For the first time in our history, more people live in urban vs. rural areas and humans continue to move into cities. Cities have huge impacts on our natural resources. Urban dwellers consume vast amounts of energy, produce waste, and alter landscapes to the point where native plant and animal populations decline precipitously. As cities grow, people have pondered – can we develop land without destroying our natural heritage?
While conventional development has years of inertia behind it, there is a movement afoot to design and manage growing cities in a more sustainable fashion. You most likely have heard the buzzwords – green development, new urbanism, smart growth, conservation development, etc. Urban communities have and will continue to expand, and the aforementioned concepts attempt to reduce our collective impact on local and surrounding environments.
This logo for a development near Melbourne, Australia depicts the sustainability goals for the project. Courtesy of VicUrban.
Why are green developments different? The goals are conservation while providing a unique living experience, which includes energy efficiency, alternative transportation, livability and walkability, and water conservation. Biodiversity, however, often is lower on the totem pole of priorities and is not explicitly addressed in urban development plans, unless an endangered species is identified. And even then, it may not be addressed adequately.
Biodiversity, which refers to variety of life and its processes, is unique to each region and country. Metropolitan areas are embedded in natural systems, and the urban matrix dissects and sometimes surrounds natural areas. Often the end result is the homogenization of species within cities. As one travels from one city to the next, exotic species dominate; from turfgrass to ornamentals, it is often difficult to distinguish one city from another. Further, cities impact natural habitats near and far away. For example, both animal and plant invasive exotics can overrun natural environments, and theses invasives (e.g., Burmese pythons and Chinese tallow trees) often originate from peoples’ yards.
Homes can be nestled in amongst the trees and native plants used as landscaping. Photo Credit Steve Allen.
As an urban wildlife ecologist, I have been involved with a number of green development projects, not only conducting research but also implementing outreach programs and consulting with planners, developers, and citizens. Often, there are many connections between biodiversity conservation and energy, water conservation, transportation, and walkability strategies. Examples include conserving native trees near buildings (which provide shade to reduce energy consumption during the summer) and clustering homes to reduce vehicle miles traveled (which conserves open space for wildlife habitat). From my experiences, though, many green development projects fail to meet the test of time and the original intent is lost, and the community becomes dysfunctional, at least in terms of biodiversity conservation.
In the community of Prairie Crossing, Illinois (USA), lots and common spaces are landscaped with native plants. Photo Credit Vicky Ranney.
Of course, site design is very important and one must conserve the appropriate green infrastructure, which translates (among other things) to a compact design where significant natural areas are conserved and connectivity is built across landscapes. Whatever is on paper, though, is only the first step. Construction activities can destroy the conservation areas carefully identified during the design phase. A host of contractors and sub-contractors, with a variety of equipment and heavy earthwork machines, can wreak havoc. Examples include:
• Earthwork machines run over the root zones of conserved trees, effectively killing the trees.
• Construction vehicles park or drive through natural areas, compacting the soil and even spreading invasive exotic plants.
• Silt fences are improperly installed and managed, causing nutrients and sediments to choke nearby wetlands.
• Chemicals and materials on site are improperly managed, changing soil chemistry and killing conserved vegetation.
Even if the design and construction phases went well, over the long term, successful biodiversity conservation is dependent on how people manage their homes, yards, and neighborhoods. The below actions can dramatically compromise the biological integrity of a green community:
• Large amounts of fertilizers and pesticides applied on yards, causing the pollution of bodies of water and killing non-target species (e.g., butterflies).
• People release invasive exotic plants and animals, including cats, killing wildlife in nearby habitats.
• Homeowners remove native plant landscaping and replace it with turfgrass and exotic plants.
• Conserved areas are compromised by improper recreation activities, such as people riding ATVs throughout a designated conserved area.
A Way Forward
How do we create functional, biodiverse communities? First, a range of stakeholders must understand the dynamic relationship among the three phases of development: design, construction, and postconstruction. Policy makers, planners, regulators, tree survey companies, and green certification agencies must not only create the enabling conditions for a good design, but set in motion incentives and regulations to promote good construction and postconstruction practices. Built environment professionals (including landscape architects, contractors, civil engineers, etc.) need to adopt alternative design, construction, postconstruction practices.
Most importantly, each of us needs to know how to evaluate the “greenness” of a community in order influence future green developments. Collectively, through purchasing power, negative and positive feedback will help raise the bar on what is a green development. The “functionality” of a green city or neighborhood is directly dependent on our actions, and we should reach out to neighbors to share and demonstrate green ideas.
In order for urban communities to conserve biodiversity, a range of stakeholders must be engaged. In this heuristic model, policy makers, developers, and residents constrain and influence each other in dynamic ways. Policy makers constrain the decisions made by developers through regulations. Developers constrain the decisions of residents by how the communities were designed. Residents, though, because of voting and purchasing power, can influence the decisions made by developers and policy makers. In addition, developers wielding economic power can dramatically influence policy depending on local political conditions.
I am utterly convinced the way forward is dependent on creating working models of “green” developments, from whole subdivisions to individual yards, in each county and neighborhood across the country. Do not underestimate the power of a local example. Nothing speaks more to increasing the uptake of alternative designs and management practices than examples that people can see and discuss. I have found building that first, local green subdivision helps to showcase green development practices and provide a catalyst for future developers to adopt new practices. To help promote biodiversity conservation in subdivision development, I recently have written a book titled, The Green Leap: A Primer for Conserving Biodiversity in Subdivision Development (University of California Press). This book contains a host of strategies and case studies to create model conservation developments.
The time is ripe for action; the current low in the housing market allows some breathing room to discuss and set in motion new ways for communities to grow. The leap towards a new path is not complicated, but it will take a concerted effort from a variety of folks. I welcome comments and even examples of urban biodiversity conservation in your towns and neighborhoods.
Mark Hostetler
Gainesville, Florida USA
Editor’s note: this blog was also published as a Huffington Blog post
Diverse scientific evidence suggests that interaction with nature is essential to achieving the New Urban Agenda’s goal of health, and policymakers should explicitly say as much. Without nature, the “urban century” will fail.
As readers of the Nature of Cities are no doubt aware, we are living in what could rightly be called the urban century, with 2.4 billion more people forecast to live in cities by 2050. In a recent essay in Sustainable Earth, my coauthors, Tim Beatley, Thomas Elmqvist and I reviewed three different academic disciplines—urban economics, environmental health, and ecology—to understand what role nature might play in this urban century. Taken together, trends in these three disciplines suggest that the urban century needs nature to succeed. We then compared quantitative global datasets of land cover and urban population to understand whether the cities we are actually building incorporate nature in a meaningful way.
The first discipline we reviewed was urban economics. As a whole, the field is strongly (although not entirely) focused on the positive benefits to individuals, firms, and societies of life in urban settlements. Edward Glaeser, a chief exponent of this view, even referred to cities as mankind’s greatest invention [1]. Economists have traditionally talked about the economic benefits of urban life to production, such as the way that proximity of people and firms enable sharing of infrastructure and resources. In recent decades, economists have also focused on the economic benefits of urban life to consumption, as proximity enables it financially viable for cities to support unique consumption opportunities, from baseball stadiums to libraries to zoos.
The major theme of all this economics literature is that proximity—the increased potential for interaction inherent in living at higher population density—has its benefits. Perhaps one of the most famous recent analyses in this vein was by Luis Bettencourt and colleagues [2], who compared lots of metrics of urban activity with population size, to see how activity scaled with city size. Economic productivity, patent generation, and innovation all scale supra-linearly with city size. Bigger cities, with presumably more potential for interaction, are better for those metrics. Aristotle famously referred to human as a social animal [3], by which he meant that our unique skill and love for interacting with one another is part of species essence. In cities, one could argue we are creating the perfect space for social interaction. Cities could therefore be seen as quintessentially human, an expression of our deep need for social interaction.
The second discipline comes from environmental health studies of the urban health penalty. This term was first coined in the study of communicable diseases and death rates in European cities in the 19th century. In England, for instance, death rates were substantially higher in cities than in the countryside. The last century, however, has seen a transformation to what one scholar called the “sanitary city” [4], where clean drinking water is piped into homes and wastewater is piped out. This transformation, along with environmental regulations on air quality, have for many urban dwellers (although certainly not all) reversed the urban health penalty: those in cities live longer on average than those in rural landscapes.
However, two major health issues are still worse in cities that in rural areas, on average. Obesity in many countries is more prevalent in cities where a lower fraction of people works active jobs, although sometimes the ability of urbanites to walk while commuting on going about their daily life can counteract this tendency toward obesity. More to the point of this essay, there is a clear trend toward an increased prevalence of some mental health disorders in cities. For instance, Sundquist and colleagues [5] studied more than 4 million adults in Sweden, finding a significant increase in the incidence of psychosis and depression among populations living at higher densities in cities than those living in more rural areas. There are multiple possible pathways by which the urban environment and its increased pace and interaction can increase stress and the prevalence of some mental disorders. Cities create a local environment with far different environmental conditions than the ones we evolved as a species to handle. Thus, in this sense, the urban environment can be shockingly inhumane, by not being in accord with our organism’s design and capacities.
This unnatural environment is now the norm for our species. Global population data suggests than 3.7 people live at population densities that exceed 800 people per square kilometers, densities at which Sundquist and colleagues [5] began to detect an urban psychological penalty. If this finding from Sweden were to apply globally (and that is a big if!), then close to half of humanity is living at urban densities that significantly increase to risk of mental health problems. This urban psychological penalty will arguably be harder to get rid of than other facets of the historical urban health penalty. Crowding and the increased interaction of cities is part of what makes cities our greatest invention, yet it is also part (although only a part) of why the urban psychological penalty exists.
The third discipline we reviewed is one that is perhaps most familiar to the Nature of Cities readers. The central idea of this literature, coming out from the ecology and health fields, is that interacting with nature has health benefits. This occurs through multiple pathways. For example, parks and open space can help encourage recreation, which can help reduce obesity. Trees can help clean and cool the air, while natural habitats can reduce the risk of flooding. Most relevant to this essay, there are a growing number of studies that show a psychological benefit of interaction with nature.
Some studies have taken an observational approach, analyzing large population datasets to show the association between nature and health. For instance, using data over time from the British Household Panel Survey, Alcock and colleagues [6] showed that those who moved from a neighborhood with less nature to one with more nature showed an increase in mental health. Recently, Cox and colleagues [7] studied individually in southern England, a dose response of nature exposure: neighborhoods with more than 20% forest cover had a 50% lower incidence of depression and 43% less stress. Similarly, a study of more than 260,000 Australians found that those with a greater green space within 1 km had lower rates of psychological distress as well as higher rates of physical activity, suggesting that recreation in greenspace may be a causal mechanism improving mental health [8]. A study in Brisbane, Australia found a dose-response effect, with visits to outdoor greenspaces of 30 minutes or more per week resulting in 7% less depression and a 9% reduction in high blood pressure [9].
These results from observation studies are also supported by available experimental studies. There is now a large number of studies that show that interaction with nature can reduce stress, whether measured through self-reporting or from levels of cortisol. One recent experiment [10] in Philadelphia randomly selected vacant lots for clean-up and (in some cases) increased greening. Neighbors near vacant lots that were greened had an improvement in self-reported mental health over vacant lots that weren’t cleaned up, with lots that were cleaned up but not green intermediate in effect. My own organization, The Nature Conservancy, is working with the University of Louisville on the Green Heart Project. This neighborhood-level, controlled experiment seeks to quantify health benefits from an increase in urban tree canopy in the intervention neighborhood, relative to the control neighborhood.
Knowledge of the dose-response curve of nature’s effect on mental health is still imperfect. Available studies are culturally biased, for example, tending to be in the U.S. and Europe. Still, given that humanity is in the midst of the fastest period of urban growth in our species history, it seems worthwhile to ask: what fraction of the world’s urbanites get enough nature now? To address this question, we examined forest cover data for 245 cities globally.
Currently, only 13% of urban dwellers live in neighborhoods with more than 20% forest cover, the amount found by Cox and colleagues that provides a protective affect against depression and stress. Despite our growing scientific knowledge of the value of nature for mental health, our urban world remains mostly gray.
Knowledge of the state of global urban forest canopy over time is spotty. In the U.S., at least, urban forest canopy seems to be in decline. Nowak and colleagues looked at urban and community areas in the United States and found an 1.0% decline in forest cover from 2009 to 2014, which amounts to an annual loss of 36 million urban trees [11]. A lot of this decline seems to be due to systematic under-investment by the public sector in tree planting and (especially) maintenance. There has been a 25% decline in per-capita spending on urban forestry by municipalities since the 1980s.
So, what can be done to change this picture, to make the urban century greener? The most important step is perhaps to recognize that nature in cities is not a mere amenity, a “nice to have” thing on par with other urban amenities. Rather, nature in cities is a way to counteract the inevitable psychological downside of increased interaction in cities. Nature in cities is a way to have our cake and eat it too, to have the benefits of an urban world while still having a more humane, more natural life. Nature for urban dwellers then seems more like an essential feature of successful urban century.
In our essay, we explore three particular policies or programs that might help with this change in mindset. One of the ideas is a Green Prescription program, as exemplified in a program in New Zealand of the same name. Doctors can write prescriptions for patients, requiring a certain period of time outdoors in a park or natural area. For every ten green prescriptions written, participants achieved 150 minutes of exercise, which was associated with a 20-30% reduction in all-cause mortality. Overall, the program has been shown to be a cost-effective way to improve public health.
Another, complementary route would be to incorporate nature into our urban form, more deeply into the fabric of our daily lives. This leads to the idea of biophilic urban design, that integrate natural elements from the building scale to the scale of neighborhoods, cities, and regions. One commonly cited example of such a strategy is Singapore, which requires new building, to at least replace 1-to-1 the nature lost at ground level with nature on roofs or walls. One remaining challenge for biophilic design is to develop examples that work in less affluent settings (the Global South), which will likely require different kinds of biophilic design than those that work in richer cities like Singapore or San Francisco.
Finally, we argue that international policy can help as well. UN Habitat’s New Urban Agenda points to the role of ecosystem services in risk reduction and natural resource management. These are important goals, but we believe natural features are needed also simply to make our urban home more humane. We believe the scientific evidence suggests that interaction with nature is essential to achieving the New Urban Agenda’s goal of health, and policymakers should explicitly say as much. If we do not build some nature into our cities, we risk creating an inhumane, grey world for ourselves. Without nature, the urban century will fail.
Glaeser, E., Triumph of the City: How our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. 2012, New York: Penguin Books.
Bettencourt, L., et al., Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 2007. 104(17): p. 7301-7306.
Aristotle, Politics. circa 330 BC.
Melosi, M.V., The sanitary city. 2008, Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg Press.
Sundquist, K., G. Frank, and J. Sundquist, Urbanisation and incidence of psychosis and depression. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 2004. 184(4): p. 293-298.
Alcock, I., et al., Longitudinal effects on mental health of moving to greener and less green urban areas. Environmental science & technology, 2014. 48(2): p. 1247-1255.
Cox, D.T., et al., Doses of neighborhood nature: the benefits for mental health of living with nature. BioScience, 2017. 67(2): p. 147-155.
Astell-Burt, T., X. Feng, and G.S. Kolt, Mental health benefits of neighbourhood green space are stronger among physically active adults in middle-to-older age: evidence from 260,061 Australians. Preventive medicine, 2013. 57(5): p. 601-606.
Shanahan, D.F., et al., Health benefits from nature experiences depend on dose. Scientific reports, 2016. 6: p. 28551.
South, E.C., et al., Effect of Greening Vacant Land on Mental Health of Community-Dwelling Adults: A Cluster Randomized Trial. JAMA Network Open, 2018. 1(3): p. e180298-e180298.
Nowak, D.J. and E.J. Greenfield, Declining urban and community tree cover in the United States. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 2018. 32: p. 32-55.
A review of Public Parks: The Key to Livable Communities, by Alexander Garvin. 2010. ISBN: 0393732797. New York, USA: W. W. Norton & Company. 224 pages.
And City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughts, by Catie Marron. 2013. ISBN: 0062231790. New York, USA. Harper. 304 pages. Buy the books.
The last part of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st represent a new “Golden Age” for city parks. Certainly, looking at the American and international urban landscape, beautiful and expansive new public parks have popped up all over, while many historic parks first created in the 19th century, have been restored through novel public-private partnerships. Why is the creation of big new parks happening in so many cities, and what does this portend for global social trends? In my view, this “peacetime arms race” for bigger and better parks reflects several goals—parks are important parts of making cities more environmentally sustainable and people healthier, but they are also magnets that attract both investment and newly mobile tech workers, who can work anywhere but are choosing cities for quality of life. Parks—and the lifestyles they enable—are part of the attraction, and in the global competition for the young and the talented, parks are part of the winning formula for cities.
Parks are essential to human interchange and to the growth of the human soul.
As parks have become touchstones, defining and enabling the resurgence of cities, several authors have tried to document that phenomenon. Two books published in the last five years provide a fresh perspective on parks around the world and across centuries. One book focuses on the common factors that make great city parks, addressing many of the practical “mechanics” that lead to good design and management of parks; the other likewise builds the case for parks as an attribute of livable cities, but mostly from the point of view of untrained, but highly perceptive, park users. Both attempt to get “inside” parks, but one comes in more through the brain, the other through the heart and soul.
Bethesda Fountain, Central Park, 2009. Photo: Alexander Garvin
“Public Parks: The Key to Livable Communities”
Alexander Garvin, who describes himself as a “strategist of the public realm,” is the CEO of AGA Public Realm Strategists. The Yale-trained architect and city planner has worked extensively in both the public and private realms and has also taught at Yale for more than 45 years as an adjunct professor. Among his many professional accomplishments was the development of an innovative plan to try to lure the 2012 Olympics to New York City (which ultimately went to London), and many master plans for communities across the country, including a plan for the Atlanta Beltline.
Millennium Park, Chicago, 2008. Photo: Alexander Garvin
It is clear from this book, and from his many projects, that Garvin adores parks and sees them as essential keystones to livable cities. Garvin, whose professional focus has been on larger-scale cities and communities, rather than on individual parks, sees landscape architects as planners and, perhaps, planners as landscape architects. In fact, he dedicates his book to Frederick Law Olmsted, stating that Olmsted “conceived of parks as an essential component of metropolitan living.” “That is a metropolitan planner’s conception,” Garvin adds, “taking the same comprehensive approach to urban and suburban planning to which I, as a planner, am committed.”
Derby Arboretum, Derby, 2007. Photo: Alexander Garvin
Garvin provides a great resource to professionals in the park and city planning, design and management realms, as well as to citizen activists and civic officials, beginning with a concise but illuminating history of the emergence of public parks in Europe and the U.S. In that initial chapter, he tries to answer the question about what is the world’s first public park. While he argues that the first purpose-built public parks are either the Derby Arboretum or Birkenhead, both in England, he also makes the case for much earlier royal parks and pleasure grounds that were at least partially open to the public prior to being fully opened or owned by the public. He follows this historical introduction with thematic chapters that manage to encompass his notions about the common elements that make great parks, while also providing a “user’s manual” for how to develop, design and manage parks, from “Site Selection” to “Finance and Governance”—two of 12 chapters that are replete with examples and beautiful color photos taken (mostly) by Garvin himself.
Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, 2007. Photo: Alexander Garvin
While the chapter headings thematically group parks, the chapters act as ample vessels for taking the reader around the world in 80 parks (or so), allowing Garvin to explicate, from a city planner’s perspective, how parks both define and are defined by the cities in which they are created, and how different circumstances—such as abandoned rail lines and industrial sites—can be reborn as magnificent new parks (as in the now well-known High Line in New York City, as well as less-well-known but equally compelling urban trail parks, such as the Cedar Lake Trail in Minneapolis, and Boston’s Southwest Corridor Park, built over an underground subway line that replaced an old elevated rail line).
Cedar Lake Park Trail, Minneapolis, 2007. Photo: Alexander Garvin
While Garvin’s global gallivanting to provide examples is enjoyable, those who work in the park management realm may find his four concluding chapters, which address Stewardship, Finance and Governance, the Role of the Public, and Sustainability, to be most illuminating. In those chapters, Garvin neatly summarizes the many strategies developed in recent decades to create, restore, fund and manage parks—no small trick when many pressing needs absorb the bulk of the urban treasury. With some focus on examples in New York City—where the park conservancy model was born and perfected—and also with a diverse set of examples from cities across the U.S., Garvin explains the many different funding and management models, from more traditional public funding, to business improvement districts and conservancies that belie the notion that cities can’t afford to have great parks. Though Garvin provides excellent examples of the mechanics of designing great city parks and restoring and managing them, it is clear in his summations that these mechanics, and indeed the parks themselves, are in the service of a larger goal—livable cities. The book’s concluding paragraph enumerates “the roles that every great park must play: enhancing well-being and improving public health, incubating a civil society, sustaining a livable environment, and providing a framework for urbanization.”
“City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughts”
Catie Marron, philanthropist, former chair of the New York Public Library, and current chair of the Friends of the High Line, also takes readers on a tour of parks around the world, but she does so not through the mind of a professional planner, nor exclusively through her own mind. Instead, she visits parks near and far through the experiences of others, mostly highly regarded authors of fiction and non-fiction, but also a movie star, a world-renowned architect, and the 42nd President of the United States.
Whereas Garvin takes a thoroughly professional, mostly distant perspective on the parks and related themes he writes about, Marron’s approach is highly personal. She is joined in the endeavor by photographer Oberto Gili, who took pictures of the 18 cities (and 22 parks in those cities), and more importantly, by the 18 authors of the essays about the parks.
The result is a highly entertaining set of personal excursions into space, but also into time and emotion. They are wide-ranging: President Bill Clinton’s essay is a functional combination of personal experience and history in Dumbarton Oaks, the spectacular but intimate private garden designed by Beatrix Farrand, America’s first great woman landscape architect, which is now open to the public (though it is not technically a public park). President Clinton mixes unveiling personal memories of visiting Dumbarton Oaks as a college student at Georgetown and, later, with his wife, Hillary, but also tells the story of how the mansion that the garden surrounds was the site of the WW II-era Dumbarton Oaks Conference, held by allies to plan what was to become the United Nations. President Clinton, in his short essay, takes great pains to point out that the garden was the product of the efforts of the two “strong women who created it,” Farrand and then-owner, Mildred Bliss—and one can’t help but notice a bit of “product placement” for “strong women.”
The High Line, New York City. Photo: Oberto Gili
Most of the other essays are by professional writers of both fiction and non-fiction, and though the approaches vary, the quality is mostly high. I most enjoyed Andre Aciman’s essay on the High Line. Aciman, a New Yorker and prior documenter of the role of parks in the lives of the locals, uses a “then and now” narrative to call out not only the history of the area, but also the contrast of the functional, muscular steel framework of the former freight rail viaduct to the contemporary “high-tech, new-age, eco-friendly, cutting-edge green park” that was inserted into it. In gazing at the old warehouses and factory buildings that still surround the High Line, Aciman conjures some images of the paintings of Edward Hopper, but mostly of fellow NYC painter John Sloan: “This is Sloan country. If while staring north on the High Line, I can no longer dispel John Sloan, and if John Sloan intrudes on my vision, then his paintings become the visual equivalent of a soundtrack.”
Protestors in Grant Park, Chicago 1968.Grant Park today. Photo: Oberto Gili
Some of the others are even more personal. Historian Jonathan Alter recalls his childhood in Lincoln and Grant Parks in Chicago, including the checkered history of Chicago parks that involved a race riot in 1921, the police beatings of protestors in 1968, and the culminating historic moment on Election Night, 2008, when President-elect Barack Obama gave a victory speech outdoors, “quoting Lincoln in Grant Park.”
Griffith Park, Los Angeles . Photo: Oberto GiliVilla Borghese, Rome. Photo: Oberto Gili
When people think about or write about their personal experiences with parks, loved ones often intrude, as in Candice Bergen’s hilarious memory of her grandmother, Lillie Mae, who took her on visits to LA’s Griffith Park. Bergen’s grandmother protected her “incredibly pale skin” with a hat made from the grocery store paper bag she had used for bread crumbs to feed the ducks, fashioning a “humiliator” that mortified the young Ms. Bergen. And invariably, the “romantic landscapes” of many parks both spark romance and bring back memories of love—familial, unrequited, lost, found, or re-found. Zadie Smith summons up a trip with her elderly father to Florence, and an ultimately unsatisfying trip to the Boboli Gardens that occurred shortly before her father’s death; she also documents finding relief in mourning her father’s passing in the wild beauty of Rome’s Villa Borghese park.
Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris.
Both Andrew Sean Greer and Amanda Harlech summon up very personal, deeply felt memories of romantic encounters in the Presidio—not yet then the refined National Park it has become in San Francisco—and in the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris, respectively. Recalling the specific walk in a park and an unrequited love that failed to blossom on the other end, Harlech writes:
I have never forgotten that morning in May in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Often when I’m staying in Paris I will retrace that walk and stand, lost in the passing moment of the past, in the beat of the present—in the rain, in the magnification of snow, in early spring when the orange trees and palms are brought out and unwrapped from their winter cladding, or in the blinding blue of July—and sense the haunting of first love in Paris.
For that is the intangible power of parks. In her introduction, Marron notes that “each park has its own soul, one that has profoundly influenced the culture of its surroundings and the multitudes who enjoy it. Yet the parks’ similarities speak to the fundamental needs of urban dwellers workdwide. Parks are essential to city life, and they have been since the mid-eighteenth century, when cities became crowded and people needed an escape from the tussle and bustle of chaotic, noisy, dirty street life.” As the writers of these essays universally imply, each in a different way, parks are essential to human interchange and to the growth of the human soul.
A review of The High Line. By James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofido + Renfro. 2015. ISBN: 9780714871004. Phaidon Press. 452 pages. Buy the book.
New York City’s High Line Park, once a rusting relic of abandoned freight rail transportation infrastructure, has become arguably one of the world’s best-known urban parks, and possibly the single most visited park in the United States—and perhaps the world—on a visitor-per-acre basis.
The High Lineis, in the end, a sensual experience reflecting its creation, design, and current reality.
As I travel across the United States, speaking with audiences of planners, landscape architects, park aficionados, and interested lay people, informal polls reveal that more than half have visited the High Line. It has become both a major tourist destination and an economic development magnet of unprecedented proportions, attracting at least 40 new residential and office buildings and spurring a reported $4 billion economic impact. It has also spurred at least 60 similar projects in cities around the globe, and it has been lionized (and occasionally reviled) as an apotheosis of urban design and placemaking.
How the High Line became the singular phenomenon it is, and, in particular, how it evolved from condemned ruin to celebrated masterpiece through finely honed design, is documented in this recent book by the project’s principal designers, landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations and architecture firm Diller Scoffidio Renfro. This handsome, massive “doorstop of a book,” as landscape architect and co-author James Corner referred to it, is beautiful to look at and to feel (its cover is embossed and textured like the precast planks that make up the High Line’s flooring). As with many books about architecture, whether monographs of an architect’s or firm’s work, it is replete with delicious color photographs and renderings, sections and, axonometrics. But this book, in some ways like the work it describes, resembles high-end erotica—like the “art” books of the 1960s that arrived in “plain brown wrappings”: architectural glamour of the highest order.
As someone closely involved with the preservation, planning, design, construction, and management of the High Line, I recognized early on that this was a park of a completely different order than any New York City park of the last century or more. I served as New York Parks Commissioner during most of the life of the project to nearly the completion of its second phase, and worked closely with Robert Hammond and Joshua David and the Friends of the High Line, who conceived of and fought for the project, and City government colleagues, including City Planning Chair Amanda Burden and the Economic Development Corporation, under the direction of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself a major supporter of the project.
From the project’s inception, I had a sense of its subtle sexuality. That sexuality is cited often in this book, both overtly and by implication, and it could be argued that the High Line is the first “Out” public park landscape. Further, the sexuality of the concept and its environment were evoked in the sensuality of the design of its landscape.
The sexual aspects of the High Line (and this book) are apparent in the book’s design. Like old issues of “Playboy” magazine, it has foldouts—not one, but scores, sumptuous photos and renderings laid out in graphic detail for landscape architecture and architecture aficionados to pore over. And both in photos of the High Line neighborhood’s recent “seedy “ past and in conversations between the project’s designers transcribed in the book, the sexual aura of both the High Line itself and its neighboring buildings is laid bare. One photo shows a group of apparently trans individuals, one with bare breasts protruding from a shirt. Another suggests a prostitute, conversing with a potential customer in a car. The Meatpacking district surrounding the abandoned High Line was well known for prostitutes of various sexual persuasions and identities, for sex clubs catering to a variety of clients and preferences, and for the abandoned piers that were locales for mostly gay sexual assignations, at a time when homosexuality was still vilified by many and openly gay people were at risk for harassment and much worse.
Also thoroughly documented in the book is the design competition sponsored by the Design Trust for Public Space, a non-profit group that was an early supporter of the High Line; one imaginative concept turned the elevated rail line’s “basin” into a linear swimming pool, and a rendering shows a naked, muscular man climbing out of the pool. Later, after the High Line opened, so did a sexy new hotel designed by Polshek Partners, situated directly over the High Line, with its legs towering over and astride the park. Almost immediately after it opened, there were reports and salacious tabloid news items about people having sex or parading nude behind the hotel’s floor-to-ceiling windows (and the book contains several pictures of both).
The park’s designers, in conversations transcribed in the book, discuss the sexual aspects of the High Line, as well as the hotel and the other buildings so close that you can almost touch them (and certainly engage in casual or studied voyeurism of the “Rear Window” variety with them). In the opening conversation, “Forethoughts”, Elizabeth Diller describes the “illicit quality of the place”, when it was still a post-industrial ruin, and Matthew Johnson discusses the sociological conditions as the neighborhood evolved from industry to “queer subcultures…sex workers and cross-dressing kids sharing the streets with meatpacking workers and longtime tenement residents.”
Later in their accounts, after the High Line has been built, the sexuality of the new park becomes more pronounced as the designers see it: “We never imagined the High Line would become a place of romantic intimacy…” says Diller. “It’s considered the make-out park in New York City. I took a walk on a nice night recently and counted twenty-three couples passionately kissing.”
The designers understand that they created a new form of public stage for seeing and being seen. “On the High Line, the close proximity of others attracts a strange sort of public intimacy,” says Diller. “The voyeur and the exhibitionist have a consensual relationship. The pleasure of watching people is matched and perhaps exceeded by the pleasure of being watched.” Johnson confirms: “Encouraged by the many extra eyes on the High Line exhibitionism seems more publicly embraced than ever.”
But I would argue that the ultimate product, both the design and the completed work, is actually more sensual than sexual, and the details of that sensuality are gloriously covered in the book. For starters, everything in the park was unique—no off-the-shelf park furniture for this new form of park. The chapter headed “Design” may be the most explicit for lovers of architectural detail. It contains numerous foldouts with renderings of different areas—the pinups you are tempted to pull out and put on your wall. The foldouts include typical sections and details galore, including the more than 50 different types of precast concrete aggregate planks that make up not just the High Line’s “floor” but also the stunning “peel-up” benches that seem to grow out of the deck like wind-stunted pine trees growing from rocky crevices.
In addition to the three sections of interviews, the book contains seven chapters. “Found” documents what the design team, also including gifted planting designer Piet Oudolf, discovered in the summer of 2004 when they first hopped off a concrete deck of an abandoned warehouse into chest-high mugwort and wildflowers, like explorers debarking into an abandoned ruin, with both large-scale photos in the foldouts and small scale snapshots at measured distances. The large photos include walls with huge, faded graffiti murals, and found objects—a bucket of spray paint cans, a mannequin torso, a package of strawberry-flavored sexual lubricant, a robin’s egg in a nest.
The “Archives” chapter is rich with historical artifacts—documents, plans, and working drawings for the original High Line, including sections, details, and isometric drawings of constructions joints. It is apparent that Master Builder Robert Moses was constructing for the ages in this ambitious project to lift freight trains above 11th Avenue and onto a massive, functional steel structure capable of holding two fully loaded freight trains simultaneously. “Archives” also includes photos and other documents of the neighborhood’s transformation from industrial, to post-industrial, to chic, and brings the project up to the point of the Design Trust for Public Space report.
The “Concept” chapter explores the design completion, focusing on the eventual winning team’s entry, and the initial design development. One concept sadly missing from the final design and realization was a combination pond/pool and elevated beach; the pool would have turned into a skating rink in winter!
The “Design” chapter lovingly details the entire design, with plans, sections, and renderings for each of many segments, and you can see the eventual High Line really taking shape. This is the phase I most remember from my days working with the team—many long design meetings, including one where we examined and debated for several hours the different possible subtle configurations for the pre-cast planks. Among the delectable details of the “Design” are those of all the furnishing and fences, as well as the more than 50 types of pre-cast planters. Also here are Oudolf’s planting plans, and color photos of more than 400 plant species actually growing on the High Line—200 perennials, 36 grasses, 12 vines, 50 bulbs, and 100 varieties of trees and shrubs.
“Construction” documents in burly, large-format color photos the transformation of ruin to glorious completion, and “Walk” is just that, a walk through the newly complete High Line, compressing 5 years of opening three separate segments between 2009 and 2014. “Walk” is bookend to “Found,” with both large-scale photos of the completed park in full use in all seasons, along with smaller snapshots at almost the same measured distance as the initial chapter, so one can do almost perfect “Before and After” comparisons.
The final chapter, “Unforeseen”, documents the unanticipated uses and phenomena of the High Line. There is artist Patty Heffley doing performances on her fire escape, drawing attention to the fact that she has now completely lost her privacy to millions of annual visitors. There are the myriad events—official and spontaneous; the arts installations and musical performances organized by the Friends of the High Line—who, by then were completely managing the park, and funding its operations; weddings, stargazing, the topless reading group, and, of course, the exhibitionists in the Standard Hotel, parading their nudity or having sex in the windows. “Unforeseen” also documents the perhaps not completely unforeseen mushrooming of development with at least 40 new buildings, many by world-renowned architects, along with the 60 similar adaptive reuse projects around the world, many apparently inspired by the High Line.
Reading—really, “looking at”—The High Line is, in the end, a sensual experience reflecting its creation, design, and current reality. Its 452 pages and scores of foldouts offer great delights, and encourage many repeat visits—as with the High Line itself.
Citizenship is derived from city, and floristry from forest or jungle. Forest and human being live a socio-ecological pact in which the forest becomes a new citizen respected in its integrity, stability, and extraordinary beauty. Both benefits, as the utilitarian logic of exploitation is abandoned and the logic of mutuality is assumed, which implies mutual respect and synergy. — Leonardo Boff[1]
2020 has been a year full of uncertainties for the whole world. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to change our perception in many aspects of daily life.
This work is long and has not been easy. Sometimes we are discouraged by lack of resources and understanding, by violence, by increases in poverty, by politics, by the realities of Colombia. But our hope is still alive, and we remain motivated to contribute our little piece of peace to the life of this beloved corner of the hills of Bogota.
In times of compulsory quarantine, we citizens of Bogotá have had to look to the hills again. The over 13,000 hectares that makeup Bogota’s Eastern Forest Protection Reserve, commonly known as the Eastern Hills[2]—in which the localities of Usaquen, Chapinero, Santa Fe, Candelaria, San Cristobal, and Usme are located—seem unperturbed by what is happening in the city, in the country, in the world. It seems as if this piece of the Andean mountain range is statically watching over the life of its inhabitants from its 3,600 meters of altitude.
The country’s capital is a privileged city, as it is surrounded by a majestic mountain range, a set of moorlands[3], peaks, and multiple watercourses that have unfortunately been barely accessible to its inhabitants.
Bogotá. Photo: Fernando Cruz
This low access is a subject of reflection and action for those of us who are part of the Bogota Hills Foundation (Fundación Cerros de Bogotá) and for the various groups formed for the defence and the informed and sustainable use of the hills. We assume ourselves as citizens in the high plain tropical forest in the region of Bogota. We extend this type of citizenship “inter-retro-connected” in a new civilizing narrative. In an area of transition between the city and the forest reserve, we promote ways of relating to others and nature in an urban-rural peace process within a city of more than eight million inhabitants, and in a country that is still trying to understand what this means on a national scale. That is why we are agents of peace.
We are part of the ecosystem as citizens of the forest. Source: own elaboration from photos by Leonardo Centeno. Editing: Gabriela Fernández.
Quarantine does not stop life in the hills
During this year, which has been full of uncertainties, intimacies revealed in virtual meetings, and work with people who only know each other through a screen, the strength and passion of a group of florestanios (“citizens of the forest”) added to the fears derived from the scarcity of opportunities or resources and generated a challenge of creation and intense movement.
The quarantine, which has just been lifted in Bogotá after six long months, shows the impact that the pandemic has had on the streets, on businesses, and on meeting places. We can now see the citizens, almost hidden behind their masks, walking at a different pace of life.
Despite this landscape, life buzzes in the Eastern Hills. Nourished soils and others in the process of regeneration, species of fauna and flora as well as the bodies of water that surround it give life to the city, clean the air, provide a sense of well-being, and reaffirm the sense of belonging.
Apart from the importance of their very existence, the hills are also subjects of reinvention. Coinciding with our 11th birthday, as Bogota Hills Foundation, we decided to launch the campaign: The Hills Save Us to highlight the vital and protective role of the hills for the city and reiterate the importance of complying with the ruling of the Council of State that ordered the creation of a social, ecological, and recreational corridor. A need that became more evident in these times of pandemic and quarantine. #LosCerrosNosInspiran (#TheHillsInspireUs) #VozCerros (#HillsVoice) #VisionCerros (#HillsVission) #LosCerrosNosSalvan (#TheHillsSaveUs).
During these six months, we worked intensely to launch the largest platform with complete information about the Eastern Hills, its people, its flora, its fauna, its moors, and its water basins. In addition, citizen initiatives, projects undertaken with children, footpaths, historical studies, and neighbourhood histories are shown there. The citizens will be able to take the hills home thanks to the drawings we designed to download and colour, and, in the process, learn names, toponyms, and sacred places.
Graphic piece Sofía Estrada Photography: Juan Amarú RodríguezBogotá Campaign with and without the mountains. Photography: Pouya Razavi. Graphic piece: Erika Tovar.
A socio-ecological project that cannot be postponed
As “florestines” citizens, we have witnessed the changes that have altered the ecosystem of our hills, and, perhaps pretentiously, we have always said that the mountain needs us for its restoration. We make plans and talk about how necessary these actions are to recover the biodiversity lost by the construction of the city. But at this historic moment, after having spent six months in quarantine, we have seen from our windows the wonderful chain of life. We have breathed the fresh air; we have rediscovered the landscape and only now do we realize that it is not we who will save the hills, but they are the ones who can save us.
In light of the current crisis, the need for green spaces in urban environments – for us and for the whole world – has become clear and precise. People from different latitudes found there a source of strength to face the crisis. However, in other cities, perhaps in too many, the deficiency of safe and accessible green spaces that affect the improvement of the physical and mental health of the communities became evident.
To corroborate this statement, it is interesting to mention a survey carried out by Greenpeace Colombia, as a result of the isolation, in which it was found that 41% of the people interviewed currently value public green spaces more and consider it important to expand, take care of and protect them for the good of the people and the communities, in addition to promoting their sustainable use. Likewise, according to what was observed by the Bogota Hills Foundation at this time, the pressure from citizens to walk the trails, even at the risk of safety, shows the acute need for natural spaces without congestion.
It is precisely this scenario that has motivated us to insist on the possibility of building a shared vision and comprehensive management for the city’s eastern hills. The Foundation dreams of creating a socio-ecological corridor in the Adjustment Strip that restores existing trails with native species and integrates new public spaces. The dream also involves neighbours and hill leaders in the care and management of this new urban ecosystem (what the Foundation calls neighbourhood pacts). The neighbourhood pacts will be trained guides and share stories about ethnobotany, geology, and environmental history at lookouts, among native species as cedars, tibars, tunos, and amargos[4], through visible and clean streams, while spotting Andean guans, hummingbirds, weasels, and frogs.
This affectionate and productive coexistence of the citizen with the imposing Eastern Hills, utopian or risky for some, is already becoming a reality through a small living laboratory in the three hectares of the Civil Society Natural Reserve called Cultural Threshold Horizons. There, with the collaboration of volunteers and experts, talks, collaborative restoration with native species, orchards, and composting processes have been carried out, forming a pilot project that can be replicated as private property for public use.
The Natural Reserve acts as a laboratory of collaborative transformation and, through a volunteer program, we have been carrying out participative restoration for five years now (730 plants of more than 33 different species)[5]. We also generate collective works such as the creation of barriers and filters to retain plant material, mitigating the impact of rain on the area; we produce land art, and offer weekly talks on urban ecology called Cátedra Cerros Bogotá (Bogota Hills Chair) in which the mountain takes the stage.
We, at the Land art workshop. Photo: Lauryn García.The mountain takes the word all fridays in the Bogotá Mountain Classroom #CatedraCerrosBogota Photo: Carlos LinceGraphic piece: María Paula Guerrero for the “Fundación Cerros de Bogotá”. Photograph: Leonardo Centeno.
This work is long and has not been easy. Sometimes we meet walkers who do not fully understand our work. We are discouraged by the lack of resources or frustrated by the slow progress of our activities. We are also overwhelmed by the reality we live in our country, the violence, the attacks on environmental leaders, the increase in poverty, and the generalised pain of a country that resists change, even though it tries hard. We are sometimes saddened by the lack of will and political action to restore the Eastern Hills to its role within the community. However, our hope is still alive, and we remain motivated to contribute our little piece of peace to the life of this beloved corner of the hills of Bogota[6].
[1]Boff, Leonardo. “Florestanía” in FLORÆ Magazine # 1. Bogotá: Flora ars+natura, August 2015.
[2]The hills shelter 91,444 inhabitants (2018) distributed in 64 neighbourhoods between the localities of Usme, San Cristóbal, Santa Fe, Chapinero, and Usaquén.
[5]According to records published in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)
https://www.gbif.org/, the Bogota’s Eastern Forest Protection Reserve, as of August 2020, has 1673 species of flora and fauna, of which 137 are endemic, that is, their geographical distribution is limited to this area.
[6] This article is a tribute to that passionate group that has accompanied me this year and whom I thank from the heart to continue increasing the population of “florestanios”: Maria A. Mejía, Lucía Martínez, Isabela Uribe, Jorman Romero, Gabriela Fernández, Miguel Leguízamo, María Paula Guerrero, Nicolás Bazzani, Adriana Cabrera, Mateo Hernández, Ricardo Gamboa, Francisco González, Martha Gómez, Santiago Rosado, Leonardo Centeno, Fernando Cruz, Carlos Lince, Mateo Hernández, Leonardo Villa, Lina Prieto, Jaime A. Vargas, filmico. col, Laura Gómez, Elsa Rey, Carolina Fiallo, Ingrid Obando, Juan Camilo Cruz, Byron Calvachi, Johanna González, Lina Prieto, Andrés Gómez, Juan Camilo Castro, Sebastián Cerquera, María Alejandra Peña, Ana Puerto, Luisa Castro, Juan Pablo Rojas, Nicolás Barrero, Jacqueline Vargas, Erika Tovar, Sofía Estrada, Mark Skepasts, Elizabeth Barragán, Ivone Malaver, Nathaly Ortiz, Gabriela Fernandez and Lauryin García.
* * *
Los cerros nos salvan
Ciudadanía se deriva de ciudad, y florestanía de floresta o selva. Floresta y ser humano viven un pacto socioecológico en el que la floresta pasa a ser un nuevo ciudadano respetado en su integridad, estabilidad y extraordinaria belleza. Ambos se benefician, pues se abandona la lógica utilitarista de la explotación y se asume la lógica de la mutualidad, que implica respeto mutuo y sinergia. —Leonardo Boff[i]
2020 ha sido un año lleno de incertidumbres para el mundo entero. La pandemia derivada de la enfermedad denominada covid-19 nos ha obligado a cambiar nuestra percepción en muchos aspectos de la vida cotidiana.
Este trabajo es largo y no ha sido fácil. A veces nos desalienta la falta de recursos y comprensión, la violencia, el aumento de la pobreza, la política, las realidades de Colombia. Pero nuestra esperanza sigue viva, y seguimos motivados para contribuir con nuestro pequeño trozo de paz a la vida de este querido rincón de las colinas de Bogotá.
En tiempos de cuarentenas obligatorias, los ciudadanos de Bogotá hemos tenido que volver a mirar a los cerros. Las más de 13 000 hectáreas que componen la Reserva Forestal Protectora Bosque Oriental de Bogotá, comúnmente conocida como Cerros Orientales[ii], en los se ubican las localidades de Usaquén, Chapinero, Santa Fe, Candelaria, San Cristóbal y Usme parecen imperturbables ante lo que ocurre en la ciudad, en el país, en el mundo. Pareciera como si ese pedazo de cordillera de los Andes vigilara estático, desde sus 3600 metros de altura, la vida de sus habitantes.
La capital del país es una ciudad privilegiada, ya que está rodeada por una cadena montañosa majestuosa, un conjunto de páramos, picos y múltiples cauces de agua que han sido, infortunadamente, poco accesibles para sus habitantes.
Bogotá. Foto: Fernando Cruz
Ese bajo acceso es un tema de reflexión y de acción para quienes hacemos parte de la Fundación Cerros de Bogotá y para los diversos grupos conformados para la defensa y el uso informado y sostenible de los cerros. Nos asumimos como ciudadanía en la floresta tropical de altiplano, en la región de Bogotá. Ampliamos esta forma de ciudadanía «interretroconectados» en una nueva narrativa civilizatoria. En un área de transición entre la ciudad y la reserva forestal promovemos formas de relacionarnos con los otros y con la naturaleza en un proceso de paz urbano-rural dentro de una ciudad de más de ocho millones de habitantes, en un país que aún trata de comprender lo que esto significa a escala nacional. Por ello, somos agentes de paz.
Somos parte del ecosistema como ciudadanos de floresta. Imagen de elaboración propia con fotos de Leonardo Centeno. Montaje de Gabriela Fernández.
La cuarentena no detiene la vida de los cerros
Durante este año, que ha estado lleno de incertidumbres, de intimidades reveladas en reuniones virtuales y de trabajos con personas que solo se conocen a través de una pantalla, la fuerza y la pasión de un grupo de «florestanios», sumadas a los miedos derivados de la escasez de oportunidades o de recursos nos generó un desafío de creación y de movimiento intenso.
La cuarentena, que recién se levanta en Bogotá, después de seis largos meses, permite constatar el impacto que la pandemia provocó en las calles, en los negocios, en los escenarios de encuentro. Podemos apreciar ahora a los ciudadanos, casi escondidos detrás de sus mascarillas, caminando a un ritmo de vida diferente.
A pesar de este paisaje, la vida bulle en los Cerros Orientales, suelos nutridos y otros en proceso de regeneración, especies de fauna y flora así como los cuerpos de agua que la rodean dan vida a la ciudad, limpian el aire, brindan una sensación de bienestar y reafirman el sentido de pertenencia.
Aparte de la importancia de su misma existencia, los cerros también son sujetos de reinvención. Coincidiendo con nuestro 11.º cumpleaños, como Fundación Cerros de Bogotá decidimos lanzar la campaña: Los cerros nos salvan, a fin de resaltar el papel vital y protector de los cerros para la ciudad y reiterar la importancia de cumplir el fallo del Consejo de Estado que ordenó la creación de un corredor social, ecológico y recreativo, una necesidad que se hizo más evidente en estos tiempos de pandemia y de cuarentena. #LosCerrosNosInspiran #VozCerros #VisionCerros #LosCerrosNosSalvan
Pieza gráfica: Sofía Estrada Foto: Juan Amarú Rodríguez
En estos seis meses trabajamos con intensidad para lanzar la mayor plataforma con información completa sobre los Cerros Orientales, su gente, su flora, su fauna, sus páramos, sus cuencas hídricas; además, se muestran allí iniciativas ciudadanas, proyectos emprendidos con niños, senderos, estudios históricos e historias de barrios (https://cerrosdebogota.org/). Los ciudadanos podrán llevar los cerros a su casa gracias a los dibujos que diseñamos para descargarlos y colorearlos, y de paso aprender nombres, toponimias, lugares sagrados.
Campaña de Bogotá con/sin sus cerros. Foto Pouya Razavi. Montaje Erika Tovar.
Un proyecto socioecológico impostergable
Como ciudadanos «florestanios» hemos presenciado los cambios que han alterado el ecosistema de nuestros cerros, y, tal vez pretenciosamente, siempre hemos dicho que la montaña nos necesita para restaurarla. Se hacen planes y se habla de lo necesarias que son estas acciones para recuperar la biodiversidad perdida por la construcción de la ciudad. Pero en este momento histórico, luego de haber pasado seis meses en cuarentena, hemos visto desde nuestras ventanas la maravillosa cadena de vida, hemos respirado el aire fresco, hemos redescubierto el paisaje y recién ahora nos damos cuenta de que no somos nosotros quienes salvaremos a los cerros sino que son ellos los que nos pueden salvar.
A la luz de la actual crisis, la necesidad de los espacios verdes en los entornos urbanos —nuestros y de todo el mundo— se ha vuelto clara y precisa. Habitantes de distintas latitudes encontraron allí una fuente de fortaleza para enfrentar la crisis; sin embargo, en otras ciudades, tal vez en demasiadas, se hizo evidente la deficiencia de espacios verdes seguros y accesibles que inciden en el mejoramiento de la salud física y mental de las comunidades.
Para corroborar esta afirmación, es interesante mencionar una encuesta que realizó Greenpeace Colombia, a raíz del aislamiento, en la que se encontró que un 41 % de los interrogados valora en este momento más los espacios públicos verdes y considera importante ampliarlos, cuidarlos y protegerlos para el bien de las personas y de las comunidades, además de promover un uso sostenible de los mismos. Así mismo, según lo observado por la Fundación Cerros de Bogotá en esta época, la presión de los ciudadanos por recorrer los senderos, inclusive corriendo riesgos de seguridad, evidencia la necesidad acusiosa de contar con espacios naturales y sin congestiones.
Es justamente este escenario el que nos ha motivado a insistir en la posibilidad de construir una visión compartida y una gerencia integral para los Cerros Orientales de la ciudad. La Fundación sueña con la creación de un corredor socioecológico en la Franja de Adecuación que restaure a su paso los senderos existentes con especies nativas e integre nuevos espacios públicos. El sueño también involucra a los vecinos y líderes de los cerros en el cuidado y manejo de este nuevo ecosistema urbano (lo que la Fundación llama pactos de vecindad), quienes serán guías capacitados y compartirán relatos sobre etnobotánica, geología e historia ambiental en miradores, entre cedros, tíbares, tunos y amargosos, a través de quebradas visibles y limpias, avistando al tiempo pavas de monte, colibríes, comadrejas y ranas.
Esa convivencia afectuosa y fructífera del ciudadano con los imponentes Cerros Orientales, utópica o riesgosa para algunos, ya viene haciéndose realidad mediante un pequeño laboratorio vivo en las tres hectáreas de la Reserva Natural de la Sociedad Civil denominada Umbral Cultural Horizontes. Allí, con la colaboración de voluntarios y expertos, se han llevado a cabo charlas, restauración colaborativa con especies nativas, huertas y compostaje, conformando un proyecto piloto replicable como predio privado de uso público.
Grupo de colaboradores en el Taller El arte de la Tierra en la Reserva Horizontes. Foto Lauryn García.
La Reserva Natural actúa como un laboratorio de transformación colaborativa y mediante un voluntariado llevamos ya cinco años de restauración participativa (730 plantas de más de 33 especies diferentes)[iii]; generamos, además, obras colectivas como la creación de barreras y filtros para retener material vegetal, mitigando así el impacto de las lluvias sobre la zona; producimos obras de arte de la tierra (LandArt), y ofrecemos charlas semanales sobre ecología urbana denominadas Cátedra Cerros Bogotá en las que la montaña se toma la palabra.
La montaña se toma la palabra los viernes en la Catedra Cerros Bogotá” Foto: Carlos LincePieza gráfica: María Paula Guerrero para la Fundación Cerros de Bogotá. Foto de Leonardo Centeno.
Este trabajo es largo y no ha sido fácil. A veces nos encontramos con caminantes que no comprenden bien nuestra labor, pasamos sinsabores por la falta de recursos o nos frustra el bajo eco que a veces tienen nuestras actividades. También nos apabulla la realidad que vivimos en nuestro país, la violencia, los atentados contra líderes ambientales, el incremento de la pobreza y del dolor generalizado por un país que se resiste a cambiar, aunque lo intenta con fuerza. Nos genera tristeza a veces la falta de voluntad y de acciones políticas que le devuelvan a los Cerros Orientales su papel dentro de la comunidad. Sin embargo, nuestra esperanza sigue viva y seguimos motivados por contribuir con nuestro pedacito de paz a la vida de este rincón amado que son los cerros de Bogotá.[iv]
[i] Boff, Leonardo. «Florestanía» en Revista FLORÆ # 1. Bogotá: Flora ars+natura, agosto de 2015.
[ii] Los cerros albergan 91 444 habitantes (2018) distribuidos en 64 barrios entre las localidades de Usme, San Cristóbal, Santa Fe, Chapinero y Usaquén.
[iii] Según los registros publicados en la Infraestructura Mundial de Información en Biodiversidad (GBIF)
https://www.gbif.org/, la Reserva Forestal Protectora Bosque Oriental de Bogotá, a corte de agosto de 2020, cuenta con 1673 especies de flora y fauna, de las cuales 137 son endémicas, es decir, su distribución geográfica está limitada a esta área.
[iv] Este artículo es un homenaje a ese grupo apasionado que me ha acompañado este año y a quienes agradezco de corazón seguir adelante aumentando la población de «florestanios»: María A. Mejía, Lucía Martínez, Isabela Uribe, Jorman Romero, Gabriela Fernández, Miguel Leguízamo, María Paula Guerrero, María Elvira Talero, Nicolás Bazzani, Adriana Cabrera, Mateo Hernández, Ricardo Gamboa, Francisco González, Martha Gómez, Santiago Rosado, Leonardo Centeno, Fernando Cruz, Carlos Lince, Mateo Hernández, Leonardo Villa, Lina Prieto, Jaime A. Vargas, Laura Gómez, Elsa Rey, Carolina Fiallo, Ingrid Obando, Juan Camilo Cruz, Byron Calvachi, Johanna González, Lina Prieto, Andrés Gómez, Juan Camilo Castro, Sebastián Cerquera, María Alejandra Peña, Ana Puerto, Luisa Castro, Juan Pablo Rojas, Nicolás Barrero, Jacqueline Vargas, Erika Tovar, Sofía Estrada, Mark Skepasts, Erika Barragán, Ivone Malaver, Nathaly Ortiz, Elizabeth Barragan,Gabriela Fernandez, Maria Jose Velasco y Lauryin García.
“And what can you do, as an individual, to clean up the spaces around you? How can you show your family and community the value in protecting the nature, the forests and the sea you all say you love?
We walk through Mashhad, Iran, and start giggling like children.
“Look how clean everything is! There are trash bins, and parks with good exercise equipment, and wide sidewalks you can actually walk on without being sideswiped by motos, rickshaws, bicycles and cows! Oh, how nice… they painted the park benches! And, people are sitting on the grass, having a picnic, enjoying their public spaces! And, are those birds singing?”
Iranians love their city and national parks and open spaces. We found many people strolling their clean paths, using the exercise equipment, and camping in their gazebos, which is permitted in many cities. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
Lluís and I fully savor these small pleasures as if we are experiencing them for the first time. We will have the same reaction with almost every city we pass through during our approximately 1,500-kilometer, 2.5-month walking journey in North Iran. The shellshock from seven months of exhausting, psychologically-scarring walking in filthy, noisy, chaotic, overpopulated and overwhelming Bangladeshi and Indian cities, finally, starts to fade.
But, the high we feel from being in Iranian cities, where access to public spaces appear to be a priority and where many crews are hired to keep these spaces clean, lasts only in the cities.
Out in nature—along the roads beyond city limits, on the main thoroughfares cutting through national parks and at Caspian Sea beaches—we see a significant disconnect. Piles of trash, usually picnic-related trash, litter the landscape. It’s disappointingly heartbreaking.
The piles of litter and remnants of past picnics makes it hard to enjoy the beautiful green open spaces outside Iranian cities. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
We find ourselves asking over and over, who are these people who are leaving behind their soda and doogh (a local yogurt drink) bottles, disposable picnic tablecloths, and styrofoam food trays with grains of rice and grilled chicken bits? How can they be the same people who keep their homes and cities practically spotless? How can the Iranian love of picnicking anywhere in the outdoors where the mood strikes—one of the most social aspects of Iranian culture we have partaken in and enjoyed immensely—be such an enemy to the country’s natural beauty?
We posed these questions informally to people of all ages and economic status along the way. When they ask us how we like Iran, we answer, “You have a beautiful country filled with wonderful, generous and kind people. But, honestly, the trash left behind from your picnics is a real eye sore. As much as we wanted to enjoy your very pretty Golestan Park or beaches, we found it difficult to look beyond the trash. How can this be?”
Iranian picnic lunch. Photo: Bargkok Barcelona On Foot
People shrug their shoulders. They sigh a deep sigh filled with lament, regret and resignation.
“Yes, it’s a big problem. People throw their trash out of the windows as they drive by. These just don’t care about nature,” some people say, shaking their heads, ashamed.
Others add with a hint of dismissiveness, “If there is no trash bin exactly where they are sitting, people won’t look for one.”
Iranians are expert picnickers and enjoy being outside during the warm weather months. They throw down their blankets and set up their steam pots wherever the mood strikes—in city parks, along the road, out in nature, on the beach. Photo: Bargkok Barcelona On Foot
Several get defensive, “We take our trash with us and throw it away when we see a container or when we get home. We don’t know why others can’t do the same!”
“What can we do?” some ask us, hoping that the foreigners can bring insight to a matter they interpret as beyond their control.
Maybe the wild boars are the only ones who enjoy the trash left behind from Iranian picnickers. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
We are quick to say that our countries are not much better than Iran, and that we too struggle with this same dilemma. We applaud how much Iranians use their open spaces and really appear to enjoy being outside in nature. We come up with ordinary solutions such as putting more bins in places where people gather, imposing a heavy fine for littering, organizing community clean-up days, and educating people about how to better manage their own waste.
There’s a suggestion to return to the “old ways.”
Glimpses of Iran’s beautiful national Golestan Park. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
“Historically Iranian people had cloth bags to carry their stuff, but, nowadays, they have forgotten their traditions. Unfortunately, they prefer to clean their own house without any notice to the state of their environment,” says Eskandar Gordmardi, director of natural habitats of Iran’s North Khorasan province, adding that municipalities and the Department of the Environment can only do so much in public places and that individuals need to take more responsibility for their behavior.
Gordmardi’s comment reminds us of the neon-colored reusable baskets we saw some Iranians use. They load up these trendy baskets with real dishes and glasses, and haul them home to wash post-picnic. Making a picnic a fashion statement may help usher in new thinking around product reuse, but, still, disposable plastic is easier and vastly more convenient for a significant number of people.
Several people, including a park ranger we spoke with, emphasize the generational gap around environmental consciousness.
Glimpses of Iran’s beautiful national Golestan Park. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
It will take time to fix this issue, the ranger tells us over tea at an aid station near the park. He says, “I think we don’t have enough culture about nature and picnics in nature. On the other side, we don’t have enough training about how [to engage] with nature and we have to put some courses about this topic in … high school and elementary school.” Older people, he says, think it’s OK to leave their trash wherever they want, and don’t see it as a problem. The younger generation is much more aware of this, and are more sensitive to it, he adds.
We feel that to be true.
We sat in on group conversations and oral presentations at an English school where the topic of the day was taking care of the environment.
These teenagers and young people spoke, with high English fluency, about the dangers of polluted water and forests and the consequences of not having clean green spaces in areas beyond municipal jurisdiction. They eloquently suggested tighter government controls, more corporate accountability and responsibility, and city-level recycling programs.
We agreed that those measures are necessary, but we wanted them to also have a personal stake in the world around them.
We walked with new friends in a green area near the city of Gorgan, and ended up collecting dozens of pieces of plastic and bottles that we put in the bin at the park’s entrance. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
“And, what can you do, as an individual, to clean up the spaces around you? How can you show your family and community the value in protecting the nature, the forests and the sea you all say you love? What can you do in your city, today, right now, that can be replicated in natural areas outside your city?”
Their responses were as ordinary as ours were. Pick up the trash after we picnic, and dispose of it properly. Separate recyclables. Be an example to others and not accept that throwing trash from car windows is OK.
We nudged them to think about other things that could have a lasting impact. We, too, wanted to hear about and consider innovative ideas. This is, after all, not only an Iranian issue. Every country we walk through, and every country we have ever visited or lived in, is dealing with these same problems and addressing them largely in the same way—at a relatively basic level.
Our time runs out, with questions lingering and answers pending.
We walk on, kicking through other people’s trash and wondering how to reconnect the joyful picnickers with the delicate urban and rural spaces around them.
Biodiversity-positive design is a response by landscape architects to enhance biodiversity in their work in cities. Perhaps the most important contribution that landscape architects make to enhancing biodiversity in their projects is their interpretation of biodiversity for the specific site context.
Biodiversity is receiving much attention at the moment, not least among landscape architects in Australia. In 2018, David Maddox on this website posed the following provocation: “Landscape architects are the practitioners of biodiversity’s meaning through their acts of shaping nature into ‘spaces’. They have their hands on definitions of biodiversity that they use in their work, and that we experience in the landscapes they create. But they aren’t necessarily the same definitions as a scientist’s. Or even a regular person’s. So, how do landscape architects view the word ‘biodiversity’? How does it find meaning in their work?” Twelve landscape architects from around the world responded in a fascinating variety of ways.
I came upon this roundtable when considering the importance of a single definition of biodiversity to guide landscape architects’ work, a definition also shared with other professions. The roundtable showed that landscape architects thought of biodiversity and how it informed their work in different ways. Nevertheless, every response acknowledged the importance of increasing the abundance of all floral and faunal species in the landscape.
There is no single definition of biodiversity. It is a contraction of the term “biological diversity”, initially used by T.E. Lovejoy in 1980 in The Global 2000 Report to the President. It was first defined, in this extended form, in 1992 by the United Nations Convention of Biological Diversity. The convention’s current formal definition, dated 11.2.2006, is “the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine, and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems”. In contrast, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) defines biological diversity, or biodiversity, as “the variety of life on Earth and the natural patterns it forms. The biodiversity we see today is the result of 4.5 billion years of evolution and, increasingly, of human influence as well. It forms the web of life, of which we are an integral part and upon which we so fully depend”. These contrasting definitions, even within the United Nations, illustrate the lack of consensus.
Does it matter that there is no single, shared definition of biodiversity? Ian Swingland in 2001 asserted that “biodiversity is a populist word invented for convenience” and as such is indefinable. Three years earlier, Michèle Kaennel had referred to the “utopia of a non-ambiguous definition”. Nevertheless, both regarded the definition of biodiversity as essential to guide natural resource management, which requires measurable attributes. This is where the commonly quoted UN definition falls short. It also doesn’t clarify how to deal with non-indigenous or exotic plants. Do these contribute to biodiversity?
Landscape architects work with both natural and man-made landscapes. Man-made landscapes, especially in cities, often include exotic plants. There has been quite a vigorous discussion in scientific literature about what constitutes biodiversity. In 1994, Paul Angermeier distinguished native and artificial diversity. He argued that total biodiversity includes aesthetic, utilitarian, and ecological values, to which artificial diversity contributes. However, “in most cases, especially valuable elements are natural products of evolutionary processes and are therefore components of native diversity” (p. 601). He concluded that native diversity should be the focus of conservation efforts, continuing that “[a]rtificial diversity is no substitute for native diversity in terms of societal value or ecological function, and it should not be considered a substitute for native diversity in conceptions of biodiversity” (p. 601). Indeed, artificial diversity, such as invasive alien species, can contribute to biodiversity loss. In contrast, Don Delong included all biotic communities, including those altered by humans, in his definition of biodiversity, published in 1996. Given the activity of landscape architects across natural and man-made landscapes, on projects with a huge variety of objectives, which might specifically include conservation and natural resource management but might not, his definition of biodiversity seems most useful:
“Biodiversity is a state or attribute of a site or area and specifically refers to the variety within and among living organisms, assemblages of living organisms, biotic communities, and biotic processes, whether naturally occurring or modified by humans. Biodiversity can be measured in terms of genetic diversity and the identity and number of different types of species, assemblages of species, biotic communities, and biotic processes, and the amount (e.g., abundance, biomass, cover, rate) and structure of each. It can be observed and measured at any spatial scale ranging from microsites and habitat patches to the entire biosphere” (p. 745).
Its usefulness, though, is not confined to landscape architects. This definition can be a shared, common definition of biodiversity, for use by all participants in a project, regardless of profession or discipline. It allows communication between project team members, with a shared understanding and common goals. What counts as biodiversity in each project, be it native or artificial, including novel ecosystems, can be identified in the project brief with specific management or monitoring objectives depending on the context and social values.
Perhaps the most important contribution that landscape architects make to enhancing biodiversity in their projects is their interpretation of biodiversity for the specific site context. In the roundtable, Mohan Rao stressed the importance of the geographical, social, ecological, and cultural aspects of that context and the role of landscape architects to provide a nuanced interpretation of biodiversity as they design places.
The role of the landscape architect is not as an ecologist but to create a place for the landscape’s inhabitants. In doing so, the landscape architect works across multiple disciplines, including the sciences and the arts, to develop a design solution. Depending on the project, different emphasis is given to different knowledge, but context is always critical. Thus, in the city, usually designed for humans as the primary inhabitants, flexibility must be accepted in the pursuit of biodiversity to create places that meet human needs. In a world of changing climate and an emphasis on sustainability and resilience, this might mean that artificial diversity is given priority in some instances over native diversity. A simple example in Australia, where most indigenous trees are evergreen, is the use of exotic deciduous trees in cities for summer shading, cooling, and winter solar access.
Biodiversity-positive design is a response by landscape architects to enhance biodiversity in their work in cities. How this is implemented is still being developed. One challenge is to assess the success of conserving or enhancing biodiversity in a design project. Landscape architects might not be able to quantify the impact of their work on biodiversity as metrics. An alternative is to adopt principles, such as criteria or targets, to inform their design. I am aware of two approaches, which overlap to an extent. One involves five principles for biodiversity-sensitive urban design:
maintain and introduce habitat,
facilitate dispersal,
minimise threats and anthropogenic disturbance,
facilitate natural ecological processes, and
improve potential for positive interactions between humans and nature.
construct diverse and complex habitats to attract or retain biodiversity,
ensure cycles that mimic natural flows,
facilitate interactions within and between ecosystem elements,
ensure benevolence of urban infrastructure to reduce negative impacts on biodiversity, and
support novel ecosystems and ecological communities.
One thing is certain, though: landscape architects care deeply about biodiversity in their work. A shared definition of biodiversity will help them with this.
It is interesting that we think of nature in cities only as fauna and flora. Mineral nature—the rocks and inert resources—is the stage on which living nature is set. In cities, this means that the embedded nature all around us, that has been extracted from the Earth like the processed aggregate that we use to make concrete, or the oil (decomposed plants) we lay down for our streets as asphalt, are excluded from the conversation about nature in the city, or city nature. What is it about mineral, inert nature that surrounds us in the city—and is used to create the infrastructure we depend on like buildings—that it gets no attention? We make pilgrimages to see Half Dome in Yosemite, or admire the Palisades along the Hudson River, but the transformation of this inert nature, the rocks, gypsum, iron ores and other metals and minerals, timber and asphalt, are never considered as part of the nature in cities. They are often seen as in the way of planting more trees, allowing water to infiltrate into the soil, and to creating more green open space.
What would happen to our view of city nature if we began to be aware of all the embedded inert nature in urban areas and consider the enormous resource value they contain?
Inert nature, the materials that make up the city and every object in our daily lives, is almost incomprehensibly ubiquitous, and valuable. It represents a sunk investment, sunken fossil energy, sunken human energy, sunken materials that can only be reused (if at all) by applying more energy, labor and ingenuity. Many of the materials are already highly energy intensive, like concrete, aluminum, steel. Energy that is often fossil energy, and to reuse them means more fossil energy expended. These mineral resources in cities are predicated on a vast exploitation of Earth ecosystems and resources. Should we begin to treat this embedded mineral nature with more awareness of what it represents relative to the exploitation of natural resources, ecosystems and people, it might lead to new ideas about how to make cities more sustainable.
The ubiquitous way in which sunken infrastructure is invisible can be seen in the way modern ecology has turned its back on the interactions between natural and modern industrial systems, just like much of neoclassical economics has ignored the physical and biotic underpinnings of economic production. Economic production is treated as sui generis, subject to its own rules and not to natural scarcities or pollution impacts on future biotic or physical resources. Ecologists have little to say about modern industrial systems, despite those systems being derived from, and built upon, physical principles and elements (Hall, Cleveland and Kaufmann 1992). Sustainable city literature seems to have done so as well. Ecological footprint analysis, that measures embedded energy in the city, still does not seem to make us appreciate the actual mineral materiality in our every day urban lives. To realize how much Earth resources our existing cities contain, and to begin to consider those transformed resources as part of city nature, could transform our relationship to the city’s infrastructure.
One of the myths supporting the invisibility of nature in infrastructure is that technological advances and human ingenuity make the issue of resource availability and resource quality irrelevant (Hall, Cleveland and Kaufman 1992). Though modern technology has made the link between natural resources and human existence less apparent, we are still as dependent as ever on the extraction of natural resources to make material goods, and to build infrastructure. The lack of awareness of the processes and impacts of resource exploitation and the often profound disruptions in the ecosystem where that deposit is located, regardless of its scarcity, enable a kind of cavalier approach to the built environment, where not only do we build carelessly as to the local impacts on natural systems, but we are wasteful of Earth resources, building cheaply knowing that things will be torn down and rebuilt in the next economic cycle, or by the next property owner, or that with enough heating and cooling energy expended, the quality of the construction does not matter.
Half Dome, Yosemite National Park. Photo: USGS.
Yet, true resources are expended in rebuilding, resources from nature that come from somewhere. Just like cutting down mature street trees is wasteful, so is our churning of the urban fabric to maximize the next real estate cycle. So, to better take this situation into account, we need to comprehend that the mineral hard surfaces of the city are city nature too. This calls for consciousness in what we use to build, how we build, and ensuring the longevity of that investment.
Over time, as resources become rare, or dissipated, the more energy will be needed to extract them. Geological factors ultimately determine the amount of energy needed to exploit a resource deposit and humans can apply greater and greater fossil energy to extracting resources—to a point. Ultimately there are diminishing returns and the resource is too dissipated to be exploited in any reasonable manner. There are changes in quality of the resource with increased rates of exploitation. All this is important to keep in mind when thinking about the nature in cities and sustainability.
What has already been extracted and transformed into usable materials must be valued for what it is: largely unrenewable. For example, copper deposits, once exploited, do not regenerate. Copper in infrastructure provides important services, it has to be conserved, reused, well managed. Plastics, such as for pipes, may be more abundant since we still have fossil energy, but once disposed of are unrecoverable, and pose disposal challenges.
Chino open pit copper mine., New Mexico USA. Credit: Wikipedia.
Understanding that cities are nature—including an inert nature that is harvested, extracted, mined, reprocessed and made into our roads, buildings, pipes, roofs, wiring, doors, windows, mechanical systems, and more—is sobering. It means we need to be thoughtful when we advocate for new LEED buildings, or Zero Net Energy buildings. It means that any new infrastructure, including public transportation infrastructure, means more capturing of mineral nature and the application of fossil energy, to make it and to place it in existing infrastructure, ripping out the existing infrastructure that will then need to be disposed of. All that rubble originally came from somewhere, whose extraction damaged ecosystems.
One approach to better determine how to retrofit the existing built environment is to begin to employ new tools like life cycle analysis more systematically, to reveal the already invested materials and energy in what we have built. Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) is a cradle to grave energy and materials accounting method that reveals the existing sunk costs. Conducting LCAs to better evaluate choices in approaching the already built environment could lead to better use of existing cities, densifying them, repurposing existing buildings, reworking existing transportation corridors, and appreciating the degree to which the cities we live in are expressions of nature in and of themselves rather than disregarding the resources already mustered in what we have built already.
In Los Angeles we have a research project attempting to quantify the city’s urban metabolism—the energy flows in and the waste flows out—in greater granularity and specificity. Concerned with understand the energy and materials already existing in the built environment, we are using county tax assessor parcel data that includes building age, size, type, and material make up. Based on this information we are creating a life cycle assessment of the embedded energy in 27 different building types to begin to account for the nature that we have already used and are living in.
This type of accounting may help in determining the true cost of new building, especially on green fields, and urban retrofitting. We are still in the process of developing the calculations on the LCA of the building types, but according to new studies, there is evidence that retrofitting existing infrastructure for energy conservation has lower life cycle impacts than building new energy efficient buildings – except for warehouses. This adds to the argument that building on green fields is generally less efficient than infill. Additionally, as there is plenty of land already annexed in most American cities new population growth should be accommodated where there is already infrastructure. So, if already existing infrastructure is retrofitted and urban space better utilized, the pressure on virgin resources, and on ecosystems will be lessened. While ecological footprinting has already shown the Earth impacts of cities, it has not really been used to examine the amount of nature captured in city systems; life cycle tools are useful in this regard.
In the end, our immersion in nature is inescapable, even in what we perceive of as the most non-natural of environments—cities. Once this realization starts to change we can really begin to appreciate the nature of cities and treat the mineral resources of cities as lovingly as fauna and flora.
While we have been focused on the nature of cities in cities and its sublime paradoxes, one could perhaps also enlarge the city nature question to reflect on the gradual urbanization of planet Earth. Whether it is global appropriation of Earth resources by humans — human activities now appropriate nearly one-third to one-half of global ecosystem production (Foley et al, 2005) — or the concentration of Earth’s resources and energy in cities, cities and thus their dwellers have enormous footprints and thus embedded nature from afar in city-infrastructure (see a previous Pincetl blog here).
This, I would argue, should now also includes how nature outside city limits gets dramatically altered with exurban development. Exurban development is not suburban development. It is the house on 5 to 20 acres, surrounded by either public land, or large ownership parcels that are relatively undisturbed. Land use rules and the availability of cheap (relatively) fossil fuel have enabled people to live in far-flung places and commute long distances into urban centers for employment. Not all of these exurban dwellers are affluent, but living outside of the city and the suburbs is a clear choice. And they bring with them a “city nature” spreading it along a city to exurban gradient — manicured lawns, non native ornamentals, and most of all, defensive spaces as I describe below.
Here in Southern California where I live, I see the ravaging impacts of exurbanization on nature all around when I travel outside of the city itself. Unless the land is protected, like in National Forests, land continues to be developed and urbanized even in far-flung places. There are still many pockets of private land in the National Forests, and inholdings in large parcels. Alluvial fans, some of the best land for ground water recharge and urban–non urban buffers, continue to be developed due to their beautiful views. Because of our region’s fire-prone and fire-dependent ecosystems, when humans build dwellings in the exurban countryside it sets of a vicious circle of nature destruction. To build, there must be vegetation clearance around the home (unless it’s a suburb), and that now must be 300 feet around the dwelling. This is required by county fire departments, and fire insurance is predicated on complying with clearance requirements.
Vegetation clearance is just that: tabula raza, dirt. Increasingly rare chaparral and coastal sage scrub vegetation is removed for “fire safety”, creating disturbance conditions that favor Mediterranean grasses. Mediterranean grasses, in turn, burn more frequently and more easily than chaparral, and increased fire frequency in chaparral — a fire dependent ecosystem — stresses its ability to recuperate and engenders system change.
And the cycle reinforces itself. More fire (due to human intrusion and fire clearance that enables more fire prone grasses to grow) undermines the ability of indigenous vegetation to come back, which leads to more fire and more clearance.
Chaparral and coastal sage scrub vegetation in the exurban hills outside Los Angeles. Photo: Stephanie Pincetl
Expectations of a safe, fire-free environment, brought to the fire-prone countryside by city folk, means the destruction of the very nature one would think they have escaped the city to enjoy. Many millions of dollars are spent protecting these homes, despite their bulldozed perimeters, because the truth of the matter is that fires in this part of the world are wind driven. They can easily jump 300 feet, and embers have been known to travel much, much farther. Often these same homes have trees all around them — there is a 300 foot buffer to the chaparral, but the houses themselves are closely surrounded by vegetation — perhaps to buffer the views from the scarred landscapes all around. Trees are, of course, akin to Tiki torches once the embers touch them, and the house is next. There is a great deal of discussion currently about revising building codes to make dwellings less fire prone — no open eaves, no wood shake roofs and so forth. But forbidding building in fire prone landscapes is not part of this discourse.
So what is driving this madness? A number of factors, including old subdivisions plotted at the turn of the 21st century and vestigial parcels claimed under the Homestead Act still exist and are seen today as great opportunities to develop for pastoral living. Weak land use regulations are another reason, and a remaining belief that developing beyond city limits is cost free. Thus, private property rights trump common sense and county budgets, and the landscape is the sacrifice zone for continued individualistic preferences for country living and long commutes (Pincetl et al. 2008).
A house surrounded by trees in the middle of chaparral vegetation outside Los Angeles. Photo: Stephanie Pincetl
And there are other impacts. Roads are built to provide access to the dwellings, creating further habitat fragmentation and fire hazards. Roads disseminate more non-native invasive and weedy species, accelerating the flammability of the landscape and thus the transformation of native habitat. Above ground power lines (much less expensive) also increase fire risk, and there is more pressure on water resources either due to well-drilling or water system expansion. With irrigation of yards for these exurban houses, there is run-off, often contaminated with fertilizers and pesticides. If the homes are on septic systems, they can contaminate soils and water. Exurban living must have the same amenities of any urban living, and more: privacy, space and the investment of many more resources to make it possible to live so far out. This includes infrastructure — made from petroleum products, plastics, minerals, timber — extracted from nature to begin with.
Not only is indigenous nature impaired and changed, but the resource intensity is high of such development. These exurban dwellers expect city-like services like fire, medical, sanitation and trash disposal, maintained roads and reliable access to where they need to go though rarely are those costs internalized to the individual home builder or purchaser. Rather, they are borne by society as a whole, and by, most especially, nature.
Roads, houses, and supporting infrastructure in the ExUrban hills outside Los Angeles. Photo: Stephanie Pincetl
Exurban development continues, eroding habitat and landscapes. It makes for a continuum of “city nature” from the downtown core outward. In Southern California fire clearance is perhaps the most visible impact of that continuum, but habitat fragmentation, pollution and dramatic landscape transformation can be found across the U.S. Often exurban development takes place in vernacular and unprotected landscapes, carrying with it the characteristics of suburban living — the lawns, shrubs and trees, full blown energy and water use of more urban dwelling — but having an outsized impact and cost.
The curious thing about this phenomenon is that many of the dwellers of these far-flung places seek quiet and nature. They do not wish to live in the hustle and bustle of the city, the noisy, dangerous, populated city. Yet the transformation of nature they bring with them means they have urbanized the countryside. Such alienation from the city engenders changes far beyond the individuals themselves and raises questions about how to build better cities, more livable, humane and beautiful places such that there is less desire to transform our ever fragile and disappearing landscapes.
Want to explore diverse and connecting threads in urban ecological arts? In the LEAF, three FRIEC Urban Arts Collective members share something from their ideas and work for 10 minutes each, followed by Q&A.
Presenters: Olive Bieringa, Oslo Matthew Jensen, New York Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, Paris
21 October, 11am EDT
Olive Bieringa, Oslo: “Resisting Extinction” is a performance work that will offer embodied practices for grieving and resisting extinction amidst our spiraling ecological devastation. This performance work will offer participatory practices for building relationship and agency through weather walks, grieving practices and hauntings in urban landscape with the land meets the water.
Matthew Jensen, New York: I will share a few recent projects that help unpack what I mean when I say I have a “walking-based practice”. I will touch on Tree Love: Street Trees and Stewardship in NYC and show a few iterations of the project. And I will quickly explain the first and only “virtual walk” I created for City as Living Laboratory during the pandemic. The piece takes a walk and spreads it out on StoryMap, an interactive map with video and text.
Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, Paris: I will present about an ongoing body of research on what I’ve coined “the permacircular museum”. It revolves around gestures of object maintenance, looking at expanding the field of museum care practices to ecosystems and non-human collectives. There are currently two field experiments: in Karlsruhe, with ZKM museum of art and media – we are regenerating an abandoned fruit orchard, in the framework of the exhibition Critical Zones; in Taipei, with Taipei Fine Arts Museum – an urban reforestation action in partnership with Taipei Forestry Technologist Association and Geotechnical Engineering Office. I’m keen to explore the question recently asked by curator Chus Martinez on the possibility for cultural institutions to “produce shelter”, in a time characterized by the disappearance of refuges (Haraway, Tsing).
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The FRIEC (Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Cultures) Urban Ecological Arts Collective is a global group of almost 100 artists and creatives interested in the connection between nature and people in cities. The LEAF is a monthly webinar in which three Collective members spend 10 minutes describing an ideas or motivation central to their work, followed by discussion and Q&A with the audience. The idea to get to know the work of the Collective members, and to explore creativity and imagination in urban ecology.
Interested in being part of the FRIEC Collective? Write is at [email protected].
Banner image: A photographic series by Matthew Jensen celebrating the myriad of ways city residents care for street trees and the spaces surrounding them.
Matthew Jensen is an interdisciplinary artist whose rigorous explorations of landscape combine walking, collecting, photography, mapping and extensive research. His projects investigate the relationships between people and local landscapes.
Stéphane Verlet Bottéro (b. 1987) is an artist working at the intersection of social practice, installation, education, writing, gardening, and cooking. He is interested in the entanglements of community, materiality, body, and place. Based on site-specific research and durational interventions, his practice seeks to open spaces to unlearn and unsettle ways of inhabiting the world.
Want to explore diverse and connecting threads in urban ecological arts? In the LEAF, three FRIEC Urban Arts Collective members share something from their ideas and work for 10 minutes each, followed by Q&A.
Presenters: Christina Freeman, New York Lucie Lederhendler, Montreal Paula Nishijima, Amsterdam
Christina Freeman, New York. I will share work from my cooperative and participatory practice. As an artist and curator, my projects challenge pre-existing cultural value systems such as definitions of waste, and the normalization of competition as inherent. Most recently, I worked with the USDA Forest Service’s New York City Urban Field Station (NYC UFS) and Pratt Institute’s Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative (SAVI), to organize Who Takes Care of New York? Presented at Queens Museum in September 2019, this exhibition highlights the wide range of environmental stewardship throughout New York City. An online version of the exhibition will be presented by TNOC very soon!
Lucie Lederhendler, Montreal. Within the framework established by Roland Barthes that “myth is a type of speech chosen by history” (1970/1991 trans), I’m going to review a few past projects that tried to unearth neglected but extant mythologies by highlighting the traces of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal’s industrial past. Building on that approach, I will introduce my current, nascent research trajectory, which deals with the incontrovertible existence of sea monsters, ghosts, and the complexity of void spaces.
Paula Nishijima, Dieman. I’ll share my ongoing artistic research and series of works “Game of Swarms.” The project draws on theories about self-organisation and swarm intelligence—common in the collective behavior of decentralized systems in nature, e.g. social insects and slime molds—and materializes into an audio-visual piece and a cooperative game. I propose the swarm as a framework to discuss how the world is tackling global issues, such as the environmental crisis, while claiming the self-organised and auto-poetic forces of living matter. GoS seeks to stress a non-hierarchical relationship among living organisms that work together through local interactions to achieve a global harmony. It is an initiative to spark new ways of thinking inspired by the behavior of swarms in nature.
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The FRIEC (Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Cultures) Urban Ecological Arts Collective is a global group of almost 100 artists and creatives interested in the connection between nature and people in cities. The LEAF is a monthly webinar in which three Collective members spend 10 minutes describing an ideas or motivation central to their work, followed by discussion and Q&A with the audience. The idea to get to know the work of the Collective members, and to explore creativity and imagination in urban ecology.
Interested in being part of the FRIEC Collective? Write us at [email protected].
Banner image: A drawing of my empty street corner during COVID, by Lucie Lederhendler.
Lucie Lederhendler has been the curator of the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, a community-engaged, contemporary public art gallery, since 2021. Her research is concerned with the ecosystems of mythologies and the mythologies of ecology. She is a lecturer in art history at Brandon University.
Paula Nishijima is a Brazilian visual artist whose research-based practice unfolds on the crossroads of life science, technology and participatory social practice. Exploring individual and collective motivations, either through happenings or longer processes of interaction, her production materialises into different digital media, such as video, web applications and photography.
Want to explore diverse and connecting threads in urban ecological arts? In the LEAF, three FRIEC Urban Arts Collective members share something from their ideas and work for 10 minutes each, followed by Q&A.
Presenters: Tim Collins, Glasgow Robin Lasser, Oakland Wendy Wischer, Salt Lake City
Tim Collins, Glasgow. I will talk about Deep Mapping: Lough Boora Sculpture Park a recently published deep mapping project that considers a ‘cutaway’ bog in Offaly County Ireland which was strip mined for its peat fuel over a period of fifty years. In 2000 with efforts to reclaim the land for agriculture it was turned into amenity public space that featured a sculpture park. I will talk about the historic conditions and future options revealed in our publication. https://collinsandgoto.com/deep-mapping-lough-boora-sculpture-park/
Robin Lasser, Oakland. I will be sharing two projects: Dress Tents : Nomadic Wearable Architecture and Migratory Cultures. The DressTent project is a conflation of photography, fashion, performance and installation dealing with the geo politics of place, social, and environmental justice issues. Migratory Cultures is a site-specific video projection mapping and documentary video project connecting regional experiences of immigration with stories from around the world.
Wendy Wischer, Salt Lake City. I am going to talk about 3 projects that encompass different aspects of my work. One is “Displacing Vibrations” a collaboration with a geologist, this is about my scientific collaborations. Then I’ll discuss “Written on the Wind” a video/sound installation for the Natural History Museum of Utah that included a community component with 4th graders. And then “Your Memory is Already Fading” an installation and sound piece representing my object making and turning data into personal meaning.
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The FRIEC (Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Cultures) Urban Ecological Arts Collective is a global group of almost 100 artists and creatives interested in the connection between nature and people in cities. The LEAF is a monthly webinar in which three Collective members spend 10 minutes describing an ideas or motivation central to their work, followed by discussion and Q&A with the audience. The idea to get to know the work of the Collective members, and to explore creativity and imagination in urban ecology.
Interested in being part of the FRIEC Collective? Write us at [email protected].
Banner image: Ms. Homeland Security: The Illegal Entry Dress Tent. Robin Lasser
Visiting Director for the Contemporary Art Galleries at UConn in Storrs, Connecticut, Wendy Wischer is an artist and educator with a focus on artwork in a variety of media from sculptural objects to installations, video, projection, sound, alternative forms of drawing and public works. Much of the artwork is based on blurring the separation between an intrinsic approach to working with nature and the cutting edge of New Media.
Bibi Calderaro, New York. Caring for the environment means taking immediate action to cultivate stewardship at a bioregional scale. The CARE Program (Collaboratory in Active Regenerative Ecologies) is a bioregion-specific and radically innovative project that aims to invite educators to a summer residency in the Hudson River Estuary that focuses on immersive pedagogies. The program’s overall goal is to learn with the estuary and from ourselves as co-inhabitants in the bioregion, to then circulate the experiences, nurturing practices of care and curiosity. It aims to do so by introducing and integrating environmental humanities and aesthetic practices in the commons of the Hudson River bioregion, while making the latter into an open-air transformative space, fostering communication and awareness of the close interconnections that exist at cultural, historic, geographic, socio-economic, and ecological levels. The estuary is the connective tissue between the rural and the urban publics along the valley, both of whom benefit from the watershed in order to sustain their livelihoods.
Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo New York. I plan to talk about my involvement with the Earth as an artist and my induction into ecosexuality and the daylighting of Tibbet’s Brook in New York.
Ursula Heise Los Angeles. My presentation will be on the documentary Urban Ark Los Angeles that I wrote and produced, and the related research project “Urban Biodiversity: Stories, Cultures, Taxonomies.”
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The FRIEC (Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Cultures) Urban Ecological Arts Collective is a global group of almost 100 artists and creatives interested in the connection between nature and people in cities. The LEAF is a monthly webinar in which three Collective members spend 10 minutes describing an ideas or motivation central to their work, followed by discussion and Q&A with the audience. The idea to get to know the work of the Collective members, and to explore creativity and imagination in urban ecology.
Interested in being part of the FRIEC Collective? Write us at [email protected].
During the last 20 years I have exhibited and performed extensively in the U.S. as well as internationally. Since 2006, I have pursued trainings with key people in the healing, somatic movement, writing and ecosexuality fields.
Ursula Heise is the Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies at the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature and the environmental humanities; environmental literature, arts, and cultures; science fiction; and narrative theory.
It’s a sunny morning and I leave the house, walking towards the gate of our subdivision. It’s just a few meters, downhill, around that pechay plantation, then uphill, typical of the sloping contour of Marikina Valley.
The street may be the most important public space because of the way it should be shared.
In the two minutes and few meters, I see almost no one. Perhaps just Mr. Pechay, or so I call him, who’s busy tilling the soil or slaving over his watering cans and new seeds to keep the largest greenspace we have, green. He rarely talks, but will drop by the house during Christmas to sell his overly large upo and ask for a fifty-peso bill. Past his tree, I see closed, locked gates and wide walls.
Treading up the path, I see cars, parked on either side of the street or taking up my space on the sidewalk, so I have to tiptoe around whatever shadow I can to avoid the glaring heat of the sun. A child screams, then laughs somewhere inside the cream-colored house, and a dog barks from the white gate across. Even with all these voices, it’s sad because there’s no one to say hello to.
The gated community, where mostly cars enter and exit. Photo: Ragene Palma
The vegetable stall on Panorama. Photo: Ragene Palma
A few seconds more and I exit our subdivision gate. But before I do, I anticipate a different sight compared to the bland, boring, unfriendly walls and quiet, lonely road. I enter what is called a thriving street. It is aptly called Panorama.
I first wave to Mr. Bananas, whose meter-long stall is just outside the gate. He smiles and waves back, and as always, says, “Ang sipag magtrabaho a! (You work so hard!)” I nod and take note that I have to buy some saba on the way home tonight. Almost simultaneously, Mr. Foochow grins from across the street, perhaps wondering if I’d be too lazy to cook dinner later and order his Chinese fried chicken and classic bihon. Starting downhill again, I look to my right. Mrs. Rice nods at me, but as always, is busy asking how many kilos of Malagkit or Sinandomeng Mrs. Three-Blocks-Away would need. I pass the first FX terminal, and ask old Mr. Yosi if the driver would make the long route or take the short route. As always, he replies with the long route. I know that all too well; I just ask the question to stir conversation into the old man’s life. I avoid the gaping, hazardous hole on the pavement, making yet another mental note to call City Engineering, then walk some more to avoid Mr./Ms. Fantastically Fabulous, who keeps telling me he’s/she’s just more beautiful than I am. I continue a little bit faster (because the slope gets steeper) and ask Mr. Fruitstand how sales have been this morning. “Laging maganda, (always beautiful)” he replies with a wink. I turn right and make eye contact with Mr. Barker. He raises his pointing finger, and I make the same gesture to reserve a passenger seat. I leave Panorama and embark on a silent journey with a heading towards Cubao. Or, as silent as the FX FM radio allows it, anyway.
The many trikes of Panorama. The tricycle is a two- to three-seater mode of transport that operates in neighborhoods. Photo: Ragene Palma
Panorama Street is an example of what urbanists like to call a thriving street or a vibrant part of the community. It isn’t perfect because it still has zooming jeepneys and too many trikes, like any other Philippine street, but it has familiar faces, each with a role to play. As opposed to mere space, it becomes a place which has meaning to the people who use it, who take part in it, who take center stage in its story. It is vibrant not just because of this chitchat, but because of the many small businesses it has and the way people have relationships. I take comfort in knowing that I can trust these not-really-strangers, who anticipate the people who pass by and look out for everyone’s well-being. I love that even if the smallest conversations with some of the vendors repetitively adhere to a template, they establish a connection between real people. Most importantly for me, and I guess everyone else who lives in the southeastern outskirts of this highly urbanized city, Panorama is known to be a final stop on the commute from other places in the metro area. It’s what Filipinos call dulo when we use public transport. For me, Panorama is home.
A thriving place or a busy street is something urban planners stand for. It’s something that we champion in design and in planning for better communities. The street is meant to be used by everyone. That’s why it is called a public space. The street is, perhaps, the most important public space, because of the way it should be shared. It embodies equity among the people. It’s simply saying that while I take one point of view in this story, it’s not just mine that matters. We could take Mr. Pechay’s or Mrs. Rice’s story, or perhaps that of an unnamed supporting character who was passing in the background of what I saw. It wasn’t just my route or my character that meant something here; it’s everybody else’s. It’s all of ours.
Four young girls looking at a toddler being carried along Panorama. Photo: Ragene Palma
I would never have known what Panorama was like before. I would never have been able to tell this story, because I wouldn’t have known anyone from it, or whatever it is that they did. Even if I had already lived for a decade in our current home, the majority of those years were spent inside the bubble of a car. And all the while, I believed that vehicle-bound experience to be normal. Mostly because of convenience and partly because of ignorance, I traveled through mere spaces, not places, and I saw more traffic lights than people’s faces.
Then I came to realize that cars fit perfectly in gated communities. The solitude is built exactly for someone who prefers to ride alone in the car, where there are no people, just roads; no connections, no relationships, just yourself and the wheel, shut out from the cool breeze and in sight of tinted greeneries.
I’ve stopped using a private car (or limited it the most I can) because I prefer to be at one with my community. While I consider the tremendous smoke-belching in this country as a curse to my lungs, there is still the privilege of knowing that I’ve played a part in lessening traffic congestion, reducing car emissions, and contributing to the income—no matter how small—of the local drivers. Most importantly, I’ve learned to replicate Panorama wherever I go. I now see familiar faces in the security guards or streetsweepers in other places, and it’s not a sea of blank stares anymore. Places mean more to me now than they did before. Memories are made with every step taken, and memories come flooding back with a few steps more.
At the corner of Panorama: an old lady asking for spare change (see the recycled cup?) so she can eat lunch, and a young boy who was amused because I wanted to take his picture. Photo: Ragene Palma
Inside the gated community – no one in plain sight. Just high walls and locked gates. Photo: Ragene Palma
You know when I miss riding in a private car? It’s when I leave Panorama, in the few meters that lead back to my house, because there’s no other way to go home. I miss the car because it makes me feel safe from the dark, and all the high walls that surround me. The juxtaposition of a lively street and a gated community suddenly becomes so striking.
Come to think of it, I only walk those meters when daylight can provide me safety. There have been a few times I’ve been forced to sprint home, strongly wishing the house with a chihuahua would open a night barbecue or that Inday from the bougainvillea canopy house would suddenly take a nighttime stroll. It would brighten the way home. But they don’t, and I don’t think they ever will. This leaves me with the option of riding the trike. The drivers at our terminal are very friendly, thank God for them, and sometimes they even say, “Good night.”
Just as building real connections with people cannot be achieved quickly using technological shortcuts but rather requires time and effort over the long term, building the landscape elements that create biocultural connectivity is also a slow process.
On social media and connectivity
Like a lot of people, my new year’s resolution last year was to stop spending so much time on Facebook and other social media. And like probably a lot of people, I completely failed. So this year, I made a different resolution. This year I resolved to spend more time on social media.
To clarify, I resolved to keep using social media but to make active efforts to post things and be more engaged. I realized I had become a social media lurker, spending hours scrolling through Facebook or Twitter feeds, but hardly ever posting anything myself. My notification areas were empty. Social media and all our modern tech is supposed to connect us, but for all the time spent online, I was making very few actual connections to other people.
I am writing about this for TNOC as a way to make my resolution part of the public record, increasing my chances of keeping it, and also because it is relevant to the nature of cities as an analogy for what I see happening related to connectivity in fields like biodiversity conservation, sustainable development, and others that we read about here. I have been writing on TNOC for a few years about biocultural diversity, particularly discussing biocultural connectivity, and these topics seem particularly relevant to what is happening today. In short, some of the very institutions that have been created to enhance connectivity—both interpersonal and environmental—are having exactly the opposite effect.
First, a little background including some recent developments. In Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) processes, we are approaching the end of the timeframe for the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, which coincides with the UN Decade on Biodiversity. The Aichi Biodiversity Targets are the heart of the Strategic Plan, consisting of 20 targets of varying scope and specificity, supposedly to be achieved during the Decade (although, as we will see below, some of them are conceived as aspirational targets and cannot reasonably be expected to be achieved within one or even several decades). The timeframe for these targets is therefore coming to a head as Parties to the CBD consider what progress has been made, which targets are and are not likely to be met, the process of how the targets were produced, and what lessons can be learned for what comes after 2020. Mention has already been made in CBD negotiations of a “post-2020 global biodiversity framework”, and it is expected that a new set of targets will be adopted at the CBD’s fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (CBD COP 15) in China in 2020.
Within the context of the Aichi Targets, connectivity is most explicitly mentioned in relation to Target 11, which says “By 2020, at least 17 per cent of terrestrial and inland water areas and 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services, are conserved through effectively and equitably managed, ecologically representative and well-connected systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, and integrated into the wider landscape and seascape”. This is usually thought of as the target on protected areas, but—in a reflection of the difficult negotiation process that produced the Strategic Plan—a lot of different ideas got tossed into the word salad that is this target, so it could also be about concepts like “equitably managed”, “integrated”, and “well connected”. But generally speaking, connectivity shows up in CBD contexts essentially as a function of protected areas management.
Target 11 is unusual among the Aichi Targets because it is one of the few that includes measurable numbers for parties to aim for, by specifying 17 percent for terrestrial and inland water areas and 10 percent of costal and marine areas to be somehow protected. Other targets are vague about requirements to be met, for example, Target 7: “By 2020, areas under agriculture, aquaculture and forestry are managed sustainably, ensuring conservation of biodiversity”. What is meant by “areas” in this context? All agricultural land, or just some of it? This—similar to Target 1: “By 2020, at the latest, people are aware of the values of biodiversity and the steps they can take to conserve and use it sustainably” among others—is an example of an aspirational target, unlikely to be met within the UN Decade on Biodiversity.
The pitfall here is that because Target 11 includes quantitative goals, countries can positively evaluate their progress in achieving it, by counting hectares of protected areas or kilometers of protected coastlines. But in doing so, uncountable concepts like integration and connectivity get lost. After all, it is a relatively simple matter to count protected areas, but not to quantify whether they are ecologically representative, well-connected and integrated into the wider landscape. This is one reason why a major survey like the Global Biodiversity Outlook 4 indicates that despite protected area coverage growing globally and likely to meet the target, the status of biodiversity continues to decline.
There are, therefore, two lessons that we should hope CBD negotiating parties will take from the experience of Aichi Target 11 as they look toward creating the next set of targets for the post-2020 global biodiversity framework. One is putting too many elements into one target results in a lack of focus and confusion about the actual goal of the target. The other is that targets must be consistent in identifying quantifiable goals or not. Otherwise, parties will find it easier to focus on quantifiable targets, to the detriment of all of the other targets and important concepts like connectivity.
In case you needed another acronym to remember, meet “OECMs”
An integrated socio-ecological production landscape in Spain. Photo: William Dunbar
An ongoing effort to address some of the concepts included in Target 11 is work by IUCN and partners developing “guidelines for recognising and reporting other effective area-based conservation measures” (OECMs). OECMs were included in Target 11 in an attempt to address some of the very problems identified here by making sure that it is not simply a matter of creating official protected areas, but also recognizing that many different types of land-uses can benefit biodiversity, from indigenous-controlled lands to Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) recognized by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) or “socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes” promoted in the Satoyama Initiative.
Unfortunately, the lessons suggested above seem not to have been learned in developing these guidelines, which define OECMs as distinct, clearly defined areas set aside for biodiversity conservation. In other words, these are protected areas in every way other than legal recognition as such. This approach results in the same problems we see in protected areas, namely that they are so specific and narrowly-defined that they cannot be integrated parts of a “well-connected system” as prescribed in the target. This represents a real missed opportunity since the idea of OECMs is well-suited to embrace connectivity and integration into the landscape if areas like buffer zones and biocultural corridors were included. The guidelines as they currently exist are more likely to only apply to a small number of isolated pockets of biodiversity, and provide no motivation for integration or connectivity. It can only be hoped that these issues will be dealt with somehow in future planning.
At the beginning of this essay, I described how communications technology available to each individual person in modern society has gotten much greater, but a lack of real connection between these individuals shows that this technology is not achieving its intended purpose due to a lack of real, robust connectivity. I hope the analogy has become clear to the continuing tendency towards creating protected areas, and now OECMs, as isolated pockets that each may contain great biodiversity but are not achieving the intended goal of improvements to the biodiversity situation. In both cases, it is a lack of connectivity that prevents these instruments from fulfilling their purpose.
Slow progress on biocultural connectivity
For Target 11 to be fully effective, protected areas need to be integrated into landscapes where much more land area is used for human production activities. I would like to stress that the connectivity needed in wider-scale landscape planning is exactly what we call biocultural connectivity, and this can only be achieved with biocultural diversity. Toward this effort, there are some recent developments in the field of biocultural diversity that I wrote about in an earlier essay, following up on the process of creating an “Ishikawa-Kanazawa model” for biocultural diversity in cities, partly led by the government of Kanazawa, Japan.
Signatories to the 2016 Ishikawa Declaration on Biocultural Diversity. Photo: UNU-IAS OUIK
My own project’s “Indicators of Resilience in Socio-ecological Production Landscapes and Seascapes” are expected to be among materials on indicators presented for the action group’s “cross-cutting exploration of knowledge systems and indicators of wellbeing”. The set of indicators developed in this project attempts to identify elements that suggest whether a landscape or seascape and its resident communities are resilient. It is clear that many of these indicators are biocultural elements, such as “households and/or community groups maintain a diversity of local crop varieties and animal breeds” and “local knowledge and cultural traditions related to biodiversity are transmitted from elders and parents to young people in the community”. This is to say that, to some degree, what makes a landscape resilient is what makes it biocultural.
There is another way the analogy of modern technology failing to connect us as humans and the lack of connectivity in the landscape works. Just as it is relatively quick and easy to create protected areas—still often difficult, but easier than fostering true biocultural connectivity—in order to fulfill quantitative biodiversity goals like Aichi Target 11, sending messages through modern technology is also easy and fast as the speed of light. But again, just as building real connections with people apparently cannot be achieved quickly using technological shortcuts but rather requires time and effort over the long term, building the landscape elements that create biocultural connectivity is also a slow process.
Socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes in places around the world have been created through a slow process of people interacting with nature over hundreds or thousands of years. Rebuilding them where they have become degraded will likewise take years of work and smart management to restore their biocultural connectivity. In much the same way, the often-frustrating negotiations in international processes like the CBD, and the process of arriving at a truly effective global biodiversity framework, can be slow and not immediately gratifying. Perhaps we should not be overly afraid of slow progress, and trust that the very process of undergoing these negotiations is itself a kind of connectivity-building, just as continuously working the land can result in harmonious connections between humans and nature.
Going back to my analogy for how this biocultural connectivity relates to interpersonal connectivity via social media, so far, my new year’s resolution to post daily on Facebook has not resulted in any immediately satisfying improvement in connectivity, although I have mostly stuck to it. But in a small way, I am already having a few more interactions with friends on the site every day, finding common interests, or just joking about a silly picture. These little interactions provide a few more things that my friends and I have in common, gradually forming a little more solid basis to our relationships. Turning social media technology into something worthwhile is a slow process of making connections, and making connections is itself what builds connectivity. Similarly, producing the post-2020 global biodiversity framework will be done in a flurry of policymaking and negotiations over the next few years, but achieving the real goals of a world where people live in harmony with nature is going to be long-term and slow, and only achieved by doing the hard work to build many different forms of connectivity.
If you have never been to Baltimore, you should come to visit. From Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, you can ride the light rail to downtown in 25 minutes for one of the best deals in the country. If you ride the train between Boston and Washington, you can walk out of Pennsylvania Station and board the Charm City Circulator to downtown, and it’s free! However, if you live in the city of Baltimore and you want to rely on transit to get you to all of life’s functions, you need to recalculate your aspirations for life’s necessities and ambitions. For the 30 percent of people who live in Baltimore without a car (which, coincidentally corresponds with the percentage of people between 16 and 64 not in the labor force), the pursuit of economic opportunity, particularly beyond the confines of downtown, comes with limitations.
This image of a public servant—say, an airport security guard—forced to sleep on a hard chair because they have no way of getting home after a late shift epitomizes the conditions of today’s unjust city.
The above example serves as powerful reminder of how access to opportunity, transit mobility and the missing luxury of transportation choice is a critical gap in the path to shared prosperity for many in places like Baltimore. It is equally important to understand and underscore that fostering a more just place that includes all, especially those with the most limited means, is not a zero-sum game, but can create greater benefits for everyone.
Baltimore is a wealthy region in the highest-per-capita income state in America. With the Port of Baltimore—the furthest inland deepwater port on the Atlantic coast—significant highway access and the birthplace of the B&O railroad, Baltimore in its heyday boasted one of the best intermodal transportation networks in the nation. At one time nearly 40 percent of the US population was within a day’s drive of Baltimore.
Despite its proximity to abundant wealth, Baltimore is a poor city. The median family income in the city is less than two thirds that of the next closest jurisdiction, and most new jobs, particularly those that pay good salaries, are located outside of the city in areas disconnected from public transit and inaccessible to the 30 percent of Baltimoreans without a car.
There are racial dynamics that further complicate this picture. Baltimore is a poor and majority black city in a wealthy and majority-white metropolitan area. Nearly 70 percent of the regional—read suburban—population is white, while 64 percent of the Baltimore City population is black. The racial dynamics of this spatial mismatch—defined as the gap between home and employment—is real and unavoidable for now.
While there has been a move towards “transit-oriented developments” in the region, these have tended to intensify existing disparities by catering to those who can afford market-rate rents, many of whom also happen to work commute-friendly 9-5 days. Meanwhile, those don’t have that coveted first-shift schedule—many of them lower-wage service workers—find themselves at the mercy of a broken transit system. In one example, late-shift airport workers at BWI Airport must either take a bus to a transfer point and wait a few hours for the next leg of their journey home, or find a place to sleep in the airport until light rail operation commences in the morning. In other instances, transit services terminate at the edge of business parks, leaving employees trekking the last mile or more on foot.
This image of a public servant—say, a TSA agent—forced to sleep on a hard chair because they have no way of getting home after a late shift epitomizes the conditions of today’s unjust city.
This past June, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan chose to pull the plug on Baltimore’s planned Red Line, a 14.1-mile, $2.9 billion east-west light-rail line which Baltimore residents and transit advocates had been working to make a reality since 2002. If constructed, the new rail line would have been the start of transit system—more than our current disconnected transit modes—that could work for Baltimore’s underserved commuters. It would have created hundreds of new jobs and many new development opportunities in underserved neighborhoods. Afterwards, the state released a map of the proposed reallocation of the funds that showed road projects everywhere but Baltimore, adding insult to injury
Hogan’s decision to cancel the planned investment in Baltimore became public a mere two months after the city broke out in demonstrations and protests over the death of Freddie Gray. Known as the Baltimore Uprising, these demonstrations against police violence and inequality were themselves a warning of the looming volcanic eruption to be expected after generations of unjust treatment and lack of access to economic opportunity.
Yet there are steps policymakers and others can take to interrupt this pernicious cycle and begin to create the conditions for a just city.
Two weeks before the governor’s decision to cancel the Red Line, the Opportunity Collaborative—a public/private collective—released a Regional Plan for Sustainable Development. The effort, funded through HUD’s Sustainable Communities Initiative, began with the premise and understanding that racialized structural and institutional barriers were created that have long denied citizens with reasonable access to opportunity.
The broad recommendations of the Opportunity Collaborative—to retain, attract and prepare a workforce for growing mid-skill career path jobs and to strengthen housing and transportation connectivity to those regional employment centers—would create more inclusive outcomes to improve individual and family well-being and to better position the region and the state in a more competitive global economy.
A just city is one that supports this vision of a shared destiny: one that strives to guarantee access to opportunity for all its citizens without regard for race, income or political affiliation. One step in that direction is to mandate equity analyses of policies under consideration. Similar to the traditionally used fiscal impact analysis, this would give lawmakers a greater awareness of the potential disparate impacts of their decisions before they are made.
A just Baltimore is a place where the ease and convenience of access is provided for everyone, not just tourists and visitors. Transportation plans and investments must consider the needs and realities of those who depend on public services every day not only on special occasions.
History shows that once services are designed and implemented for a full spectrum of users, more users show up and ridership demand grows.
We must strive for a system that works for all, not just for the moral good it affords us, but for the economic benefits. There is so much I love about Baltimore—our people, our history and the hidden charm in our many neighborhoods. We are a place that, despite the knocks we took this year, is getting better. It is our choice, our charge and our duty to grow opportunity for all for the benefit of all. In the end, that’s what makes for a more just Baltimore.
Greek green roofs—Oikosteges, or OS for short—were born when I discovered that the existing conventional Northern and Central European green roofing systems could not be applied to our situation because they had been designed for the climate and building situations in those countries. Greece has many differences.
In sparking the localized green roof movements in Israel and Greece, we realized biomimicry was the way to go.
Greece is in a seismic region with regular earthquakes above 6 on the Richter Scale—a problem not encountered in Berlin or Geneva. Greece is also very arid, yet, unlike Northern Europe, can have monsoon-like rain events. The country experiences temperature extremes, with peak summer temperatures of 45°C and Siberian winter lows well below 0°C in the region at the Northern border with Bulgaria. Greece is very windy, with annual hot gale force winds found in many parts of the country during summer.
It was clear that to apply green roof technology to Greece would require trial and error, as well as research and development, to overcome all these challenges. For us, the endeavor started as a personal hobby, but grew into a business when we realised we were making progress that could be used by others. We constantly researched to achieve our main goal—to develop a super lightweight, local ecosystem on a roof would withstand the aforementioned extreme and harsh conditions with very little, if any, water, and no use of chemicals or industrial fertilizers. In a word, these roofs would be: natural.
To achieve these goals, we realised early on that copying nature—or biomimicry, as it is known—was the way to go. Beyond biomimicry, there are only three things that matter when doing a green roof—safety, safety, and safety. Safety matters both for the installers and for the users of the building once the green roof is installed.
Green roof on the Treasury Building, Constitution Square, Athens, Greece. Photo: Andrew Clements
View of downtown Tel Aviv, Israel, from the top of a bus and its green roof. Photo: Andrew Clements
Safety added further challenges to our venture. The main safety concerns were weight, because we are in an earthquake area; waterproofing, because many of the membranes used elsewhere are unsuitable to our building situation; and the high solar exposure our roofs receive. The vegetation had to be low-growing because of our annual winds, and the monsoon rains that arrive after an arid period meant that dry, loose substrates could be washed away.
For 12 years, we had successfully and safely applied natural ecosystem green roof technology in the challenging setting of Greece, including many years of trial and error research and development. We were looking for new challenges. Proving our concept outside of Greece was an important next step, and it came from Israel.
Israel has many similarities to Greece in terms of climate, building methods, and business challenges. But it also has differences. Our experience in Greece—adapting European tools to new contexts—seemed to arm us with the tools needed to transfer the technology across the Aegean Sea.
To be able to apply green roof technology to Israel, we needed to find the right local partner on the ground, so we visited the country with a business mission of the President of the Greek republic. We found a number of candidates, but one stood out. He was a passionate, young, serial entrepreneur with a track record of successful startups, but little ecological or horticultural background. It did not take long to realise Eyal was the man who could bring our technology to and apply it in the Middle East, starting with Israel.
Eyal had toyed with the idea of greening buildings in Israeli cities for over a decade at the time, and had started to develop his own local green wall application when we met. We shared the same views from an early stage. Our first meeting, which was a meeting of the minds, lasted over 12 hours, two meals, and many carafes of Greek wine. Localizing a technology is a necessary process when transferring green roof knowledge between countries. Eyal had been looking at systems from around the world for many years, with a lot of admiration for those who already did it on a large scale.
The task ahead was completely uncharted for the both of us.
Project site in Hanaton, Israel. Photo: Andrew Clements
A green bus with a green roof, Tel Aviv, Israel. Photo: Andrew Clements
Halation Israe.l Photo: Eyal Mirelman
Not long after we met, Eyal partnered with the person who would become the other half of this dynamic and creative Israeli duo, Ram, to develop greening technologies for the challenges of Israel.
They named the business Building Vegetation: simple and cool.
They are two very different individuals.
To start, one was born in the city, the other in the countryside.
The list goes on—in many ways, they are opposites.
Nevertheless, they complete each other and share the same values, as Eyal and I do in an absolute way. They do not stop learning and questioning everything around them.
What we found when we visited Israel and talked with Eyal and Ram was that there seemed to be a similar green roof implementation trajectory in Israel as there had been in Greece—only they were slightly behind the curve.
They needed a pilot project such as The Treasury building, which we had done in Greece. This project had set the ball rolling for green roofs in Greece, and led to great publicity for the cause, catalyzing several projects. In Israel, we had to overcome this learning curve to get them up to speed.
Finding a pilot in Israel proved to be as difficult as it had been in Greece. There were candidate roofs on public buildings, which came and went without application because green roofing was an unknown. It was the classic chicken and egg problem.
Undeterred by setbacks, Eyal and Ram continued the search to find the right pilot project.
Hanaton, featured in The New York Times, home of another open-minded, forward thinking entrepreneur was to be the pilot. So started the process of sourcing all the ingredients to make the cake. One of our priorities is to source materials locally, as we believe that shipping bulk materials around is not sound ecologically. I thought this would take time, as it had in Greece, but I didn’t know how dynamic Eyal was—he found most of the stuff we needed within a matter of months.
A super-lightweight green roof in Israel. Photo: Andrew Clements
A lush green roof in Israel. Photo: Andrew Clements
We set a date in 2013 to manufacture the roof locally and to install it. Eyal went to work and had everything set up in about six months. It had taken eight years for us to reach the same level in Greece. The roof was installed in November of 2013. At this time, there were very few completed green roof projects in Israel. The roof was a natural Israeli ecosystem mimic, which is quite close to our own built Greek ecosystem. Thus the process of trial and error, research and development, had now begun in Israel, with the date-stamped pilot under our belt. More projects followed, and each one built on the knowledge of the previous ones until Israel was completely up to speed with its own independent, homegrown green roofing company. Building Vegetation (http://www.bldveg.co.il/) is the only purely Israeli, homegrown green roofing company.
Our story shows how green roofs are not like other products, such as cars, for example. You can’t just apply a model that works in one situation to another. Green roofs have to be localised and tailored to the climate, building situation, and local culture. This requires ongoing trial and error, as well as research and development. There are some similarities that can be applied directly between countries, but on the whole, novel approaches are required. There are certain basic things that a green roof must do—such as being waterproof and draining properly—but how these functions are achieved depends on the situation.
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.
In a healthy functioning city, various forms of urban capital, including natural, social, cultural — and economic — are enabled to flow smoothly and flexibly, along paths that are productive and enriching to the system of which they are a part. The most efficient patterns of capital ‘flows’ in a city are organic: well connected, rooted to ‘cores’ that branch out to ‘outer’ places. As we know, there is an ecology to the city, a pattern of reciprocal connections that underpin its resilience. We see this in the landscape and topography that (hopefully) informs the constructed city, and then in the design of human-made services of city-life, like transit and street grids, public spaces that serve as recharge areas (in all sorts of ways), and in the ways that water and energy and food are transmitted through the city.
This connectedness is an essential prerequisite for urban resilience in all its forms: environmental, cultural, social, and economic. Nowhere is the natural pattern of cities more alive than in their economies, which function as ecosystems of invention and opportunity, connecting ideas with designers, thinkers with doers, makers with traders, producers with buyers. As with all natural ecosystems, the denser and more diverse a city economy is, the more resilient and adaptive it can be, nimble and able to self-correct. At its root is the capacity of a city, through its economy, to provide multiple opportunities and choices for its denizens. This essay illustrates just how a city economy mimics nature, and needs tending, just as other natural systems do.
Filling gaps and seeing new opportunities: entrepreneurs create diversity and choice
As in all forms of urban life, a city’s economy is the result of combining an agglomeration of people with a particular place. Together, we make our way forming a web of connections that we then navigate, daily, to raise our families, earn a living, enjoy leisure and make a contribution to our common life. A diverse city economy provides many different kinds of economic opportunity, including for those who aspire to pursue an independent economic life, not working for someone else in an established enterprise, but in fact to start up a new venture and be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are fundamentally searchers, looking for new ways to solve problems, close gaps, develop new products that make life easier, more productive, pleasant, fun. Entrepreneurs are resourceful: they see connections, gaps, and opportunities to try something differently. Larger cities like New York have been the perfect habitat for entrepreneurs because the city offers so much diversity in close proximity, especially of people. Different skills, knowledge, and tastes in an urban population makes it much easier to co-develop products or services that are adapted to particular users. If you have an idea and need a prototype made, someone here can do it. If you have a concept but need a technical expert to test it, someone here can do it. And if you have a dream, but need some financial capital to realize it, someone here has the resources to help you mount it.
Plus you have a test-market right on your doorstep. The hackneyed phrase, famously attached to New York, “If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere” is literally true. We have 15 million diverse consumers reflecting the cultural and ethnic preferences of the globe, within a 20-mile radius: if there’s a market for your offering here, there is probably a market anywhere.
A diverse city teems with choices
Entrepreneurs thrive on choices, because they’re always making them, choosing this approach over that, trying A but realizing B is in fact better. Trial and error is part of the entrepreneurial cycle, until you find the right choice. A city friendly to entrepreneurs makes that pursuit of finding easy. And perhaps most importantly, once found, the entrepreneur can access the resources they need to realize and to capitalize upon their idea.
It’s the urban economy, stupid
City economies drive national GDPs: we know generally that 70-80% of any nation’s wealth is generated from their productive cities. This has become more widely acknowledged over the last few decades, debunking the prevailing notion of previous times when cities were wrongly thought of as consumers of capital rather than net generators. But despite this growing acknowledgement from economists, economic and workforce development policies still aren’t particularly focused on the spatial form of the city, and how it may in fact impact upon the capacity of the city to generate wealth, and within it, affect the capacity of local businesses and the entrepreneurs.
(c)UN-Habitat/Alessandro Scotti
We live in New York City, the great urban laboratory that continues to manifest the challenges, and opportunities, of contemporary city life. But our circumstances, although unique to this place, are not exceptional. The world’s global cities share with us many similar struggles. One is how to continue to attract and then harbor new people and their ideas, and provide them with the conditions that allow their ingenuity and creativity to flourish, for them to search and find. People are what made New York New York. So too London, Hong Kong, Paris, and Shanghai, Mumbai and Rio. But as our cities grow, in wealth and population and physical size, are those characteristics that allowed entrepreneurs to contribute to their initial making imperiled?
Principles that underpin an entrepreneurial city ecosystem
Above, we mention diversity, choice, and proximity. We also touched on the ease of finding and access. These elements, characteristics typical to any life-giving ecosystem, are essential to supporting urban economic life, and in fact characterize the entrepreneurial process. There are others important ingredients that are probably less tangible, much harder to measure. Is a city ‘open’ to new ideas? Is there a culture of experimentation, of risk-taking? Does the city feel flexible, adaptive, creative, nimble?
Make way for serendipity and ecosystem ‘volunteers’
Cities that house significant numbers of entrepreneurs have a ‘vibe’. They seem more dynamic, ever changing, and responsive to new trends and styles and needs. You can be surprised in an entrepreneurial city: by a neighborhood which seems to have suddenly formed up around a coffee roaster, or a new funky shop selling clothes by consignment, or a community garden you serendipitously stumble upon, or a new app someone has out ‘in beta’ that helps you call a local cab or order some take out food. Entrepreneurial cities aren’t predictable, like university towns might be, or factory towns once were. Entrepreneurs are almost by definition non-conformists. They’ve rejected an existing approach or service and have started up a venture because they think can do better. Successful ones do. So in a city where entrepreneurs thrive, you see that kind of non-conformism manifesting physically. Neighborhoods don’t look the same: as in natural systems, they differentiate. Historically, this has often been by ethnicity, or class or race, or business niche. The local businesses reflect the tastes and preferences of those neighborhoods. In some cases, a micro-ecosystem forms, where a particular economic niche grows in proximity: most cities of a certain size have a Chinatown; an entertainment district; a garment district; a tech sector; a medical district. Large global cities form more than just one of each, and naturally spin off sub-ecosystems.
Porosity
Healthy entrepreneurial ecosystems — as in natural systems — are also characterized by porous edges, where there can be a flow within but also out to the adjacent parts of the city. This is critical to ensuring diverse access — both for the entrepreneur and the consumer. It allows the system to ‘re-fuel’ itself, to be exposed to other forms of innovation, other consumer preferences and inputs. Sometimes within neighborhoods you see an anomaly: for instance, a Mexican restaurant opens up in the middle of a Chinatown, which brings a new clientele into the neighborhood, who may shop for fabrics before they order their tacos. Rather than seen as an interloper, these volunteer species within the entrepreneurial ecosystem introduce new potential, new products, new variations (Asian fusion, anyone?).
Photo: Mary Rowe
Interlopers signal innovation
In the early days of digital and social media, they were the interlopers, encroaching upon traditional journalism and publishing. Started by entrepreneurs who found un-served populations with unmet needs that new technologies could reach, these startups brought a new hip, legitimacy to entrepreneurship, which previously may have been perceived to be primarily the purview of geeky tinkerers working in their garages and basements on off-hours.
Similarly, over the last decade we’ve seen in urban environments a resurgent interest in bringing innovation into the social economy: mission-based enterprises focused on improving how society functions. Social entrepreneurship has emerged as an ambitious career choice, attracting highly educated university grads wanting to come up with disruptive innovations to transform everything from public education to approaches to re-incarceration and recidivism. Young people entering the urban workforce now are just as likely to reject any separation between pursuing private interests and serving the public good. They see no reason for their careers to not serve both by creating personal wealth and making the city better for everyone. Entrepreneurship is the new legitimate career aspiration, suggesting a skill set that is fundamentally ecological: adaptive, resourceful, flexible, and opportunistic.
Threats to an entrepreneurial city ecosystem: why the spatial city matters
The success of global cities like New York is often measured by their capacity to attract investment. Here is how that thinking goes: if global capital finds a safe haven here, we too who walk the streets and play in the parks are assured that the quality of our life will be maintained. But anyone living in this kind of global city knows that setting a city’s sights on attracting international investment, to the exclusion of fostering the entrepreneurial ecosystems that lie below the frisson of winning yet another global investment deal, is a fool’s errand. Here are just a few of the ways in which we see the entrepreneurial ecosystem can be undermined.
Monocultures kill diversity
As in good agrarian practice, diversity ensures the health of a city’s economy. For global capital centers this is an ongoing struggle. We need our Fleet and Wall Streets; we need that tax base; we need the financial means to invest in the ventures that our entrepreneurial community develops. The pursuit of global capital, though, can become a vicious cycle: where the only kinds of new development worth pursing are ones that provide the most expensive real estate. Here in New York that has set us up to think that Class A office space and high end residential is our only bet. Over the last few years our work at the Municipal Art Society of New York, a century-old, esteemed civil society organization concerned with the livability and resilience of this city, has raised questions about the overall sustainability of this winner-takes-all approach to urban development. Vibrant urban economies need a diverse mix of users and uses. That includes types of buildings.
Famed urbanist Jane Jacobs, cited often in this The Nature of Cities blog, famously said “New ideas need old buildings”, pointing out so definitively how dependent a vibrant city economy is on connecting the new with the old. Businesses grow incrementally, with old work being converted into newer work, and older, more affordable workspaces make that kind of creative morphing possible. Older buildings are cheaper to run (even if they need to be retrofitted) and therefore cheaper to rent. But there is also something ethereal, not quantatatively measurable, about older buildings that appeal to entrepreneurs. Maybe its because they see the possibilities in adapting an older space to their newer use, and that just feels better than the pristine floorplates of new construction. Or maybe they just like them because they’re cheap. But old spaces are most often where today’s entrepreneur wants to work. A dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystem needs a mix: of old and new, of small suppliers working in make-shift spaces, and larger corporate services.
Photo: Mary Rowe
We need city policies that support diversity and inhibit monocultures
Predators in global cities take many forms. Up-zoning initiatives that incentivize new developments also have the potential to crowd out other existing building types and uses that are an essential part of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Growing institutions like universities and hospitals run the risk of encroaching upon the mixed nature of their neighborhoods that are also home to those smaller enterprises, housing and offices that in fact act as their supply-chain, feeding their core business and supplying their workers with the amenities they need. Large-scale developments of any kind, either private or public, need to be designed with great care to allow for detail and differentiation, always enabling the organic mix that we know will grow, if permitted.
Keeping the street affordable to a diverse mix
Probably the most significant threat to the diversity of use and user in a city is the cost of land. Where we can see this most viscerally is on the street. If retail space becomes so expensive, smaller independent businesses that deliver the variety and serendipity of urban street life can’t manage. Just as when described above when institutions become predators, if the market crowds out smaller enterprises it disrupts, and not in a good way, the entrepreneurial supply chains that the city’s larger, dynamic economic enterprises rely upon. Anyone traveling to New York City and spending time in Manhattan will be struck by the dominant presence of two repeating uses at key intersections: banks and drug stores, in some cases occupying all four corners.
Photo: Mary Rowe
Here is a typical story: a decades old shoe repair business operates in east midtown, a neighborhood home to one of North America’s most economically productive districts. Jim’s family business not only resoles the shoes of the city’s business elites, he also is the one surefire place where fashion designers can get a dozen pairs of pumps dyed over night for their runway show the next day. Over the almost eight decades that Jim’s business has operated, around him the retail landscape has changed, and in 2014 he will potentially have to close, because the Duane Reed pharmaceutical chain that surrounds him will finally engulf his business. And they are unlikely to add shoe repair to their offerings. Again cities must find ways to secure the presence of smaller independent enterprises that service the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Could Jim have stayed had his tenancy been secured by his buying his unit, or his landlord incentivized to keep him there?
In less affluent neighborhoods you see other kinds of dominant businesses: fast food outlets, cheque cashing stores. What ways are available to the city to ensure a mix of retail uses that make room for the smaller entrepreneur? In New York City, even in neighborhoods where the average household income is lower, commercial and retail real estate is still very expensive; all the more reason to explore ways to make access to prime spaces affordable to local merchants.
Our defense of these kinds of businesses is not out of nostalgia, but rather an awareness that sustainable city life is dependent on the mix of services and amenities. To attract and keep entrepreneurs choosing to open their businesses in New York City, we need lots of varieties of everything: restaurants, suppliers, tech companies and investors. And shoe repair shops. And we also need attractive public spaces and infrastructure that makes our density an asset and not a liability. If the streets become too crowded, the transit system overwhelmed, and there is no place for respite and recreation, entrepreneurs will leave in droves.
Which takes us back to choice. The entrepreneurial ecosystem offers many choices.
Draconian zoning and other outdated rules inhibit choice: let’s make it simpler
Zoning is a product of the last century and no doubt contributed to cities being freed from the tyranny of soot and noise and refuse, which literally contaminated urban life for decades following the industrial revolution. But, for the most part, the threats to cities in this century are quite different. Generally, entrepreneurs need access to a variety of places: they work wherever they are, on their own, and with others. In their apartments, the local coffee shop, in public places like parks and libraries, in bars, in pool halls. Zoning that prohibits businesses from operating in certain parts of the city is outdated, protecting neighbors from uses that no longer threaten to encroach upon their lives. We mentioned above about the priority of access for entrepreneurs: to each other, to capital, to markets.
One glaring example where rules impede access is in public housing, where residents are prohibited from (legally) running businesses out of their units. This isn’t a challenge unique to public housing, as similar prohibitions exist in many forms of rental housing. But the difference may be one of enforcement. Either way, people have run businesses (formerly, and rather quaintly, called ‘cottage industries’) out from the backs of their vans or yards or back bedrooms forever. Now with the Internet people can do this less conspicuously [1]. And yet we continue to put up barriers to this form of economic life, instead of finding ways that enable it, addressing any real risks, and ensuring some form of monitoring and taxation can be incorporated. Further, the administrative burden we place on people willing to risk their own resources and livelihoods is out of proportion to the economic benefits their ventures can potentially bring to the city. A city friendly to entrepreneurs would be aggressive in findings ways to ease their establishment [2].
We need city policies that make access to shared services easy
Another way in which a city economy acts like a natural ecosystem is in its reusing of waste. Ideally a vendor would always prefer to sell his excess to another user, rather than pay to have it landfilled. (A recent trip to one of the new businesses in the Brooklyn Navy Yard incubator space showed a local distillery, which sells all of its waste by products back to the upstate farms that supply it with grains). Scrap industries of all kinds have grown up in the city: metal, fabric, used clothing, food. Now entrepreneurs have spotted other forms of waste or excess capacity, not in disposable goods, but in under utilized resources or ‘slack’: extra bedrooms, under used tools, spare office space, cars left parked in garages except for a few hours on the weekend, empty industrial kitchens.
The rise of the sharing economy, again something that has existed informally forever, but is now able to formalize easily though the Internet, has exposed in the city new forms of income generation. Our colleague Lisa Gansky, serial entrepreneur and author of The Mesh, says the fundamental principle of the sharing economy is ‘where access trumps ownership’. In dense urban environments where space is scarce, owning less and sharing more makes sense. Urban dwellers already do this: we share parks, cafés, libraries, skating rinks and pools. Why not create the city mechanisms to make the sharing economy easier [3]?
We need policies that incentivize making better use of empty, or underused spaces
Entrepreneurs are the ones who really do know how to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. Many are artists, again familiar with finding frugal ways to create something of value. Cities are full of spaces waiting to be better used, shared, providing opportunities for new uses and collaborations. Here are some obvious examples: underneath elevated expressways; lands that often surround public housing; the second and third floors of buildings that line otherwise very successful commercial corridors. City governments can find ways to incentivize smart, imaginative design thinking that liberates these spaces and puts them into productive use. There was a time, not so long ago, when no one wanted to live or work in an old factory. If it was a city without development pressure, the old building just waited, until popular tastes and investment caught up with its potential. In hotter markets, we lost some of that stock, its potential never to be realized.
Right before us now are spaces waiting to be used anew, for purposes we may not have even imagined yet, but old rules remain, demanding too many forms of egress, or concerned with regulating competing uses, and stand in the way of these spaces being released into play. We are not advocating for the elimination of practical zoning, which helps cities function in safe, fair ways. But we know that there are rules still on the books that impede trying new approaches. And we would go even further: we need new tax credit schemes, new investment vehicles that entice developers and financial institutions to invest, and property owners (public and private) to be interested in opening these spaces up [4].
One size never fits all
Part of nurturing economic diversity in cities means allowing differentiation to happen. The not so secret ingredient to successful global cities is immigration. Newcomers arrive with their skills and preferences, and often with a profound work ethic and experience running businesses in the countries they have left. Quite naturally, newcomers chose neighborhoods to settle in and establish their businesses where family members and other cultural connections exist. This may lead that neighborhood to physically develop in ways that reflect the preferences of the people that have chosen to live there, creating those micro-ecosystems we discussed above. Land uses, building types, outdoor signage will begin to reflect the cultural make up and economic preferences of the neighborhood. Planning policies coming from City Hall needs to support these unique, varied needs. The idea is not for them to all look the same: but rather reflect unique identities. So too the needs of local entrepreneurs will vary. We need to find ways to decentralize planning and build the capacity of local community members to participate in decisions that affect them.
Co-working and co-production: enabling connections
Entrepreneurs on both sides of the equation: those looking to create economic wealth and those building social capital (and those doing both) are increasingly looking for spaces to work in the company of others. These co-working spaces are literally hives of development. Members can work alone, or easily find collaborators within their co-working community. Writers find publishers, techies find marketers. These spaces are flexible, so if your enterprise grows the space can continue to accommodate you, up to a point. Incubators are another form of co-working but offer more support to help new enterprises scale. In some cases public monies are invested in these spaces, through rent subsidies generally. They might also receive workforce development program money if training is an integral part of the facility’s aims [5]. Co-working spaces run as profit-making businesses continue to pop up, but there is the challenge to making them both profitable for their owners and affordable for their users.
Co-working space. Photo: Courtesy of Center for Social Innovation
One unusual model is that of the Centre for Social Innovation, a mission-based non-profit to support social innovators through co-working and shared programming. Originally based in Toronto, CSI was wooed to New York City by an enlightened property owner Scott Rechler who had purchased the majestic Starrett LeHigh Building in the west Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, a sprawling multi-story building that housed blue chip design and media companies. Rechler wanted to find the best co-location model to infuse his building with the energies and ideas of startups. He settled on CSI and offered them early support to develop a New York operation. With a robust tenant mix and extensive programming, the benefits of CSI accrue not only to its members but also to the buildings’ other tenants.
Co-working space are another form of micro-ecosystem, a way of enabling entrepreneurs to make connections and find access. Scott Rechler’s Starrett-LeHigh building is mimicking the life of mixed tenancy buildings all around the city. In the past tenants may have occupied entire floors, but now enterprises may be smaller and would ideally sublet a portion of their space, or wish to co-locate with related enterprises on the same floor. But without an amenable landlord like Rechler, the legal logistics of arranging sub-leases often prohibits these kind of flexible arrangements. How can cities encourage developers and landlords to make smaller spaces easier to rent? In new developments, in addition to provisions for affordable housing, should we be considering forms of inclusionary zoning that set aside percentages for smaller, entrepreneurial ventures?
Garment District, New York City. Photo courtesy of MAS NYC
New York City still has an intact garment district, where fabric cutters and piece workers share buildings and maybe even share production space. And nearby independent button sellers and bead stores do both a wholesale and retail business. But only a few short years ago this district was threatened by development activity that would have shattered these webs of exchange [6]. The garment district isn’t just a throw back to simpler times before offshore production displaced the larger factories that used to also be located there. It demonstrates the improvisational quality of true urban economics. Small ideas are improved upon, value is added though craftsmanship, and finished products are brought to market under the watchful eye of their creator. And city economic life doesn’t stop there: products can be replicated in factories located somewhere else, where land and labor is cheaper. But the entrepreneurial process, that took an idea through its gestation, and co-developed it for a potentially global market, is fundamentally an urban one, made possible by diversity, choice, serendipity, access, proximity, improvisation, adjacency, supply chains, immigration, and sharing: all attributes of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
A cautionary tale
As with any natural system, feedback loops are critical to a city’s survival. When a city starts to worry more about the personal income tax filings of its residents by postal codes, rather than the per capita investment in new businesses or number of new patents registered; if land use policies, zoning and planning decisions favor larger lot assembly and mega developments over the incremental, more modest developments that accommodate smaller enterprises; if we continue to resist the changing consumption and production preferences of our urban populations who are choosing to share rather than own; and uphold archaic rules that discourage people from being resourceful and inventive in finding new ways to earn self-employed income, then the entrepreneurial ecosystem upon which the wealth of the city was based in the first place, is imperiled.
The Nature of Economies. Jane Jacobs.2000.
The Economy of Cities. Jane Jacobs. 1970.
Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Jane Jacobs.1984.
Natural Capitalism. Paul Hawken. 1999.
The Mystery of Capital. Hernando de Soto. 2003
Sanford Ikeda. http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/type/wabi-sabi Market Urbanism. http://marketurbanism.com/ The Mesh. Lisa Gansky. http://lisagansky.com/
Notes:
1 — Etsy, an on-line platform based in Brooklyn, New York to connect artists, makers and artists directly with consumers, now has a membership of 80,000 people and on average contributes $25,000 annually to a typical vendors household income. http://www.etsy.com/about?ref=ft_about
5 — Successful examples here in New York City of publicly funded spaces are Hot Bread Kitchen, http://hotbreadkitchen.org/ which trains immigrant women to work in the baking industry, sells products at local farmers markets and also provides production space for artisinal food entrepreneurs, and The New York City Accelerator for a Clean and Resilient Economy http://www.nycacre.com, a partnership with the city’s economic development agency and a local university NYU-Poly, which is focused on the intersections between buildings, energy, technology, and data. These enterprises demonstrate the range of entrepreneurial opportunity that exist in a diverse global city: its not confined to just the knowledge economy and workers with advanced degrees. The food truck phenomenon, taking many global cities by storm (at least those that are smart enough to permit it), is a great example of a relatively accessible choice for entrepreneurs without formal educational credentials.
Mary W. Rowe is an urbanist and civic entrepreneur. She currently lives in Toronto, Canada, the traditional territories of the Anishinabewaki, Huron-Wendat and Haudenosauneega Confederacy, and works with government, business and civil society organizations to strengthen the economic, social, cultural and environmental resilience of the city and its neighborhoods.
I was looking at an infographic on Twitter recently. It was in the form of a wheel of words, listing dozens of objectives and issues relating to urban design. Hoping that soil, water, vegetation, habitat, or biodiversity would be featured, I looked for some mention of these terms. I did not find soil, water, vegetation, habitat, or biodiversity, but I did find the word “green”. What I found to be strange about that is that “green” was the only word in the graphic to be presented in inverted commas. Perhaps the writer wanted to acknowledge that there is uncertainty about what is meant by the term. If so, it would be helpful to choose something more precise. Did the writer mean vegetation or environmentally sound processes? I don’t know. However this episode inspired me to write this article on the various meanings and misunderstandings associated with the word.
Use of the term “green” could be a good thing—if it was clear that “being green” meant applying ecological knowledge.
Part of the background with the term “green” is its political dimension. The German Green Party was founded in 1980, after green candidates began to stand for election in Belgium and Germany in the 1970s. The British equivalent, founded as the PEOPLE Party in 1972, became the Ecology Party in 1973 and, following the European example, the Green Party in 1985. A green party was established in the United States in 1984. There are now Green parties in over 90 countries. One of the key values of the Greens is “ecological wisdom”. Civilization and cities will need to apply ecological wisdom to survive, so conveying that message through the use of the term green could be a good thing, if it was clear that “being green” meant applying ecological knowledge.
Oxford colleges were some the first customers for the lawnmower, which was invented in 1830. Photo: Gary Grant
We frequently read about the need for green infrastructure and the need to green cities, neighborhoods, streets, and buildings. Various definitions of green infrastructure list every conceivable kind of green space and water body (with watercourses and water bodies sometimes referred to as blue infrastructure). A limitation of these catch-all definitions is that the wide spectrum of quality of green spaces may not be evident. Not every category of green infrastructure is of equal value. Although it is nearly always preferable to replace sealed surfaces with soil and unvegetated surfaces with vegetation, some types of green infrastructure lack habitat and species diversity, or may require heavy inputs of energy, irrigation, and pesticides. A notable example of such resource intensive green spaces are lawns, which probably originated as short grasslands maintained by grazing animals in Europe, but which are now found across the globe, even in deserts and jungles, where the climate is unsuitable for lawns and the indigenous vegetation would be unlikely to create this effect. The modern lawn became possible with the invention of the lawnmower in 1830. An area of unproductive land with no purpose other than ornamentation is a display of wealth and control. Lawns have long been considered a sign of “civilization” and have spread in concert with modern city-civilization. “Lawns” must be kept short and must remain green for people to accord them the name. They are maintained by many cuts by gasoline-powered machines through the growing season and, in most climates, also need to be irrigated through the dry season in order to stay green. Apart from a few exceptions, these are simplified ecosystems with a lack of biodiversity and low ecological value. They do not provide the full range and intensity of ecosystem services provided by the more natural habitats that would replace them if they were neglected or abandoned. Lawns are ubiquitous in most all cities and, like many other ornamental landscapes, are green in color. This means that there is an expectation on the part of a typical city dweller for green space to be, literally, green.
Like “Green Party”, the term “green roof” was translated into English from the German. The extensive green roofs developed in Germany during the 1970s were not irrigated and were never a uniform green in the way lawns normally are. Although sedums, which dominate typical northern European green roofs, are green during the winter, they become carpets of yellow and white when in flower in spring and early summer and turn red when dry. Those who have sought to create biodiverse, low-maintenance habitats on roofs, have preferred to use the term “living roofs” or “eco roofs”. These living roofs of drought tolerant wildflowers and grasses are usually the various shades of green, yellow, and brown familiar to those of us who spend time in more natural environments. However, the term “green roof” is now here to stay, along with the common misconception that green roofs, like other forms of green infrastructure, should be green. I still see proposals to irrigate extensive green roofs, which indicates, on the part of the proponent, a failure to grasp the concept of “green” as an application of ecological knowledge.
Color is not the most important characteristic of green infrastructure. Green infrastructure must include fully functioning ecosystems if it is to provide the widest range of ecosystem services. We know that ecosystem services make human life possible, and although humanity has an incomplete understanding of how ecosystems function, there is a recognition that biodiversity is critical to the functioning of ecosystems and the provision of ecosystem services. For the past decade, people have been mapping and attempting to measure urban ecosystem services in research that supports the argument that green infrastructure is an essential component of a thriving and resilient city. Now, more work is required to identify locally appropriate alternatives to the conventional, ornamental types of green space found in cities.
This will require a global effort, where each bioregion rediscovers its indigenous flora and re-invents its urban green space. Horticulturalists and others who have traditionally been concerned with ornamentation or single-purpose landscapes will need to work with ecologists to assist in the creation of functioning urban ecosystems, where biodiversity is restored.
A biodiverse extensive green roof in Switzerland that is neither green nor brown. Photo: Dusty Gedge
There are some promising signs. Ecologists in Switzerland, for example, understood that the exposed dry conditions on green roofs could be important habitats for rare spiders and beetles, and they pioneered research and guidance that has influenced others in Europe and North America. In England, London’s green roof advocates coined the term “brown roof” for biodiverse green roofs designed to mitigate for the loss of brownfield habitats. However, one of those advocates, Dusty Gedge, now discourages use of the term—not because of color, but because of the way in which the concept has been misinterpreted and standardized into an unsatisfactory formula by some designers and builders.
The Dutch pioneer, Thysse, wanted to ensure that people had access to native flora by planting it in parks. These so-called “heemparks” are exemplified by the park named after Thysse in Amstelveen, which was implemented in three phases between 1945 and 1972. Thysse addressed objections to the use of native plants that people expected would have a messy appearance by planting in a deliberately stylized way. Progress has been slow; however, there have been many projects inspired by the heemparks. A recent example is Taikoo Place in Hong Kong, where the rich native sub-tropical flora has been brought to a space hemmed in by high-rises. It may not be designed to provide the full range of ecosystem services, but the use of Hong Kong native flora is a new level of sophistication.
An ecological approach to the daylighting of lost rivers or the restoration of water bodies has seen more success. Wetlands are easily damaged by the spread of invasive, non-native species. Invasive, non-native species have spread rapidly in aquatic environments all over the world, driving indigenous species to local extinction and causing billions of dollars in damage. Due to this pattern, designers working on river and lake restoration projects in cities tend to choose their planting palletes with care. Restoration invariably involves the eradication of exotic species, and continuing control is usually necessary; however, the re-profiling and re-planting of urban river banks has had seen many successes and has restored ecosystem services and biodiversity to some particularly urban settings—including, for example, the Bronx. This may be blue infrastructure, but it is an example of urban greening, because we don’t have urban bluing (as of yet).
The management of surface water, with the creation of features such as rain gardens, is also an important factor in the development of green infrastructure soil and planting design. Soils need to be amended to ensure that they are free-draining and plants must be selected that are drought tolerant (rain gardens that may remain dry for long periods), yet able to withstand temporary inundation (rain gardens that may hold water for a few hours following heavy rain). These demands mean that designers cannot rely on conventional ornamental planting pallettes. The “rain garden people” recommend native plants for these purposes, and emphasize the importance of planting for beneficial insects and animals, so that rain garden provision involves the application of ecological wisdom, in the alleged spirit of the “Greens” themselves.
Despite its name, then, the color of green infrastructure is not as important as the natural processes that green infrastructure provides—natural processes that keep us, and the organisms we share our world with, in the pink of health.
I am utterly convinced the way forward is dependent on creating working models of “green” developments, from whole subdivisions to individual yards, in each county and neighborhood across the country. Do not underestimate the power of a local example. Nothing speaks more to increasing the uptake of alternative designs and management practices than examples that people can see and discuss. I have found building that first, local green subdivision helps to showcase green development practices and provide a catalyst for future developers to adopt new practices. To help promote biodiversity conservation in subdivision development, I recently have written a book titled, The Green Leap: A Primer for Conserving Biodiversity in Subdivision Development (University of California Press). This book contains a host of strategies and case studies to create model conservation developments.
The last part of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st represent a new “Golden Age” for city parks. Certainly, looking at the American and international urban landscape, beautiful and expansive new public parks have popped up all over, while many historic parks first created in the 19th century, have been restored through novel public-private partnerships. Why is the creation of big new parks happening in so many cities, and what does this portend for global social trends? In my view, this “peacetime arms race” for bigger and better parks reflects several goals—parks are important parts of making cities more environmentally sustainable and people healthier, but they are also magnets that attract both investment and newly mobile tech workers, who can work anywhere but are choosing cities for quality of life. Parks—and the lifestyles they enable—are part of the attraction, and in the global competition for the young and the talented, parks are part of the winning formula for cities.
How the High Line became the singular phenomenon it is, and, in particular, how it evolved from condemned ruin to celebrated masterpiece through finely honed design, is documented in this recent book by the project’s principal designers, landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations and architecture firm Diller Scoffidio Renfro. This handsome, massive “doorstop of a book,” as landscape architect and co-author James Corner referred to it, is beautiful to look at and to feel (its cover is embossed and textured like the precast planks that make up the High Line’s flooring). As with many books about architecture, whether monographs of an architect’s or firm’s work, it is replete with delicious color photographs and renderings, sections and, axonometrics. But this book, in some ways like the work it describes, resembles high-end erotica—like the “art” books of the 1960s that arrived in “plain brown wrappings”: architectural glamour of the highest order.
As someone closely involved with the preservation, planning, design, construction, and management of the High Line, I recognized early on that this was a park of a completely different order than any New York City park of the last century or more. I served as New York Parks Commissioner during most of the life of the project to nearly the completion of its second phase, and worked closely with Robert Hammond and Joshua David and the Friends of the High Line, who conceived of and fought for the project, and City government colleagues, including City Planning Chair Amanda Burden and the Economic Development Corporation, under the direction of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself a major supporter of the project.
If you have never been to Baltimore, you should come to visit. From Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, you can ride the light rail to downtown in 25 minutes for one of the best deals in the country. If you ride the train between Boston and Washington, you can walk out of Pennsylvania Station and board the Charm City Circulator to downtown, and it’s free! However, if you live in the city of Baltimore and you want to rely on transit to get you to all of life’s functions, you need to recalculate your aspirations for life’s necessities and ambitions. For the 30 percent of people who live in Baltimore without a car (which, coincidentally corresponds with the percentage of people between 16 and 64 not in the labor force), the pursuit of economic opportunity, particularly beyond the confines of downtown, comes with limitations.
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