; and settle plates, sterile filter paper or other techniques can be used to sample fungi and micro-organisms. Camera traps and other audio visual recording devices offer additional options for passive ecological sampling.
More active survey techniques can also be used, such as field observations conducted by researchers or citizen scientists.
To be confident about which new organisms are visiting the Biodiversity Box, compared with those which are already in the landscape, a modified version of the Before–After Control–Impact experimental approach can be used. This would involve sampling the location where a Biodiversity Box will be installed (Impact site) and a similar location nearby (Control site). Sampling would be conducted for a period of time before the Biodiversity Box was moved to the site in order to establish a baseline, continue during the time the Biodiversity Box was present in the landscape, and for a period after the Biodiversity Box has been removed. This Before-During-After Control-Impact (BDACI) approach allows the effect of the Biodiversity Box to be disentangled from the baseline levels of biodiversity in the area (comparing Before and After data with data collected During) and any possible trends in change over time (comparing Control site data with Impact site data). While scientific rigour would require a large number of sites to be sampled in this way, it still may be worthwhile to consider collecting this information for a single installation, as there is the potential for data to accumulate over time and between organisations, where individual pieces of data would begin to make an important contribution to a larger whole. While many of the designed experiments I discuss could benefit from this BDACI approach, there will be some situations where the emphasis is on the effect of the Biodiversity Box while it is at a site and the additional sampling is unnecessary.
Sampling local ecosystem processes
Ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling, water and pollution filtration, and the life cycle of organisms underlie the provision of many Ecosystem Services, particularly regulating and supporting services. Quantifying the inputs, outputs, and transformations of nutrients, water, energy, pollution, etc. in different locations across the city will reveal insights into how ecosystem processes are modified by urban environmental conditions.
In much the same way that the Hubbard Brook Sandbox Studieshave contributed to a more detailed understanding of forest ecosystem processes, Biodiversity Boxes offer an opportunity to quantify ecosystem processes in urban environments. To be confident in the data collected for this type of designed experiment, it is essential that the nutrient levels (or other response variables) in the Biodiversity Boxes are standardised and accurately quantified prior to placing the boxes in landscape.
Quantifying inputs, outputs and transformations.
Studying ecological relationships and dynamics in urban systems
Understanding the role of biodiversity, functional diversity, and ecosystem dynamics is one of the key questions in ecology, design, and ecosystem services. Biodiversity Boxes offer an opportunity to set up a designed experiment that can shed light onto these questions, in much the same way that the Grassland Diversity-Stability Experiment, conducted at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve in Minnesota, USA, revealed important relationships between the diversity of plant species and the stability of grassland plant communities. Detailed understanding of these relationships is critical if we wish to create urban ecosystems that are sustainable and resilient, as it will allow us to develop planting designs that will be effective in responding to future changes in the environment.
Experimenting with composition and performance.
Urban island biogeography
The extent and configuration of vegetation within a landscape can have a significant influence on the movement and persistence of plants and animals. According to Island Biogeography theory, smaller or more isolated patches will have lower biodiversity than larger patches or patches that are closer together. Landscape Ecology research expands on this theory, and proposed that the shape of patches and their degree of connectivity are also important influences on biodiversity. However, the theories of Island Biogeography and Landscape Ecology were largely developed in non-urban landscapes and there are questions around how these principles translate to the build environment. Using the same designed experiment approach that was employed to investigate configuration and placement at the site level (see Experimenting with planting and management options in different contexts), Biodiversity Boxes can also be used to investigate equivalent questions at the landscape scale. Biodiversity Boxes offer an opportunity to add to our understanding of Urban Landscape Ecology and the Island Biogeography of the Anthropocene by understanding species-area relationships, species-isolation relationships, and colonisation dynamics in urban landscapes. This information will be critical in helping us to make decisions about where to place vegetation for the most effective urban acupuncture, as well as giving us a better evidence-base on which to evaluate whether biodiversity interventions have been “successful” by providing a more realistic understanding of “success” in different landscapes.
Revealing and rebuilding the nature of cities
Just like Legos can be used to build and re-build many different things, Biodiversity Boxes have the potential to be the building blocks that provide us with a stronger foundation for more sustainable and resilient cities in the future.
I am positive that some of you who read this will know of examples where pop up parks or other temporary or mobile greenspaces are already being used as designed experiments. Please feel free to share your stories and knowledge by leaving a comment here. It would be wonderful to hear about these projects and they may even provide inspiration for future designed experiments in other locations.
Disclaimer: Human and/or Animal Ethics approval may be required for some of the designed experiments discussed in this article. As application processes vary, it would be worthwhile checking out any responsibilities or obligations that may apply prior to setting up a potential experiment.
A review of Great City Parks; Second Edition, by Alan Tate with Marcella Eaton. 2015. ISBN 978-0-415-53802-2/ ISBN 978-0-415-53805-3/ ISBN 978-1-315-75071-2. Routledge, New York. 344 pages.
In this thoughtful and detailed documentation of “great” city parks, which is enlivened by spare and insightful opinions, I am reminded of the series that started with the book Jane’s Fighting Ships, first published in 1898 by Fred T. Jane. The book was intended to aid in then-elaborate naval ship battle games. Over the next century, well after Jane’s passing, battleships and war planes have been similarly cataloged for the enjoyment of military history buffs under the catchall title Jane’s … In some very basic ways, Great City Parks is a park buff’s “Jane’s…”. But the author, Alan Tate, with Marcella Eaton, goes much further than cataloguing; he interweaves facts and figures with social and political history, design ethos, management and restoration plans, and, occasionally, subtle but incisive criticism
Having spent a lifetime in city parks, both as a citizen user and as a professional manager, I count myself as a member of the proud and sometimes eccentric community of park lovers and urban nemophilists. Thus, any book that comes out about the great city parks of the world immediately commands my attention. Dr. Alan Tate, planner, landscape architect, and professor and Head of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Manitoba, has just released his second edition of his 2001 Great City Parks, this time assisted by Dr. Marcella Eaton, also a practitioner and Associate Dean in the University of Manitoba Department of Landscape Architecture.
Park geeks and urban nemophilists, not to mention the “designers, administrators, planners and politicians with current and future responsibilities for city parks” that the author cites as the primary target audience, have reason to celebrate and pore over this lovingly detailed volume, richly illustrated with photographs (most of them by the authors) and simple plans of the parks, and heavily annotated with quotes, citations, and footnotes.
Birkenhead Park, Upper Park, Merseyside, UK. Photo: Marcella Eaton, Great City Parks
Great City Parks focuses on 30 parks, from the very earliest urban public park—Birkenhead Park in Merseyside, UK—to one that has just been completed—New York City’s High Line Park—and looks at a scale ranging from entire parks systems, such as that of Minneapolis, Minnesota (US) and the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Massachusetts (US), to a tiny, (1/10 of an acre) privately owned public space in New York City: Paley Park. The authors follow the same formula for each park so that comparisons can be made, looking consecutively at history, planning & design, and management & usage as broad categories of analysis, with important sub-categories including “Key figures in the establishment of the park” and “Original design concept.” In some of the analyses, the authors include rigorous, in-depth histories; for some parks, these are based on citing the work of other researchers, especially in writing about older and much-documented parks such as Central Park. For others, as with the High Line, the histories appear based on substantial personal interviews with the key players.
Central Park, Bow Bridge. Photo: Belinda Chan, Great City Parks
I have visited 18 of the 30 parks cited and have intimate knowledge of all the parks in New York City, some of whose creation or restoration I played a role in. So I paid particular attention to their descriptions of the NYC parks, checking for accuracy in their interpretations. On accuracy, based on my knowledge, they get an A+. In the descriptions of the five NYC parks, I could find only one very minor point to quibble with. The authors properly credited Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Central Park’s first Administrator, founder of the Central Park Conservancy, and leader of the Park’s extraordinary restoration, for her huge roles, but incorrectly cited her for acknowledging “contemporary demands”— specifically, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates,” a Park-wide art installation of 2005, which was held long after Ms. Rogers had stepped down. (In fact, Ms. Rogers and then-Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis rejected the art installation in the early 1980s in a lengthy and eloquent treatise that cited the primary and urgent need to restore the then-devastated Park. With the enthusiastic support of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris, I worked with a team to stage The Gates to enormous critical and popular acclaim in a park that was, by then, beautifully restored.)
That teeny quibble aside, I was astonished at the ability of the authors to capture so much salient information in what were very complex acts of park creation and/or restoration, both in digesting and summarizing many critical works on the parks and park movements, and in keen observations, one mirroring mine about Central Park: “It can also be construed as a precedent for Disneyland—with Main Street USA equating to the Mall and Sleeping Beauty’s Castle representing the Belvedere on Vista Rock.” That observation is contained in the important section of each chapter titled “Conclusions.” Few have ever so succinctly captured the importance of a park: “Central Park is the prototypical American pastoral park and remains one of the most powerful precedents in the entire history of landscape architecture. Latterly it has also become a model for philanthropic private support for public parks.”
Was Central Park’s Belvedere Castle (left) an inspiration for Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty’s Castle (right)? Photos retrieved from Wikimedia Commons
The “Conclusions” are also places for the otherwise restrained authors to reveal personal opinions of the various parks. For example, in evaluating Parc de la Vilette in Paris, by architect Bernard Tschumi, they shift from understated to quietly scathing: “The results on the ground do not justify the fanfare that preceded them…[Tschumi] produced an ultimately unsatisfactory exploration of non-place-specific architectural theories—a flat open space between government cultural institutions.” They close with this zinger: “Other park designers tend to recognize that they are responsible for creating places for users rather than for themselves.”
It would be tempting to see the authors as tilting toward the practice and practitioners of landscape architecture (and away from architects and architecture), and toward historic, pastoral exemplars as opposed to modern, architectural parks. However, they celebrate the designs of some very modern parks, including several constructed out of urban blight, highways, and post-industrial areas, such as Freeway Park in Seattle WA (US); Westergasfabrik Park in Amsterdam, Netherlands; Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord Park, in Germany; Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London (UK), and the High Line in New York City, NY (US), among ten parks built after the mid-20th Century featured in the book. And while Paris’s Parc de la Vilette takes some appropriate criticism, two other contemporary Parisian parks, Parc Andre Citroen and Parc de la Bercy, receive positive reviews.
Westergasfabrik, Water garden in excavated gasholder. Photo: Alan Tate, Great City ParksLandschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, recycling of site water into canal. Photo: Marcella Eaton, Great City ParksQueen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Wetland bowl and ‘Park Live’ during Olympic Games. Photo: Peter Neal, Great City Parks
Great City Parks is a 344-page treasure chest for park professionals and aficionados and catnip for city park enthusiasts. It is a book to which one can return repeatedly and which one can treat both as a great reference book and as a primer for how one might think about designing or restoring the next great park. In reading it, however, I found myself wishing for just a bit more of the author’s sparingly dispensed opinions along with more of a sensory exploration of what it is like to actually walk around these parks and experience the people, smells, sounds, and the overall genius loci. In the preface, Tate teases at one of the most intangible but important aspect of a park landscapes:
But what might constitute a great park? There is no easy answer. Well, there is. It’s like being in love. You know when you’re in it and that gels with Burke’s definition of beauty as ‘that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love [“that satisfaction which arises to the mind upon contemplating any thing beautiful, or whatsoever nature it may be, from desire or lust”] or some passion similar to it’.
In other words, “greatness,” in a park, is not just what technically makes a park function at the highest level, but what puts the romance in the “Romantic Landscape.” In addition to the important “virtues” that parks bring to cities—as Frederick Law Olmsted enumerated in an 1865 letter to a newspaper, namely “increased real estate value…better public health, an amicable public gathering place, and promotion of safety and social order”—there are so many more values that parks both possess and provide. This book appropriately celebrates Prospect Park as the “less famous but more fabulous younger sibling of Central Park…the ‘anything goes’ counterpart to its more restrained older sibling.” In describing the park’s main entrance from Grand Army Plaza through a tunnel, the superlatives are earned: “The entry sequence through Endale Arch into the Long Meadow is one of the most highly praised human-made visual experiences in the world.” But they also quote Alexander Garvin, planner and educator (who has written his own highly regarded book on the topic, Public Parks: The Key to Livable Communities), in a pop culture-oriented comparison of that entry: “Dorothy opening the door of her black-and-white house to wander into Technicolor Oz, enters into a gorgeous landscape devoid of any trace of the city.”
Prospect Park, Long Meadow through Endale Arch. Photo: Marcella Eaton, Great City Parks
And whereas Tate is reserved most of the time in his explorations of the human experience of park space, it may be up to the reader of this book to understand the true soul of city parks and what makes them great, which is the people who use them and how they interact with design, nature, and each other (such personal responses can be found in Catie Marron’s lovely City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughts, a collection of essays mostly by fiction writers, but including one by President William Clinton).
As someone who has traveled through that Prospect Park tunnel and explored the seemingly vast reaches of the Long Meadow and intimate byways of the wooded Ravine, I understand on a personal and tangible level what this book hints at in terms of the experience of place in great city parks. It’s almost a paraphrase of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of hard core pornography: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…”
This book succeeds at defining what makes great city parks; what makes them truly great is up to the beholder. And we know one when we see it.
A pop-up garden in Kiev, volunteer “spotfixes” along sidewalks in Bangalore, and a flower garden planted atop a deadly landslide after an earthquake in Japan. These and other civic ecology practices are expanding in number. But how do we connect people across these disparate practices and places so that we learn from and motivate each other? And perhaps realize a common identity or, even, a movement?
When I started work on the Garden Mosaics community garden education program in the late 1990s, I first realized the difficulty of reaching out to small community-based organizations that were not connected through national organizations or networks. These were half-way homes like Abraham House in the Bronx, or youth programs like Literacy for Environmental Justice in San Francisco. They were interested in Garden Mosaics, but we had to reach out to each community organization one at a time. Later, when Keith Tidball and I expanded our work to encompass tree planting, dune restoration, and an ever expanding diversity of civic ecology practices, we experienced the same challenge. How could we facilitate social learning and action by connecting multiple organizations around the world, all of whom were conducting some flavor of community-based environmental stewardship?
Images from the Civic Ecology course.
The answer came in an unexpected place. Last year, I was invited by Cornell to develop an edX Massive Open Online Course—or MOOC—which we named Reclaiming Broken Places: Introduction to Civic Ecology. Like all unsuspecting MOOC instructors, I was overwhelmed by the number of hours it took to prepare the lectures, readings, and assignments—and terrified at the prospect of talking straight into an unforgiving camera. It took the better part of 10 months full time to develop and teach the 6-week MOOC.
Also like most MOOCs instructors, I facilitated a discussion board, which was clunky on the EdX platform, but which generated novel perspectives about civic ecology. (We are in the process of analyzing these data to further our civic ecology scholarship.) And like some MOOCs, we had a Facebook group. But unlike Facebook groups for MOOCs that are content- rather than idea- or action-driven, our Facebook group became a means for people from all over the world, who were engaged in similar yet diverse practices, to connect and learn from each other. My favorite example comes from a Facebook conversation initiated by a student in Syria, who was supported in her quest for information from fellow students in Lesotho, Iran, and the USA.
Not only did the MOOC provide a platform for connecting civic ecology stewards around the globe, it was also an experiment in motivating civic action. Students shared stories about their civic ecology practices on the Storify multi-media blogging platform. We harvested a bunch of interesting cases: a group building trails to the site of “Caved in Castle and an Old European Wild Pear” in the Czech Republic, one of the first community gardens in Kiev Ukraine, and a coal mine restoration project in Alberta Canada, among others. (The author of the Czech story later visited community gardens in Kiev, hosted by our Ukrainian student.) One student, Danny Rueda Cruz from San Francisco and the Philippines, decided that he was going to compile an eBook of all the practices that were shared. Watch for the Civic Ecology MOOC eBook later this year, which will be a compilation of these and other stories.
Stanford professor and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng’s statement that “we now have the technology for professors to teach not just 50 students at a time but 50,000” has come to define the way we view MOOCs—as sharing content with the masses. But so called content-driven or xMOOCs, which often focus on science and engineering, are not the only game in town. In fact, the first MOOC was a cMOOC, or connectivity MOOC, where students designed their own learning experience. And although MOOCs have been called a “disruptive” force in higher education, they are not just upsetting the ivory tower. WA State University professor Justin Smith has worked for years with people trying to create online platforms to motivate democratic action. He feels that our MOOC Facebook site is one of the most successful experiments he’s seen to date of “designing” an online platform to facilitate social learning and action.
Our MOOC wasn’t totally successful in connecting people and creating opportunities for what’s called “many-to-many” (as opposed to “one-to-many”) learning. Similar to other MOOCs, we reached few low-income students in the US. We actually we tried an experiment in “mentored MOOCs” to address this issue. And we are just starting to analyze the student postings to find out how much we motivated them to engage in civic ecology practices. But MOOCs are many different things. For some, they offer a chance to gain a certified professional credential. For others, they are simply a free library of resources. For still others, they represent an opportunity to meet people with similar interests. But as groups such as Occupy Wall Street and The Ugly Indian have shown, social media can be a platform for forging a common identity that sometimes coalesces into a social movement. So let’s keep experimenting with MOOCs and online learning, in combination with mentors, Facebook, Storify, and other people and platforms, to connect people from around the world who are stewarding urban nature and community.
Acknowledgements: I thank my MOOC teaching assistant Samar Deen; MOOC production team Rob Vanderlan, Dina Banning, Colbert McClellan, Mike Tolomeo, Serge Petchenyi, Patrice Prusko, and Diane Sempler; and co-instructor Keith Tidball.
According to the old urban paradigm, cities are crime-ridden, car-infested, unhealthy and over-crowded centers of humanity.
Could we conceivably cherish nature, respect others, grow our own food, earn a reasonable living, and enjoy a healthy and equitable urban environment?
Reversal of the old urban paradigm is not yet a given, especially when we take into account that people’s opinions are not usually based on facts, but on their perceptions of reality. I am sure that both contributors to this blog and its readers will agree that in an urbanized world, we should be heavily invested in marketing the new global brand: sustainable urbanism. However, I am not at all sure if this brand is perceived by the majority of city dwellers as worthy, desirable, or even identifiable. Thus, not only do the “country mice”, or rural dwellers, continue to feel superior to their brethren, the “town mice”, but the city dwellers themselves feel their quality of life is inferior in terms of its lack of nature.
I believe that most of us, by nature (not a pun), tend to pursue research or develop specific projects, and it is certainly good to know that many people around the world care about the quality of life in cities and see urban nature not only as a barometer of sustainability, but also as a factor contributing to biodiversity. I understand that urbanism is currently “in”, but for sustainable urbanism to thrive, we are going to have to work much harder.
The change in attitude to cities needs to take place at several levels. I will attempt to address the levels that are easy to identify, but there are probably additional layers to examine.
Individual and “social/cultural” mindsets: it is not easy to see past concepts that many of us grew up with. For example, if we want to breathe clean air, we should go “to the country”; we will find nature “in the country”; and we will grow our food, of course, on farms “in the country”. Even if we live in an enlightened city that has reduced emissions and pollution levels, improved its care for natural resources, and encouraged residents and communities to grow food locally, it does not mean that the residents themselves perceive their city environment as healthy.
Local government: there is a strange disconnect in the understanding of local government leaders: more and more people will be moving into cities, resulting in an ever-increasing need for housing, yet there is a lack of awareness of the need for cities to be really attractive and healthy places to live. It is therefore fascinating to see grass-roots, community-based initiatives building the fabric of solidarity and social frameworks that make neighborhoods livable and happy environments. This is an integral part of the new urban paradigm, in which bottom-up processes are setting the tone for community life. Local governments have grasped the need for urban densification, but will have to work together with their neighborhood communities to understand what is needed to make the renewed neighborhoods livable.
National government: in many countries, yet another disconnect results in the inability of local governments to revitalize their cities because national or regional legislation has impeded, or even contravened, local processes. This means that even when local governments manage to tune in to the needs of their neighborhood communities, their decisions are stymied by outdated national laws. An example from the local arena in Israel is the issue of garbage. The country set national targets to reduce the dumping of solid waste and to gradually increase the percentage of recycled solid waste, separated at source. This is admirable, but local governments were unable to provide incentives for their residents to separate waste at source, since the kind of tax reduction they wanted to offer needed to be approved at the national level. In the resulting impasse, national government continually complained that local governments were not meeting their recycling quotas, while the latter were complaining that they lacked the legislative power to offer their residents a financial incentive to recycle.
Global: It is not surprising that the mindsets that influence individual perceptions are the very ones that establish global trends. After all, experts in the U.N grew up like us: “knowing” that to breathe clean air, to enjoy the wonders of nature, or to grow food, we must head to a rural area.
I am writing this contribution to The Nature of Cities in dismay—not in anger, yet with a touch of the innate optimism that has buoyed me through two decades of environmental campaigns, many of which have not only proved successful, but which have also been recognized as “right’’ and which have been vindicated by the establishment that initially rejected them out of hand. I have included pictures of two such examples from my own beloved city of Jerusalem. The “Gazelle Valley Park” and the “Railway Park” in Jerusalem resulted from a massive fights between civil society organizations and the planning authorities. Remarkably, today, those very same planning authorities cite these two parks as the key to sound urban development, each in its own setting.
Gazelles meet kids and adults daily at the Gazelle Valley Park, 60 acres of urban nature in the heart of diverse neighborhoods that can now undergo densification because of the green balance provided by this wonderful park.
These two examples illustrate another, equally important aspect of the reversal of paradigms in urban thinking. Local communities are turning out to be key players in the process of branding sustainable urbanism in a way that they never were before. Communities are rising to defend their urban nature, which is often integral to the cultural identity of their neighborhood.
In addressing the intricacies of the global transition from a rural to an urban world, I believe we should include the urgent need for a change in our perception of the role of nature in cities. Not only do residents fight to protect nature in their neighborhoods, realizing the important role of local flora and fauna, as well as the cultural values of our urban landscapes, but academics of global repute recognize that cities have an important role to play in protecting biodiversity. This role can be fulfilled much more effectively if we adopt the model of the inverted biosphere, whereby the large city at the center of a metropolitan hub recognizes its responsibility for the sensitive bioregion around it, along with the smaller towns and villages in the region. This model is being developed with considerable success by the Jerusalem Bioregion Center for Ecosystem Management by addressing cross-boundary issues together with the other stakeholders in the bioregion and by understanding the irrelevance, to this shared thinking, of statutory municipal or geopolitical boundaries.
The urban challenge facing the world is both simple and complex. Some will say this is the final and most tragic phase of a process that began with the industrial revolution. The continuing influx of individuals and families to cities in search of a livelihood, or, in some cases, the influx of desperate refugees fleeing persecution or a climate event disaster zone, is indeed producing a new generation of slum-dwellers alarming in its proportions.
This might imply that in cities that are neither in a disaster zone nor severely impacted by disaster, all is well. And yet, while it is true that there are many wonderful examples of sound urban practice, these are somehow the exception, while our job is to make them the rule. From the perspective of years of leadership in the environmental movement in Israel, and from a full term of office as Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, I find myself taking a somewhat simplistic approach, and often wonder if that is perhaps the very thing we all need in our urban thinking, planning, and managing—simplicity. Just as when we set up an aquarium and want the fish in it to thrive, we put in appropriate plants to generate oxygen, and the kind of shells and stones that we believe will make them feel comfortable (although nobody really knows what a comfortable fish feels….). Why can’t we do the same in our cities? Why can’t we plan cities to be as beautiful and as healthy as possible for all the diverse communities living in them?
Eight kilometers of abandoned railway line have become Jerusalem’s famous “Railway Park”, a meeting place for all the neighborhoods nearby it, and for all of Jerusalem’s diverse communities.
It is true that the approach to cities began to change when, in 2007, we were told that more than 50 percent of the world’s people were already city-dwellers. The current estimation is that by the end of the 21st century, 90 percent of us will be city-dwellers. This is an extraordinarily dramatic shift, compared with 15 percent of the world’s population living in cities at the beginning of the twentieth century. 2,500 years ago, when Aristotle penned his famous sentence, maintaining that “Man is a political animal”, meaning that human beings like to live in organized communities such as cities, he surely didn’t expect us to go so far….
One useful development came in the 1980s, when global city networks began to be established, and cities around the world began to talk to each other about their common challenges. Within their own countries, cities felt that their national governments were not always the partners they should be, and were strangely pleased to find that this was the case in other countries too. By the 1980s, the U.N was already talking about sustainable development but— being a community of nations, not cities—found it hard to relate to cities at all. The only U.N agency that actively concerned itself with cities was UN HABITAT, which is responsible for human shelter. The reason for its engagement with cities was simple—most human shelter occurs in an urban context.
In 2016, UN HABITAT will be hosting HABITAT III, focusing on the conditions of urban communities around the world. UN HABITAT has requested its member states to mitigate the disconnect between national and local governments by establishing national urban policy, to be debated and worked out by a national urban forum. In my simplistic world, this is a minor revolution in global thinking, since it recognizes a disturbing reality whereby national legislation often serves as an impediment to achieving urban sustainability, instead of assisting cities as they strive for a sustainable future.
This minor revolution is the latest in a short history of progressive actions. At the WUF (World Urban Forum) held in Naples, Italy, in 2012, Dr. Joan Clos, Director of UN HABITAT, requested member states to formulate urban policy at the national level. By the next WUF, held in Medellin, in April 2014, the process was already well under way and a special UN HABITAT team had been set up to visit countries and regions where nascent national urban forums were taking the first steps in “thinking urban” at a national level. In 2012 and 2014, delegations from my country, Israel, attended the WUFs. We appreciated the significance of Dr. Clos’ request and the possible benefit this could have for our country.
Israel is a tiny country which is already more than 90 percent urbanized, but has only just begun to think of the national implications of its intensive urban development. Profoundly influenced by the UN HABITAT vision, we have taken the first exciting steps towards the establishment of the Israel Urban Forum, which is to be launched in Akko in November 2015. There is a steering committee for this process, which has brought together representatives from government ministries, local government, academia, businesses, and NGOs. We are discovering just how many stakeholders there are in the urban arena and are inviting them all to contribute to an urban celebration in Akko, which will mark the creation of a multi-sectoral and multi-disciplinary platform for the better understanding of sustainable and equitable urbanism. We hope that the main product of our Akko conference will be the launch of the Israel Urban Forum in its capacity as a body of urban thinkers, that will continue to ponder the most intelligent solutions for the multiple challenges facing not only each city individually, but also the country as a whole, in the sense that it represents the collective of all the cities in Israel.
As Chair of the Steering Committee of the First Israel Urban Forum, I feel a burden of responsibility, as all of us who love our cities must surely feel at this time. In a 90 percent urban world, it seems that global sustainability will depend on urban sustainability, while the latter will depend on our joint ability to ensure that the cases of best practice in planning and management of our cities become mainstream—no longer the exception, but the rule. I would posit that on this front, failure is simply not an option.
The concept of biocultural diversity— the coming together of biological and cultural diversity—is receiving more attention recently along with an awareness that elements of cultures all around the world are deeply rooted in the nature, or biological diversity, around them, and that greater cultural diversity comes with greater biological diversity.
Cultural innovation in urban areas is often attributed mainly to the cultural diversity found in urban areas because the myriad ways that cultures and cultural elements merge, clash, interact, and rub off on each other in urban areas makes them hotbeds of innovation and creativity. Wide recognition of this fact manifests itself through the existence of programs like the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN), which includes member cities all over the world in seven categories of cultural creativity—Crafts & Folk Art; Design; Film; Gastronomy; Literature; Media Arts; and Music. UCCN recently held its 2015 Annual Meeting in Kanazawa City, Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan, a Creative City in the Crafts & Folk Art category.
Logo of the UCCN 2015 Meeting in Kanazawa.
From biological and cultural diversities to biocultural diversity
While cultural diversity has always gotten a lot of attention, the existence of The Nature of Cities and the lively dialogue it generates is just one example of the increasing recognition of cities as equal hotbeds for biological diversity. Parallels between urban biological and cultural diversity can perhaps be seen in the way diverse species are brought to cities—for example, as pets, ornamentals in gardens and parks, etc.—just as cultural elements from all over the world are gathered in cities to interact, interbreed, compete, survive, or perish.
This biological interaction, however, functions differently from cultural interaction in a number of ways. It can lead to problems with alien and invasive species, whereas the cultural parallel—interesting new cultural elements—is often seen as a beneficial rather than a damaging factor. Also, while some new biological variants have certainly arisen from urban biological melting pots, actual evolution of new species is subject to a much longer time scale than cultural innovation. These differences in the functioning of cultural and biological diversity in urban settings can make it harder to see what biocultural diversity means for cities.
It seems intuitively true that richer biological diversity leads to richer cultural diversity if you think about the wide variety of art, rituals, traditional knowledge, etc. that are related to nature and are integral to indigenous peoples and local communities around the world. Empirically as well, greater cultural diversity has been shown (for example, in this study) to correlate with biodiversity hotspots.
Many urban natural spaces are preserved specifically for their cultural value, like Hoàn Kiếm Lake in the center of Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo: William Dunbar
From this description, it might be tempting to think that biological diversity leads to cultural diversity but not vice-versa. But in fact, the causality can work in both directions, meaning that cultural diversity can actually lead to higher biological diversity. For example, the areas surrounding Kanazawa, where the Creative Cities Network Meeting was held, are known for their satoyama landscapes and satoumi seascapes, which are places where long-term interactions between human production activities and the surrounding nature have produced a diverse mosaic of land and sea uses. This diversity of land uses comes from a wide variety of cultural practices and traditional knowledge resulting from people historically diversifying their livelihoods in order to ensure sustainable provision of ecosystem services. Diversification of livelihoods in turn results in a wider diversity of habitats within the landscape, from rice paddies to coppiced forests to maintained grasslands to sustainable fisheries and human settlements. A multi-year survey called the Japan Satoyama Satoumi Assessment found that the diverse forms of land management practiced over long periods of time in satoyama and satoumi have led to higher levels of biodiversity in these areas. Similar results have been seen (for example, here) in other human-influenced areas around the world, with higher biodiversity compared to places that have been left wild or abandoned.
A Japanese satoyama landscape. Photo: Mikiko Walker
A proposed model for a biocultural region
The importance of satoyama and satoumi areas for biocultural diversity around Kanazawa was on display at an event held in the city at the same time as the UCCN meeting. The event was an International Symposium titled “Introducing the Ishikawa-Kanazawa Biocultural Region: A model for linkages between biocultural diversity and cultural prosperity”, held on 28 May 2015 at Kanazawa’s 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art and organized by the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability’s Operating Unit Ishikawa/Kanazawa (UNU-IAS OUIK). According to the event website, “UNU-IAS OUIK has been conducting research focusing on how ecosystem services are associated with interrelated cultural and biological diversity. This research looks at how the tangible and intangible aspects of culture in Kanazawa City are influenced by the ecological conditions of surrounding rural areas and vice versa.”
The event featured speakers from the Ishikawa/Kanazawa area, from around Japan, and from around the world. Among the keynote speakers were representatives from a Joint Programme between UNESCO and the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (SCBD) on “Linking Biological and Cultural Diversity”, which was established in 2010 to respond to the need to better understand the mutual links between cultural and biological diversity. Abstracts and discussion by the presenters can be found in the conference proceedings.
The International Symposium “Introducing the Ishikawa-Kanazawa Biocultural Region: A model for linkages between biocultural diversity and cultural prosperity.” Photo: UNU-IAS OUIK
One of the outcomes of the International Symposium was the reading of the “Kanazawa Message 2015”, and its endorsement by the participants. The original English text of the Message is as follows:
We, the participants:
Recognize the contribution of biological and cultural diversity to our health and wellbeing as well as to building a resilient and sustainable society.
Support to enhance urban and rural communities towards maximizing the vitality of local power and the pleasure of ingenuity based on the use of local biocultural resources, and to create a commons and human resources for the next generation.
Seek integral pathways to conserve, utilize and hand down local biocultural diversity and landscapes through learning each local knowledge, technologies and cultural practices.
Promote the building a platform in which citizens, municipalities and researchers can form networks and foster exchange towards better policy development regarding biocultural diversity with urban-rural linkages.
At the international symposium, “Introducing the Ishikawa-Kanazawa Biocultural Region: A model for linkages between biological diversity and cultural prosperity” held on 28 May 2015 in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan
The Symposium and its Message are intended to serve as an early step towards wide recognition of the Ishikawa-Kanazawa area as a model for promoting biocultural diversity, both in urban areas themselves and in terms of the ties between urban areas and surrounding rural areas. The Ishikawa-Kanazawa region’s claim to be worthy of serving as a model is due to the essential connections between the many crafts and folk arts Kanazawa City is famous for, as recognized by the UCCN, and their grounding in the nature and traditions of satoyama and satoumi areas around Ishikawa Prefecture and beyond.
Maps showing some of the biocultural elements in the Ishikawa-Kanazawa area. Photo: excerpt from a brochure by UNU-IAS OUIK.
The ongoing development and promotion of such a model will require a great deal of institution-building, as noted in Paragraph 4 of the Kanazawa Message above, in addition to a firm theoretical underpinning. In recognition of this, one of the keynote addresses at the Symposium was about the process leading up to the Florence Declaration on the Links between Biological and Cultural Diversity and its promulgation at the UNESCO-SCBD European Conference on Biological and Cultural Diversity in Florence, Italy, in 2014. Another example mentioned as informing the Ishikawa-Kanazawa model, this one also originating in Japan, is the Satoyama Initiative, a global-scale effort to promote the revitalization and sustainable management of so-called “socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes” in rural, peri-urban, and even urban areas around the world, including Japan’s satoyama and satoumi (for more information on the Satoyama Initiative, see the website of the International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative). UNU-IAS OUIK, the organizer of the event, will be the main coordinator of institutional efforts in favor of the Ishikawa-Kanazawa model.
Finding roots of biocultural diversity
The proposal of the Ishikawa-Kanazawa region as a model for biocultural diversity brings us back to the original issue of this essay, namely: how biocultural diversity applies in cities, where biological diversity and cultural diversity apparently function quite differently. What makes the Ishikawa-Kanazawa region a suitable model to resolve this apparent conflict? The answer would seem to lie in exactly what is described in the previous section: the close ties between the urban area of Kanazawa City and the satoyama landscapes and satoumi seascapes in the surrounding Ishikawa Prefecture.
A Japanese satoumi seascape. Photo: Akane Minohara
As noted earlier, it would likely take evolutionary timescales for biological processes to produce new species from urban interactions, while cultural innovations sprout quickly from urban diversity (although it would not surprise me to learn that new species have appeared recently in cities, and I encourage anyone to post examples in the comments). The biological underpinnings of cultural elements that ultimately interact in cities, however, are what make urban cultural innovations biocultural.
A kind of biocultural diversity: a biodiverse mosaic production landscape portrayed in an urban mural in Guatemala. Photo: William Dunbar
In the Kanazawa Message, this idea is present in its references both to “landscapes”—in the local context, meaning satoyama landscapes—and “urban-rural linkages”. Representatives from the local region at the International Symposium explicitly noted the rural origins of apparently urban cultural elements, ranging from the dyeing of silks used to make kimonos to different kinds of food culture. Food may be a particularly easy-to-understand example in that, while much of the cuisine found in the city’s restaurants represents a fusion of elements from various places coming together in the urban setting, there is no denying the ultimately rural origin of the ingredients. When seen in this light, other aspects of urban culture, art, crafts, music and others can be seen to be biocultural. Many such elements have been covered in The Nature of Cities recently. For example, regarding trees as a basis for art, where artistic techniques likely refined in urban settings are nonetheless highly reliant on nature both for content and for technology, illustrates how otherwise “urban”-seeming cultural phenomena can be described as biocultural.
Dyeing silk for kimonos with a nature-based pattern. Photo: UNU-IAS OUIK
The approach proposed in the Kanazawa event and ongoing work related to it is, of course, one model of urban biocultural diversity; further work will show to what extent it can be applied to different settings. In any case, it would behoove us all to keep in mind cultural aspects of biological diversity and biological aspects of cultural diversity whenever we work with the nature of cities.
We all know that we are living in a deep crisis regarding the rate of our use of natural resources. We also know that addressing these problems will have inter-related and resonating effects. Such interconnection also has good aspects. Smart catalytic action can produce benefits across many levels—science has explained that butterfly wings can affect planetary weather.
We also know that there is too little time and too little capacity from challenged funders for us to squander the little money we have to invest in anything but the best solutions. Moreover, we know that there is a need for local action to follow global guidelines, so that those solutions reach the scale we need. As we move toward interconnected tipping points surrounding the use of nature and our quality of life, the need for decision makers who can think of and apply interconnected solutions for resource conservation and development options—those precious win-win approaches that improve efficiency in our use of resources and generate equitable forms of employment and business—increases. For globally significant impact, local activities need to be coordinated so that influences resonate across various level of governance. Such “glocal” solutions should be attuned to the guidelines of Multilateral Environmental Agreements and the policies of global and UN agencies. We need our future policymakers and managers to focus on integrated solutions.
It is already difficult to find experienced professionals who can work with these inter-related challenges and smart solutions today. So, how can we train our youth, who are increasingly urban, to deal with these complex connections? Many of tomorrow’s decision makers today live in cities and may have lost, by force of circumstance, many cultural and intuitive connections to the evolving links between natural cycles and survival. In these conditions, how can we promote opportunities for urban youth to get engaged and to learn—in concrete governance situations—the kinds of professional qualifications that create benefits for people and biodiversity?
These questions have driven several agreements, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, to adopt programmes to encourage action by youth and to promote scientific and technical cooperation and capacity-building programmes designed to “mainstream” approaches for biodiversity and development. They exist, these synergetic approaches—they are described as “bright spots” and, under the best circumstances, can be part of exchanges that inspire other sets of players in new places to adapt the key ideas and exchange lessons. There are opportunities for applying composite solutions that optimize capacity and needs in each case. We need to qualify people who are capable of creating, identifying, and spreading such solutions at a global scale.
There are creative ways to overcome the difficulties in developing such change makers. One we’d like to highlight involves connecting students and teachers in Quebec with real development situations in developing countries. The Inspired Generations (IG) project is an insightful example for what could be achieved if well-coordinated capacity-building is connected to local integrated planning needs.
IG students and local residents interact during consultations in Telchac, Mexico.
The Inspired Generations programme
Recently, the Secretariat began cooperating with the Quebec-based Youth for Sustainable Development Foundation (YFSD) on their IG programme. This innovative, capacity-building approach, alongside its related “Youth United for Change” programme, engages university students and their teachers across various disciplines in the on-the-ground sustainable development of a city, region, or country through missions over many years. For hosts, the programs offer planning and technical support tools to a local community in a developing country. After a sustainable development diagnostic is agreed upon with local leaders, a conference is set up in cooperation with international, national, regional, and local stakeholders to develop a common vision and a 5-year strategy, all to be managed by a Sustainable Development Committee. The Committee, usually led by local governments and including associations, NGOs, businesses, and local universities, then calls for projects for which it will help to raise funds. In the municipality of Telchac Puerto, Mexico, for instance, the work of the Foundation-supported Committee is focused on increasing sustainability in the main sectors of the local economy: tourism and fisheries. Students and teachers contribute directly to create more socially equitable food and handicraft production systems that are better connected to the needs of the local tourism industry.
Today, nine countries are engaged in the implementation of the IG and related methodologies, with over 300 students and teachers participating. Twelve conferences on sustainable development (and their respective Committees) have been organized since the beginning of 2012: nine in the Indian Ocean and three in Africa, with an average participation of 150 people per conference. 17 projects have been executed since 2013, creating perspectives for green and inclusive economic development and generating approximately 30 local jobs since 2014. Experiences by the YSDF around the world show that such goals are best achieved through involving students in the design and implementation of the IG projects, which include feasibility studies, environmental impact studies, engineering works, training activities, social venture incubators, etc.
Scaling up action for global impact with the CBD
More recently, the SCBD and IG have approached each other to explore synergies. With the objective of coordinating local action with the mandates and strategies of the CBD, a pioneering activity has been started in the province of Samana in the Dominican Republic, where students have so far cooperated with the local Committee on strategies for sustainable fisheries’ management, coconut production, and sustainable packaging/solid waste recycling and management (the latter in cooperation with local restaurants). Annual meetings of the Committee and the IG student/teacher team will allow for further support, stock-taking, reporting, and definitions of next steps. Following the same approach, contacts are being developed in Brazil with the prestigious Fundacao Getulio Vargas.
The community garden initiative—designed by the Committee with collaboration from IG students,—to support local revenue generation linked to tourism, Samana, Dominican Republic.
However, in most IG cases, there are still limitations to the scope of integration of CBD objectives and projects could only feed back to national-level CBD-related activities on some issues. It is expected that closer cooperation of the Secretariat and the Foundation, with national focal points for the Convention in future activities, will result in greater efficiencies and multiplying effects.
Perspectives for local action with regional impacts with the Indian Ocean Commission
A more comprehensive local-global connection is being planned in the YFSD’s partnership with the Indian Ocean Commission (IOC) within its ISLANDS Project and Biodiversity programme. In the Seychelles following the IG Symposium in Mahe, April 27-28, 2015, the Foundation and the Commission, in contact with the SCBD, have been working to support the establishment of the Seychelles Committee for Sustainable Development to generate a Status and Action Plan. The Committee will provide a better link with all local stakeholders (NGOs, the private sector, students, local authorities, social and economic actors) bound by a shared strategy and will facilitate public-private partnerships and better linkages with student/teacher networks locally, regionally, and internationally.
In September 2015, the YFSD will co-organize a regional Forum for all the countries of the Indian Ocean involved in IG where these ideas can be explored further. With support from the Secretariat, the Foundation has started a cooperation with the official focal points for the governments of IOC members in Comoros, Mauritius, Madagascar, and Seychelles.
IG Coordinator Cedric van Riel leads an IG student team in Madagascar.
Focus on reciprocal exchanges
In our vision, the reciprocal involvement of youth, teachers, and universities in developed and developing countries is critical. In remarks to declare the IG symposium open at the international Conference Centre in Mahe in April 2015, the Minister for Finance, Trade and the Blue Economy of the Seychelles, M. Jean-Paul Adam, recognised and acknowledged the support being provided by the Commission, the European Union, and the Inspired Generations Programme. He noted how important it is to project the experience of the Seychelles internationally and said the IG is another opportunity for young people to share ideas and to work side by side with their Indian Ocean coastal neighbours.
Universities at the regional or national level on both sides could be further involved in regional technical and scientific cooperation, and activities could be proposed to optimize links to the work of the Convention’s scientific and technical bodies and initiatives. Initial discussions are ongoing to develop exchanges between the University of the Seychelles (UniSey) and international students through a SIDS Youth AIMS Hub supported by Quebec universities and a French network of students (REFEDD, Réseau Français des Étudiants pour le Développement Durable). These partnerships will contribute to UniSey becoming a regional center of expertise and a CBD knowledge hub. These synergies are particularly relevant given that the overall objective of the IOC’s Biodiversity project (an agreement between IOC and EU for the Biodiversity project for an amount of € 15 million over five years) is to contribute to regional integration by promoting an effective, coordinated, and sustainable use of the regional natural capital in compliance with the relevant regional and international agreements. In this sense, future IG activities can be planned to help Parties achieve their national objectives, reflecting the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and thus generating opportunities for students and teachers to support voluntary reporting by Parties.
Local students participating in the Indian Ocean Commission’s Inspired Generations programme.
Some ideas for the future
Ongoing cooperation between the Foundation and the Secretariat may result in an IG manual with guidelines and lessons learned about the most effective ways to link local action with implementing the CBD. Better coordination can also result in valuable contributions from students and teachers (with input from local governments and representatives of major groups) to be considered by national governments for voluntary reporting to the CBD in line with the Aichi Targets. Putting the Convention to work requires better local coordination and regional exposure as part of annual Inspired Generations Forums.
As project support by IG is designed for longer range projects, students (Canadian and local) would be uniquely able to witness the evolutions of the Committee’s work, and thus would be able to get qualifications that help them evolve into professionals who can mainstream the services of nature into development approaches while helping to make concrete decisions that address the challenges of local communities. And if the Committees are linked to ongoing government strategies, reflecting local needs identified and revised in multi-stakeholder governance systems, the IG teams on both sides can help Committees align their strategies with national and global policies; identify and address technical and scientific needs and cooperation; exchange opportunities; and (through reporting to the Convention) get global recognition of their progress.
Other similar programmes and initiatives could follow suit—the Foundation regularly cooperates with other agencies and organizations supporting students in Canada and elsewhere. We look forward to exchanges and comments from TNOC’s expert community about capacity-building and professional development opportunities for youth on urban and local development strategies that address the need for integrated approaches. Please contact us at [email protected].
Manuela Gervasi is an urban planner with a master's degree in Environmental Governance awarded by the Institute for the Advanced Studies of Sustainability of the United Nations University in Tokyo and another in Urban Planning and Policy at the Polytechnic of Milan.
Urban populations—and the associated concentration of livelihoods and assets in cities—continue to increase worldwide, thereby increasing exposure to hazards. Coupled with aging infrastructure and housing stock, this trend leads to an increase in vulnerability. And this vulnerability is compounded by climate-change driven storms, sea-level rise, and associated flooding and landslides. Such events are increasing year after year; still, governments avoid reducing existing risk because they prefer not to spend money on uncertain outcomes before a disaster, especially because such efforts remain invisible even if the risk materialises. Instead, there are plenty of certain and visible outcomes to spend money on: compensating people after they lose their homess and sources of income. Governments also choose not to spend resources on risk reduction because of the prevailing political-economy climate, which is curbing expenditure in the public sector. This means that new risk (in terms of both exposure and vulnerability) continues to accumulate at a rate higher than existing risk is being reduced by risk reduction and resilience strategies. Most alarmingly, the prevailing process of reconstruction of houses, infrastructure, and livelihoods after a disaster often reintroduces risk into livelihoods and the built environment. Why is this still happening?
The political-economy framework for understanding and analysing drivers of change. Copyright F. Hamdan
The UN, practitioners, and risk management consultancies are doing a lot of good work on disaster risk reduction, including encouraging governments to invest in disaster risk reduction. But the participants in this work haven’t connected to the public debate that is happening about risk—they are disconnected. What can we do to connect them?
To answer the above questions, it is probably good to start with examples of some of the problems that whole cities, and certain sectors (e.g. education sector especially in poor neighbourhoods and urban slums) within cities, are facing worldwide. Below are a few such examples:
The rapid growth of cities and the populations within them means that cities are expanding quicker than the ability of governments to plan them according to pre-designed urban master plans and land use plans. This makes the people and the infrastructure more susceptible to damage from weather-related hazards (e.g. storms, floods, sea-level rise, etc.) and other hazards (e.g. earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, landslides, etc.). Also, all cities have poorer neighbourhoods with aging infrastructure (sewers, rainwater drainage networks, etc.) that is becoming ineffective even without the additional pressures due to climate change. These poorer neighbourhoods tend to have high population density, with people living in cramped conditions, in old unsafe buildings, and sometimes in close proximity to hazardous polluting industries. Clearly, this is a disaster waiting to happen when the next storm or the next earthquake arrives! Everyone knows that! National and local governments know that, local businesses know that, international aid agencies and UN agencies should know that, and the people themselves most certainly know that! Yet rarely do we see these risks being reduced before a disaster! Why? This is a question that we must ask even if we don’t have a clear answer to it.
The stock of school buildings varies widely in many countries, with some new buildings built to resist major earthquakes and other risks together with older school buildings designed and built decades ago. Often, such older buildings are crumbling without the help of an earthquake or a storm. Countries that have succeeded in improving safety in all their school buildings are countries that have adopted what is referred to as a National School Safety Programs (NSSPs) that takes a long-term view to safety in schools. NSSPs have been successfully adopted in Chile and New Zealand and are promoted in all OECD (Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development) member countries. Yet in many countries, even including those ranked as middle as high income countries, an NSSP is not even on the agenda! Why? This is another question that we must ask!
In our age of globalisation, economies and businesses in different continents are connected by complex supply chain dynamics wherein businesses in the USA depend on parts manufactured in Asia or Europe and vice versa. Businesses rely on the safe functioning of trade routes, including ports and canals, in order to ship and sell their commodities all over the world. If a trade route or a supply chain is interrupted somewhere, capital and investments will leave and not return. In such cases, local economies and livelihoods will be lost and investments wasted. Yet we still see a prevailing mentality of investments pouring into countries with a short-term view of maximising profits irrespective of the sustainability of these profits or the livelihoods producing them.
Risk governance framework model. Copyright F. Hamdan
The answer to all of these questions—or, at least, the part of the answer which is often ignored—has to do with the way decisions are made regarding 1) accountability for the creation of risk, 2) what risks we decide to reduce or not reduce, 3) to what levels we reduce those risks, 4) where we get finances to reduce those risk or why we decide not to finance risk reduction, 5) who participates in all of the above decisions and who is excluded in terms of sectors (e.g. banking, industry, commerce, agriculture, natural scientists, social scientists, etc.), and 6) to what degree the decision making process is transparent, subject to scrutiny and accountability (for example: how often are officials held accountable if risk is not reduced or if risk is reintroduced after a disaster?). All of these aspects of decision making related to risk form what we call Risk Governance: how governments arrive at decisions on risk creation and risk reduction, as well as who is allowed to participate in the decision-making process.
It is only recently that we have recognised risk governance as an issue, and so more work needs to be done to rectify problems with risk governance. Improved risk governance is very important because it forms the missing link between the knowledge creation being pioneered by various practitioners, UN agencies, and aid agencies on the one hand and between governments who are ignoring the evidence and not acting on this knowledge on the other hand. Good risk governance will empower all affected people, sectors, and businesses to lobby for enhancing the accountability of decisions regarding risk construction, risk reduction, and risk reintroduction.
But let us first start from the beginning, or near the beginning, of one of the most important international initiatives to manage and reduce risks.
International frameworks and initiatives for disaster risk reduction, including risk governance
The Hyogo Framework for Action 2005 – 2015 (HFA) is a 10-year plan to make the world safer from natural hazards and was endorsed by the UN General Assembly in the Resolution A/RES/60/195 following the 2005 World Disaster Reduction Conference. The HFA set five Priorities for Action for reducing disaster risk between 2005 and 2015:
Ensure that disaster risk reduction is a national and a local priority with a strong institutional basis for implementation.
Identify, assess, and monitor disaster risks and enhance early warning.
Use knowledge, innovation, and education to build a culture of safety and resilience at all levels.
Reduce the underlying risk factors.
Strengthen disaster preparedness for effective response at all levels.
The above priorities for action are meant to be implemented at national, local, and sectoral levels. In particular, their implementation at local levels was strengthened by the development of the Making Cities Resilient Campaign, launched by the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) in May 2010.
Jeddah flood, 2011. Courtesy of Saudi Gazzette
In analysing progress in the implementation of the HFA, the following challenges have been observed:
More effort is needed to move from a culture of disaster management that focuses on responding to disasters after they occur to a culture of disaster risk management that prevents new risk from accumulating and reduces levels of existing risk before a disaster actually occurs.
While significant effort has been directed at planning to respond to disasters and to prevent new risk from accumulating (partly through building codes and land use planning), more effort is required to reduce existing levels of risk. Even when strategies for disaster risk reduction are developed, they are not regularly transformed into policies with corresponding allocations of resources.
Additional effort is needed in developing recovery strategies, policies, and plans a priori to ensure that reconstruction of livelihoods and the built environment in the wake of a disaster will not reintroduce risk. We can only avoid reintroducing risk by building back better. However, in many cases, in the wake of a disaster, the pressure to restore services and housing means that risk is created and transferred as a result of a reconstruction process that lacks the necessary scrutiny and participation of various stakeholders.
Additional work is needed to understand how risk is constructed and transferred between sectors, which will in turn allow for much-needed enhancement of accountability for risk construction and transfer.
Additional effort is required to engage more diverse stakeholders in disaster risk management activities, particularly in the most vulnerable sectors and communities.
Capacity-building for local and national governments did not lead to the desired change in disaster risk reduction practices. It was concluded that change can only be effected by focusing on improving risk governance as defined above.
In many cases, capacity-building and awareness-raising is driven by supply (e.g. by universities and research institutions, risk management consultancies, etc.) rather than demand and ignores the social, economic, and institutional factors contributing to vulnerability; instead, such efforts focus solely on natural and physical factors contributing to vulnerability.
In many cases, too much emphasis is placed on natural factors (e.g. hazard frequency and severity, which are used to produce hazard area and hazard intensity maps) and physical factors (e.g. the physical state of the built environment, critical infrastructure, etc.). Notwithstanding the importance of the physical and natural factors, these alone do not complete our understanding of why vulnerability and risk accumulate (and are allowed to accumulate) and why they are (or are not) reduced. To do that, there is a need to examine the social (construction of risk in informal settlements, limited awareness, social capital), economic (financing disaster risk management from public and private investments, competing sectoral needs) and institutional (e.g. overlap in mandates, gaps in mandates, capacity shortages) factors contributing to vulnerability.
The above challenges are also reflected in The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015 – 2030 (SFDRR), the successor instrument to the Hyogo Framework for Action, which was adopted at the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan, on March 18, 2015. The SFDRR reviewed the progress of various states in the implementation of the HFA and identified the following challenges: the need for improved understanding of disaster risk; the need to strengthen disaster risk governance; the need for accountability for disaster risk management; the need to be better prepared to “Build Back Better”; the need for recognition of various stakeholders and their roles; the need for mobilization of risk-sensitive investment to avoid the creation of new risk; the need for resilience of health infrastructure, cultural heritage, and work-places; and the need for accountability for risk creation and the transfer of risk. Based on the above, the SFDRR proposed seven global goals, outcomes, and outputs and then identified the following four priorities for action over the coming 15 years, from 2015 up to 2030:
Priority 1: Understanding disaster risk.
Priority 2: Strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk.
Priority 3: Investing in disaster risk reduction for resilience.
Priority 4: Enhancing disaster preparedness for effective responses and to “Build Back Better” in recovery, rehabilitation, and reconstruction.
Gaps in risk governance
Jeddah flood, 2013.
At this stage, as the SFDRR is being finalised and the monitoring framework and indicators agreed upon, it is useful to elaborate on some of the main governance gaps in the implementation of disaster risk reduction strategies and policies categorised under different headings below:
Institutional governance gaps: very few countries worldwide have succeeded in establishing risk governance frameworks to provide checks and balances—in a transparent and participatory manner—throughout the risk management and reduction process.
Science-based governance gaps: There is unanimous agreement on the need to improve the science/policy interface, particularly in view of the increased recognition of linkages with sustainable development and climate change. However, the “science” in the science/policy interface is often dominated by earth science and risk management consultancies addressing frequency and severity of natural hazards and/or by engineering consultancies addressing the vulnerability of the built environment and housing, including critical infrastructure. Therefore, often the social, economic, and institutional factors are missing from scientific assessments on vulnerability and risk. In many instances, this leads to “scientific” solutions being developed without addressing the social, economic, and institutional challenges and factors that have led to the accumulation of risk and vulnerability in the first place.
Preliminary assessment governance gaps: In many cases, important solutions are not identified or are ignored at the risk framing stage, when the scope of hazards is identified and the qualitative and quantitative methodologies that may be used to assess risk are being selected. For example, as mentioned in the beginning of this article, in the education sector, best practice dictates the adoption of National School Safety Programs (NSSPs) that have proven to be an effective tool in preventing new risk from accumulating in school buildings and in reducing existing levels of risks. However, in many countries worldwide, NSSPs are not identified as a possible solution. A similar argument can be made for other critical infrastructure sectors (e.g. health, industry, energy, water, public sector buildings, and primary responding agencies). Indeed, in many instances, calls for identifying the financing gap—let alone securing the finances—required for ensuring the sustainable development and resilience of cities and sectors within them go unheeded.
Comprehensive risk assessment governance gaps: Even though there is scientific evidence that extensive risk (risk that occurs regularly, such as the flood that happens every year due to average year rainfall and is not severe) significantly and disproportionately impacts vulnerable communities and livelihoods, leaving them more vulnerable to intensive risk (which happens rarely, such as the flood corresponding to the storm that happens once every couple of hundred years, but is more severe when it happens), the fact remains that most multi-hazard, vulnerability, and risk assessments continue to a) ignore extensive risk and b) assume that intensive risk happens in a vacuum rather than recognizing that it is superimposed on a socio-economic situation where people and communities allocate resources to address everyday needs and extensive risks (which feel more tangible because they are more frequent).
Societal risk governance gaps: Very few countries and cities have mechanisms for carrying out both technical and societal risk assessments, which are important in case of substantial uncertainty associated with the frequency and severity of hazards or with the consequences of its occurrences.
Risk evaluation governance gaps: The value of the tolerable and the unacceptable levels of risk should be determined by states and countries depending on their level of development and available financial resources. Setting values of tolerable and unacceptable risks inevitably involves setting a value on saving a human life. However, these decisions are too often made in an implicit, non-transparent manner or, perhaps even more worryingly, these decisions are knowingly or unknowingly delegated to private sector companies.
Disaster loss data collation governance gaps: Loss of human lives, sources of income, and assets continues to be influenced by disaster-loss data collation practices that focus on compensation. This automatically implies that those communities that are living in informal housing or whose livelihoods are obtained from the informal sector will not be included in the loss collation exercise, as they are not considered eligible for compensation. However, especially because there is wider recognition of the need to identify and strengthen linkages with sustainable development and climate change, there is a need to widen the scope of disaster loss collation and analysis so it includes direct and indirect losses to livelihoods, lives, and economic sectors irrespective of eligibility for compensation. Furthermore, loss data, when available, is not dis-aggregated according to age, sex, ability, and social and economic backgrounds, making the analysis of factors affecting vulnerability more challenging.
Recovery governance gaps: Few countries and cities have developed a priori recovery plans so that the reconstruction process will not reintroduce risks into the built environment, critical infrastructure, and livelihoods. Having a priori plans is particularly important when the reconstruction process is being financed using public debt for developments that are unsustainable. These will have to be paid for by future generations who will not reap the benefits of the unsustainable development.
Financing risk reduction governance gaps: all countries and states have fixed budgets with competing sectors and stakeholders for resource allocation. There is a need to understand why certain strategies and policies for risk reduction are not being implemented, how the winners and losers are determined as a result of decisions being made regarding where public funds are directed, and the type of incentives given to the private sector.
Governance gaps regarding the regulatory role of governments in disaster risk reduction: National and local governments are allocating resources for responding to disasters. More recently, through land use and building codes, amongst others, new risk is prevented from accumulating via sound investment and development decisions by both the private and public sectors. Through such decisions, governments are fulfilling part of their stewardship role of protecting people against external hazards. Currently, this role is not being completely fulfilled because existing risk is not being sufficiently reduced. In addition, governments are explicitly reviewing and refining mandates for disaster risk management to ensure they are capable of fulfilling their managerial role in disaster risk management. The main gap, however, is in the regulatory role of governments. Governments are required to protect people and sectors against risks created by other individuals and sectors. This was one of the main gaps in the HFA and therefore it is necessary to ensure that it is sufficiently addressed during implementation of the SFDRR. In turn, this requires us all to address the challenging task of understanding how risk is created by sectors and individuals and the manner in which it is transferred, legitimately or maliciously, to other sectors and individuals.
A proposed way forward
Jeddah floods, 2013
Risk management consultancies have vested interests in focusing on the natural and physical factors contributing to vulnerability. Other stakeholders, including insurance companies and contracting and construction companies, may have other vested interests related to risk transfer and recovery practices. Many practitioners are trying to balance these vested interests by calling for a risk governance process to manage all decisions and by producing evidence-based arguments showing the need for risk governance. However, these arguments produced by practitioners will not effect change unless they are taken on board by concerned and affected citizens and stakeholders who want to improve the environment in which we live.
Therefore, it is important for us—disaster risk management practitioners, urban designers, and others—to recognize that we must increase our efforts to ensure that we are providing the needed advice to decision makers. However, perhaps more importantly, we must also view our work as trying to act as the missing link: to inform the public debate that is taking place around disaster risk and resilience, thereby providing the public (the ultimate decision maker) with the scientific tools to carry out scientific, evidence-based lobbying to reduce disaster risk and improve resilience.
How to bring together nature, fitness, and public transportation.
A few weeks ago, my partner, Lluís, and I wanted to go for a two-day trek, to test some camping gear, to sleep outdoors, and to listen to birds while walking under the shade of pine trees.
But we didn’t want to make a big deal of it. This wasn’t meant to be a trip to a faraway place requiring lots of planning, expenses, or days off from work. It was a spur of the moment decision, a little escape from the city noise, traffic, and summer heat baking concrete buildings. We wanted a quick way to “get our nature on.”
Luckily, because we live in Barcelona, this turned out to be a pretty simple thing to do.
One early Friday morning at dawn, free of work commitments, we grabbed our backpacks (which now sit ready to go near our front door because we’re planning a multi-year walking trip and spontaneously head out for training hikes) and walked out the door.
We strolled 10 minutes to the city’s main train station, paid €2.15 for a 19-minute regional train ride, and found the red and white trail marks near the arrival train station. We climbed a flight of stairs, followed a paved path under a highway overpass, and, a few minutes later, we were all alone listening to our feet crunching dirt.
Now and again, a runner would zip by or a couple of cyclists would pass us. Occasionally, we would see the rooftops and terraces of the housing sub-divisions at the end of edge towns, cross a busy street to pick up the trail again, or hear dogs barking from behind fences. Even so, for long stretches of time, we were out in the woods by ourselves and lost in our thoughts along parts of the GR 92 trail that loops behind the densely populated towns circling Barcelona. We were never far away from home–and at some points we could see our neighborhood in the distance–but it certainly felt like we were.
These are the kind of things I have come to love about Catalonia and my adopted hometown of Barcelona. It seems like a little thing, something obvious and logical: Let’s design nature trails and outdoor fitness routes close to cities and accessible via public transportation. Unfortunately, I think it’s less common than it should be.
Walking trials loop around Barcelona city and throughout Catalonia, allowing locals to get their nature on within a few train stops. Photo: Jennifer Baljko
Shifting views of nature
I grew up in the United States, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Talk about life in the city. During my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s, my idea of nature, green spaces, and parks was marked by images of sad-looking oak trees, broken swings, basketball hoops without nets, chain fences dividing concrete tennis courts lined with weeds, crushed beer cans, and the occasional used drug needle (Thankfully, urban revitalization initiatives and scores of Manhattan-based workers looking for affordable housing on the other side of the Hudson River have changed parts of Jersey City for the better. Today, there are more green spots with improved care and maintenance. With any luck, kids living there today will have better memories of playing in the parks than I did.)
For anything that looked like “real nature,” we had to load up the car and do a grand expedition to some place like the Delaware Water Gap a couple hours away. Those were rare events and logistically complicated ones because of my father’s work schedule and coordinating the whims of five kids. I admired nature from the backseat of the car as we moved along New Jersey’s highways and I remember staring out into the clumps of trees lining the road’s shoulder lanes, wondering what was behind them. In those younger years, though, it never occurred to me that I could go explore the woods or that there was an invitation on the table waiting for me to do that.
In the late 1990s, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and lived in and around the city for about 9 years. My idea of nature changed there and became forever linked to health and fitness. Being outdoors meant “doing something outdoors.” Nearly everyone I met was a marathon runner, a 100-mile cyclist, an Ironman triathlete, or did some other sport that involved being outdoors for hours at time. On the weekends, besides their regular exercise routines, people piled into their cars and headed out to Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, or along windy, coastal roads with breathtaking views and redwood forests. I fell into that rhythm, too. I would run several times a week in random parks in and close to San Francisco, and would be immensely grateful that I was there and for things my eyes were seeing. At some point, I realized I was stopping to smell the roses, literally, in Golden Gate’s rose garden or pausing to pay momentary homage to blooming calla lilies before trudging onwards. Even though my daily encounters with nature were confined to the local parks, the rest of the West Coast had many outdoorsy things to do, and hopping in my car to do them seemed normal.
Now that I have lived in Catalonia longer than I lived in the Bay Area, my appreciation for nature has shifted again, but in a subtle way that I have just started to more fully understand. Whether it’s because we have good weather most of the year or because we’re in Europe and life is just different than in the U.S., the idea of spending time outdoors shows up here in less assuming ways. For instance, Catalans will say, without any pretension, “vaig a fer muntanya.” This literally translates to “I do the mountain,” but what they mean by that is that they will go for a hike, rock climb, or walk somewhere out in the mountains. They’re not usually doing this as part of a competitive race to prove courage or to achieve lofty personal fitness goals. They would simply say that they want to be outside enjoying the mountains and breathing fresh air. The novelty of that struck me when I turned the phrase around in my native-English mind. “Oh, you can walk out in the woods and go do the mountain, just like that? You can walk for the sake of walking, and take in whatever you see?”
Although many locals drive to do the mountain and some parks can only be reached by auto, Lluís and I don’t own a car. It’s not practical for our everyday lives. So, getting our nature on depends on where our two feet and local trains and buses take us. And, surprisingly, we have no shortage of choices.
Caption: Common things in Barcelona: Buses and signs pointing the direction to a greenway where locals walk and cycle. Photo: Jennifer Baljko
Making nature accessible
In almost any direction from our Barcelona apartment, we’ll eventually hit some green patch sooner or later. A few blocks from home we have Montjuïc Park, a big open space that makes living in the city bearable. We call it our backyard, and that’s where we spend a lot of our time “doing something outdoors”: running, going for an evening promenade, or general de-stressing. For longer day walks close to the city, we trek through Barcelona’s streets and then up to Collserola Park, which boosts 8,000-hectares of natural goodness, has lots of well-marked trails, and can be reached by local trains. Or we can walk along the greenway linking Barcelona with neighboring towns and parks.
Fan out farther from the city, say a couple hours by bus or train, and you could be criss-crossing vineyards; smelling fennel, rosemary and thyme; or doing leg-crunching ups and downs in the foothills. There’s access to routes with views of the sea or snow-capped peaks or rolling hills of Mediterranean flora.
To their credit, the Catalan government and local municipalities have done a good job connecting the embedded cultural idea of “vaig a fer muntanya” with modern-day, health-oriented fitness programs and public transportation accessibility.
The Catalan government, for instance, has a census of the region’s sport and equipment availability. This particular statistic caught my eye: under the category of “sport activity areas,” there are 2,791 installations around Catalonia, including walking trails, protected rock climbing routes, greenways, and activity zones in urban, sea, or aerial areas. And there’s plenty of information online about combining train rides with mountaineering, hiking routes, walking guides and maps, and touring national parks. (While I focus on walking options, because that’s my primary way of being in nature, I would be remiss if I did not point to the multitude of other ways locals “get their nature on” that don’t involve walking; some alternatives options are found here).
Provincial and city tourism offices usually have brochures or maps with outdoor itineraries encouraging people to appreciate nature, engage in healthy exercise, and take in local sights or landmarks. Many of these experiences are waiting to be had within short distances of train or bus stations.
Many tourist offices around Catalonia have maps and brochures outlining local trails and providing information about the bio-diversity and landmarks you’ll find along the way. Photo: Jennifer Baljko
It’s hard for me to say if my relationship with nature has changed because I live in a place where nature is within closer reach to me, or if my growing need to have nature play a bigger role in my everyday life and how I choose to stay fit has increased my awareness of how much accessibility I now have to it. In the end, they feed each other’s motivation and leave me feeling grateful that I’m no longer admiring nature from the backseat of a car, but instead folding it seamlessly into my urban lifestyle.
Something very significant is happening in London. It’s a plan to make London the world’s first National Park City. Now that’s an idea that could catch on in a very big way.
Over the past 18 months, a movement has been growing, drawing together Londoners who want to apply National Park principles to the whole of Greater London. The aim is to turn traditional attitudes to the city inside out, ensuring that nature has a place in every aspect of London’s fabric and making it accessible to every Londoner. The idea has gained huge support from many different sectors of society. It’s a people’s movement that is gaining momentum by the day and, last month, a draft charter was launched for public consultation (see NationalParkCity.London).
St James’s Park in Westminster, where people and nature co-exist a stone’s throw from parliament. Copyright David Goode.
The steering group has come up with a working definition of a National Park City:
“A large urban area that is managed and semi-protected through both formal and informal means to enhance the natural capital of its living landscape. A defining feature is the widespread and significant commitment of residents, visitors and decision-makers to allow natural processes to provide a foundation for a better quality of life for wildlife and people”.
They have gone further by identifying nine specific aims:
Ensure that 100 percent of Londoners have free and easy access to high quality green space.
Connect 100 percent of London’s children to nature.
Make the majority of London physically green.
Improve London’s air and water quality year on year.
Improve the richness, connectivity and biodiversity of London’s habitats.
Inspire the building of affordable green homes.
Inspire new business activities.
Promote London as a Green World City.
Nurture a shared National Park City identity for Londoners.
Richmond Park, a Royal deer park since 1637, was designated as a National Nature Reserve in 2000. Copyright David Goode.
This movement is not something that has suddenly emerged out of the blue. London has a long and impressive history of protecting its green environment, from the Royal Parks created in the late medieval and Tudor periods, to the Metropolitan gardens movement of the 19th century and Garden City suburbs of the early 20th century, to the designation of London’s Green Belt and Metropolitan Open Land in the 1950s and the massive proliferation of urban nature reserves since the 1980s, large numbers of which are now protected through planning legislation. The idea of a National Park City is building on firm foundations.
The statistics are extraordinary. Greater London covers nearly 1600 km2, of which 47 percent is physically green. Nearly 20 percent is made up of private gardens and there are 3,000 parks. The total length of streams, rivers and canals is more than 850km, many of which are accessible by footpaths. Signed footpaths and well established greenways exceed 1000km in length. London’s natural habitats are exceptional, with considerable areas of ancient woodland, meadows, heath and common, as well as ancient deer parks—such as Richmond Park—and recently created wetlands that have proved to be extremely popular. These natural habitats include some that are internationally important, but it is particularly striking that the total amount of natural habitat now protected by nature conservation designations amounts to nearly 20 percent of Greater London.
These habitats, which are spread throughout the capital, include about 50 specially protected areas of national significance, 142 Local Nature Reserves and over 1400 Sites of Importance for Nature Conservation. Londoners have access to hundreds of natural areas within this great conurbation and there are numerous groups providing everyone with facilities for contact with nature. It is an extraordinary paradox that the capital city of the UK, with 8.6 million people, is so rich in accessible wildlife compared with rural farmland, which is fast becoming bereft of nature.
Walking through Brook Farm Open Space along the Dollis Valley Green Walk, which takes you across north London to Hampstead Heath. Copyright David Goode.
So, the idea of a National Park City is not so strange as it may seem. Indeed, if we were not so conditioned by deep seated assumptions that a national park must be a pristine wilderness, or that a city must be an entirely man-made entity from which nature should be banished, the idea might have emerged much earlier. It is entirely logical. London is paving the way for a new approach that will be very exciting.
What makes me excited is that the idea has sprung from a diverse group of ordinary Londoners who have a vision for the future. It is not a top-down initiative from government, or the Mayor, or from IUCN or UNESCO. This is a people’s movement. The prospectus says, “All kinds of people are involved: cyclists, scientists, tree climbers, teachers, students, pensioners, unemployed, under-employed, doctors, swimmers, gardeners, artists, walkers, kayakers, activists, wildlife watchers, politicians, children, parents, and grandparents.”
They have put it in plain words:
“Let’s make London the world’s first National Park City. A city where people and nature are better connected. A city that is rich with wildlife and every child benefits from exploring, playing and learning outdoors. A city where we all enjoy high-quality green spaces, the air is clean to breathe, it’s a pleasure to swim in its rivers and green homes are affordable. Together we can make London a greener, healthier and fairer place to live. Together we can make London a National Park City. Why not?”
Having worked on a detailed strategy to protect London’s wildlife habitats since the 1980s (see link below), I am delighted that this new initiative is based on a much broader constituency. It gives ordinary people a voice, an opportunity to influence London’s environment in ways that have not been possible before and an opportunity for everyone to benefit from London’s natural assets.
Mudchute City Farm, next to the financial district of Canary Wharf, in 2007. Copyright David Goode.
The idea has been remarkably well received. Celebrities such as Stephen Fry have been wholehearted in their support. He said, “Imagine London as the first National Park City. Wow, heck of a thought. Help make it happen.” But most of the comments come from lesser-known people who recognise the enormous opportunities offered by this idea to their own particular area of work. Whether it be child poverty, sustainable schools, transport planning, mental health, green building projects, or provision of long distance footpaths, these are just a few of the vast array of activities that are likely to be affected. Sir Terry Farrell, the prominent architect and urban planner, described it as “One vision to inspire a million projects.”
It has also gained the support of the London Assembly and several London boroughs, though the instigators are not looking for the kind of top-down designation by Government that is the hallmark of traditional national parks. This will be a people’s project which will act as a catalyst to promote new solutions for our capital city. But the idea of a National Park City could take the concept of nature in the city into a whole new realm. If it catches on, it could go a long way to meet the kinds of objectives now being espoused by IUCN for protection of urban natural areas; I am sure it will influence the future debate on development of urban Biosphere Nature Reserves.
Momentum is growing in London for this radical new venture and there are positive signs, even in these early stages, that it could shake up some long established attitudes to nature. I believe there is a parallel here with public perceptions of climate change. In her book This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein argues that it will require a shift of public attitudes on a scale equivalent to the movement for abolition of slavery if we are to reverse current trends. So it is, too, with our perception of nature in our predominantly urban lives. But the idea of a National Park City led by citizens turns everything on its head. I’m all for it.
With acknowledgements to the National Park City steering group prospectus.
Can we re-envision our cities with a stream of linear open spaces, defining a new geography of cities? Can we break away from large, monolithic spaces and geometric structures into fluid open spaces, meandering, modulating and negotiating varying city terrains, as rivers and watercourses do? This way, the new structure of open spaces would relate to and integrate with many more areas and provide access to more people across neighborhoods and the city. Why? Because a linear park passes near more people than a square part of the same size—that is, more people are within a short walk of a linear park than a square one of the same size in the same neighborhood. And linear parks are parks of opportunity. Where would one create a big square park in Mumbai? But streams and other naturally linear features provide opportunities to create park access in an otherwise crowded urban zone.
Over the years, across cities, we have been planning and building parks and gardens and other public spaces as geometric blocks that, in most instances, stand out in sharp contrast to the character of the neighborhoods in which they are placed. Such decisions that impose such blocky parcels of land seem guided by intentions of promoting exclusive spaces, spaces that could be contained and controlled, with access to them regulated. In many urban situations, such blocks have led to class and community polarization due to the very nature of their design and governance structure. A public space has significant socio- political colour that cannot be ignored or masked under the guises of city beautification programs and limited environmental objectives.
Today, we are confronted by many critical questions that need to be answered. Can public spaces in various forms be conceived to harness social and community relationships? Can they bring together the disparate fragments of spaces within cities, otherwise characterized by forced ghettoisation and gated communities? Can sensitive ecological assets that have been classified, colonized, and/or treated as backyards of development programs be put into the public domain and turned into social and cultural fore-courts? How can we alter the established blocks of barricaded spaces and structures into open and clear spaces for all, forever? Can more people freely access and exercise control over common property in order to democratise the ecology of cities? Alternately, can we work towards developing linear structures of open spaces as an answer to many of the above issues, while significantly altering the established, dogmatic order of public spaces in the planning and development of cities?
These are key questions for the future of city building. It may be a tall order, but worth pursuing, as it is rooted in the idea of a new urban rights agenda—governance models that strive to achieve integration, equality, and socio-environmental justice. In most instances, public spaces have been shrinking with city expansion. Open land, including that reserved for gardens and playgrounds, has either been converted by governments for building construction purposes or is being grabbed and developed for real estate projects, as has been experienced in the case of Mumbai. In such an event, collective or community ownership of common spaces becomes crucial for maintaining a desirable balance between open spaces and built-up areas. It is in this regard that linear streams of open spaces achieve significance. This is not to say that larger parcels of land for open spaces are not necessary at all. Rather, that the interesting possibility of linear systems is that small residual or marginal spaces that are often ignored or neglected can be stitched together with other open spaces and natural areas into a larger structure of open spaces. Such an approach would greatly aid our struggle for expanding open spaces in dense cities where open lands are in short supply, helping us to achieve minimum open spaces standards.
Pimpri Chinchwad Networking Plan: Central Park. A network of green corridors and a central park in a plan by this author for Pimpri Chinchwad town in the state of Maharashtra, India. Credit: PK Das & Associates
In terms of physical planning, at P.K. Das & Associates we aim to develop contiguous open spaces by interconnecting various facets of areas open to the public. This would produce a network of green corridors throughout the city and its various localities, nourishing community life, neighbourhood engagements, and participation. With public space being the main planning criteria, we hope to bring about a social change: promoting collective culture and rooting out alienation and a false sense of individual gratification promoted by the market. By achieving intensive levels of citizens’ participation, we wish to influence governments to devise comprehensive urban plans and to integrate disparate developments. The ‘open and clear forever’ public space policy will truly symbolize our democratic aspirations. This is a significant way to rebuild humane and environmentally sustainable cities.
In Mumbai, the ‘Mumbai Waterfronts Centre’ and architects PKDas & Associates have made an attempt to re-envision the city by proposing such a linear public spaces structure, bringing together the vast extent of the natural assets and the available open spaces within the city. An illustration of such an idea shows how a system of linear parks and other public spaces can radically alter the socio-environmental character of the city. More importantly, by this plan, it is possible to mobilise neighborhood people’s participation in the development and expansion of open spaces as much as their participation in the development and expansion of the city, as seen in the plans for Juhu, a neighborhood in the western suburbs of Mumbai.
In order to Re-Vision Mumbai and democratize its public space, we have launched the ‘Vision Juhu’ plan as a pilot project.
A public campaign poster, published by area residents and this author to popularize the idea of linear open spaces structure in the Juhu neighbourhood of Mumbai, currently under implementation. Credit: PK Das & Associates
A rendering of the green corridor onto a Google image of Juhu area. Credit: PK Das
As Mumbai expands, its open spaces are shrinking. The democratic ‘space’ that ensures accountability and enables dissent is also shrinking, very subtly but surely. The city’s shrinking physical open spaces are of course the most visible manifestation of this, as they directly and adversely affect our very quality of life. A new order of linear open spaces must clearly be the foundation of city planning.
Open Mumbai Exhibition and inauguration photos
Through this plan we hope to generate dialogue between people, governments, and professionals and dialogue within movements working for social, cultural, and environmental change. It is a plan that redefines land use and development, placing people and community life at the centre of planning—not real estate and construction potential. A plan that redefines the ‘notion’ of open space to go beyond gardens and recreational grounds to include the vast, diverse natural assets of the city, including rivers, creeks, lakes, ponds, mangroves, wetlands, beaches, and the incredible seafronts. A plan that aims to create non-barricaded, non-exclusive, non-elitist spaces that provide access to all our citizens for leisure, relaxation, art, and cultural life. A plan that ensures open spaces are not only available, but are geographically and culturally integral to neighbourhoods and participatory community life.
Such plans for cities will be the beginning of a new dialogue to create a truly representative ‘Peoples’ Plan’. Let streams of linear open spaces flow across urban landscapes, defining a new ecology—socio-environmental order—of cities the world over
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Maryam Akbarian, TehranRoof gardens have to become an accessible and economically native item that enhance buildings’ spatial quality and operating income.
Wolfgang Ansel, NürtingenCarrots and sticks—the combination of regulations, incentives, and public relations is a successful recipe for municipal Green Roof policies.
Nathalie Baumann, BaselCities can require much more green infrastructures on buildings via policies and laws combined with subsidies campaigns.
Michael Berkshire, ChicagoThe City of Chicago is estimating that over 80 percent of its 509 green roofs were built because they were required by the Sustainable Development Policy.
Amy Chomowicz, PortlandTwo key ingredients for a green roof program are policies and education.
Andrew Clements, CorinthScaling green roofs to the world with safe, cost-effective, user friendly OS could make them accessible to your granny.
Karla Dakin, DenverWhy should a developer spend money on a green roof? What is the long-term return rate? How does it benefit investment? The answers can be found water, healthcare, and community/jobs.
Stuart Gaffin, New YorkI see no necessity for hot urban surfaces any more, what with new cool roofing technologies and options (including green roofs) becoming well-known, popular, sometimes required in building codes, and increasingly comparable in cost to traditional membranes.
Dusty Gedge, LondonAll public and private buildings should have green roofs, but the natural benefits of soil and vegetation don’t quite fit into the current market model.
André Gonçalves, GoiâniaThe challenge is to get people involved. Civil society can play an important role in the establishment of public policies for green roofs.
Ulrike Grau, Mexico CityGreen roofs on every single public building require a joint effort of all city government departments, not only the Environmental Secretary.
Angela Loder, DenverLegislation and links to resilience and biophilia will move green roofs into the future.
Amosh Neupane, MiddleburyOne solution to the lack of green space in New York is the installation of green roofs on all of the City’s public schools—we did it at our high school.
Matt Palmer, New YorkTo greatly increase the number of green roofs, we need convincing evidence of the benefits, realistic comparison of the costs in comparison to other technologies, and a solid sense of the long-term return on investment.
Kerry Ross, CalgaryDespite acceptance of the multiple benefits of green roofs elsewhere, costs, misperceptions and a protracted approvals process hinder greater uptake in Calgary.
Kaveh Samiei, TehranThe worst trend underway in vertical greenery in Iran is limiting ourselves to an ornamental view—an orchard on a rooftop!
Julie Santos, London & Buenos AiresGovernments, business leaders, and communities alike need intense and constant education regarding green roofs and all the advantages these bring to the built environment, let alone our wellbeing.
Kate Scherer, New YorkOne solution to the lack of green space in New York is the installation of green roofs on all of the City’s public schools—we did it at our high school.
Mark Simmons, AustinGreen roofs in temperate climates are too easy. I suggest that, for hot climates, the barriers of plant palette and growing media need to be significantly modified.
Kevin Songer, JacksonvilleGreen roofs provide critical habitat niches for the survival of imperiled plant and animal species.
Christine Thuring, SheffieldFor widespread green roof implementation to be worthwhile, a future-oriented approach with a committed ecological vision is crucial.
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
Many of the benefits of green roofs are appreciated and increasingly well-studied: stormwater management, mitigation of heat islands, insulation, biodiversity, increased longevity of the waterproof membrane, green space for enjoyment, and so on.
With all these benefits, why don’t more buildings—especially large ones—have green roofs?
Shouldn’t they?
Should all public buildings and large new construction be required to have green roofs?
Answering these questions obviously requires complicated technical and political calculations about the real and perceived values of green roofs, what they cost to build and maintain, and whether greens roofs are “worth it”.
So, would programs to significantly expand the use of green roofs make sense? If so, how can we better make the case—say, with better data or more effective outreach—to elected officials, to developers, or to the public that green roofs belong on all buildings?
Maryam is a landscape architect in Tehran. Plants and planting design are her most favorite subjects.
Maryam Akbarian
Invest to make greener
Creating green shells, including green roofs and walls on the outer sides of buildings, causes many well studied and approved positive effects on ecosystems and the quality of urban life that are mentioned in the introduction article of the roundtable. Although these features have irreplaceable values in the fields of sustainability and climatic adaptation, something more is needed to convince private investors to add these living shells to their buildings—something made of continual economic profits and involving the creation of vendible value added parts in the building.
A roof garden in Tehran.
Among two main types of green roofs, due to their functional and spatial characteristics, extensive ones are often used in large urban public buildings and shells. In Tehran, governmental organizations such as municipalities are most often sponsors of these projects. Intensive and semi-intensive green roofs, which are used more in large and medium-sized privately owned buildings, are the main subject of this article.
In Tehran, private investors own a significant proportion of commercial and office buildings and almost all residential on both large and medium scales. The use of green covers in buildings and the creation of green roofs is growing rapidly, but is not popular enough yet. Roof gardens in residential buildings tend to be added as a fancy item intended to increase luxury, just like a rooftop pool, a billiard room, or a high-tech home theater.
The main obstacles in using green roofs in buildings in Tehran are as follows:
High cost: The main reasons that green roofs are expensive are imported green roof materials and the lack of true competition in the pricing of goods and services, which is rooted in the novelty of green roofs. Shortages of materials at affordable prices and skilled construction teams lead to unreasonable prices for each square meter; consequently, most small building owners (due to Tehran’s small-scale urban subdivisions, this group of buildings is numerous) do not have the financial ability and justification to have roof gardens.
Poor quality construction process
Operating problems: Unfortunately, a significant portion of the green roofs in Tehran are designed and constructed by the trading companies that supply green roofs materials. Most of them don’t have any landscape architects or other related professionals to consult during the design and construction process. Obviously and naturally, their main concern is the business. Sometimes, a quick access to sale step means finishing the design of a 1,000 square meter roof garden in just 3 hours, drawing only a few lines on the existing building’s roof plan. Most of these green roofs have operating problems in many parts such as insulation, irrigation, planting maintenance, and even, in some rare cases, structural stability. All these transform the process of designing, constructing, and operating green roofs into a challenging item which owners and construction investors are hardly likely to do again.
High maintenance: Green roofs in hot and dry weather have significant benefits for projects; meanwhile, they have higher maintenance costs that can result in a challenging situation if construction and design teams don’t pay enough attention to materials, planting, soil composition, and other issues. For example, people’s planting taste is a bit different in Tehran. They prefer annual blooming flowers in all seasons instead of the appearance of perennials and permanent bushes. In fact, they like a spring landscape much more than autumn or winter ones. This is a combination of culture and aesthetics and affected by context. In roof gardens, the need to use perennials and planting maintenance hardships require planting designers to reach an optimum point between technical requirements and owners’ desires.
Safety: Roof gardens, especially intensive ones, are often joined with other recreational and entertaining functions. When you send users to the highest parts of buildings, which are most attractive at their edges, you must pay attention to safety systems seriously; this is even more critical in public buildings for both designers and investors.
Lack of supporting laws: Legislative support for private investors, who dedicate a part of saleable building spaces to green areas such as green roofs and spend money to make the outer shells of buildings green, can help to popularize green roofs faster. At this time, there are no codified and inclusive laws related to this in Tehran.
To give cities greener top views, roof gardens and green shells of all kinds have to become an accessible and economically native item that, along with proper construction and maintenance costs, enhance buildings’ spatial quality and operating income.
Wolfgang Ansel is Director of the International Green Roof Association (IGRA), a network for the worldwide promotion of the ecological green roof idea.
Wolfgang Ansel
Many municipalities in Germany are using regulations to make Green Roofs mandatory in new urban development plans. The background of this policy is that the city officials believe in the environmental benefits of Green Roofs for urban ecology. The regulation policy generates a kind of “flat rate” for the German Green Roof market. As a result, several million square meters of Green Roofs are installed every year. And Green Roofs have become an accepted standard in the building industry over the last three decades.
Can the German Green Roof experience be duplicated in other countries? Yes and no. In a lot of countries, environmental regulations in the building sector are not well accepted. Therefore, an exact transfer is not possible. Cities should also develop an individual Green Roof policy in light of their financial and human resources and their specific urban ecological problems. There is a saying that many roads lead to Rome. And this is also true for the different ways to establish a successful Green Roof policy.
What helps to speed up this process and to avoid setbacks is information exchange. The policy toolbox with the main ingredients for a successful Green Roof promotion campaign is already available and has been tested. Among the established instruments are regulations (“sticks”), incentives (“carrots”), and public relation activities in different specifications. The International Green Roof Association (IGRA), the City of Portland (Environmental Services) and the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) created a platform to facilitate information exchange in the field of Green Roofs Policies, the “International Green Roof City Network” (www.igra-world.com).
In Stuttgart / Germany Green Roofs are mandatory for new flat roof buildings. Copyright IGRA.
From my point of view, one of the most important things for the spread of Green Roofs is to show that the roof is a valuable open space. Imagine a new building with a room that is locked up and can’t be used by anyone. Of course the investor would agree that this is a waste. But if we look at aerial pictures of cities we can see a lot of unused open space on top of flat roofs. People seem to accept this waste of space as normal. If we can make them see the development potential, we achieve a great deal.
Nathalie Baumann is an urban ecologist and lecturer, researcher, and consultant in the Green Space Development Research Group at the Environment and Natural Resource Sciences Institute of the Department Life Sciences and Facility Management in Zurich (Zurich University of Applied Sciences).
Nathalie Baumann
I’m sitting in a bar, 32 floors above ground level, called Bar Rouge and enjoying the view over the city where I grew up and still live: Basel, Switzerland. The people who are with me are stupefied by the view: there are loads of green roofs around this city. About 23 percent of the flat grey roof surfaces are greened, maybe even more nowadays. Just below this view, the last big surface of approximately 20,000 m2 was greened one year ago: one of many combination roofs with Solar Panels (PV) and green roofs: a Biosolarroof (www.biosolarroof.com). There are not only big public surfaces that have been greened, but many private buildings are visibly green from above as well.
View from Bar Rouge (in the exhibition tower) to the green roof and Solar panel roof (PV) of the Messehalle (exhibition Hall) just below the view point. 16,000 m2, completed in 1999. The whole roof is greened, as well as below and behind the panels. It’s a combination of LandArt with ecology and renewable energy—there are no limits! Photo: Carole Blomjous (2015)
How can this be possible?
It was an engagement of the city authorities, their politicians, and citizens which started nearly 20 years ago. Their engagement was to make a change to save money on energy consumption and to promote biodiversity, which brought them to one of several solutions: biodiverse, extensive green roofs.
The second step to this engagement was to launch a subsidy campaign in 1996/1997 with good public communication in different media to inform house owners (public and private) about this solution; those who renovated their roofs or built a new one within this subsidy year could apply for funds (20-30 Swiss francs/m2). This money was coming from a city fund, which is fed from a special tax for energy consumption paid by individuals—part of citizens’ commitment to support innovative and low energy consumption techniques. In 2001, this engagement resulted in a simple paragraph in the Law of Construction for the city, which said: “…each flat roof, public or private, new, built, or renovated, has to be greened.” Any construction project receives documents and manuals providing information about how quality of a design, choice of substrate (local and natural), and choice of indigenous and regional plants can be fulfilled. This documentation was provided by us: the Green Roof Competence Centre of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences.
Basel is one of the densest cities in Switzerland and doesn’t have a square meter left open to be built on. Therefore it’s a waste to have empty grey spaces—as many cities of this world do—which could serve as replacement habitats and ecological compensation to promote biodiversity.
It is absolutely possible to green many more roofs. It’s not a Swiss phenomenon; it’s about the commitment of decision makers, planners, and politicians to make a change and to take a step in order to be sure that future buildings are greened—it doesn’t matter if it’s public or private buildings or the size of the surfaces. Cities can make the change and have to do it! The example of Basel shows this possibility explicitly: after the implementation of the law, a green business developed and supported the local economy (small companies) in developing well. It’s in the cities hands!
A green roof visit up on the roofs of Basel with delegates from the Parisian government, planners, scientists, and a National Assembly member from France. We explainined to them how a biodivers green roofs looks and how to install it and maintain it. We also let them meet with the local government ministers who brought the green roof change into Basel 20 years ago. Photo: Karine Peiger (2013)
Cities can require much more green infrastructures on buildings via policies and laws combined with subsidies campaigns. Parallel to that, it is important to offer possibilities of trainings for professionals (planners, roofers, landscapers, etc.) to learn how to install green roofs right—just to put green on a building doesn’t mean that it will promote biodiversity. This is all possible because there are already some experts around the world who have been to Switzerland and the UK in order to see the best practices in these countries and to learn how to do it.
It’s not necessary nowadays to re-invent everything; there is already a long history of well-designed, biodiverse green roofs in Europe. Just get in contact with us.
Michael has a Masters Degree in Urban and Regional Planning and has been with the City of Chicago for the past 12 years creating and implementing public policy and incentives that encourage sustainable urban development.
Michael Berkshire
Chicago’s City Hall green roof.
Beginning with the iconic, 20,000+ square foot prairie planted on the roof of City Hall, the City of Chicago has been placing green roofs on municipal buildings since the beginning of the new millennium. The latest count is one dozen public buildings with green roof systems ranging from shallow tray systems to 20-inch deep, fully-integrated systems.
Once it was proven that green roofs would work, flourish, and perform, the City began requiring green roofs on private projects. Since 2004, all buildings that are (1) receiving financial assistance from the City, (2) part of a planned development, and (3) located on the Chicago waterway system or near Lake Michigan must have a green roof.
This is a requirement of the Chicago Sustainable Development Policy, a summary matrix of which can be seen here. According to satellite imagery from 2013, there were 509 green roofs in Chicago totaling almost 5.6 million square feet. Based on a previous analysis, the City is estimating that over 80 percent of those green roofs were built because they were required by the Sustainable Development Policy.
Rebecca Bratspies is a Professor at CUNY School of Law, where she is the founding director of the Center for Urban Environmental Reform. A scholar of environmental justice, and human rights, Rebecca has written scores of scholarly works including 4 books. Her most recent book is Naming Gotham: The Villains, Rogues, and Heroes Behind New York Place Names. With Charlie LaGreca-Velasco, Bratspies is co-creator of The Environmental Justice Chronicles: an award-winning series of comic books bringing environmental literacy to a new generation of environmental leaders. The ABA honored her with its 2021 Commitment to Diversity and Justice Award.
Rebecca Bratspies
Green Roofs Are Environmental Justice In Action
Urban areas are replete with environmental burdens. The air is polluted, the water is polluted, and green spaces are few and far between. It is the urban poor that suffer the most. Poor communities, especially poor minority communities, bear the lion’s share of environmental burdens while having the fewest resources for promoting resilience. If investment were apportioned on a “biggest bang for the buck” basis, cities would be pouring money into solving environmental problems in these communities. A good place to start would be with green roofs.
Growing concerns about climate change add an additional impetus for green infrastructure. In New York City, buildings are responsible for the vast majority of carbon emissions. Anything that reduces energy consumption in those buildings will also reduce the building’s carbon footprint. This set of concerns prompted Chicago to launch an extensive green roofs project.
Green roofs are, of course, just one aspect of the green infrastructure needed to transform cities into sustainable, low-carbon communities. Yet, even considered in isolation, green roofs might make a big difference. Green roofs can filter airborne pollutants, offset urban heat island effects, reduce carbon emissions, provide flyways for migratory species, in addition to reducing energy consumption.
Despite the clear benefits from urban green roofs, cities have been slow to invest themselves, or to mandate green roofs for private development. And, when such investments do occur, they rarely are directed at the poor communities most in need of the benefits that green roofs bring.
There are many implacable social and political forces behind this lack of investment. However, there are also a set of legal and regulatory barriers. Much of the impetus for green roofs, along with other green infrastructure, emerges from the Clean Water Act’s mandate to manage stormwater and to control combined sewer overflows. Grey infrastructure, in the form of pipe and concrete, has an established regulatory effectiveness. Green infrastructure is less certain in the near term. Lingering information and performance gaps mean that adopters may be taking additional risks. With fines for violations ranging in the thousands per day, it is a safer design choice to choose concrete pipes, even though green roofs and green infrastructure offer so many additional environmental benefits.
With thought, regulatory mandates could be revised to promote, rather than inhibit, green infrastructure.
Nearly a decade ago, the New York Department of Design and Construction recognized that per unit area, green roofs save over twice the energy as cool roofs. However, the cost is very high. As a result, there has been no official recommendation for putting green roofs on the roughly 4,000 buildings New York City owns. The One City Built to Last Initiative commits the City to invest in energy efficiency, clean energy sources, and installation of many leading edge technologies. Despite a commitment to “lead by example” the Initiative contains virtually no discussion of green roofs, focusing instead on cool roofs, solar power and energy efficiency.
For private real estate, the Initiative requires information gathering and energy benchmarking, but does not include any green infrastructure mandates. New York City does offer a tax abatement to property owners that install green roofs. The tax benefit, along with the marketing cachet of green living, might be enough to tempt private developers to incorporate this element into new designs.
That still leaves the environmental justice question—how to direct the investment in green infrastructure toward those most burdened and vulnerable communities. Sometimes, all it takes is political vision.
In terms of making an impact, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is an obvious target. NYCHA is the single biggest landlord in New York City, overseeing 2,553 residential buildings that are home to nearly 5 percent of New York City’s residents. NYCHA’s combined real estate holdings are roughly three times the size of Central Park. Anything that happens at NYCHA would have a huge impact on the City, and would make an important statement to the rest of the world. Green roofs at NYCHA housing could be a bellwether for use of green roofs elsewhere, and might make a real environmental difference for the City’s poorest and most vulnerable residents. In short, NYCHA might achieve environmental goals while advancing environmental justice. This potential for synergy is not lost on NYCHA residents, and environmental justice advocates.
Unfortunately, no such plan exists. NYCHA is chronically underfunded, and has been running a budget deficit. Mayor DeBlasio’s Next Generation NYCHA proposal call for reducing energy costs by making basic investments in upgraded equipment. These investments will certainly make an environmental difference, but it misses the opportunity to do more. Green roofs could make a significant contribution to Next Generation NYCHA by dramatically lowering heating and cooling costs, while also addressing other environmental justice concerns in these communities, providing flyways for migratory birds, improving air quality, and diverting runoff from the City’s overtaxed combined sewer overflow system.
Small, incremental steps are happening. For example, Corsi Houses Community Center in Manhattan already has a green roof and Bronx River Houses has a blue roof, installed as part of a green infrastructure pilot project.
Schools and other public buildings are also inviting targets for bring the benefits of green infrastructure into all the City’s communities. PS118 in Queens is home to a blue/green roof investigational study. The Parks Department headquarters on Randall’s Island has one of the largest green roofs in the City.
While green roofs require commitment in terms of vision, policy, and personnel, they have the potential to transform the City.
Amy Chomowicz is a board member of the Green Roof information Think-tank (GRiT). GRiT is a Portland non-profit that provides education and outreach to support the use of green roofs.
Amy Chomowicz
Portland’s ecoroof program began in 1996, when Tom Liptan put an ecoroof on his garage. (An ecoroof is an extensive green roof.) Tom, now retired, worked for the City of Portland Bureau of Environmental Services (BES), and his co-workers, bureau leaders, and, ultimately, elected officials were all receptive to his continuous advocacy for ecoroofs. In 2008, Sam Adams, who was Portland’s Mayor at the time, launched the 5-year Grey to Green (G2G) Initiative. G2G fully funded an ecoroof program along with several other watershed restoration initiatives and programs. Through G2G, BES offered a cash incentive of $5/sq ft and significantly expanded our technical assistance.
So, why don’t all public buildings have green roofs? Or all large private buildings (e.g. businesses)?
Retrofitting existing buildings with a green roof can be a challenge. From our experience in Portland, most existing buildings cannot hold the additional weight of a green roof without structural upgrades. From 2008 to 2013, BES evaluated 18 buildings in Portland to determine if they could be retrofitted with an extensive green roof. Results showed that three buildings could be retrofitted with no or minor adjustments. The remaining 15 structures would require extensive structural modifications to be retrofitted. It wouldn’t make sense to incur the substantial cost of structural modifications just for an ecoroof. However, if an owner is embarking on a building renovation anyway, it is a good opportunity to upgrade the structure so it can be retrofitted with an ecoroof.
The lack of local data can be an obstacle to implementing a green roof program. One of the unique aspects and an essential element of Portland’s program is data BES gathered from monitoring several Portland ecoroofs over the past 10 years. The data show ecoroofs retain 50 percent of the rain that falls on them and cut peak flows by 90 percent. Having local performance data demonstrated the benefits of ecoroofs to local decision makers and provided information our engineers can use for modeling and design.
Is this a good idea?
Green roofs make sense from many perspectives. They provide many environmental and human health benefits as well as adding green jobs to local economies. BES manages stormwater, so green roofs, with their stormwater management capabilities, make a lot of sense for our system needs. BES uses green roofs to keep stormwater out of our combined and separated sewer system to preserve pipe capacity, help reduce local flooding, and reduce basement sewer backups. Also, when space on the ground is limited, an ecoroof may be the best way to manage stormwater sustainably.
Cities need to grow by developing in ways that restore the environment and protect human health. The negative impacts of current construction practices need to be mitigated, and new construction should have a net benefit to environmental and human health. Green roofs are one aspect of restorative development which provides multiple benefits to the buildings themselves, as well as the community.
What would it take to make it happen and be worthwhile?
Two key ingredients for a green roof program are policies and education. Jurisdictions such as Chicago, Seattle, and Washington D.C., that have strong policies and requirements are seeing a booming green roof industry. Portland’s ecoroof policies are embodied in our Stormwater Management Manual, which requires onsite stormwater management for new construction, the Green Building Policy for city-owned facilities, and financial incentives such as reduced stormwater fees.
With or without a requirement, education is critical. Teaching building owners about ecoroof benefits helps them understand what they will gain and makes them more likely to ask for an ecoroof. We conducted ecoroof seminars and vendor fairs that attracted as many as 500 attendees. We also provide technical workshops and materials for the design and construction community. To respond to requests for a low-weight, low-cost, low-maintenance, and no irrigation ecoroof, we developed the red cinder ecoroof design.
The Green Roof information Think-tank (GRiT) is a discussion forum that is unique to Portland. GRiT’s membership includes design and construction professionals, agency staff, landscapers, roofers, irrigation contractors, and interested citizens. GRiT supports education and outreach, and GRiT members consult on projects and they advocate for green roof policies, codes, and programs.
Andrew holds two patents for Greek-appropriate green roofs and is particularly interested in water-wise, natural, ecosystem development in hot cities such as Athens, as well as the challenges of working in a seismic region. Landmark projects include The Greek Treasury building in Constitution Square, Athens.
Andrew Clements
All projects and photos by http://oikosteges.gr.
On a plane trip to Turkey from Greece five or so years ago I was seated next to the CFO of a global corporation and we got chatting about cricket. The conversation inevitably turned to what we each ‘do’. When I told him that I worked on green roofs and showed him photographs of projects, he responded with a surprised ‘Wow, what a great idea’ and said that he had never seen or heard about the practice. This was an eye opener for me. I think green roofers, like all professionals, misjudge the level of penetration into the consciousness of humanity of their field of expertise. We live in a rock pool at the edge of the world’s oceans, in other words, thinking we are in the sea and that all the other creatures know of our presence. We are still an embryo of an industry in comparison with other fields.
The reasons for this are varied and numerous. First of all, although the practice of putting plants on roofs is literally as old as the hills, in its modern form, it is quite a recent development in many countries of the world. And in many countries of the world, there are formidable technical challenges to safe, cost effective green roofing. In a hot, dry, seismic region such as Greece, for example, these technical challenges include severe weight restrictions, use (or preferably not) of summer irrigation, hot gale force summer winds, and monsoon-type torrential downpours. Add to this the financial difficulties most of the post-2008 world faces—and, in particular, debt sunk places such as Greece face—and it is not hard to realise why we have not yet seen much wider implementation of green roofs, despite the increasing attention, interest, and huge efforts made by many of us to network and communicate. Finally, although modern green roof technology is well developed and does tend to function as it is designed, the general perception of putting plants on a roof immediately draws comments like ‘Won’t the roof leak?’ or ‘Won’t the roof collapse?’
Whether large-scale implementation of green roofs is a good idea is a no brainer for me. The plethora of well-known benefits of green roofs makes this technology an essential component of sustainable building practices going forward. The question really is, how do we make this happen?
Firstly, green roofs have got to become accessible to everyone. Most current technology is the green roof equivalent of MSDOS to information technology, in my opinion. Green roofs need an Apple type OS or a MS Windows OS to make them user friendly to the masses. We need green roofs that can be understood by a Yiayia (Granny) in a Greek village.
Furthermore, green roofs have got to become far more affordable to the masses in our cash-strapped world economies. A green roof should cost the same, if not less, than a conventional roof on a new build and should be equivalent in cost to thermal insulation on a retrofit if we want to see mass adoption. Moreover, a green roof must have similar or lower maintenance costs to a conventional roof. If the end user has to shell out for summer irrigation water, weeding, fertilisers, and pesticides, we are unlikely to see wider implementation beyond the novelty-seeking architect or the hard core eco-enthusiast.
Finally, we need to get green roofs into the human mindscape as the obvious default method of roofing. This requires the continual, relentless, communication and networking that this site has afforded green roofers with this roundtable and that countless green roof activists and enthusiasts from around the world now engage in on social media and through other communication outlets.
Karla Dakin combines her landscape architecture expertise—she holds a masters degree in landscape architecture from the University of Colorado, Denver—with fifteen years of experience in the art worlds of New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Dakin’s past work in the art world gives her insights into the creativity of art and design.
Karla Dakin
The motivating question here seems like an odd one given the context of our ingrained, American, individualist sentiment. America is not Switzerland or Germany after all, whereby government fiat mandates the inclusion of green roofs. And yet, all the time I get asked some form of this same question. It usually goes like this, “How can we convince people, i.e. those with money and control, that they need to include green roofs in the planning of their public and commercial buildings.” The answers go way beyond the up front costs—the main reason green roofs do not get built in this country.
History, albeit a brief green roof history in the US, is a good place to start for answers. We can study our past to see how we coerce controlling parties to build green roofs, reflecting on “carrots” (i.e. expediting of permits if you include a green roof or stormwater credits), “sticks” (Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] fines for polluted waterways that led the charge for many green roofs in Portland, Oregon and in the Washington D.C. area), and “visionaries” like Mayor Daley of Chicago bringing to fruition his city greening initiatives. Does history teach us that we must wait for the next disaster or the arrival of a forceful politician?
Not to overstate the obvious, but the primary component of American democracy is capitalism and that is about money, baby. Money, money, money. Why should a developer spend money on a green roof? What is the long-term return rate? How does it benefit investment? Can’t they just use some other less costly implementation to get around stormwater mandates?
Perhaps what we need to do in the U.S. is lay out the truth and consequences, like a showdown at the OK Corral. Make the reason for green roofs all about money—the money “you” will make. We ought to drive the conversation not only about present but also about future costs.
WATER: Oil and gas might be cheap now and projected, long term low costs look rosy, but what about the cost of water, now and in the future? The paucity of water in the far west United States will drive water costs up but so will the abundance of polluted water across the continent. Polluted stormwater is coloring and will color the conversation. Green roofs can pull the stormwater filtration card when we need to clean our polluted water or slow down our stormwater.
HEALTHCARE: How about healthcare costs? Anyone who pays for their own insurance can attest to the rising monthly payments. Corporations pay huge health insurance costs for their employees. Do they know about the rising rates of asthma caused by pollution in the cities? How about job stress and its related medical expenses? Now it’s time to pull out recent studies by people like Dr. Angela Loder (also in this panel), whose research reveals how green roofs can mitigate these costs.
COMMUNITY/JOBS: Apparently crime pays the wrong people. How much money do we spend as a citizenry on crime? Our prisons are overcrowded and costing us billions. Have we looked at green roofs as an answer to this expenditure? People like Ben Flanner and Majora Carter can explain the cost benefit ratio of introducing people who never have seen a garden to the world of growing their own food on a roof. Young people get exposed to a world beyond their dreams, where they might find a different profession. We also need to educate the public on the research that shows increased real estate values around green roofs, not only from the ecosystem services angle but also from the community-forming angle.
Stuart Gaffin is a Research Scientist at the Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University.
Stuart Gaffin
Why don’t all public buildings have green roofs?
I recall a statement I read from Art Rosenfeld and colleagues of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab Heat Island Group that paraphrased as ‘… the era of the dark asphaltic roof should be phased out …’ I agree with the statement, as I see no necessity for such hot urban surfaces any more, what with new cool roofing technologies and options (including green roofs) becoming well-known, popular, sometimes required in building codes, and increasingly comparable in cost to traditional membranes. Public buildings should go green, especially when the old roof is up for retirement. As to why they currently don’t, such technologies are probably still novel in many respects to building managers who often just opt for the same old, same old.
Or all large private buildings (e.g. businesses)?
Private owners may have more leeway about building decisions and less red tape or bureaucracy to go through, so they have even less excuse to not go green. Plus, they have more personal incentive to enhance building amenties and cut down on energy costs, especially if they live there. These amenities include novel new green spaces with potential for such popular residential activities as gardening or small-scale food or herb production—I once heard that gardening is the number one hobby in America.
Would this be a good idea?
Yes, for the reasons just cited and the public benefits from urban heat island mitigation, stormwater management, and ecosystem services. If we debunk the remaining misconceptions about green roofs (costs, maintenance burden, and the winter heat penalty, especially), that can increase the demand and market share of these systems, and thus bring down costs, as has happened apparently in Germany, the undisputed leader in the field; the price there is ~40 percent of the US cost (Phillipi, 2006).
What would it take to make it happen and to make it worthwhile?
The appeal of living green infrastructure with multiple functions, as opposed to single-purpose gray infrastructure, is growing within cities. Indeed, cities, as they are in so many ways, are the incubators for innovation and leading the way, especially on climate change policy, both in carbon emission mitigation and adaptation. It is an exciting time for many urban disciplines and urban environmental research that will shape how cities evolve, function, and look over the next decades and beyond.
Reference:
Phillipi, Peter. (2006). How to Get Cost Reduction in Green Roof Construction. Greening Rooftops for Sustainable Communities. Retrieved here.
Dusty Gedge is a recognised authority, designer, consultant and public speaker on green roofs. Dusty has also been a TV presenter on a number of UK shows and makes his own Green Intrastructure and Green Roof and Nature Videos. He is an avid nature photographer and social networker posting on Twitter, Facebook and G+.
Dusty Gedge
All public and private buildings should have green roofs. This is more than a good idea. It is an intelligent one. All the benefits that vegetation and soil bring to both cities and the buildings themselves is where we need to be going to help our cities adapt to climate change. When ones consider a city, such as London, where I have estimated that over 10 million m2 of existing roof space could be greened tomorrow, why aren’t we green roofing like crazy?
The problems is that the natural benefits of soil and vegetation don’t quite fit into the current market model. The cost-benefit analysis of the payback time of a green roof really doesn’t stack up if you are private owner of a building. Therefore, there is no fiscal stimulus to entertain the idea. I have met many a building manager who has bought into the idea, but who just can’t justify the costs. Furthermore, many existing buildings, both in the public and the private sector, are restricted because of weight issues. Notwithstanding this technical issue, there is huge potential in cities across the globe if the fiscal challenges can be overcome.
The main driver for the delivery of green roofs on buildings can only be through policy initiatives from city and regional authorities. Linz in Austria was one of the first in the world to start this process back in 1984 and has also provided funding to deliver the green roofs.
When you visit the industrial areas of Linz, one can easily tell when which buildings were built before 1984 and those that were built after. Soil and vegetation bedecks the newer buildings. The developers and owners are unlikely to have delivered green roofs without the policy and the initiatives from the City.
Since London initiated its policy, green roofs have blossomed over the capital. Prior to 2008, the Mayor encouraged the use of green roofs. This was like asking commuters politely to pay for the London congestion charge. Most wouldn’t. Since 2008, there has been a planning ‘expectation’ for green roofs. My city now has over 175,000 m2 in the Central Activity Zone. Encouragement would never have achieved that.
Whilst helping to form the policy, I travelled widely in Europe and North America to research green roof policy for a technical report I was writing for the London Government and England’s Environment Agency. Switzerland, in many ways, has the best approach, although Germany is seen as the world leader. Swiss cities take a more holistic approach in my view—some cities performance criteria requires native wildlife flowers. Specific seed mix characteristics are desired and this ecological approach is now enshrined in the Swiss green roof standard (one of only two such standards in the world (the other being the Austrian Standard).
This is important as, commercially, the early innovators were actually interested in supplying a broader landscape than the current sedum extensive green roofs seen across Europe and North America. This is an important elemental detail within the question. What do we want on our public and private buildings to deliver when it comes to green roofs?
Sadly, green roofs over the last 30 years have been pared down to their bare essentials.
Green roofs are almost like an oak tree, full of promise, stripped to their bare bones—a barkless trunk akin to a telegraph pole. And this is not naïve—I know how the construction industry works, when it comes to green roofs and I know how landscape architects and architects respond to the issue. The original Swiss and German green roofs were ‘nature’ roofs supplied by commercial companies. No romance there. In the last twenty years, the main driving force for green roofs has been stormwater, which is engineer-lead, not ecologist-lead. To achieve designs that attain stormwater and building physic requirements, architects want a neat product that ticks the boxes. The green roof industry, often berated, can only supply what they are asked for.
So the early green roof suppliers, who may well have wanted to supply ‘nature’ roofs, have been constrained to supply the simplest homegenous systems throughout the world. When Swiss cities and my city ask for wildflowers and provisions of biodiversity as part of the policy agenda, the architects have to respond and the green roof industry can return to its roots of providing sustainable, resilient vegetation that is locally appropriate.
Policy is probably the only way to get not only more public and private buildings to have green roofs, but also to refine and re-invigorate how green roofs are delivered. I can already hear the naysayers—after 20 odd years promoting green roofs with a reasonable degree of success, I am used to the grumbles in the wings and the dress circle! But if we really do think green roofs are a good idea, which they most definitely are, it is up to the nature movement in cities to take a robust stand. It needs to demand an approach that is in keeping with our specific city and it needs not to be cowered by the might of the design and construction professionals.
One final point also needs to be made; how we incentivise more green roofs on existing buildings. This is the real challenge currently facing our cities. My answer is simple—if only building owners had to pay a rent to the ‘original’ landlord. The landlord (nature) would probably spend the rent on returning our cities to some semblance of what was there before buildings usurped the natural environment. And it would be at roof level, as most cities are nearly 80 percent roofscapes.
Sadly, I can’t see this happening in the near future. However, we can make policies deliver for both natural and human inhabitants of cities. To that end, cities need to set the agenda, not the design and construction professionals.
André Gonçalves is co-founder of Sobreurbana, a startup company dedicated to the activation of public spaces and promotion of urban culture in Goiânia, Brazil.
André Gonçalves
Our planet is getting more urban every day. Since 2008, more than half of the world’s population has been living in cities that keep growing faster and faster as the countryside shrinks. This tendency, dosed with some lack of planning, greed, and absence of knowledge or ethics, have already provoked disastrous consequences for Earth, most of them irreversible. Urban heat islands, floods, air and water pollution, droughts, and lack of biodiversity are some of the climate change phenomena that we feel more and more strongly everywhere in the world.
Green roofs are a solution to mitigate these problems. They can be effective at cleaning the air, retaining rainwater, isolating buildings, and bringing beauty and biodiversity to the neighborhood, among many other advantages that contribute to well being and life quality. So the question is quite pertinent: why don’t all buildings, or at least public buildings, or large private buildings, have green roofs?
The immediate answer would be: costs. Building a green roof is more expensive than building a conventional one, besides which it needs maintenance, which also has its costs. However we may question this accounting: as a green roof isolates the building, it contributes in saving energy; as it cleans the air, it saves money that would be spent in health; as it manages stormwaters, it prevents floods and saves private vehicles and public equipment from getting damaged. Thus, green roofs, like other urban green infrastructures, are not luxuries, but investments that actually bring economic benefits: financially, by cutting off expenses that would be spent in energy, health, restoration work, etc…; but also in other non-accountable advantages such as life quality and air quality, which are increasingly becoming luxury goods in the real estate industry.
Politicians tend to manage their agendas according to their mandates and green roofs are long-term investments whose return can’t be seen in a spreadsheet. So why would they prioritize green roofs when they could invest their efforts in other areas with more visibility and immediate returns? I believe the answer resides in civil society. Politicians are elected by citizens, who are increasingly informed, connected, and committed to environmental and urban causes. All over the world, movements of citizens concerned with improving their cities and their public spaces have been rising. These movements, and civil society in general can and must pressure their leaders to start thinking in the long-term and working for their neighborhoods, their cities, their planet. When we talk about politicians, we can also point out developers and construction professionals: if their clients are truly concerned about these issues, they will build and sell them green buildings.
The challenge is to raise awareness and get people involved. We now live in a time where citizens are gaining more and more power: information is increasingly accessible, processes are increasingly transparent. Citizens elect their politicians to represent them. If they feel misrepresented, they will charge for it.
A Jane’s Walk in Goiânia.
In Goiânia, Sobreurbana has been promoting Jane’s Walks since 2013: free community walks, based on Jane Jacobs’s ideas and aiming to bring people out to the streets to discover, observe, and discuss their city and their neighborhoods. Sobreurbana also produced Goiânia’s Urban Ecology Week, joining specialists, researchers, professionals, politicians, and citizens to share their knowledge on that subject. These activities aim to raise awareness about urban issues and to discuss possible solutions.
Also in Goiânia, a movement leaded by the construction industry organized public sessions to debate and ideate the future of the city in the long term. The purpose was to create a city development council composed of different actors in the civil society as a means to pressure politicians to make the right choices for the city. On the environmental panel, it was unanimous that green roofs are necessary in a future sustainable city.
We believe that these kinds of initiatives, promoted by different sectors of society, can play an important role in the establishment of public policies for green roofs.
Ulrike Grau has been involved in green roof design and the setup of plant trials in Spain, Puerto Rico and Mexico. She is currently working at the agricultural Chapingo University in Mexico.
Ulrike Grau
My gut response is “Sure, in an ideal world, all public and private buildings would have a green roof.” While it is relatively easy to require a green roof in every new construction, things seem to be a bit more difficult for the thousands of already existing buildings. You’ve got the building up and running, have fulfilled all the legal requirements, so why spend extra money on something that mainly “only” benefits the environment?
I have been living in Mexico for 15 years and things have moved forward considerably over this period. In 1998, the first green roofs were installed on public buildings in Mexico City, on the initiative of the city government, later followed by urban public schools. As in most cities, the environmental regulations of Mexico City oblige all new constructions to compensate their impacts through a series of different programs and specific actions. Since 2012, these have focused more on green roofs and green walls as a means to guarantee green areas in new development projects. Also, fiscal incentives for green roofs range between 10 and 15 percent off property taxes.
Apart from the recognized environmental benefits of green roofs, the City takes advantage of other benefits: put a green roof on a school and you can use it for environmental education. Following this principle, over the last four years, the government of Mexico City has financed almost 35,000 m2 of green roofs on public schools and hospitals.
Though all these actions sound good, they still seem to be a drop in the ocean. Why doesn’t every single governmental building, school, and hospital feature a green roof yet?
It probably does not only boil down to the major money issue, but also to the fact that relatively few local green roof companies exist which are able to fulfill legal requirements for governmental contracts as well as having the capacity for managing bigger building sites. And even with established companies, sufficient supply of materials, such as plants, can be a limiting factor at times.
Especially with green roofs on public buildings, one possible way out of the dilemma springs to my mind. Promoting and financing green roofs should not only be up to the Secretary of Environment, for example. It should be a combined effort of several governmental entities such as the secretaries or departments of:
Finances — let it spend part of the city’s income on green roofs
Education — use green roofs as a source of environmental education for the youngest citizens and for further research
Health — implement green roofs on hospitals and as a general means of reducing stress levels induced by living in an ocean of concrete
Economic Development — support the creation of new green roof companies
Social Development — lead the way by turning green roofs into recreation centers, food production units, and locations of social cohesion
Rural Development — show rural communities a way to a new source of income such as producing green roof plants
Housing and Urban Development — implement policies to include green roofs in every urban development
…and—why not?— even the…
Secretary of Tourism — be the first one to offer green roof tours.
While most of these ideas are directed towards a general support of green roofs and the strengthening of the corresponding industry, those secretaries could also be politely obliged to “sacrifice” a percentage of their budget on the actual implementation of green roofs. Or is this being too optimistic?
Dr. Angela Loder is a researcher and strategic planner whose work focuses on the relationship between occupant health, buildings, and urban nature.
Angela Loder
The biggest challenge, and possibly the most difficult to overcome, is cost. Green roofs cost at least twice as much as a conventional roof and the benefits are dispersed over multiple factors—private and public, energy and habitat, air quality and social/psychological well-being. This makes it harder to figure out who should pay for a green roof, particularly for public entities. Getting green roofs on public buildings also requires industry and municipal staff training, as well as the alignment of the planning and building codes, which can be obstacles to green roof implementation. How successfully green roofs are adopted can be indicative of a city’s overall ability to implement environmental initiatives, as their benefits cross departmental jurisdictions and thus require economic, socio-political, and ideological buy-in by different departments in the city.
For example, the City of Toronto initially paid for their Eco-roof incentive program using money from Toronto Water (for the stormwater mitigation benefits of green roofs), but the incentive program did not initially cover nearly enough of the cost at $10/square metre ($1/square foot) to encourage green roof implementation. Though in 2007, costs increased to $50/square metre/ ($5 square foot) and up to $100,000 per project, the real green roof shift came from City’s 2010 legislation, which required all new developments over 2,000 square metres (21527.82 square feet) to install a green roof. This required a graduated coverage ranging between 20-60 percent of available roof space for institutional, commercial, and residential buildings. It should be noted that this legislation also required a provincial legislation that allowed the City of Toronto to require and govern a more stringent green building code than required by the province. Similarly, while Chicago also had a green roof incentive program, it was their Green Matrix that placed Chicago as the national leader in the US for multiple years in a row. The Green Matrix requires projects receiving public money and/or building in certain areas of the city (such as the Loop) to choose a green building option, one of which is a green roof.
There are two lessons to be learned here. (1) Though incentive programs encourage early adopters and some green roof traction (especially among residential projects), there is some indication that these developers would have put a green roof up anyway, as it encourages their brand or reflects their beliefs. This is happening in New York City, where high-end condos are using decks and green roofs as amenity spaces for residents, regardless of municipal legislation. Requirements, code, and limited choices to encourage ‘greener’ building options seem to be the most effective methods for encouraging green roof legislation where there isn’t a market to encourage green roofs. (2) There may be legislative changes that are needed in order to require green roofs, and this can necessitate state and municipal coordination.
Would green roofs on all public and/or private buildings be a good idea? In cities with serious stormwater or urban heat island issues, possibly, but they need to be integrated as part of a larger plan and a broader discourse on resilience in the face of climate change, with green roofs being part of ecosystem services.
The other area where I see green roofs being pushed is in the health and design industry. Biophilic design is increasing in popularity and explicitly mentions visual or physical access to nature, including green roofs as an option to achieve this access in densely built urban environments. Healthy buildings are also increasingly looking at adding greenspace for their tenants based on research that shows that looking at a green roof can improve concentration and calmness and can contribute to well-being. For example, the new WELL Building Standard has green roofs as one of their biophilic design optimization strategies.
Thinking of green roofs as providing more than just stormwater and urban heat island benefits will engage the public and make green roofs more popular. To paraphrase the former Mayor Daley of Chicago, ‘people need to see that you’re doing something’ and green roofs, with their symbolism of progressive design and environmentalism, might be the mascot many cities need.
Amosh Neupane is a 19 year old climate activist is a sophomore at Middlebury College in Vermont. He's worked with Global Kids for the past three years, and is an alumnus of Global Kids’ Human Rights Activist Project and the Greening Western Queens Internship program.
Amosh Neupane and Kate Scherer
We live in a city, New York, that is over 190,000 acres, yet only 19 percent of this is green space. One solution to this issue is the installation of green roofs on all of New York City’s public schools. I (Amosh) first learned about “green roofs” when I was an intern for Global Kids, Inc. and the Horticultural Society of New York‘s collaboration on the North Star Fund’s “Greening Western Queens” summer program. During the course of the internship, we sat in on classes on green roofs, visited several of them, attended information sessions, brainstormed ideas on how to make one, and walked around neighborhoods to collect signatures for petitions all through the summer.
One of the biggest obstacles to building green roofs on public schools is the cost of the work. Constructing a green roof can range from ten to thirty $US per square foot. The structure of a green roof includes insulation on the roof, a waterproof membrane, a drainage layer, and a layer of light soil. In addition to these fees, there is also the issue of hiring an engineer or architect. Logistical issues can arise in the building process. Before starting construction, the original roof must be in good condition. If it is not, then there must be repairs. There is also an annual cost in maintenance that can vary depending on the size of the building and its accessibility.
Amosh Neupane with GK Leader Maxine Nash and GK Trainers Angela Marshall and Devon Mercurius, November2013
Cost issues often deter public schools from even considering the idea of a green roof. However, there are ways to build green roofs at lower costs with minimal maintenance—this is what we aimed to do (and did!) at Global Kids back in 2013. Our goal was to convince the NYC Department of Education to build a simple green roof on one public school in each of New York’s five boroughs. We wanted to do this at schools and in neighborhoods that desperately needed green spaces. My supervisor designated my school, William Cullen Bryant High School, in Queens, as a school that was in dire need of a green roof.
William Cullen Bryant High School is located in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens. With two major power plants in operation in the vicinity and many industrial complexes running in Woodside, Astoria, and Long Island City, Bryant lies in one of New York City’s most environmentally challenged neighborhoods. The majority of students attending Bryant are immigrant or first-generation Americans and living in low-income communities of color. In the Global Kids’ Leadership Program at my school, I learned the importance of empowering youth to create social change. Kids attending schools such as Bryant often faced injustices perpetuated by socioeconomic factors. Our schools aren’t as robust as the ones in more privileged neighborhoods. There are dismally low numbers of healthy, fresh food markets and restaurants in the area. Often, students and families from these communities are unaware of the importance of a pollution-free environment, green spaces, and fresh food for their minds and bodies. If people are not educated about the effects of climate change and pollution, they often don’t advocate for things such as green roofs on schools because they don’t realize their significance. Through our green roofs campaign, Global Kids students wanted to alleviate some of the environmental issues in underserved neighborhoods.
A Global Kids Leader at William Cullen Bryant High School tending the green roof garden, May 2015.
The importance of green roofs cannot be understated. They reduce carbon emissions by cooling the building. Green roofs also cool the surrounding air, decreasing heat island effect. In addition to helping overall temperature and gas emissions, green roofs can also protect our water supply. Green roofs absorb excess stormwater, stopping it from flooding our streets and backing up our sewers. By putting green roofs on every public school, we would ensure that every neighborhood in New York City would have its environment improved. If we limit the amount of green roofs to only commercial buildings, we would only see improvement in the environment in select neighborhoods in New York. These green roofs can also act as science classrooms for students. With their new climate knowledge, future generations of students will advocate for better environments for their communities.
By 2013, after two years of work, we made several remarkable accomplishments. After several months of successful campaigning, Bryant High School had a green roof. To reduce costs, we decided to use simple planters rather than put soil on the entire roof. We planted basil, thyme, tomatoes, lavender, and mint, among many other herbs and vegetables. Even though we hadn’t managed to reach our campaign goal of building a green roof in one public school in all five NYC boroughs, we had managed to get a green roof for one school in a heavily environmentally burdened neighborhood. Another of our vital achievements was influencing the Department of Education’s Office of Sustainability to publish the “Guide to Green Roofs on Existing School Buildings,” a handbook on how to retrofit public school buildings with green roofs. We also led a community discussion on sustainability and climate resilience.
Today, the green roof at William Cullen Bryant High School is tended to and managed by the students participating in the Global Kids program—there is no need for outside maintenance, eliminating a huge potential cost. A year ago, the school set up a farm-stand and the proceeds of the sales were used to aid victims of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. The site also serves as an education space for certain science classes. Tehmeena Khan, a rising junior at Bryant, says:
“The green roof is an ideal place for me to wind down, contemplate things I’ve learned at school, hang with my friends, and just indulge in some gardening. I like the escape it provides from the stressful academics of the school, despite its location within the school walls.”
Kate Scherer is a 15 years old junior at the Notre Dame School of Manhattan. Kate has been with Global Kids since 2014 and has been working as a youth activist since, especially on climate education.
Matt Palmer is a senior lecturer in the department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University. His research interests are primarily in plant community ecology, with emphases on conservation, restoration and ecosystem function.
Matt Palmer
Infrastructure is expensive and retrofitting older buildings with new technologies takes time, money, and a tolerance for risk. In many regions, green roofs are new enough technologies that the cost and benefit calculations are not robust. Few cities have green roofs with extensive monitoring data, so many questions remain about how well green roofs perform their stated benefits—especially when considering how these benefits may vary over time. Given this, it is understandable that many municipal governments have been slow to adopt green roofs for public buildings or to require them of private building owners.
The range of possible green roof designs is extensive—there are choices on drainage materials, the depth and composition of the growing media, and the composition and maintenance of vegetation, to name only three axes of variation. While having choices is great, there are also tradeoffs involving costs and benefits. For example, a thicker layer of growing media will capture more stormwater and support a greater biomass and diversity of plants, but adding thickness increases both installation costs and the wet weight, thus increasing the structural load. Choosing the right design will vary from building to building based on engineering and financial issues and on the desired kinds of human interaction (e.g., visibility from surrounding buildings, passive recreation, educational use). Some designs will succeed on one building but not others, and some designs may succeed in one city but not in others. While it is exciting that design choices abound, the work of comparing them—especially across cities and through time—has only just begun.
Some of the benefits of green roofs can be realized at lower cost with other technologies. Many of the energy benefits to individual building owners can be achieved more cheaply through better insulation and HVAC upgrades. Stormwater can be captured and stored more cheaply at ground level with bioswales, basins, and storage tanks. Green roofs could offer benefits that these other technologies cannot—extensive greening in densely built neighborhoods with potential neighborhood aesthetic and cooling benefits—but these benefits are hard to value quantitatively. Though green roofs are sometime touted for their ability to filter stormwater, they increase runoff nutrient concentrations in many cases, making them far worse for water quality improvement than other types of green infrastructure.
Some of these limitations to green roofs can be overcome with innovative design and associated research on green roof performance. With regards to vegetation design, there are exciting advances in trialing a greater range of plant species such as a recent program at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Much of this work is horticultural in nature, focused on survival, growth, and aesthetic appeal. It will take the next step of translating these findings to ecosystem functions, such as potential for stormwater capture, cooling, and effects on nutrient and pollutant capture, to be able to evaluate how plant choices might affect the overall benefits of a particular design.
Since green roofs are dynamic, living systems, it is also important to study how plant and soil communities change over time. Many building owners will have limited resources for green roof maintenance, especially over the long term. Without regular care, some plants will die out while others will spread, including “weeds” that will arrive and establish on their own. Since green roofs are usually built with expectations of a long life, it is critically important how the living components of a roof will change as the roof ages. These successional dynamics will be affected by maintenance efforts and will influence the value provided by green roofs.
So, what would it take to greatly increase the number of green roofs? Convincing evidence of the benefits, realistic comparison of the costs in comparison to other technologies, and a solid sense of the long-term return on investment. There are many aspects of these cost-benefit relationships that are hard to quantify, but there are research groups around the world contributing to our collective knowledge. Whether building all these roofs would be a good idea depends very much on what we all find.
Why don’t all public or large private buildings have green roofs?
In Calgary, Canada, we have been slower to adopt green roofs than we ought to be despite being the first municipality in Canada to implement the requirement of a LEED Silver (now LEED Gold) certification for all new municipal buildings and major renovations. This early adoption brought tremendous awareness of and action in the building design and construction sector to lessen environmental harms and attain targeted levels of sustainability, which, in turn, led to the development of New Best Management Practices for buildings.
However, a lack of understanding of the performance of green roofs and how they contribute to LEED certification has led to green roofs being overlooked not only for public buildings but many other building projects. This has resulted in fewer uptakes in favour of other competing technologies (reflective roofing, solar panels, etc.). There is also concern that LEED may not adequately value or reward green roofs.
The capital costs of green roofs are higher compared to other alternatives and the business case for their use is poorly understood; hence, they are often thought of as a luxury feature. For instance, while working in Edmonton, I became aware of concerns expressed by their Mayor for the expense associated with green roof technologies for publically funded projects. Efforts were made by the design team and administration to demonstrate the value to the project and the green roofs were retained.
Many of the same reasons that green roofs are not incorporated on all public buildings also impede their uptake on large private buildings: higher first costs, lack of full understanding of the multiple benefits, competing technologies, aesthetic preferences, etc.
On many large projects, particularly mixed-use commercial developments with residential towers, the local planning department promotes the inclusion of green roofs. These green roof projects are typically developed as intensive rooftop gardens for open space amenities.
It is my experience that green roofs are included in either public projects or large private buildings only when there is a champion of the technology amongst the stakeholders or when the planning department makes them a requirement.
Is this a good idea?
An increase in green roof implementation would be beneficial to my region. While we have an excellent stormwater management system overall, our region is subject to sudden, intense rain and hailstorms. This can overwhelm the catchment systems and causing flash floods, particularly in established neighbourhoods.
Hail damage to buildings, including to roof waterproofing, is on the rise, which has resulted in some very large insurance claims, making the protective covering of a green roof a wise choice for building owners.
As one of North America’s sprawling municipalities, Calgary is actively promoting “Smart Growth” to encourage higher density development. Accommodating multiple functions on site, including places for people, and providing habitat and ecosystem services, all while making density more attractive, would be a definite win-win.
With our new Biodiversity Action Plan, there are opportunities to look at rooftops as sites to compensate for habitat loss and enhance the ecological network in the city.
Whether public or private, green roofs on large-scale developments are an excellent idea, as they would profit from greater economies of scale, create positive environmental impacts in the city, receive higher visibility, and encourage more organizations and individuals to incorporate green roofs.
What would it take to make it happen and to make it worthwhile?
As a first step, our municipality could expedite the approvals process by making it easier and more streamlined, particularly for owners who voluntarily integrate green roofs. Other incentives that we should consider include a renewal of the density bonus, reductions for stormwater fees, or tax breaks to motivate project teams eager to incorporate green roofs.
Broad education and training is needed at the local level to more fully understand the business case for green roofs in our region and to and convince design teams and municipal leadership that the initial capital outlay is worthwhile. Closing the gap between research and practice will further facilitate appropriate local solutions, improve success and help lower the upfront costs.
It is also important to shift our appreciation for new forms of urban landscapes and aesthetics. In many areas of the country, it is understood that vegetation goes dormant in the heat of the summer; however, we remain infatuated with the mowed, green lawn despite our low level of precipitation (399mm/yr). Recognizing the potential for more frequent droughts in our future, we need designs that incorporate water-wise strategies and better ecologically performing vegetative practices.
Kaveh Samiei is an architect and researcher in built environment sustainability.
Kaveh Samiei
I prefer to answer the question with particular reference to current conditions in Tehran. Loss of green urban areas during the last century and high rise construction has meant that vertical green technology is now the most effective way to implement greening in Tehran.
One group of people assigns the built and natural to distinct realms. Others make efforts to achieve significant integration between built and natural realms, including using green roofs.
But why vertical? Aren’t there other choices? And while we don’t take advantage of green spaces on lands correctly, why do we need to implement vertical green spaces that consume more time and money? Don’t forget, the design and construction of vertical vegetated systems requires sufficient skill, room for experimentation, and, finally, appropriate and adaptable technology.
Despite these arguments, there are many benefits of vertical greenery right now in the middle of polluted and crowded cities such as Tehran. The main reasons for utilizing vertical greenery are:
Shortage of unoccupied lands for urban greening in most metropolitan areas
High-rise construction and the growth rate of overall of grey surfaces where flat green spaces can’t develop more
More benefits through utilizing vertical green skins rather than ordinary green spaces
The possibility of making an integrated green space network by greening each building and attaching separated parks and green spaces to them
Recently, rules about green roofing in large cities have been approved. They include incentive programs, i.e. the ability to increase building density on top of public and governmental buildings if a green roof or roof garden is installed. Also the Headquarter of Vertical Green Space Development, a governmental organization in Iran, has begun work in the “Tehran organization of green spaces and parks”. Some municipal branches and “Park and green space organization” headquarters now have a green roof, or their facades became green during recent years, although the quality is questionable!
The main barriers to future development are created by the lack of understanding of the benefits of green skins among people and environment-construction managers. Knowledge, acquired through education and exposure to existing technologies, is critical. Still, in some schools of thought in architecture and construction, vertical greenery is viewed by professors and tutors as merely decorative! Still, encouraging change is beginning.
In addition, vertical vegetation systems are typically very expensive, very slow to mature, or both. Therefore, when vertical vegetation projects are considered, it is important to be able to make informative design decisions at an early stage.
In Tehran, the acceptable exemplars meeting minimum of standards are limited. A semi-arid region is not a heaven for green roofers but choosing plants intelligently, using suitable layering systems, and finding an appropriate irrigation system are the mysterious components of successful green roofs that normally are not specified in most exemplars! Certainly, ecological and environmental benefits of a green skin are the last or forgotten element here!
The worst trend underway in vertical greenery in Iran is limiting ourselves to an ornamental view—an orchard on a rooftop! From the current point of view, decorative beauty and large spaces are more important than other benefits. There is a necessity to shift opinions from this misguided, ornamental view of ground-level greenery on green roofs. The dominance of hard landscape over soft landscapes is another problem for inexperienced green roofers and designers.
We require educational and learning programs. The change must be happen in two main portions:
Shifting traditional view points about vertical greenery.
Adapting laws, codes, regulations, and incentives in the works and designs of law makers, designers, and contractors.
At least, educators must start to introduce vertical greenery in university classes and all architecture, landscape architecture, and environmental design students must take courses in this field. Definitely, the future of architecture and construction will be ecological; that’s not a preference or prediction, but a fact!
This is why most public and private buildings in Tehran have no green roofs yet. Planning for green roofs and living walls are important components of green development in urban planning alongside guiding suitable policy and providing standards and supportive regulations. With sufficient awareness, we can improve and develop vertical greenery in Tehran and throughout urban areas of Iran. We need to go towards such a green infrastructure framework for Tehran, bolstered by research and experiments.
Julie Santos is a Digital Art Director with a keen interest in urban greening and the improvement of the environment through intelligent regeneration.
Julie Santos
Public and large buildings do not host green roofs in their totality mainly due to a lack of appreciation and steadfast support—as a consequence, we are without the full power enlightenment can harness. Governments, business leaders, and communities alike need intense and constant education regarding green roofs and all the advantages these bring to the built environment, let alone our wellbeing. But is it enough with our current approach?
Living roofs and urban greening as a whole have definite roles to play in our cities, unifying and grounding us in the nature within our immediate surroundings. Advantages such as maximising food production, supporting life forms, and lessening our environmental impact are well documented arguments in favour of green roofs. As a Digital Art Director and Garden Designer, I feel my case is best put forward by touching on the design considerations of our daily experience within our cities—taking into account the end-to-end experience of our interactions and how these affect each person and our culture as a whole.
As we observe relationships with the built environment, it soon becomes evident that there is much frustration and stress caused by the everyday demands a modern city bestows on us. From the daily commute to the concrete jungle, there is little opportunity for pause and taking respite—essential ingredients in continuing with renewed energy whilst keeping healthy, connected, and centred. Modern cities as we know them today date back to a mere 250 years or so—it is no wonder, then, that we are not fully equipped for the demands these complex hubs expect from us, should we compare them with the millennia of earth’s evolution. Genetically, we still belong to seas and rolling hills, so ensuring our cities equip us with a balanced environment is not only advisable but essential.
Green roofs provide specific solutions to challenge the disconnectedness brought on by modern lifestyles. As focal points, they soften the visual landscape, allowing our eyes to rest whilst positively influencing mood through colour, sound, and texture. By supporting and improving fauna, green roofs retain our connection to nature, providing grounding and a sense of belonging. A lessened dependancy on regulating temperatures helps curb artificial environments, improving health and natural resilience while maintaining a closer-to-optimum environment for indoor plants to thrive—‘bringing the outdoors in’ and purifying air in a more natural manner. If green roofs can interact with added immersion in a natural environment, they bring a welcome opportunity to closely appreciate flora and fauna, encouraging the curiosity and observation that are essential to creativity and ‘out of the box’ thinking—key assets for professionals in all walks of life.
At present, we are heavily dependent on government support for social awareness and laws regarding green roofs. If we are to make the most of these unique offerings, we should strenghten existing research in Applied Service Design: mapping the lifecycle of a green roof with its key interactions as well as observing how the value in these interactions is directly brought into workplaces, homes, and our other social structures. This approach will reinforce our existing research and back up the scientific advantages with people-centric profitability, effectively influencing business and government interests by bringing swifter takeup via a profit-led understanding and, therefore, committed buy in.
There is still so much that can be done to maximise the understanding and appreciation of green roofs and why they are essential to any serious and forward-thinking community. I believe Service Design thinking can improve the effectiveness of the green roof message and ensure this most deserved cause harnesses the attention it deserves.
Mark Simmons Ph.D. is Director of Research and Environmental Design for the Ecosystem Design Group at the University of Texas.
Mark Simmons
Why green roofs in hot climates are missing and why we need them there more than anywhere.
PREAMBLE Green roofs in temperate climates are too easy. They have been developed and adopted in the temperate and cool-temperate climates of Europe and North America. Although these regions can get extreme weather, they generally do not experience climatic extremes of high temperatures, prolonged drought, or intense rainfall events in the same way as tropical and subtropical regions. This presents challenges for hot climate green roof design to not only provide adequate growing conditions for plants, but also to improve roof performance with respect to all the intrinsic (e.g. cooling building, extension of roof membrane lifetime) and extrinsic (e.g. flash flood mitigation, reduction of heat island effect) benefits we expect. I suggest that the components of conventional green roofs, including plant palette and growing media composition and components, need to be modified. Here I identify the following barriers:
PLANT SELECTION First, we need to get away from traditional temperate plant palettes: plants adapted to thin, well-drained environments. High daytime and (as importantly) nighttime heat loads, drought, and floods mean a switch away from plant guilds with a narrow niche (e.g. most sedums) to those with a broader ecological breadth. Plants must be able to survive long-term saturation for weeks, as well as weeks or months of drought and seasonal or year-long heat.
WATER RETENTION AND PLANT AVAILABILITY Paradoxically, green roof design has been driven by the need for the conflicting goals of good stormwater retention and adequate drainage (both in the media and immediately above the roof membrane), while at the same time leaving sufficient available water in the growing media for plant uptake. These benefits are even more desirable in a hot climate to optimize retention of stormwater— prolonging its availability for plant use—and to be able to dry-prime media to accept the next rain event. Plant transpiration abilities and root morphology can be exploited to help this, but the conventional ‘sandwich’ design of media over root barrier over retention layer may actually interfere with this performance benefit.
HEAT It isn’t necessarily high leaf temperature that limits growth in the hot-climate green-roof environment. Most vascular plant roots have a much narrower temperature envelope of performance in comparison to aboveground stems and leaves. Although it is species-specific, generally the operational temperature range of root physiological processes is from 4°C to 30°C. Above that upper temperature limit, respiration and other root processes decline rapidly and certain processes, particularly the synthesis of secondary materials, slow down until temperatures climb above 48°C, where such processes stop functioning altogether. Conventional green roof media has a high fraction of expanded mineral component (clay, shale) and this can have high specific heat capacity and high conductivity; together with large pore space between particles, this allows for air movement, meaning that heat can travel vertically through the media to depth—remember that, on a hot day, media surface temperatures can exceed 70°C. On an extensive roof, this means reduction of effective root volume and reduced nighttime cooling.
CONCLUSION The characteristics of green roof water retention, plant water availability, plant selection, and thermal properties are all critical factors which need to be adapted to help address the harsher environmental conditions and performance demands of hot climates. If these problems can be overcome—and current research is showing that they can—then the combined environmental, ecological, and sociological benefits suggest green roofs could be an imperative technology for towns and cities in tropical and subtropical regions of the world.
Kevin is a plant biologist, lawyer and acute aortic dissection survivor. His tropical and coastal green roof designs include installations in Main Street Disney, Orlando, Florida, on the island of Bermuda and on historic structures.
Kevin Songer
Today, many native wildlife and plant species struggle to compete with exotic, invasive horticultural and anthropogenically related non-native species for survival. Aggressive species with no natural predators are, in many areas, replacing native plants and animals at an alarming rate. Although change across our planet has always occurred, today’s rate of pre-Columbian ecosystem change has accelerated to the point where mass extinctions may soon be unavoidable.
Species extinction issues involve great risks to humans, including loss of potential medicines, of important economic resources, of longstanding traditions, and more. Unfortunately, invasive species colonization and native displacement is hard to control across most urbanscapes—except, perhaps, on green roofs.
We may never fully win the battle of preserving all pre-Columbian ecosystem component species. Over time, humankind will continue to lose critically important species to monocultures of aggressive plants and swarms of unnatural predator species, most brought on by our own anthropogenic activities.
Noxious species roots and seeds will cover the landscape, transported by roads, stormwater ditches, and urban runoff. Native flower blooms may be relegated to specimens in a museum or photos in a library book.
Yet green roofs, be they on a shed, garage, house, commercial building, apartment complex, or bus stop can truly make the difference between death and survival for many of our native plants and wildlife. With the health of the human species so closely related to successful functioning of those ecosystems around us, ensuring native plant and animal survival benefits humankind.
Yes, there are many sustainability-oriented reasons to require green roofs on new buildings, from urban heat island effect reduction to cleaning and attenuating stormwater to sequestering carbon. I suggest, too, that many of our native species, both plants and animals, may find last corners of uninvaded habitat on our city rooftops.
While ground-level landscapes can quickly fall prey to invasion of nuisance plant monocultures, green roofs have boundaries. Yes, maintenance on a green roof may be just as cost- and labor-intensive as ground-level exotic plant control. Green roofs, however have, clearly defined borders, usually free of an unrelenting and uncontrolled neighboring invasive grass, shrub, or tree patch.
Many threatened native plants thrive on green roofs. Case studies across the world have highlighted endangered plant colony survival successes in green and brown rooftop habitat.
Importantly, imperiled wildlife will seek out green roofs. We have seen the progression after installation of vegetated roofs of the arrival of smaller creatures: lizards, anoles, tree frogs, insects and dragonflies, butterflies and moths, each establishing its community throughout native vegetation on green roofs.
Here in Florida, as the first generation of smaller wildlife species became established on green roofs, additional populations of larger birds and reptiles begin to appear. Snakes soon forage through green roof plants for lizards and frogs, maintaining population control.
Following snakes come birds of prey tracking snakes, smaller birds, squirrels, and other green roof species.
Owls, red-tailed hawks, peregrine falcons, swallow-tail kites, osprey, and a pair of eagles regularly visit our green roofs, choosing perches in nearby trees and often taking the opportunity to feed on a ground mouse running through the neighborhood streets and yards below.
Green roofs are important wildlife sanctuaries in the concrete jungle, especially for those species endangered because of habitat loss. Green roofs should be considered necessary infrastructure—required for all new development for many reasons, but especially as a conservation measure, providing habitat for threatened and endangered species.
It may well be that future generations’ archaeological and paleontological expeditions will find that many pre-Columbian plant and animal species made their last stand atop our urban core rooftops.
Christine Thuring is a plant ecologist who integrates her love of life into creative collaborations and educational dialogues. While her expertise is expressed particularly in the built environment (green roofs, living walls, habitat gardens), she is passionately practical and enjoys restoring peatlands, mentoring students, leading interpretive walks, and advocating sustainable and healthy lifestyles.
Christine Thuring
This question reminds me of the early days of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), the US Green Building Council’s credit-based approach to sustainable buildings. It was predicted that LEED would succeed in widespread implementation because the US government was its biggest investor. I don’t know if that’s true, but it makes sense. By investing in green building technology through implementation, the government would save tax dollars through improved energy efficiency of public buildings. More importantly, this would also help establish the market for all the bits and pieces required for this system of sustainable architecture to flourish, from carpets and windows to methods and process.
Turning to green roofs, I think it’s safe to say that the reason these systems are found on some—but not ALL—public (or large private) buildings around the world is because only some, but not ALL, civic leaders and building owners are fully aware of all the benefits green roofs impart. Any city with considerable green roof coverage has probably had at least one ‘green roof champion’ on (or within the fringe) of its council. Someone with sufficient interest and time to recognize that green roofs offer numerous benefits and are economical because of everything they can do.
Installing green roofs on all large buildings is always a good idea, I reckon. Benefits such as thermal efficiency, reduced material waste (e.g., extended lifespan of waterproofing), mitigation of stormwater, improvement of air quality, and habitat creation are just the tip of the iceberg.
To make this happen, my sense is that before anything else, you need that champion. Someone who understands green roofs’ potential and who has the skills to develop and maintain a program that will facilitate their implementation. (I look forward to the contributions from the green roof champions who are part of this panel!)
For such a program to be worthwhile, a future-oriented approach with a committed ecological vision is crucial. The reason for this emphasis is to offset the simple customer transaction kindly provided by the commercial green roof industry. While this arrangement makes coverage easy to achieve, it also leads to green roof installations that could be anywhere in the world, expressing little of each bioregion’s unique ecology. Sedum-dominated green roofs emerged from ecological design processes in 1970s Europe, and they are superb for that bioregion. The sedum roof is a trimmed down ‘basic common denominator’ resulting from decades of competitive innovation, however, and is lacking in contemporary ecological rationale (e.g., Decade on Biodiversity).
In other parts of the world, then, a future-oriented approach with committed ecological vision for widespread green roof implementation could mean ensuring that regional opportunities, such as the needs of migrating species, are considered. Off-the-shelf systems may be suitable, and sedums are fantastically resilient, but the opportunities that a new, large-scale vegetated roofscape could offer invertebrates, birds, and ecological processes must not be neglected. Trans-disciplinary conversations involving ecologists with green roof and other experts, within a framework of the region’s specified goals (e.g., biodiversity action plans), will also help to make widespread green roof implementation worthwhile for this and future generations, both for human and other forms of life!
A review of “Clyde Reflections,” an art film by Stephen Hurrel and Ruth Brennan, on exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, Scotland.
The west coast of Scotland has been known to enchant, with its rough coastal edges, intricately carved islands, charming towns, and an aquatic landscape that is as often tranquil as it is a testament to the brute force of the natural elements. The Firth of Clyde, located on Scotland’s west coast, is one of the UK’s deepest bodies of coastal waters and encapsulates layers of geologic, natural, and social histories. Trailing off as a spindly leg of the firth, the River Clyde flows through to Glasgow and has been an essential waterway for Scotland’s industries and cultural heritage.
Geographically, distinctions between the Firth of Clyde and the River Clyde remain vague; understandably, the tidal nature of these bodies of water leads to a constant ebb and flow, inextricably linking city to sea. On cue, any Glaswegian will recite “Glasgow made the Clyde and the Clyde made Glasgow”, not only referring to the visual prominence of the waterway and the importance of the river to the city’s many industries, but also to the clear influence of industrialization on the tributary.
An underwater still from Clyde Reflections. Underwater footage by Howard Wood, courtesy Stephen Hurrel and Ruth Brennan
Once abundant with herring, cod, ling, and turbot, the Firth of Clyde is now an aquatic desert. When considered alongside the historic fishing heritage that can be traced back many generations, the current state of the Firth of Clyde is a complex and nuanced case for the conservation and regeneration of the ecologies in this area.
Clyde Reflections is a 33-minute film, the product of a collaboration between artist Stephen Hurrel and social ecologist Ruth Brennan. Hurrel and Brennan began their partnership after an art-science expedition with Cape Farewell to the Outer Hebrides; during this trip, it became clear to the pair that they shared a similar way of working and an interest in the natural environment. Publications and cultural maps were some of their first collaborative outputs, with the idea for the film following shortly after.
By sharing multiple narratives of those who live or work within the Firth of Clyde, Clyde Reflections encompasses the many perspectives that continue to shape the discussion surrounding this body of water and, implicitly, the voice of the Firth itself. The film premiered at Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow in September 2014 and was most recently shown as an immersive installation at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow from May 29th to July 5th 2015 as part of the gallery’s Moving Image Season.
Commissioned by Imagining Natural Scotland and Creative Scotland, the film frames responses to what is considered ‘natural’ and ‘not natural’ in this region, defying notions of untouched tranquility that the surface appearance of the firth may convey in its current state. Delving below the surface, both symbolically and metaphorically, the film exposes a more complex story of heritage, the human relationship to the water, and uncertainty about the future of the Firth. Clyde Reflections includes a mix of underwater and above-water footage and is equally meditative in both instances. The rhythm of voice-overs and music provides further content for viewers to dwell on, with more layers revealing themselves on multiple viewings.
Clyde Reflections on exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow. Credit: Stephen Hurrel and Ruth Brennan
With enchanting visuals reminiscent of a Jacques Cousteau film, Clyde Reflections reminds us just how unfamiliar and somewhat extraterrestrial the underwater marine environment remains to our everyday lives. The humble and realistic tone provided by the interview clips prevents the film from becoming too idealistic—many of the interviewees are willing to admit the lack of certainty that they have in response to questions of conservation, ecological balance, and the human impact on this body of water. This realness offers viewers the chance to form their own thoughts or accept their own hesitations, rather than forcing a singular or superficial solution, as is often the effect imposed through the ‘do-gooder’ tone used in many conservationist films and projects.
Ruth Brennan describes her perspective in approaching this project as such: people and nature are an intertwined system, and we too often have removed ourselves from what we consider to be ‘natural’. This is a concept that is reiterated within the patterns and perceptions of urban settlement suggested in the film—we’ve built a separation, physically, between nature and ourselves by aiming to construct commercially dense cities that are frequently devoid of biodiverse green spaces or accessible connections to existing environmental systems. This is also reflected in the connotations of ‘Nature’ as being located elsewhere, far away from the urban existence. However, as provoked in Clyde Reflections, this paradigm is shifting and increasingly being called into question. Despite the uncertainty that is instigated when considering ourselves as part of a natural ecological system, beginning to dissolve this barrier between human and nature will play an increasingly important role in the future of conservation, urban ecology, and the application of environmental theory.
Clyde Reflections aims to embody the complexities of human-nature relationships; its screening within the urban context of GoMA provides a much-needed interjection of a meditative space that challenges preconceptions of the human-nature relationship into the normal patterns of city life. The presence of the River Clyde within the everyday lives of many Glasgow residents has sometimes been forgotten, as the waterway has frequently been identified solely as a means of economic growth and industrialization. However, interest in the river has seen a recent reemergence, partially due to the work of artists and creatives who are searching for a deeper connection to place and context within the city. This new energy marks a turning point towards a more holistic systems-thinking approach to our immediate ecologies and the human role within them.
A still from Clyde Reflections. Credit: Stephen Hurrel and Ruth Brennan
While Clyde Reflections does not provide an immediate solution to address issues of natural resource degradation, it does provide a significant and potent opportunity for viewers to reflect on their own part in a puzzle that continues to grow exponentially in its complexity and connectivity. There is crucial importance in bringing this experience to an urban city center; in exploring the relationship between humans and nature, we must question how conservationist and ecological concepts affect the places where critical masses of humans reside. The viewer is reminded of this interconnectivity multiple times within the film through references to industry and a brief anecdote addressing the horror of microplastic particles within the firth. Industrial production and its effects on hydrological environments are a global chain in which we are all connected, and the space, pace, and nearly hypnotic nature of Clyde Reflections reminds us of this.
Clyde Reflections remains loyal to the idea of complexity and connectivity, never offering a single narrative in revealing this contested and sensitive marine environment. The window to marine ecology provided by this film engenders mindfulness towards the effects of human actions and habits instigated within the city. For this reason, the urban audience becomes an integral part of this project, providing wider engagement with the human-nature relationship expressed within the film. This engagement is critical for starting a more complete conversation about the degradation of the Firth of Clyde, and ultimately the cause-effect relationship between the human commodification of nature and the resulting deterioration of ecologies. In the case of the Clyde, only when we recognize the importance of embedding ourselves, as humans, within nature, will we truly understand the importance of balance and collaboration for the healthy coexistence of the human and natural ecologies.
Just before 10 am one Sunday this June, 300 people prepared for a boat ride on the River Spree, lining up in a park next to the longest surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall. The boat was a cheerful blue and yellow passenger vessel, mostly used for river tourist excursions and dinner cruises. But this group differed from the usual crowd of visitors from across Germany, Europe, and further beyond. Instead, local nature enthusiasts, families, and curious Berliners prepared to board the ship, ready for commentary on the river’s unique urban ecosystems.
Eight riverfront ecology boat tours carrying 300 people each traversed the Spree during the Langer Tag der Stadtnatur. Here, guide Derek Ehlert narrates the tour, as it approached the Oberbaumbrücke in Friedrichshain (top), and passed along the banks of Treptower Park (bottom).
Over 90 minutes, the boat passed the heart of gritty Friedrichshain and the media headquarters of the Urban Spree redevelopment and cruised to the east, towards the waterfront green spaces of Treptower Park. Some participants brought binoculars and observation gear, while others simply relaxed with a coffee or lager. Landscape planner and ecologist Derk Ehlert narrated the tour, pointing out wildlife and describing the various species’ habitats, food sources and migration patterns within Berlin’s parks and waterways. Ehlert estimates that there are roughly 20,000 plant and animal species in Berlin, which he considers the greenest city in Europe.
During this particular weekend, such a convening was not unusual: over 26 hours, an estimated 25,000 people explored the city’s forests, riverfront, lakes, gardens and landscapes through the Langer Tag der Stadtnatur, or the Long Day of Urban Nature. Although cities are increasingly celebrating urban biodiversity, Berlin’s event is perhaps the largest regular citywide celebration in the world and will mark its tenth anniversary next year. The event includes contributions by dozens of local partners and sponsors and is a great model for other cities hoping to better engage their citizens in matters of urban ecology.
View of Berlin’s skyline from the River Spree, including Treptower Park (at left), the Fernsehturm or TV Tower, and the Ostkreuz water tower
Wolfgang Bussman, the director for the Langer Tag der Stadtnatur has explained: “our main goal is to make nature in our immediate neighborhoods visible and to provide visitors with unique experiences which show how important conservation in the city is.”
This year, events began in the afternoon of Saturday, June 20th, with late-night activities such as night climbs and forest walks running until 1am on Sunday. Sunday, June 21st then saw a full schedule of walks, boat rides, bus tours, bike tours, lectures, and other happenings at sites ranging from the riverfront to private gardens to nature reserves. Events were nearly free: a 7-euro full-weekend ticket covered some basic event costs, but mostly existed in order to allow organizers to track participant numbers, organize reservations, and coordinate corporate block bookings.
In total, the Langer Tag der Stadtnatur included over 500 events at about 150 sites across the city, including hubs in the city’s center, north, south, east, and west. The city center’s largest hub was an urban garden sponsored by a housing association near the central crossroads of Alexanderplatz. Initially set up as a short-term project, the garden recently became a permanent space for the housing association residents. Event hubs elsewhere in the city this year included the Grunewald, Berlin’s famous urban forest; Tempelhofer Feld, the historic airport recently reclaimed as a park; the Natur-Park Südgelände in Schöneberg, and Britzer Garten in the southern district of Neukölln.
Urban garden Prinzessinnengarten, or Princess Gardens, hosted numerous events during Berlin’s Langer Tag der Stadtnatur, as well as the garden’s regular community flea market, which is held bimonthly (see below).
The first Langer Tag der Stadtnatur was held in 2007 and included about 350 events that attracted 10,000 visitors. Over the years, the program has steadily grown, with different focuses each year depending on the interests in the city at the time. Urban gardening and beekeeping, for example, have been prominent themes recently. Partnerships also emerge in different years depending on major urban initiatives or events; for example, organizers anticipate collaborating with Berlin’s upcoming IGA (Internationale Gartenaustellung, or International Gardening Exhibition) in 2017.
The Stiftung Naturschutz Berlin (or, the Berlin Nature Conservation Foundation) is the main coordinator for the event, partnering with the Berlin Senatsverwaltung for Stadtenwicklung und Umwelt (Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment), which is a primary funder. Corporate and public sector partners also contribute funding, while local NGOs, community organizations, and individuals organize and host specific events across the city. The Stiftung coordinates this citywide participation, arranging a few signature events and managing the website, printed program materials, online reservation system, and marketing. Stiftung Naturschutz Berlin staffer Wieke Mikette explained that “we try to have all the main characters in Berlin participating, ranging from the relevant organizations to private persons hosting events in their gardens.” The partnership aspect of the program is seen as one of the most successful elements, both in creating a full calendar of events and in engaging a wide range of stakeholders.
The program also aims to engage with decision-makers, to help them recognize the urban nature present in Berlin. This year, several neighborhood bus tours included the heads of Berlin’s local district administrations (the Bezirksbürgermeister) seeing their own districts, along with constituents and other event participants. National politicians also participated in the riverfront ecological tours and other events. The Stiftung hoped “that [the politicians participating] could see how important [urban ecology] is and how green the city is,” explained Mikette, who added that most other participants were regular Berliners, including “people coming from the north, from the south, from the east, from the west. They are really from Berlin. It is a Berlin event.”
The event has now grown and expanded across Germany, with 11 other cities hosting similar weekends, including Hamburg and Bremen. In Berlin, the weekend is also reminiscent of other opportunities for marathon-style urban immersion, such as the Long Night of Museums and the Long Night of Science. In fact, the Naturschutz Stiftung first looked to these events as models when piloting the Langer Tag der Stadtnatur.
Urban garden Prinzessinnengarten, or Princess Gardens’ community flea market.
Internationally, many other cities host citywide celebrations around built environment themes, but very few introduce urban nature to a mass audience the way that the Langer Tag currently does. Some address architectural topics, such as London’s Open House, which in 2014 opened 850 architectural sites to over 250,000 people. About twenty other cities internationally now also host Open Houses, including New York, Buenos Aires, Rome, Tel Aviv, Melbourne and Chicago. Similarly, Jane’s Walk is a festival of citizen-led neighborhood walking tours, held simultaneously in cities around the world. Either of these festivals may contain tours or open houses relevant to ecological issues, but urban ecology is not necessarily at the forefront of discussions.
As another alternative to the Langer Tag model, Bioblitzes celebrate the abilities of citizen scientists and invite community members to consider the ecological diversity of their cities. Short-term events in which scientists and community members seek to identify as many species as possible, Bioblitzes offer a comparable “festival” atmosphere and can be held at a site, neighbourhood, or on a citywide scale. Although the concept of a Bioblitz was pioneered in the U.S., it is currently particularly well developed in the UK. Bristol’s Natural History Consortium runs a national Bioblitz Network and London’s Museum of Natural History recently released a full Guide to Running a Bioblitz within its citizen science division.
The Melbourne Bioblitz is one particularly remarkable example due to its citywide scale, longer duration, and contribution to the city’s planning policies. Held over two weeks in October and November 2014, the project invited citizens to participate in data collection for the city’s first-ever Urban Ecology Strategy. Over 700 people participated at sites across the city, providing 300 sightings and photographs, which have since been mapped by the City of Melbourne. The Bioblitz included extensive online engagement opportunities alongside the 52 in-person events, which occurred in disparate locations and at different times of day to accommodate both human participants’ schedules and the wildlife’s likely patterns. In some ways, the event was akin to a citywide charrette for ecological planning, with citizens supporting the scientists and planning professionals in a rapid-fire period of on-site analysis.
Unsurprisingly, urban Bioblitzes are more frequently organized on a smaller scale, focused on single sites or areas of biological interest. For example, the 2015 Auckland Bioblitz invited citizen scientists to participate in the development of a Biodiversity Strategy for the Pourewa Reserve and Kepa Bush over a 2-day period. Like the Bioblitz in Melbourne, the event served a dual purpose: it sought both to create an educational opportunity for participants and to gather data to inform a plan for the site’s preservation as a reserve. Tasks for citizens ranged from freshwater fish counting to insect sweeping, plant identification, and moss identification, all of which contributed to the long-term plan for the site’s use as a reserve.
Promotional posters for the Langer Tag der Stadtnatur were visible throughout Berlin during the weeks leading up to the event, including in the U-Bahn and S-Bahn.
The organizational approach for Auckland’s Bioblitz differed radically from the Melbourne or Berlin model in that it focused on a single natural area with unique biodiversity or a particular need for a survey as opposed to encouraging participants to explore and reflect on nature in the city at large. Many other events worldwide have followed this model, such as the National Geographic 2007 Bioblitz in Washington’s Rock Creek Park or the 2015 bioblitz in Hawaii’s Volcanoes National Park. Numerous British cities also hosted small-scale Bioblitzes in 2015, as well as national themed Bioblitzes, such as the Garden Bioblitz, which invited people across the UK to tally the species in their home garden and then upload the information to a national database.
Finally, Los Angeles offers a fourth model for engaging citizens in local urban ecology: a purely educational event, hubbed at a single civic institution. The city recently piloted its Urban Nature Fest, hosted at the Natural History Museum and described as the city’s “first ever festival for metropolitan nature lovers.” Activities largely took place on site, including garden tours, performances, readings, and presentations, many of which sought to increase the public’s exposure to the museum’s scientific research. Forty different local environmental organizations participated, as did entertainers such as the Santa Monica Mountain Rangers Band.
As urban ecology plays an increasingly prominent role in local planning, will other cities take the initiative to launch events such as these? Local advocacy organizations such as San Francisco’s Nature in the City, museums such as New York’s Museum of Natural History, and academic centers such as Yale’s Urban Ecology and Design Laboratory would be well placed to spearhead efforts in their own cities. Berlin and Melbourne’s examples show that the most effective events involve partners across a metropolitan area, including both organizations and individuals. The contrast between the Berlin, Melbourne, and local bioblitz models also shows that the events can be effective as either citywide festivals or single-site immersion opportunities, with or without a substantial citizen scientist element.
Whether attending much of the Langer Tag, or environmental events at other points during the year, Berliners are lucky to have such a green city and such a chance to explore it. Cities across Germany have already followed suit, and perhaps the model will soon spread further afield.
James Corner’s prolific writing from the past two decades invites readers on a journey to discover the elusive medium of landscape. As one of the most prominent landscape architects of our time, his writing is as much a means of advancing the field as is his built work. The Landscape Imagination is the first written project composed exclusively of Corner’s own essays since Taking Measures Across the American Landscape, published in 1996. In the twenty years between these two books, Corner wrote the essays collected here while simultaneously composing a celebrated portfolio of built landscapes. Though his iconic designed works (for example, The High Line in New York City) eclipse his written works—particularly outside academia—we gain access to a rich and penetrating assessment of landscape’s profound role in culture when we wander through Corner’s sprawling wordscapes.
The Landscape Imagination is organized more thematically than chronologically, with essays parceled out according to areas of Corner’s ongoing investigations: Theory; Representation and Creativity; Landscape Urbanism; and Practice. Although many of the essays were written years ago, their sequencing in the collection renders them fresh. Each section builds upon the previous, linking theoretical aspects of the medium to practice through what Corner calls “the landscape imagination.” Described as a critical agent and a form of social action, the landscape imagination’s goal is to make landscapes that provoke and challenge society’s relationship to the natural world. Corner argues that landscape is the great mediator between nature and culture, since it invokes natural processes over time but is fundamentally a cultural construct. Therefore, he says, “It can renew the common and banal and reconcile our modern estrangement from place.” But the landscape imagination is needed to liberate landscape from its “devolved place as scenic object, subjugated resource, or scientific ecosystem.” This collection is a conversation about tools to unleash the landscape imagination, exemplified through Corner’s own journey.
The High Line, in New York City. Photo: David Maddox
In each essay, the landscape imagination confronts and deconstructs the simplistic binaries hindering landscape architecture: art versus science, culture versus nature, city versus landscape, theory versus practice, technique versus motivation, imaginary versus built, phenomenology versus technology, tradition versus modern. Corner argues that these are not actually dichotomous, but related—fundamental, even, to the landscape imagination. The landscape imagination is both interpreter and mediator, both informer and popularizer, both conversational and circumstantial, both dialogue and contemplation. It mediates between the local and global, between recovery and invention, and between past inheritance and future potential. These essays build a case for the landscape imagination as the great confounder, able to transcend limiting binaries by finding infinite potentials within them.
Since there are now built works influenced by the ideas found in these essays, we can better understand Corner’s writing by assessing its translation to practice. For example, “Sounding Depths—Origins, Theory, and Representation” (1990), explores several dichotomies limiting landscape architecture while addressing why new theory is critical to the field. In the next essay, “Three Tyrannies of Contemporary Theory” (1991), Corner proposes a hermeneutical approach to landscape architecture theory to overcome the lack of meaning in our repetitive, formulaic, and prosaic world. Hermeneutics is a practice, borrowed from the social sciences, of understanding the world through a historical interpretation of texts. Corner proposes that instead of trying to understand landscapes as self-evident objects, their complexity requires interpretation. Through critical acts of landscape architecture—drawing, writing, or constructing landscapes— we can read and interpret them like texts, uncovering infinite new potentials within the binaries. For example, it is possible to picture the High Line in New York City (a Corner project) re-created with any number of theoretical binaries: a nostalgic re-creation of its past, an objectified pictorial image, a bucolic respite from the city, or even demolished to prioritize the street grid below. If the High Line were approached from any one of these views of landscape, the final product would not offer its unique perspectives of the city and landscape as urbanism. Rather than preserving or re-creating its past, the High Line was mined for new possibilities. Thus, the High Line became an agent in the active, ever unfolding tradition of the city.
Corner’s ideas evolve in several different ways as his writing progresses over time. He identifies some of those changes in his introduction to the book, moving from representational interests to instrumental practices, from landscapes generally to landscape architecture specifically, and from landscape as parks and open space to landscape as a form of urbanism. Other changes become apparent while working through the essays themselves: from ecology as metaphor and form of representation to ecology as operational model and the gradual identification of community engagement as an “agent of creativity.” This seems to place community engagement on equal footing with ecology in Corner’s worldview.
Corner criticizes the profession for compounding the problematic binary of culture versus nature by “drawing more from objectivist and instrumental models of ecology, while design creativity has been reduced to environmental problem solving (know-how) and aesthetic appearance (scenery).” In “Landscape Urbanism” (2003) and “Terra Fluxus” (2006), he calls for a “culturally animate ecology” where culture and nature become complementary through a practice of combining them into new kinds of public spaces where landscape drives the process of city transformation. In his most recent essay, “Practice: Operation and Effect” (2010), Corner states a need for designers to develop “sophisticated conversational, social, and rhetorical skills to authentically and productively engage the public in a process that supports imagination and innovation.” With community engagement now identified as an agent of creativity, perhaps Corner will continue to explore, in writing and practice, the landscape imagination’s role in developing these skills.
Although the book’s final essay, a previously unpublished lecture titled “Hunts Haunts: History, Reception, and Criticism on the Design of the High Line” (2009), is an assessment of the High Line through the lens of John Dixon Hunt’s writings, it also exposes what Corner hopes his written and built works accomplish. Corner describes Hunt and his writings about “haunting” landscapes as likewise haunting to him over the years. Their indescribable lingering presence, or haunting, has inspired Corner to further explore them through his own writings and, ultimately, through his built work. He attributes the haunting quality of some landscapes to the human imagination. Here we see how Corner’s landscape imagination came to be, and better understand his goal to create places eluding easy definition, places that “haunt” us with lasting presence—places like the High Line.
The Landscape Imagination is a midcareer measurement of Corner’s own longue duree, what Hunt called the long duration of experience and meaning over time differentiating landscape architecture from its allied professions. Sometimes Corner’s theories are successful, sometimes they fail, but together with the vagaries of practice, they provide liberation of thought and action for those of us working with the landscape medium. There are few contemporary voices in landscape architecture whose work intentionally avoids providing formulaic answers, but rather seeks to create open-ended interpretation, as James Corner. This latest work, although a rigorous read, challenges our assumptions and encourages us to keep an open mind about landscape’s potential.
New York City is home to more than 600,000 street trees, according to some estimates. But good luck finding any one of those trees on a map—that is, until now. For the first time ever, the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation is working with thousands of volunteers to measure and map every single street tree on every single block in every single neighborhood in all five boroughs of the city.
Every. Single. Tree.
Mapping with the 120th Precinct Explorers on Staten Island in July. Photo: @healthforyouths on Twitter
As if the sheer numbers weren’t enough of a challenge, the small army of volunteers—five thousand and growing—is using old fashioned site-surveying techniques to determine the location of all those curbside trees. No GPS. No Google Street View. No satellite imagery. Just a $90 measuring wheel, a plastic tape measure, and a meticulously designed data logging website filled to the brim with sophisticated geometry, cartography, and code. The whole improbable effort goes by the name of TreesCount! 2015 and it’s inviting New Yorkers to finally see the urban forest for all of its individual trees.
Why would one of the most technologically savvy cities on earth choose to map all of it street trees using methods familiar to, say, a seventeenth century Dutch farmer plotting out the boundaries of his land at the southern tip of Manhattan Island? Three simple answers: the method is cheap, it’s reliable, and it’s easy for volunteers to learn. Developed, tested, and refined by TreeKIT during the past five years, the mapping method asks volunteers to measure the distance between trees lined up along a street edge and an easy-to-estimate “start point” at the nearby intersection. You can learn more about the details behind the method here, here, and here (full disclosure: I co-founded and co-direct TreeKIT with my longtime collaborator Liz Barry, another participatory research enthusiast based in NYC). Volunteers have mapped nearly 100,000 trees since the initiative kicked off in late May and the speed with which new trees are added to the map seems to be accelerating week by week.
Young volunTreers using the tree ID guide on Staten Island in July. Photo: @MJShanley3 on Twitter
Mapping street trees is only partly the point of TreesCount! 2015. NYC Parks, the department that oversees street trees in the Big Apple, wants to know what kinds of challenges each tree is facing and how much effort neighborhood volunteers are putting into keeping trees alive. TreesCount! volunteers record the circumference of every tree, their perceptions of the tree’s health, evidence of problems that could interfere with the tree’s growth, and signs of volunteer stewardship—things like mulching, perennial flower plantings, tree guard installations, and more. All of that data will help shape public policy and municipal spending on large scale initiatives to do the yeoman work of urban forestry: digging up and grinding old tree stumps, widening tree beds, removing metal grates encumbering tree roots, and planting more and more trees wherever they can fit.
Measuring the circumference of a street tree. Photo: @NYCTreesCount on Twitter
And who are these thousands of volunteers stepping up to stroll along the city’s busy sidewalks wearing garish green safety vests and pushing bright orange measuring wheels? It seems people of all ages and backgrounds have offered to help, with neighborhood-based organizations across the city mobilizing local residents with help from NYC Parks. Volunteers complete an online mapping tutorial before hitting the streets with NYC Parks staffers for in-person training. After about an hour of instruction, they fan off in groups of two or three to map a proscribed area of the city.
The whole thing hinges on an elaborate and elegant website developed for TreesCount! 2015 by the incredible team of geo-coders, designers, and developers at Azavea, the Philadelphia-based B-corporation behind the celebrated OpenTreeMap currently in use in cities around the globe. Volunteers can sign up on the website, complete their online training, track mapping progress in any given neighborhood, and check out blocks to map on their own time (after earning the right to do so by attending a training event and another group event hosted by a local organization or NYC Parks).
The web platform designed by Azavea for TreesCount! 2015.
The website also contains the Treecorder, where volunteers log all of the data they collect in the field and submit it to NYC Parks for quality review. The Treecorder builds on previous efforts by TreeKIT to craft a mobile data entry platform for its mapping method, and the original nugget of code that translates distance measures into mapped points still lives at the heart of Azavea’s intuitive and user-friendly application. Volunteers can interact with the site on any tablet, mobile phone, laptop, or desktop computer, and all of the site code was given an open source license so other cities can adopt and adapt it for their own needs in the future. Anyone involved in building web-based platforms that support citizen science projects would do well to spend some time exploring Azavea’s handiwork. They’ve set a new standard for excellence in this specialized area of web engineering and design.
In addition to developing the mapping method that drives TreesCount! 2015, TreeKIT worked with NYC Parks to design and iteratively refine both the online and field training experiences for volunteers. Ray Cha, a user experience designer with extensive knowledge of online learning platforms, joined the TreeKIT team for this portion of the project. The online learning experience is interspersed with short self-assessments and ends with an “Explore Your Knowledge” quiz that gives volunteers immediate feedback on their understanding of the material. TreeKIT also designed an innovative street tree stewardship identification guide, pulling in horticulture and design expert Emily Vaughn to create the 16-panel foldout guide that NYC Parks is giving out to every volunteer. Dr. Alex Paya, an expert in tree science with a knack for Photoshop, contributed a collection of beautifully processed leaf images for the high-resolution guide, which is printed on tear-proof and waterproof paper for mapping in all kinds of weather.
The TreesCount! 2015 street tree species ID guide. Photo: Philip Silva
More than sixty local schools, non-profit organizations, and government agencies signed up to serve as partner groups for TreesCount! 2015, hosting training sessions, leading special mapping events, and organizing volunteers to join the effort in every corner of the city. Partnering groups were given the chance to claim a batch of blocks to map on their own local turf, making this census much more of a grassroots initiative than previous tree counts held ten and twenty years ago. As of late July, the Washington Square Tree Counters—a group that formed in response to the census—has already mapped more than 90 percent of the blocks in their patch of Manhattan. They found just over 1,000 trees scattered across the neighborhood. AFROPUNK 2015, a massive music, art, and culture festival slated for late August, is giving out tickets to volunteers mapping trees across a wide swath of Brooklyn. Every one of New York City’s five boroughs is represented by a partnering group, and new groups can still sign up to participate until TreesCount! 2015 wraps up later in the fall.
NYC Parks plans to make the data harvested through TreesCount! 2015 openly available to the public, just like it did with the two previous tree counts (though both ’95 and ’05 were, strictly speaking, just tree counts rather than efforts to make accurate tree maps). A public-facing tree map, sponsored by the city, may someday serve as a convening ground and coordinating tool for the thousands upon thousands of NYC volunteers that help the city care for street trees. Until then, the TreesCount volunTreers (yes, just like the Treecorder, the pun was intended) have plenty of mapping to keep themselves busy.
Stanford professor and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng’s statement that “
Through this plan we hope to generate dialogue between people, governments, and professionals and dialogue within movements working for social, cultural, and environmental change. It is a plan that redefines land use and development, placing people and community life at the centre of planning—not real estate and construction potential. A plan that redefines the ‘notion’ of open space to go beyond gardens and recreational grounds to include the vast, diverse natural assets of the city, including rivers, creeks, lakes, ponds, mangroves, wetlands, beaches, and the incredible seafronts. A plan that aims to create non-barricaded, non-exclusive, non-elitist spaces that provide access to all our citizens for leisure, relaxation, art, and cultural life. A plan that ensures open spaces are not only available, but are geographically and culturally integral to neighbourhoods and participatory community life.
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