The Nature of Holy Cities

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Art, Science, Action: Cities Re-imagined

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While it is undoubtedly true that thousands of cities around the world share a wide spectrum of common denominators, from garbage to biodiversity, from air pollution to sophisticated bike-path networks, or from unemployment to entrepreneurship (to mention only a sample few) it is perhaps important to examine common urban denominators that are not universal, but are shared by a significant number of cities around the world.

We could focus on cities that have a river running through them, or historic cities with ancient walls around them, for example. That would be a systematic selection that might yield interesting results.

I arrived at the concept of an alliance or platform for holy cities, not by random selection, but after careful consideration of current global statistics, garnered from reliable sources.

Several years ago, at an interfaith meeting on Climate Change hosted at Windsor Castle in the U.K, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, convened faith delegations from seventeen diverse religions, and asked the religious leaders of the world to state their position on Climate Change. Amid the increasingly frustrating climate negotiations among the member countries of the U.N., Mr. Ban Ki-moon was astonished to learn that eighty per cent of the world’s population is largely faith-motivated, and while in our time (or throughout history for that matter) religion can be a catalyst of violence, he hoped to generate a shared concern among the faith communities of the world for the future survival of the work of divine creation.

After adding the well-known prediction that by the end of this century the world will be ninety per cent urban, there seemed to be a special opportunity for a center-stage role for holy cities throughout the world, together with the diverse faith communities that see those cities as important spiritual destinations.

An even more significant statistic is the quarter of a billion people on the move annually as part of a spiritual pilgrimage, traveling from one city to another. This makes pilgrimage a very significant sector of world travel, with impact on the environment from the journeys, tremendous impact on the pilgrim destination cities, but most of all, perhaps, an immense opportunity to have pilgrims enriched by their journey and by their experience, encouraged to return home more responsible citizens of the world, after leaving a positive footprint.

After that brief introduction to the global concept of green pilgrimage, which I was privileged to initiate at that meeting of faiths in Windsor Castle, I would like to expand the theme by considering its relevance for my own city of Jerusalem, a pilgrim destination for the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam (although of lesser importance for the latter, whose main destination is Mecca).

Reframing the way we look at Jerusalem in the context of pilgrimage has been a fascinating journey in itself for the Green Pilgrim Jerusalem team, and along the way we have learned that the challenges faced in Jerusalem are shared by many other pilgrim cities around the world.

How do residents feel when their city is inundated by pilgrims as festivals such as Christmas or Tabernacles approach? Do they perhaps feel they would rather disconnect from the holiness of their city, and live ordinary urban lives? How do the pilgrims feel, if they don’t receive welcoming vibes from the local communities?

We cannot disregard the fact that the three faiths that view Jerusalem as a spiritual destination have spent a lot of their energy in the effort to conquer and control the Holy City, which opens up a lot of questions, that must be addressed with sensitivity.

  • Can we move from a mindset of “control” of the holy sites, to a philosophy of equity and freedom of worship in the public domain?
  • Can we celebrate the roots that we share, instead of fighting for supremacy?
  • Can our joint need for economic sustainability enable us to work with partners on the other side of a difficult geopolitical divide?
  • Can grassroots initiatives such as ours really have a positive impact on local economies?
  • Can we inspire green pilgrims to return home responsible citizens of the world, geared to greening their own communities?
  • Can urban nature and the wonder of our historic landscape play a major role in our pilgrim’s progress?
The original Bunting Clover Map of Jerusalem
The original Bunting Clover Map of Jerusalem
The above illustration, created by Arch. Osnat Post, was inspired by Bunting’s famous medieval “Clover Map”, which placed Jerusalem at the center of the three then known continents, in a world that was still considered to be flat. The three continents are replaced by three religions, and three additional petals add the traditional corners of the sustainability triangle.
The above illustration, created by Arch. Osnat Post, was inspired by Bunting’s famous medieval “Clover Map”, which placed Jerusalem at the center of the three then known continents, in a world that was still considered to be flat. The three continents are replaced by three religions, and three additional petals add the traditional corners of the sustainability triangle.

The Green Pilgrim Jerusalem team began to work on the potential impact of Green Pilgrimage for Jerusalem in 2012, in the realization that here was an opportunity to reconnect pilgrims with the natural heritage of their journey, by re-examining the historic pilgrim routes and the wonderful cultural landscape on all sides of the city. Indeed, the ascent to Jerusalem gives expression to ancient tradition, going back thousands of years. The approach from the Judean desert, a breathtaking climb from the Dead Sea through the Kidron/Wadi a-Naar Basin, was the backdrop for events of importance to the three Abrahamic faiths. Israelite Prophets, Jesus and later Omar took this desert route up to the Holy City. Higher up, on the edge of the city itself is the King’s Garden, where the Kings of Israel were anointed. Over the centuries dozens of monasteries were carved into the rocks, whose monks chose a life of solitude, hermitage and humble fare, exerting a great influence on the development of Christianity during the Middle Ages. It is here, in the Qumran Caves, that the famous Dead Sea Scrolls were found, with Hebrew texts from the 1st and 2nd century CE, containing parts of the Old Testament and Apocryphal texts. Currently, the impressive structure of Mar-Saba is a pilgrim destination in its own right. This desert region was the home of John the Baptist, who initiated the custom of Baptism in the Jordan River. Nearly untouched by time, the natural landscape, heritage sites and unusual desert flora and fauna, create a unique experience for the pilgrim on his ascent to Jerusalem, and demonstrate the importance of the interface between the Holy City and the Judean Desert.

Pilgrimage routes, like ecosystems, traverse geopolitical, cultural and political borders. The experience of walking these routes on our ascent to Jerusalem can strengthen our understanding of the need to find and share common ground and mutual respect, working together for the benefit of all the communities in the region. This route gives pilgrims the opportunity to experience a truly Biblical landscape, since the local Bedouin tribes live much as did the Patriarch Abraham. The landscape, heritage and culture together create an opportunity to enjoy local hospitality in a unique ambience. The way has been opened for sustainable economic initiatives, in the spirit of “slow tourism”, developed by local stakeholders. The result will hopefully be that the local communities regain a sense of pride and ownership of their natural, built and intangible heritage.

In 2013 Jerusalem hosted “the First International Jerusalem Symposium on Green and Accessible Pilgrimage”.  Representatives of Pilgrim Cities and sites shared their knowledge and celebrated the challenges they share.  After this meeting of faiths, cities and organizations, the Green Pilgrim Jerusalem initiative accepted the invitation of the Order of St. Lazarus in Jerusalem, to become part of the order’s  St. Lazare Holy Land organization.

The above picture was taken at the closing ceremony of the International Jerusalem Symposium on Green and Accessible Pilgrimage. At the event we welcomed the swifts, who are only a few of half a billion birds that fly over Jerusalem twice a year on their migration route, following the Afro-Syrian Rift Valle. They stop over in Jerusalem for mating, rest and recreation. 88 pairs of swifts nest in ancient crevices in the Western wall, and the picture below this shows a closer view of a swift about to enter its nest. They seem to be keen on interfaith pilgrimage, since some of our swifts prefer to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, while others pray in the Great Mosque.
The above picture was taken at the closing ceremony of the International Jerusalem Symposium on Green and Accessible Pilgrimage. At the event we welcomed the swifts, who are only a few of half a billion birds that fly over Jerusalem twice a year on their migration route, following the Afro-Syrian Rift Valle. They stop over in Jerusalem for mating, rest and recreation. 88 pairs of swifts nest in ancient crevices in the Western wall, and the picture below shows a closer view of a swift about to enter its nest. They seem to be keen on interfaith pilgrimage, since some of our swifts prefer to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, while others pray in the Great Mosque. Photo: Mr. Aviad Tevel
It is interesting to note that in 2003 the Jerusalem Development Authority undertook the enormously costly job of “repairing” faults in the walls of the Old City and the Western Wall. This might have meant extinction for the swifts and other flora and fauna in and on these ancient walls, had it not been for the swift action ( not meant as a pun) of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and the International Swift Lovers’ Organization, who stepped in and saved important urban nature for Jerusalem.
It is interesting to note that in 2003 the Jerusalem Development Authority undertook the enormously costly job of “repairing” faults in the walls of the Old City and the Western Wall. This might have meant extinction for the swifts and other flora and fauna in and on these ancient walls, had it not been for the swift action (not meant as a pun) of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and the International Swift Lovers’ Organization, who stepped in and saved important urban nature for Jerusalem. Photo: Mr. Amnon Hahn, Chair of the Swift Lovers’ Society in Israel

Recently we have begun to examine the pilgrim’s approach to Jerusalem from the west, which would have started from the port of Acre or Jaffo in the Middle Ages, and reach a glorious climax during the ascent through the Jerusalem Hills, a rich green contrast to the sweeping desert vistas on the east side of the Holy City. The flora and fauna are quite different too, since the eastern and western approaches to Jerusalem represent the two contrasting microclimates that are so much a part of Jerusalem, a city that enjoys both worlds, on either side of the North-South watershed. Our Jerusalem teams are trying to fathom the interrelationship between the city and the urban biosphere around it, an interface which is experienced by the movement of animal populations, of pilgrims and tourists, and of commuting residents who in many cases live in the city but commute to work elsewhere or vice versa. In other words, the actual municipal boundary is of little relevance for the human and natural infrastructure in the region. The interface is, of course, exacerbated by the geopolitical issues faced by Jerusalem.

For Christian pilgrims, or for anyone who wants to follow in their footsteps (no one would be tested for their faith on route…), the approach to Jerusalem from the west would pass through the picturesque village of Ein Kerem, now a suburban neighborhood of Jerusalem. Set in a green landscape that retains flora and fauna from biblical times, hedged by ancient agricultural terraces, and watered by the winter streams of the western side of the Jerusalem watershed, Ein Kerem is a very important Christian pilgrim destination, being the site of Mary’s spring, an active water source to this day.

A lovely view of picturesque Ein Kerem. Photo: Danny Barak
A lovely view of picturesque Ein Kerem. Photo: Danny Barak

Ein Kerem, pastoral though it might seem from the picture above, has become a kind of battleground for the conflict between local residents and millions of visitors on the one hand, and between conservationists and developers on the other. The Green Pilgrim Jerusalem team recently offered its services to the residents and the religious institutions in Ein Kerem, to lead a stakeholder process which will hopefully create a shared vision of Ein Kerem as an important pilgrim destination.

Ein Kerem is an urban treasure, recently recommended for recognition as a World Heritage Site, whose special ambience is generated by the heady mixture of ancient traditions and faiths, telling their story through the prism of a breathtaking landscape, outstanding architecture, fascinating flora and fauna, and last but not least outstanding hospitality.

I would like to conclude with the Green Pilgrim Ladder, a concept developed together with Arch. Osnat Post. It is a concept that can be useful when planning pilgrim tourism in any Holy City, and can also be used by the members of faith communities around the world who are planning to travel to a holy city on a pilgrimage, or even as a tourist.

pilgrimage ladder 5The beauty of the Green Pilgrim Ladder is its simplicity, while its special significance is that it places the burden of environmental responsibility on the shoulders of the traveller. The framework of travel starts in preparation for the journey, and we are asking the pilgrim not only to endeavor to leave a positive footprint on the way, but also to become a more responsible citizen in his or her own city after arriving home. Responsibility implies greater care for the environment, and greater respect for the many “others” in our neighborhood and throughout the public domain that we all share and enjoy.

 Naomi Tsur
Jerusalem

On The Nature of Cities

The Nature of Public Art: Connecting People to People and People to Nature

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Art, Science, Action: Cities Re-imagined

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Urban nature and public art can help to break down barriers both mental and physical, sparking imaginations, catalyzing placemaking, forging new connections, and bringing people together.

Mankind may have left the savannah some million years ago, but the savannah never quite left us. It makes sense that since we co-evolved with nature, our need for it is hardwired into our brains and our genes. For millennia, the nature we’ve had access to has influenced everything from our food, to the prints and colours we use on our clothing; our crafts to our livelihoods; the beats and lyrics of our music to our varied cultures and traditions—both ancient and modern. It’s shaped who we are. Not to mention, there is a plethora of scientific research pointing to the fact that we need access to nature for our basic development, our physical health and our mental well-being. Perhaps our genetics have not yet caught up with the pace of our urban and technological developments—hence the number of societal ills and human health issues we see today.

The project team pre-launch (Georgina Avlonitis, Mwamba Chikwemba, Chavi Alheit, Owen Shikabeta and Mbali Dlamini).

As we push ourselves into being an ever atomised, urbanised species, it’s even more important that we have adequate access to nature, a relationship and connectedness with it, and urban green spaces that promote community. Public art speaks to both emotion and reason, in finding new ways to articulate the richness and diversity of the relationships between people and their physical and natural environment—providing a sense of place and connecting people to people, and people to nature.

A very inspired young man from the local street children program who came to volunteer with the artwork.

Greenpop—a social and environmental NGO working across sub-Saharan Africa—was recently funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization-International Fund for the Promotion of Culture (UNESCO-IFPC) to undertake their dream of an art and environment project aptly coined, “Conservation Conversation Corners“. Here, disused public corners in two African cities—Livingstone, Zambia and Johannesburg, South Africa—were transformed using public participation, mural art, public seating, sculpture and indigenous plants—into spaces of connection and of conversation around the incredible biodiversity that makes each city so unique and special. Three artists were selected for each leg of the project including South African up-cycler Heath Nash, Zambian sculptor Owen Shikabeta and Zambian painter Mwamba Chikwemba. All three artists were involved in the Livingstone leg—as well as South African installation artist Mbali Dhlamini (involved in the Johannesburg leg, in place of Heath Nash). The artworks and artists invited people into the space to break down barriers across countries, disciplines, people, and nature, turning these urban corners into functioning, colourful places of interaction—serving to physically, visually, and conceptually link the two African cities, while sparking conversation around our relationship with the natural world.

Local stencil artists came to get involved too.

In cities, we enter territory that is re-interpreted by wildlife itself—Johannesburg has one of the largest man-made forests in the world and Livingstone is hummed to sleep by a nightly chorus of frogs and the roar of Victoria Falls. But how to engage people in this incredible nature? What gets people’s attention is a link into their immediate sense of self and a relevance that draws them in. They have to be able to say “That is me, that is what I am about”. Over the three weeks spent in each city, community members were encouraged to contribute to the creation of the artwork and numerous participatory workshops were held to draw out each artwork’s main theme.

Livingstone’s artwork: Trees for Bees,
(Zambia Tourism Board Offices, Livingstone Way)

The final Livingstone Trees for Bees mural and upcycled tree sculpture. Photo: Mischke Bosse
Local Zambian kids painting their favourite leaves.

In Livingstone, a bare corner adjacent to the Zambian tourism board was chosen as the site for the artwork. Here the artwork’s main theme of bees was synonymous with the wonderful collaboration involved in creating the space. Bees are matriarchal creatures and experts at creative collaboration, working together to make the miracle of honey. After numerous workshops, the theme came about owing to the areas dire deforestation issues and the use of beekeeping in Zambia as an alternative livelihood—where indigenous woodlands are sustainably managed as valuable fodder for bees, instead of being cut down for fuel and the informal charcoal industry. The artwork set out to highlight the inter-dependency between bees and forests and their role in food security. With 90 percent of the world’s nutrition coming from crops pollinated by bees—they’re essential to our very survival. Albert Einstein’s quote was boldly included in the art space: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

Close ups of the Zambia Project

The artwork also had a clear feminist undercurrent, celebrating femininity and female power. Primary muralist of the project, Mwamba Chikwemba painted a powerful female figure as the focal point of the mural. “She represents the queen bee, mother nature and can be taken as a representation, an emblem of all powerful women. Bees are a matriarchal society and my subject matter as an artist normally focuses on strong females and the symbolism of female African head wraps. Here I have depicted a honeycomb hive as a celebratory headwrap—her crowning glory and as a celebration of all powerful women… What was also interesting was the numerous people that walked past me standing on the painting scaffolding and being surprised that a Zambian woman was actually standing so high up, and painting such a big wall. Other women from the community then got involved.”

Reactions from the local community where positive and inspiring. Josephine Monde who was the very first woman employed in the same building by Livingstone Tourism in 1966, walked past the space and commented: “You have really done a huge service to the people of Livingstone. I am proud to see a woman’s face up there on that wall. This has added beauty, not only to the building but to the whole of Livingstone. Tourism depends on the environment—without nature we have nothing.”

Owen Shikabeta.
Owen Shikabeta creating his upcycled tree sculpture.

Upcycling was a large part of the artistic process and involved numerous members of the community. Owen Shikabeta created a 3m tall upcycled tree sculpture from scrap metal from which Heath Nash hung numerous upcycled creations, which were co-created by local children and crafters alike. Livingstone crafter, Freeton Matonga arrived on site every day to get involved in the artwork and to learn from the project’s daily upcycling workshops.

Matonga said: “The mural and the recycling are amazing because I can see the response from the people around here, how they are reacting to it.” “They are seeing that they can find some value of the materials [waste] that we are using. We cut down so many forests for the wood used in our local crafts. I hope we are going to have some kind of change of mindset…maybe trying to convert things like recycling to keeping the environment clean. We’ve got the challenge of taking care of our environment so if people see that this is quite a good thing then people will be interested, and they will be doing more things—more than what we’ve just done here.”

Johannesburg’s artwork: Freedom by Nature
(Corner Commissioner Street and Berea Rd, Maboneng)

Mwamba at the Johannesburg wall being prepped and primed.

Johannesburg is one of the largest man-made forests in the world, gifted with magnificent birdlife and rich biodiversity, but it is also a city with one of the highest crime rates in the country. In this city of bars, walls, and fences the artists set out to ask: “Where do we truly feel free?”

The main theme involved birds, and was depicted in eco-friendly paint across the 45m² mural. “Birds are synonymous with freedom. As a woman in Jozi, you always feel like you need to keep eyes at the back of your head. We stay on our guards and alert at all times, whether walking or driving in the city, because of the crime here. How wonderful it would be to feel free and at peace. Nature has that. Nature gives us that. We need to access it and conserve it more in our towns and cities“, stated artist Mbali Dhlamini. Zambian artist Mwamba Chikwemba added that she could only relax properly when in nature. “I realised, the only place I’ve truly been able to relax during my stay [in Johannesburg] is in fact on my visit to Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens. Being in nature, in a functioning and safe green space, makes you feel physically and mentally free“, she said.

Mwamba creating a heron between the graffiti.
Artist Mbali Dlamini next to the Johannesburg wall.

Some members of the public commented that they felt the artwork in the space made it feel safer. “For some reason, the colours and images on this wall make me feel so much safer, and I guess, well, more carefree when I walk down this street. This space has turned from grey and dusty to something just beautiful”, remarked Gladness Phiri, a local Maboneng resident. And her comments ring true when looking at international urban ecology literature, which is replete with studies showing that birdsong and functioning public green spaces indeed help to reduce the crime rates in towns and cities.

Community members enjoying the new seating.

Zambian artist, Owen Shikabeta created a powerful sculpture and public seating out of upcycled burglar bars. “There seem to be burglar bars everywhere in this city. When hunting for scrap to upcycle for this artwork—I came across so many bars. I use what I find, and so I created a bench. Instead of bars separating us, I wanted to make something that would bring people together. When you sit on it, I wanted it to somehow feel as though you are sitting outside of a cage. Free as a bird.” This was in addition to his life-size sculpture of a human, arms outstretched and free, which sits next to the bench.

Local residents getting involved.

Over the two weeks, the community of Maboneng and local artists made their way to the art piece to pick up a paintbrush, lending their voices and talent and leaving their mark. Maboneng student, Thando Nkosi commented: “I study in the area and it has been truly remarkable walking past this wall and seeing randoms [sic] and young children helping to create this piece. It’s evolved every day. I see one of my favourite birds over there, although you don’t often hear it in this part of the city when that bird sings you know the rain is coming—it’s a comforting sound.”

Johannesburg work in progress.
Johannesburg mural from afar.
The author, Georgina Avlonitis and her painted golden starling, a colourful and common Johannesburg species.

Urban nature and public art can help to break down barriers both mental and physical, sparking imaginations, catalyzing placemaking, forging new connections, and bringing people together. Through Greenpop’s project, these Conservation Conversation Corners give thanks to the magnificent biodiversity in Johannesburg and Livingstone and hope to spark conversations around its importance in people’s daily lives.

Georgina Avlonitis
Cape Town

On The Nature of Cities

Photo credits: All photos courtesy of Greenpop Foundation’s Georgina Avlonitis & Mischke Bosse.

This project was made possible by: UNESCO-IFPC, Propertuity, Art Africa, B-Earth paint, Krost and Vogel.

Greenpop website: http://greenpop.org/
Twitter: @Greenpop
Facebook: @GreenpopTreevolution
Instagram: @greenpopsa

The Nature of Universities and Sustainability

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Art, Science, Action: Cities Re-imagined

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Through their educational and experimental roles in society, universities can play a unique and vital role in cities’ transitions to sustainability.

Universities can catalyse sustainability transitions through innovation, building community, and acting as living labs.

Although life itself is a learning process and education can happen anywhere, from the streets to virtual places, the temples of educations in our minds were—and still are—schools and universities. But how are those spaces changing, and what is their role within planetary, societal, and urban sustainability?

De-schooling universities as potential hubs for catalysing sustainability transitions

Once upon a time (more specifically, during medieval times), universities were meant to be places for teaching and shaping the elite class of the ruler in charge. This role persisted until the industrial revolution, when professors and scientists were asked to improve the efficiency of machines and new production systems. During World War II, academia was the tool for fostering technological innovation, with some of the tragic consequences we all know about. Recently, Richard Florida has outlined a new university role in nurturing the rampant “creative class”, while John Scott has recalled the needed postmodern shift of the universities missions’ from teaching to research as a tool for public service, embedded within a framework of globalization. Even more recently, Henry Etzkowitz has designed a triple helix cluster that should blend the boundaries between university, industry, and government in a way that becomes the interface for a regional innovation strategy. This last move emphasizes the emerging “third mission” of universities: the need to engage with real societal demands and link the university with its socioeconomic context.

In 1971, Ivan Illich, the philosopher, social critic, and priest, published a book called “Deschooling Society”. Feeling that an “economic growth-machine” was transforming education and our social and cultural realities into commodities (a process he called becoming “schooled”), he used his book to introduce the revolutionary potential of “de-schooling” by using technology to create institutions serving personal, creative, and autonomous interactions, enabling digital tools and learning, providing free access to information, and establishing new open economic models. Unfortunately, just a few universities undertook this road.

Still, it is worth exploring why universities and campuses retain the potential for being active engines catalysing sustainability social transitions, for at least three reasons.

First, innovation could emerge through refurbished buildings where new design and management technologies are tested even as they are revitalizing a part of the city in which a university is located. Among others, the case of Politecnico di Torino in Italy is an interesting example of how to retrofit a UNESCO heritage building (the Valentino Castle, Fig. 1a) for new purposes, or to refurbish former industrial sites, such as the FIAT and General Motors, for lectures and study rooms where car factories were assembling cars just few decades ago (Fig. 1b).

Figure 1. Retrofits of a historical building (a) and a former industrial warehouse (b). Photos: Chelleri and Sonetti

Second, universities create genuine communities, with identities and a sense of belonging that provide fertile grounds for raising awareness about environmental issues. Hokkaido University, in Japan, for example, expressed the important role of Japanese traditional ecological knowledge through a massive campaign about the need to enhance contact with nature (see Fig. 2). The campus community is encouraged to adapt to seasonal temperature changes by using blankets or hot-water bags in the offices during winter, or is allowed to not wear jackets and ties in summer in order to lower air conditioning use, thus reducing electricity consumption.

Figure 2. Community forms at Hokkaido University, Japan. Photos: Chelleri and Sonetti

Third, universities can be conceived as living labs for testing innovative solutions for low-carbon buildings, sustainable mobility solutions, and food/waste reduction strategies in an integrated way and through the active involvement of industry partners or NGOs. The concept of a living lab scales the length of the urban border condition to the campus one, and takes students, teachers, and administrative staff as “citizens” of this portion of the city, co-creating both more sustainable life conditions and a test platform for applied teaching and research (as the University of Manchester, among many others, is demonstrating).

Measuring sustainability performances: How to escape green washing metrics?

When we start critically looking for university examples and best practices about sustainability initiatives and bridges within urban systems, the results lag behind our ambitions and discourse. As with “Smart Cities” rhetoric and related solutions, sustainability has been embraced by neo-functionalism paradigms, relying on quality controls, safety norms, and quantitative performance measurements for the purpose of escalating global rankings in order to become lauded as The Most Green Campus. Greening continues to primarily exist as an outside layer adopted by universities, often lost within technocratic quantitative targets that disregard, for instance, processes, behaviour, and context-dependent aspects of sustainability.

This criticism stems from evidence found in the current Campuses Sustainability Assessment, or CSA, Frameworks. As explored in one of our recent papers, usually CSAs mainly assess material utilisation (such as the “Sustainability, Tracking, Assessment and Rating System”), or regulatory compliances (such as the “College Sustainability Report Card” system), or measuring quantitative parameters, such as the number of kilometers of bike lanes or square meters of green areas. The fallacy of these metrics arises from their total disconnection from the university community and its context, and their focus on a kind of summarizing game, in which all the criteria contribute to reaching a 100 percent sustainable university.

But what if a university is sprawled within the city, having different buildings but no campus, thus relying on the city’s bike lanes and green areas, since it does not have the physical space for building green areas within the city? Its position within the sustainability ranking will be lower, after the big campuses that have bike lanes and lots of green spaces. Also, the eco-efficiency indicators (metrics requested by the “auditing instrument for sustainability in higher education”, or AISHE, for example) simply look at the amount of kilowatts per square meter per year as a key indicator, not wondering about the “trend” in the consumption reduction pattern along the years, nor the percentage of satisfied people related to their comfort level in their working environment or the “hosted function”. What does this imply and what do we mean when we refer to a “hosted function”? Think about a university hosting a data centre and one hosting a hospital. What would its energy consumption be with respect to the data department? Could we compare these two universities within the same sustainability ranking, thereby encouraging LEED certifications to be awarded only to new, big, green campuses without energy-intensive departments? Obviously not. However, this is how current CSAs work and how they rank our universities.

These quantitative and standardized measurements of “sustainability performances” are based, and inspired by, the Global Reporting Initiative, or GRI, which has become the de facto instrument for sustainability reporting in the corporate world, establishing a common language for the discussion on sustainability issues. Although this paradigm could be seen as a necessary preliminary step towards the long process of transitioning to sustainability, we have proposed a more meaningful measuring of sustainability performances in our recent paper. It is nonsensical to compare universities without having first normalized their performance according to at least 3 background parameters: i) morphological structure (is the university a campus, or nested within a city centre having different, maybe heritage historical buildings, which are difficult to retrofit?), ii) hosted function (which are the hosted functions of the building for which we are assessing its sustainability?) iii) climatic context (are we comparing the absolute value of energy required to warm an university in Stockholm, to the energy used in Morocco to keep rooms comfortable through air conditioning, to the consumption performances of a university in Canary Island, which enjoys spring-like temperatures all year?).

Fortunately, new kinds of sustainability assessment frameworks (some of which are listed in this book, by Sandra Caeiro) are trying to introduce these new indicators. The INDICARE-model, for example, introduces a novel approach that encompasses indicators of participation in campus sustainability implementation, and also treats the assessment moment as a reflective, transformative exercise for fostering an experience of the interconnectedness of human–nature (and inter-human) relationships.

From universities to our urban planet

Through an open-ended understanding of sustainability processes that focuses on more than performances, also including universities’ communities, these last advances are key for addressing broader sustainability issues. In a recent post, Stephan Barthel introduced the need for strengthening the nexus between people (especially kids) and nature as a tool for behavioural change that fosters awareness about what nature is and what sustainability is about, beyond energy reductions. Within this post, we aim to amplify this important message, highlighting the role that universities, through their educational and experimental roles in society, can play as cities transition to sustainability. There is an undeniable increasing linkage between the city and universities; universities mission today must be strengthening this linkage through “de-schooling”, open lectures, dissemination activities, and projects involving both people, groups, and buildings sprawled through our cities.

Lorenzo Chelleri and Giulia Sonetti
Barcelona and Turin

On The Nature of Cities

Giulia Sonetti

About the Writer:
Giulia Sonetti

Giulia Sonetti is sustainability manager at the Politecnico di Torino’s Green Office and Research Assistant at the Politecnico di Torino and Università di Torino.

The Need to Develop Flora and Fauna Biometric Tools for Urban Planning

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Collectively, researchers over the past 60 years (or more) have collected a good deal of data on urban biodiversity and impacts on urban plants and animals. From urban gradient studies to patch dynamic studies, we have a plethora of empirical data that suggests how various urban designs would impact various species. However, these studies have not affected actual planning decisions in most cities (there are exceptions of course).

Gainesville Map_1
Envision Alachua Planning Process to evaluate lands for conservation and development, Alachua Florida. Credit: Sasaki Associates, Inc.; Plum Creek

 

Often, to address biodiversity, urban decision makers do not use empirical studies because they are too detailed and/or they target particular taxa (i.e., urban bird studies dominate the scientific literature). Most planners and other urban decision makers rely on broad ecological theories to shape planning.

Planners can manipulate three things that affect urban biodiversity: 1) the quality, amount, and patch size of conserved open space; 2) how open space and nearby built areas are managed; and 3) the degree of open space connectivity. Currently, to guide green infrastructure conservation, planners and landscape architects use island biogeography theory (MacArthur and Wilson 1967), using species-area curves and distance to source calculations, which translates into conserving large remnant patches (Linehan et al. 1995). They also create wildlife corridors and improve landscape connectivity, which stems from meta-population theory (Keymer et al. 2000). Overall, these ecological theories translate into clustering built areas, conserving some percentage of open space, and protecting lands for corridors (Arendt 1996). While conserving some connected patches is a good step, in reality, it is much more complicated to determine which species gain and/or lose from one design versus another.

In reality, suites of flora and fauna respond differently to sizes of connected patches, nearby land use impacts, and fragmentation/edge effects. A given corridor and patch arrangement has different effects on mammals, butterflies, herpetofauna, birds and the associated vegetation community. For example, scattered patches of habitat are more connected for birds and butterflies than for mammals and herpetofauna, because the built matrix impedes the movement of ground-dwelling animals (Hourdequin 2000). Size of the animals also matters as very small species, e.g., small beetles, hummingbirds, small lizards, and mice, operate at different scales than larger animals, e.g., large butterflies, raptors, alligators, and bears. Also, edge effects impact different species within a taxonomic group; for example, specialists are more vulnerable to fragmentation than generalists (Hilty et al. 2006). People may believe that only large patches are worth conserving but even fragmented landscapes, if done correctly, are capable of benefiting a whole suite of species (Dupre and Ehrlen, 2002; Bastin and Thomas 1999). Typically, we do not have the opportunity to evaluate the impacts on different species, and we just go with general principles in urban design.

Design is important, but both the conserved areas and the landscape matrix surrounding the conserved areas must be managed appropriately. Any green infrastructure can dramatically lose its biological integrity over time due to lack of appropriate management for both built and conserved lands (Hostetler 2012). For instance, invasive plants and animals may spread into conservation areas, requiring invasive exotic control within conserved habitat (Reichard 2004). Additionally, most urban natural areas are missing certain ecological processes and need some type of habitat management; examples include prescribed burns, roller chopping, restoration through native plantings, and other activities used to improve or maintain the habitat for native plants and animals. Even day-to-day human behaviors can impact green infrastructure (Hostetler 2010; Hostetler and Drake 2009): ATV vehicles running through conserved areas, infiltration of feral cats and dogs and other exotic pets, nutrient and chemical intrusion caused by improper use of fertilizer/herbicides/pesticides, and increased impacts from light and sound pollution (Longcore and Rich 2004). Thus, even with green infrastructure design, funded management plans are needed and residents in nearby built areas must be engaged so that their homes, yards, and neighborhoods enhance and rather than damage local biodiversity efforts.

With all these nuances, it is no wonder that planners and conservationists rely on broad theories to make decisions. Also, many of the urban studies are not understood (or heard about) in the planning world, and they are not incorporated into urban planning. To date, urban decision makers state that they do not have sufficient information to holistically address how alternative design and management practices can improve the biological integrity of cities (Ahern 2013). Tools have not been created that synthesize urban ecological data into a format that can be used by most city planners.

What to do? I suggest that we (ecologists) explore (more often) what urban planners actually use in the “real world” to make decisions. Typically, most city and county planning rely on land use maps and evaluate different designs by utilizing GIS software, such as ArcGIS Desktop software. One robust decision-support tool, called CommunityViz®, is an extension of the ArcGIS Desktop software that enables formula-driven alternative future scenarios, as well as, front-end web-based and digital presentation-driven information sharing. The software is flexible and facilitates, land use scenario planning, sketch building, time scale interval visualization, social-ecological impact assessment, urban growth modeling, and similar GIS related functions. CommunityViz® has been in use for over a decade with an extensive, and growing, track record of application to public and private sector urban land use planning processes (http://www.orton.org/tools/communityviz). By the way, this is not an endorsement as there are other similar tools out there, it is just one that I am familiar with.

In other words, if we had flora and fauna biometric equations that would plug into CommunityViz®, planners would have a tool to evaluate different design and management options and their impacts on a suite of species, simultaneously. This planning tool permits biometric equations that run in the background and display various impacts from alternative planning design and management decisions. For example, planners can manipulate patch sizes and management practices for a 100 ha site, and the outputs would display impacts on birds, mammals, and insects simultaneously.

Of course, we are currently missing these biometric equations. I propose getting a group of ecologists, planners, landscape architects, and other interested built environment professionals and tackle this problem. I have ideas about how to do this (e.g., meta-analyses) but we need various expertise involved to create usable and realistic equations for taxa big and small. Conserving green infrastructure and implementing management practices takes effort and money, and the use of these biometric fauna and flora equations will help cities to develop better planning strategies and be more confident that they are getting “bang for their buck!” Perhaps through a workshop, we will map out a strategy to generate biometric equations, ultimately helping urban decision makers to evaluate which species and groups lose or gain from different urban designs and management strategies.

Mark Hostetler
Gainesville

On The Nature of Cities

 

References

Ahern, J. 2013. Urban landscape sustainability and resilience: the promise and challenges of integrating ecology with urban planning and design. Landscape Ecology 28: 1203-1212.

Arendt, R. 1996. Conservation design for subdivisions: a practical guide to creating open space networks. Island Press, Washington, D.C.Bastin, L., and C.D. Thomas. 1999. The distribution of plant species in urban vegetation fragments. Landscape Ecology 14: 493-507.

Bastin, L., and C.D. Thomas. 1999. The distribution of plant species in urban vegetation fragments. Landscape Ecology 14: 493-507.

Dupre, C. and J. Ehrlen. 2002. Habitat configuration, species traits and plant distributions. Journal of Ecology. 90: 796-805.

Hilty, J.A., Lidicker Jr., W.Z., Merenlender, A., and A.P. Dobson (Eds). 2006. Corridor Ecology: The Science and Practice of Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation. Island Press, Washington, DC, USA.

Hostetler, M.E. and D. Drake. 2009. Conservation subdivisions: a wildlife perspective. Landscape and Urban Planning 90: 95-101.

Hostetler, M.E. 2010. Beyond design: the importance of construction and post-construction phases in green developments. Sustainability 2: 1128-1137.

Hostetler, M. 2012. The Green Leap: A Primer for Conserving Biodiversity in Subdivision Development. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, USA.

Hourdequin, M.(ed). 2000. The ecological effects of roads. Special issue of Conservation Biology 14(1): 16-94.

Keymer J.E, Marquet, P.A., Velasco‐Hernández, J.X., and S.A. Levin. 2000. Extinction thresholds and metapopulation persistence in dynamic landscapes. The American Naturalist 156: 478–4945.

Linehan, J., Gross, M., and J. Finn. 1995. Greenway planning: Developing a landscape ecological network approach. Landscape and Urban Planning 33(1-3); 179-193.

Longcore, T. and C. Rich. 2004. Ecological light pollution. Frontiers in Ecology and the Env.. 2(4): 191-198.

MacArthur, R. H. and E.O. Wilson. 1967. The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, USA.

Reichard, S. 2004. Invasive plants in the wildland-urban interface. In S.W., Vince, V.W., Duryea, M.L., Macie, E.A. and L.A. Hermansen (Eds.)

 

The New Is Well Forgotten Old: Scandinavian Vernacular Experience on Biodiverse Green Roofs

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Green roofs are becoming more popular around the globe and are considered to be a very progressive landscape design devise in urban areas. The green roof has started to become fashionable—it is even considered as one of the “compulsory” sustainable buildings features and an important part of urban green infrastructure. For example in Germany and Sheffield building companies are requested to establish green roofs on new buildings.

Green Roof on the top of industrial building in Sheffield, 2007
Green Roof on the top of industrial building in Sheffield, 2007

In the last two decades, the technology of creating green roofs has become standardized.  The most popular today are extensive green roofs with a thin substrate layer and several succulent drought tolerant species such as Sedum and Sempervivum. These plants have become among the most popular because of their low cost, simple installation and basic maintenance. The Sedum green roof industry is quite established in the US, Canada, Germany, UK and Scandinavian countries. In Germany it is estimated that 25% of rooftops are covered with green roofs.

Picture 2. Sedum green roof in 8-Tallet Building in Copenhagen, 2011
Picture 2. Sedum green roof in 8-Tallet Building in Copenhagen, 2011

However, the commercialization of green roof technologies and mass production is leading to homogenization of green roofs—they all look the same, with a limited number of Sedum species—and a decrease in their ecosystem service potential. The Sedum green roof’s main function is runoff regulation and is not particularly effective in serving as biodiverse biotopes due to the homogeneity of plant material.

The most recent trend in ecological design is creating biodiverse green roofs that can be seen as a valuable urban biotope and substitute of the lost terrestrial habitat during building construction process. In this sense the Scandinavian vernacular experience of green roofs can be a very valuable foundation for modern researchers and designers.

Scandinavian turf roofs of the 20th and 21st centuries can be assumed as the historical analogue of modern extensive green roofs. Turf roof or “torvtak” (in Swedish and Norwegian) is a traditional roof type of Scandinavia. In contrast to an ecological and esthetical purpose of vegetation on modern green roofs, turf was supposed to be a strictly utilitarian and to protect the waterproof layer made of birch bark sheets. It was the common way to construct roofs for timbered houses in Scandinavia up to the end of the 19th century.

Traditional torvtak on the 19th century building in Skansen Museum, Stockholm, 2013
Traditional torvtak on the 19th century building in Skansen Museum, Stockholm, 2013

A similar roof type was used for the Far East vernacular houses in order to protect them from the rain damage. The technology of Scandinavian turf roof implies the construction of several layers with broad sheets of birch bark laid on roof surface made of wooden planks. Two layers of natural sod are laid on the birch bark sheets. In Sweden the turf was simply cut from the meadows or forest margins and placed on roofs. The load from a roof was about 250 kg per m², which contributed to the shrinkage of wooden logs. Winter weight of the roof could reach 400-500 kg per m² because of snow. In addition, the turf had insulating properties, which was another advantage in a cold climate.

The technology of such green roofs is quite simple. Wide sheets of birch bark are stacked on the sloping roof of the boards in several layers. Turf is laid directly on the bark in two layers. The first layer is laid back up to the dead grass so it can serve as drainage. The second layer is laid on this first layer. Eventually the roots from both layers bond together. A layer of bark served an average of 30 years, and then it had to be replaced.

Schematic picture of traditional Scandinavian green roof. Source: Hidemark O. Så renoveras torp och gårdar, Ove Hidemark, Elisabet Stavenow-Hidemark, Göran Söderström, Axel Unnerbäck, Västerås: ICA bokförlag, 1992
Schematic picture of traditional Scandinavian green roof. Source: Hidemark O. Så renoveras torp och gårdar, Ove Hidemark, Elisabet Stavenow-Hidemark, Göran Söderström, Axel Unnerbäck, Västerås: ICA bokförlag, 1992

Since the materials for the construction of sod roofs can be found all over the place, construction was not costly. Construction was carried out by the family or with the help of neighbors.

Meadows had, and have, very high biodiversity and this particular point makes old experiences so valuable for modern landscape design practices. These native turfs perfectly reflect the “genius loci”, which is the main motto for searching in modern landscape architecture practice.

Turf roofs include a high variety of native meadow plant species. They are ideally fit to local climatic conditions. Torvak is a very attractive place for invertebrates, a variety of insects (including beetles, spiders, ants and bees), and some birds.

Even though today in Scandinavia Sedum green roofs are dominant type, there is growing tendency to use biodiverse green roofs.  The main supplier for traditional green roofs in Sweden is “Pratensis” nursery. This firm is specialized in growing herbaceous seed mixtures from local genetic material for biodiverse green roofs and alternative lawns (meadow like plant communities).

“Pratensis” nursery is specialized in growing native herbaceous plants, 2014
“Pratensis” nursery is specialized in growing native herbaceous plants, 2014

We researched several traditional Torvak in Stockholm (Skansen Open Air Museum) and Uppsala (Disagården Open Air Museum). These green roofs were established around 40 years ago. The aim of our research was to develop a plant compositions and recommendations for the creation of sustainable plant mixtures for nurseries for different light conditions and orientations of the roof slope. We found 76 species of higher vascular herbaceous plants.

One of the Skansen Museum traditional green roofs, 2013
One of the Skansen Museum traditional green roofs, 2013

Our observation leads to the conclusion that the similar green turfs, which were harvested in the same habitats but placed on the roofs with different microclimates, are going through several stages of ecological succession. The nature and speed of these changes depend on the light conditions, the presence of trees in the immediate vicinity that create shade and reduce air flow through the area. There was quite clear division on “open” and “shadowed” green roofs where the differences in plant compositions were quite distinctive.

Shadowed green roof. Skansen Museum, 2013
Shadowed green roof. Skansen Museum, 2013

Based on our research we recommend quite a long list of plants for sustainable biodiverse green roofs.

We also established an experimental biodiverse green roof in the summer of 2012 at SLU Campus in Ultuna, Uppsala. Cut turf from different native plant communities from the Uppsala area was placed on the roof of two story building.

Native turf on the experimental roof in the first week of the experiment. August 2012. Ultuna
Native turf on the experimental roof in the first week of the experiment. August 2012. Ultuna

There was no watering or any other maintenance operation with these plantations. Exceptionally hot summer of 2013 contributed to the loss of most grass species. However there were quite a few perennials and annuals successfully outlasted this draught, then flowered and produced seeds.

Experimental green roof in July 2014.
Experimental green roof in July 2014.

In modern conditions it is not advisable to use the cut turf from native meadows as it was in past time even in the countries such Sweden or Russia with available native plant communities. In absence of watering and maintenance the original native composition can be changed quite quickly and does not fulfill the desirable functions (including decorative appearance). The most effective and economic way is using rolled biodiverse turf from special nurseries.

Our research here begs an important question: how can designers and ecologists find, in each bioregion, ecological communities that would be appropriate for biodiverse green roofs, and apply them to the right structural engineering. Then we could develop a paradigm for locally-sourced, native-species, biodiverse roofs everywhere.

Maria Ignatieva and Anna Bubnova
Uppsala

On The Nature of Cities

Anna Bubnova

About the Writer:
Anna Bubnova

Anna Bubnova is working on an investigation of Green Roofs from the perspective of biodiversity and sustainability and completing her PhD thesis.

The New Urban Agenda: Is the Compact City Ecologically More Favorable than Dispersed Forms?

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If we want to support the New Urban Agenda, we need to know how urban form, habitat heterogeneity, and local biodiversity are linked.

Some weeks ago I took part in a seminar in Recife, Brazil, where colleagues of Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Mexico met. The main queries to be answered were:

  • How each professional from their individual specialities could collaborate to address the New Urban Agenda established by the Habitat III Conference, held in Quito in 2016?
  • What are the remaining questions regarding planning, management, and production of urban space over the coming decades especially in the Latin-American context reconsidering the physical form of the urban environment?

To me the main strength of the New Urban Agenda is that it considers the city as an ecosystem. At the same time, it shares a vision of cities for all, referring to the equal use with protection and promotion of life. Impacts on water, natural habitats and biodiversity, should be minimized by through changes in consumption and production patterns (UN 2017).

Figure 1. The New Urban Agenda promotes the compact city as a way to achieve sustainability (www.habitat3.org).

The seminar was organized by the Architecture and Urbanism Council of Pernambuco, in partnership with the Network of Studies in Sustainable Urban Development in Latin America and the Caribbean (REDEUS-LAC). Universities and multi-stakeholders were invited to articulate research and exchange networks of knowledge in light of the considerable challenges posed by the New Urban Agenda in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Latin America, one of the most urbanized regions in the world and suffering from urban sprawl, is often criticized for its environmental, social, and economic deficits. The main consequence of urban sprawl is the dispersed city. It includes greater air pollution related to the larger numbers of commuters owing to the greater distances between places for living and working, reduced water quality linked to the increase in impervious surfaces, loss of natural habitats and ecosystem fragmentation and decreases in different types of land, such as arable soil, recreation areas and open spaces.

In reaction to this, the model of the compact city has been adopted as being more compatible with the criteria of sustainable development (Fig. 1). However, everything has its cost. We know that urban compactness manages to overcome some of the negative consequences of urban sprawl. But higher population density may intensify negative environmental externalities, such as noise and pollution, and it may even surpass the ability of natural ecosystems to successfully absorb pollutants, which would come to jeopardize the sustainabilityof this urban form (Chen et al., 2008; McDonald, 2008).

Figure 2. Plaza Forte Park, designed by Burle Marx. Photo: A. Faggi

In Latin America, wetlands within cities are frequently severely transformed, with deep changes in their ecosystem functions. Most stream channels are engineered, replacing natural features with concrete structures. Also, they may become severely degraded when stream banks are stabilized to withstand increased flood flows or when extensive piped storm drainage networks are constructed. Reduced infiltration,can lower riparian groundwater levels and have dramaticeffects on ecological processes. During our days in Recife, we observed such environmental problems. Water and it’s influence on the landscape factor heavily in the city of Recife. River, sea, mangroves, wetlands and remnants of the Atlantic forest confirm that water is the main protagonist. Its importance and ecological role is also reflected in the comprehensive ecosystem vision of Burle Marx΄s parks—the famous Brazilian artist who in the thirties landscaped many urban green areas in Recife and across Brazil (Fig.2).Unfortunately the subsequent urbanization did not respect this vision: the city as a living organism; an evil extended to almost all Latin American cities.

The ecological impacts of urbanization have repeatedly been addressed in the literature, and, particularly, many studieshave assessed biodiversity changes associated with land use gradients. As an example, Blair (2004) and Concepción et al. (2016) found important impacts of urban sprawl on species richness of birds and plants, detecting that richness and diversity peaks at intermediate levels of urbanization. Forys and Allen (2005) found that neither native nor rare ant species were significantly affected by urban sprawl, whereas exotic species richness positively correlated with the amount of development. However, it remains little explained which urban development patterns are most effective in supporting ecological functions. In particular, it is as yet unclear whether compact urban forms are ecologically more favorable than dispersed forms (Mohajeri et al., 2015). Few studies have specifically evaluated the impacts of urban sprawl on biodiversity, quantifying the degree of sprawl, and the results are not conclusive.

In the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, we found that the dispersed urban form was most effective for supporting ecological functions favorable to native riparian vegetation (Guida Johnson et al., 2017). Moreover, compact urbanization was associated with lower habitat quality for spontaneous vegetation and drying of habitats (Fig. 3).

Figure 3. Effects of compact and dispersed urbanization on riparian vegetation when urban sprawl indicators are assessed at the reach or sub-watershed scales in Buenos Aires metropolis. Arrows indicate the direction of change (increase or decrease); positive impacts to riparian biodiversity are in black font and negative impacts in white font. The reach scale was defined as a 200-m buffer delimited around each studied site, whereas sub-watersheds were delineated for each site on the basis of the digital elevation model of the study area. (Guida Johnson et al., 2017).

Local ecological findings regarding the links between urban pattern and biodiversity need to be applied to the compact city design. These considerations should be taken into accountin the management of green and blue infrastructures, especially in the planning processes of sustainable growing cities in developing countries. Many previous TNOC posts have shown the relevance of green and blue infrastructure in densely built-up areas, representing a win-win way to conciliate urbanization with the protection of ecosystems services (Ignatieva, 2017; Hostetler, 2017; Sloan, 2017).Therefore forests, dunes, wetlands, parks, trails and reserves that provide wildlife habitats and connections but also floodplains and streams should be part of the urban matrix maintained and best left undeveloped. City managers should consider the implementation of an adequate urban green in each urbanization project as a must.

As it is difficult to generalize, each city should conduct studies on how its shape influences biodiversity and other metrics. If we want to revitalize the urban space restoring native ecosystems we need to know how habitat heterogeneity and local biodiversity are linked. At the same time, it is necessary to communicate their significance to local officials, planners and developers. These advances would be a desirable way for Latin American and Caribbean cities to move toward fulfilling the New Urban Agenda.

Ana Faggi
Buenos Aires
On The Nature of Cities

References

Blair R. 2004. The effects of urban sprawl on birds at multiple levels of biological organization. Ecology and Society 9: 2 .doi: http://www. ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss5/art2/

Chen H, Jia B, Lau SSY. 2008. Sustainable urban form for Chinese compactcities: challenges of a rapid urbanized economy. Habitat International 32: 28–40. DOI:10.1016/j.habitatint.2007.06.005.

Concepción ED, Obrist MK, Moretti M, Altermatt F, Baur B, Nobis MP. 2016. Impacts of urban sprawl on species richness of plants, butterflies, gastropods and birds: not only built-up area matters. Urban Ecosystems 19: 225–242. DOI:10.1007/s11252-015-0474-4

Forys E, Allen CR. 2005. The impacts of sprawl on biodiversity: the ant fauna of the Lower Florida Keys. Ecology and Society 10: 25.

Guida-Johnson B, Faggi A M, Zuleta GA. 2017 Effects of Urban Sprawl on riparian vegetation: is compacted or dispersed urbanization better vor biodiversity? River Research Applications

Ignatieva M. 2017 How to Make Urban Green Verdant and Sustainable: Designing “Wild” Swedish Lawnshttps://www.thenatureofcities.com/2017/02/01/19758/

Hostetler M 2017 Lessons Learned: What Does it Take to Create a More Natural Stormwater Pond?https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2017/09/27/lessons-learned-take-create-natural-stormwater-pond/

McDonald RI. 2008. Global urbanization: can ecologists identify a sustainableway forward? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6: 99–104.DOI:10.1890/070038.

Mohajeri N, Gudmundsson A, Scartezzini J. 2015. Expansion and densificationof cities: linking urban form to urban ecology. In InternationalConference on Future Buildings & Districts Sustainability From Nano toUrban Scale, 475–480.

Sloan K 2017 Re-Wilding: Cities by Nature2017https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2017/04/30/re-wilding-cities-nature/

United Nations2017.New Urban Agenda A/RES/71/256 ISBN: 978-92-1-132731-1

The New Vocabulary of Urban Landscaping for Southern California

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The drought in California over the last few years has been long enough and sufficiently severe to compel mandatory urban water restrictions from the State Water Resources Control Board, an unprecedented policy move. The Board has also required, for the first time in state history, the reporting of per capita monthly water use data. And yet, in Los Angeles County, which has 10 million people and 88 cities, impacts of the State Board’s water use reduction mandates (from a high of 35 percent to the average of 25 percent) have been very uneven. Poorer cities use less water per capita to begin with, and 35 percent reduction for some of the highest water users still allows them to use more than their fair share.

The fundamental factor driving outdoor water use is the currently limited vocabulary of urban landscaping and its potential future.

This drought-driven push for reduced water use has led to some savings, but years of replacing inefficient appliances—including toilets, shower heads and washing machines—with water-thrifty models means the frontier for water conservation in Southern California is outdoor irrigation. Landscape watering is estimated at 60 percent of total residential use. In an effort to curb outdoor watering, the regional Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, or MWD, provided $350 million to homeowners and businesses for turf replacement, and many cities, including the City of Los Angeles, have also developed their own complementary incentive programs for turf replacement. One could say without exaggeration that the MWD turf replacement incentive program is one of the largest natural experiments in landscape change ever undertaken. Websites replete with ‘California friendly’ landscaping tips and plant recommendations can be found from the state level to regional water agencies, including the MWD’s.

Juniperus sabina 'Acadia' LADWP
A recommended “California friendly” plant from Europe. Photo: Los Angeles Department of Water and Power

But to reach conservation goals, the more fundamental factor driving outdoor water use is the current vocabulary of urban landscaping and its potential future.

Californians are colonists, immigrants who brought their own vocabularies of landscape with them, or who had none and went for the easy and available. The dominant gardening vocabulary imported to California was based on an eastern U.S. aesthetic, where the lawn is the King of the Block in virtually all instances, bordered by exotic, often flowering, plants. As a result, in Southern California, British influence is stronger than Spanish: the Brits, with their passion for gardening, imported plants from all over their empire to create the decorative elements framed by The Lawn. They created a horticultural trade based in their colonies, so we have a rich selection of Australian and South African plants, but not as many from Italy, France or the rest of the Mediterranean. In fact, the official tree of Los Angeles (coral tree, Erythrina caffra) and the official flower (bird of paradise, Strelitzia reginae) are both from southern Africa.

Strelitzia_reginae_Wikimedia
South African Bird of Paradise is the official flower of the City of Los Angeles. Photo: Neelix at English Wikimedia.

Without an identifiable gardening heritage, Southern California’s benign climate and water—made available by the Los Angeles Aqueduct and Colorado River aqueduct—enabled an urban landscape that is a distinctive hodgepodge of imported plants. People planted whatever they could get their hands on, without reference to the region. Birds of paradise and banana trees sit cheek by jowl with camellias and azaleas, hedged by boxwood and fronted by lawn. One-hundred-foot tall semitropical ficus trees adorn parks planted with Cedars of Lebanon and Chinese elms.

At the turn of the 20th century, when the Craftsman style was being developed and many of the region’s iconic gardens, including the gardens at the Huntington Botanical Gardens, Descanso Gardens and even the Los Angeles Arboretum, were establishing, the design community pioneered a garden aesthetic for Southern California, a vocabulary of landscape that continues to endure. The vocabulary of landscape has consisted of exotic plants, arranged in the suburban context, around luxurious lawns. This extraordinary mix of plants, which reflects the discoveries of the colonial period, forms the backbone of landscaping today. It is over a century old.

Where and how should this well-anchored landscape vocabulary evolve? Going to nurseries offers little evidence of widespread change or an alternative palate of plants, other than exotic succulents and a few cacti. Promotional displays of “water saving” and even “native” plants at most nurseries and garden centers are stocked with exotics from Australia and South Africa—clearly neither California native plants, nor necessarily ‘California friendly’ plants. Landscaping companies, such as Turf Terminators, have sprouted up, offering a bedding of rock (often white) underlain with landscape cloth and punctuated with a smattering of small, oddly assorted plants that are unlikely to grow into an attractive landscape, if they grow at all. Alternatively, people have chosen artificial turf, deep and intensely green, installed like wall to wall carpet (often with wrinkles) over bald earth, with a small border of landscape plants, again from somewhere other than California. Finally, there are the landscapes dominated by either decomposed granite or wood chips, sometimes colored an unnatural red. This opportunistic landscape reduces biodiversity in soils and the biodiversity of the insect, pollinator and bird communities. It is really Lawn in another form.

Turf Terminators
A typical approach to low water use, low aesthetic and habitat value landscape design. Photo: Turf Terminators.

Overall, one can only hope that these are experiments on the way to a more evolved and place appropriate response to the need for less water intensive gardens. For this transition to take place, there is a critical need for appropriate plants, especially California native plants—plants that thrive on 30 percent to 80 percent less water than conventional gardens, require no fertilizers or soil amendments, rarely require pesticides, attract beneficial pollinators and pest-consuming insects, and create habitat for butterflies and birds, all while being stunningly beautiful and fostering a strong sense of Southern California as a distinctive place.

To get more native plants in the landscape, we need to expand horticultural knowledge and ensure the emergence of a corps of skilled horticulturists. We need more natives grown by wholesalers and sold by retail nurseries, and more skilled gardeners to care for them. Many people in Southern California no longer garden for themselves and simply hire the proverbial “mow and blow” team to take care of their gardens. Lawn care is their specialty, and blowing leaves and detritus is their task. Keeping the place tidy seems to be their goal, rather than creating something aesthetically pleasing, or plant nurturing. (In some ways, this lack of interest by residents in gardening on their own property is paradoxical given the renewed interest in urban farming.)

There are efforts around Los Angeles and around the state to provide professional development for front-line gardeners, but few are truly tailored for the general audience. Instead, these efforts seek to serve government workers and mid-sized to large landscape companies. Although most classes are offered in Spanish—the dominant language in the local landscape industry—as well as in English, many are held during gardeners’ regular work hours (which are most of the daylight hours, seven days a week). Larger landscape companies may provide professional development opportunities for their staff, but independent gardeners, who care for the majority of gardens, certainly don’t budget for the fees and time off required to be certified as native plant landscapers. Unless the range of professional development is expanded to serve “mow and blow” gardeners, it will only perpetuate earning and skills gaps in the landscape field, as well as a landscape vocabulary that is weak and thin.

Programs to encourage wholesale nurseries to grow more native plants simply do not exist and, like any successful business, the nursery business has evolved to grow plants efficiently. It knows how to grow the plants it distributes to the retailers, understands the time it takes to get them to market, and the fertilizer, pesticide and water regimes necessary to keep them looking their best. Native plant growing needs to be learned, and tried and true techniques may not be optimal. The necessary water regimes are different, potting soil requirements are different and propagation often can be quite different. But without the stock provided by large nurseries, the retail nurseries, now predominantly associated with big box stores such as Lowes or Home Depot don’t have native plants to sell. Dedicated gardeners can find California native plants, but the supply is limited due to the small number of specialty nurseries.

Even more surprising, perhaps, is the apparent lack of landscape designers who are versatile with California native plants and can design with them. Many of these designers—who could dramatically shift water use in affluent areas through new garden designs, since the affluent use up to three time more water than anyone else—don’t seem to have developed the skill to create native plant-filled trophy gardens. So, in a region obsessed with appearance, it is unfortunate that the rich and famous have not taken on transforming their mesic landscapes to showcase California natives as part of their public environmental ethic.

garden-12-del-rey-J Shields TPF
This desert-style garden, including many native plants, complements its Mediterranean revival house. Photo: J Shields/Theodore Payne Foundation Native Plant Garden Tour
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Natives plants lend themselves to English-style perennial gardens. Photo: Theodore Payne Foundation Native Plant Garden Tour
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A perennial border of California natives. Photo: Theodore Payne Foundation Native Plant Garden Tour

There is a whisper of precedent for a sustainable local landscape vocabulary. Early in the 20th century, concurrent with the establishment of major public gardens and estates in Los Angeles, there was a growing interest in native plants, spurred in part by accelerating development. Plants were collected across the state, as were seeds. Botanists and explorers sent their finds to natural history museums, including the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, and a few pioneers started cultivating the plants. Theodore Payne was one such individual.

Payne started a Los Angeles nursery in 1903 that sold natives as well as exotic plants, and he had a hand in developing the first public native plant garden in California for the 1915 Exhibition, the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, and the original native plantings at Descanso Gardens. Payne influenced his cohorts, including Charles Fletcher Lummis, who built the Southwest Museum to house the largest collection of Native American baskets (and other artifacts) in the United States. There was, among this artistic, literary and philanthropic vanguard, interest in the native. Today, the Theodore Payne Foundation is continuing Mr. Payne’s work and is one of the most important sources of native plants in the region, as well as seed and horticultural expertise. But the Foundation is small, and the transition to a true, rich and appropriate Southern California landscape is urgent, requiring us to build on this heritage of valuing the biodiversity, building materials and artisanship native to Southern California.

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Theodore Payne’s “wild garden” for the 1915 exposition. Photo courtesy of Theodore Payne Foundation.

Encouragingly, between people’s desire to live locally and save water, native plants are coming to wider attention, even for those who hire gardeners. People start with the idea that they can have a beautiful garden and save water at the same time. Then they learn that, while lots of perennials use less water than conventional lawns, native plants deliver many benefits that other plants just don’t have. Creating habitat and nurturing wildlife are a huge draw for many gardeners. The next step is often a reflection on place: its special aspects and history, and the possibilities raised by consciously choosing to live in this place. Imagine what it would be like if half the plants in Los Angeles were from Southern California. The smells alone would be amazing! Sagebrush and salvia would scent the air, creating the distinct impression of being in a particular place. There would be butterflies and flocks of birds because forage would exist: flowers, caterpillars, berries and bugs. A real dream of a real place.

But we do need the infrastructure to make this change come about. Although water utilities have initiated the change with cash for grass programs, so much remains to do. Even those folks who put in natives won’t have a successful garden without skilled gardening care. There is a reasonable fear that gardeners—who have so much influence over what most homeowners put in their yards—will restore all those lawns once water restrictions loosen, lawns they know how to care for, replete with the use of automatic sprinklers set to go off rain or shine, summer or winter, without utilizing any intelligence, without interest in calibrating for weather, soil moisture or plant type.

These concerns raise the question of how change occurs. The media has shown true delight in pointing the finger at the wealthy, who are water hogs, and their homes, with dozens of bathrooms and large lots that use 10,000 gallons of water a month. But attention to the structural obstacles—lack of plant stock, lack of horticultural knowledge about California native plants and a loss of domestic interest in gardening—has been mostly absent in press accounts and public policy. Without a comprehensive approach to landscape change in the region, change could take much longer, or the landscapes that get planted will continue to be haphazard, unattractive, biological dead zones.

Southern California is ripe for a new vocabulary of landscape, new garden design, new visions of what it is to live in this bioregion. Fortunately, there is a cohort of native plant aficionados, a growing appreciation for the water constraints of the region and an interest in gardening. A little help from the design community, a few incentives and training for wholesale nurseries to grow natives, and some prominent examples of the new style could go a long way to propel a transition. Good training for gardeners would have huge multiplier effects throughout the economy, and could be coupled with the deployment of much better irrigation technologies. The other important element in this change is patience—such a large-scale transformation will require time, and the assistance of tastemakers.

Stephanie Pincetl and Kitty Connolly
Los Angeles

On The Nature of Cities

Kitty Connolly

About the Writer:
Kitty Connolly

Kitty Connolly is the Executive Director of the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants. Her goal is to transform Los Angeles’s landscape to 50 percent native plants.

The Next “Normal” City Must Be a Sustainable Habitat for Healthy Humans

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Art, Science, Action: Cities Re-imagined

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Future cities have to be re-imagined from dystopian and polluted landscapes of chaotic aggregation where people try to scrape a living, to healthy human habitats where all life can co-exist and thrive.
“Stay home!” This is the imperative that has echoed across the planet in the last months. Everyone is at, and a, risk to themselves and others. And so we did. We mostly stayed at home. After a few days, we began to notice that our house, our cities, and our planet, is kind of a mess. Realizing how dirty, unorganized, and incongruent with our life our “home” is, has been a wake-up call to rethink what the next “normal” habitat for humans should be.

Physical and social distancing stormed upon every one of us. Some of you received it as a suggestion, some more like an imposition. Yet, the result was more or less the same. We stopped. We had to change our plans, cancel concerts, football matches, work meetings, and stay put. At home. Some of us immediately started home renovation projects, but after pairing all socks and cleaning all corners of the kitchen the lockdown forced us to look beyond the walls of our houses and apartments. Our bigger “home”. The landscape where our houses are. And we didn’t necessarily like what we saw.

For most of us, home is a city. The habitats in which human animals roam and prowl are rather small urban landscapes. These places, so different from each other in terms of buildings, culture, smell, size, and weather, are all human-dominated landscapes. They are products of humans’ desires, planning, and ingenuity, and they have something else in common. They are polluted (Mayer 1999), stressful (Hartig and Kahn 2016), and unhealthy (Engemann et al. 2019).

With one-third of the world in lockdown not using cars the way people usually do, with air traffic down, and polluting factories closed, many urban citizens across the planet noticed a cleaner background to the buildings. The difficult time of lockdown has produced a silver lining, the deadly air pollution had mostly gone (He, Pan, and Tanaka 2020). The sight of turquoise rivers and clear skies in cities are stark reminders that our everyday habitat would be better clean. Cities do not need to be detrimental to our health and wellbeing. Rather the opposite. Experiencing a different normality for our cities is a precious moment of awakening that has to be used to act in favour of our common future. With increased awareness and motivation we can change the desires that guide the design of the human habitats to improve our and our biosphere’s wellbeing.

Five realizations about city life

There are five realizations about urban life that emerged from experiencing a lockdown in cities. The first realization is that cities are not inherently polluted, but it is human activities that make them so. Pre-COVID-19 levels of air, noise, and environmental pollution do not need to be accepted as normal urban standards any longer. The internet went berserk when they saw videos of dolphins in the canals of Venice; which in truth were in Sardinia, but still, Venetians haven’t seen through their canal waters in centuries. We saw the majesty of the Taj Mahal not hidden behind a blanket of car and industry fumes. The melodies of nature noises were no longer masked by the cacophony of traffic. Even if we had to look at these positive changes through a screen or our the windows of our apartment, we liked what we saw, and it made most of us realise that we would like to keep it that way. The human habitat does not need to be harmful to us nor any other living beings. It is a design choice. It is a design choice to plan for everyday commuting distances that cannot be covered by bicycle or foot. It is a design and political choice to allow industries to economically thrive despite contributing to air and water pollution. It is a design choice to not have the possibility to hear birds in cities. All these choices can be changed.

The second realization is that in times of physical distancing—and in times when indoor recreation is almost entirely banned—being close to a green area is more than ever a luxury. The company of plants, green space and non-human life is a welcome healing treat for both body and mind that people across the world love to dive into. In Sweden, where the government opted for a soft lockdown with voluntary restrictions, the use of parks and outdoor areas in the last months has increased up to 350 percent. This trend is valid for most countries around the world. Urban green areas allow us to socialize with people while maintaining physical distance, to maintain a sense of community (Jennings and Bamkole 2019), to relieve from ordinary and extraordinary stresses, and to find much needed psychological balance (Hartig and Kahn 2016). The benefits of nature interaction for the human mind and body are so well-established that nature experiences are now prescribed by doctors and discussed in academia in “doses” (Cox et al. 2018). Not having access to green areas in cities is another design choice. Yet, the public health costs of underexposure to nature has been grossly underestimated. Now that we might have experienced directly a glimpse of what of these benefits could be, we might decide to not accept the personal and social costs of this choice any longer.

The third realization is that even if we live in a city we can survive without over-consuming. Through advertisement, cities are constant reminders that we should shop more, own more, buy new. Still, in this time of pause, we have become to realize that talking to a person gives us more pleasure than swiping a credit card. The short-lived, addictive, and environmentally destructive joy of recreational or compulsive shopping does not support us in times of crises. The obsession for brand new objects is vanishing and the extensive use of public spaces advertising our “needs” is now just an obsolete message unsuitable for our everyday happiness. Choosing to define the living fulcrum of cities with high streets and financial centres, rather than squares and parks are decisions that do not reflect the priorities of people’s needs or priorities. These choices too should be questioned for our own and our biosphere’s wellbeing.

The fourth realization is that—although COVID-19 has affected everyone—some suffer more than others. Those already exposed to higher levels of air pollution, with less access to health care, or in low-income neighbourhoods are suffering more the effects of this pandemic. Those in lockdown without access to a private garden, without a balcony, without an escape from the indoor confinement, or without a home altogether are not doing as well as those with an undisturbed view over the beach. COVID-19 has amplified existing injustices and highlighted how health care, green areas, and public services are unequally distributed in cities. These inequalities are landscaped and built in long-lasting cement. Deciding who get access to what is too is a design choice that can be changed.

The last realization is that we like to see a thriving nature living where we live. During the lockdown we saw coyotes, wild boars, deer, and even a sea lion roaming peacefully in city centres. These sights were not alarming, but welcome. We have an appreciation for animals and natural features that goes beyond puppies and cat videos. Observing nature is a joy that derives from spending hundreds of thousands of years together (Kellert and Wilson 1993). The whole biosphere is a close evolutionary family that include us humans. Our habitat should be designed as a constant reminder of this eternal bond. Some non-human species already thrive in cities, but this is mostly because we have destroyed their natural habitats and the concrete jungle is the last place to spawn. If it wasn’t because of personal economic gains, cities might not be the first choice to live for human beings either. Separating ourselves from other inhabitants of the biosphere is mostly the product of a self-granted position of superiority over the rest of nature. Isolating the natural habitats from the human habitat means hiding that social and ecological dynamics depend on each other and co-evolve together. The upcoming climate and the ecological crisis is a clear reminder that the arbitrary decision to separate human’s and biosphere’s wellbeing is not doing us any favour on the long-term. Embedding this relationship with nature in the landscape by separating human and natural habitats is also a design choice. One which might simultaneously hamper humans’ and animals’ wellbeing. This too we saw during the lockdown.

The next “normal” human habitat

How should your city be? “Polluted, stressful, grey, hubs of mindless consumption, inequitable, and isolated from wildlife, please!” said no one ever. The five realisations listed above showed us that cities can and should be different. We saw above that there are several aspects of urban design that should be reconsidered. These realisations lead to reprioritise four design choices in urban design.

First, what makes everybody healthy and happy should be prioritised over what makes people spend. After appropriate access to health care, human company (Cacioppo and Patrick 2008) and nature exposure (Hartig et al. 2014) are among the most effective (and cheap!) methods to keep humans healthy. Designing the next city should make people live happily and healthy by promoting meaningful social and ecological interactions. In practice, this means making green public land the fulcrum of social life, ensure equitable access to it, and encourage community activities in it that can promote place attachment and community building. Possible examples include the re-greening of downtown areas to ensure accessible nature experiences, creating community gardens to encourage ecological learning and social exchange, and designing other nature-based solutions that can foster intergenerational interactions to further community building and limiting loneliness.

The second design choice to reconsider is to prioritise human-powered movement over artificially-powered movement. Walking and bicycling are the main form of transportation for a sustainable and healthy city (Rafiemanzelat, Emadi, and Kamali 2017). This does not mean giving up your two-weeks annual vacation in Italy or your occasional car trip to the hardware store, but your daily commute should not include an hour-long traffic jam on a three-lane highway. That’s no good for your waistline, your stress levels, nor for the lungs of the people breathing the car’s fumes. This is a lose-lose situation. Many cities across the world devote on average up to 30% of their land to motorised vehicles (United Nations Human Settlements Programme 2013). This existing infrastructure could be used to ensure access to emergency vehicles while transformed into a cohesive cycling and pedestrian network that would stimulate the sidewalk economy and a safe sense of community. Mayors of cities such as Milan, Paris, and London are now making bold plans to make transportation human-friendly rather than fossil-fuel dependent. Improved air quality, increased safety, vibrant street life, and overall healthier—hence less expensive to the national health care system—people are just some of the co-benefits that would stem from this intervention.

The third priority is to consider human and natural habitats as one. We are animals, products of natural evolution, surviving because of ecological processes that provide us with clean air to breath, fresh water to drink, and plenty of sun and rain to grow our food. We are part of the biospheric balance from which all species benefit and to which all species contribute. The well-functioning of our habitat depends on the well-functioning of the habitats of other species on Earth. Secluding our everyday lives from this biological reality creates a fictitious disconnection from the biosphere that is dangerous for our survival (Giusti, Barthel, and Marcus 2014; Pyle 1993). The climate and ecological crises are likely outcomes of this misconception and so it is the structure of our sterilised, biosphere-adverse, nature-poor cities. True innovations for the future of urban development have to be found in nature-based solutions rather than in technological advancements (Colding, Colding, and Barthel 2018). Regenerative nature-based solutions would act in synergy with nature rather than use it as a resource of raw material. The next city should then be a true human habitat that—like other animal habitats—favour life in all its forms. In practice, this means promoting outdoor rather than indoor activities. It means promoting outdoor education and biological experiences enough so that people learn -first- to feel comfortable in natural environments, then to play and interact with it sustainably, and eventually to care and take care of ecosystems and non-human life (Giusti et al. 2018). Ultimately, a human habitat should be a landscape that acts as a constant reminder of our dependence on local and global biosphere processes.

The last priority for a healthy and sustainable city is to ensure equitable access to green urban services to inhabitants of all ages, gender, and socio-economic status. Existing inequalities in the provision of urban services affect the health, safety, and productivity of the entire urban community (Beard, Mahendra, and Westphal 2016). Once the services are provided inequitably, the ability of the poorest to be economically or socially productive is compromised. The next human habitat should not rely on electrical fencing to ensure personal and capital safety, but it should rely on a structurally supportive infrastructure that eliminates the need for violent redistributions of resources. This is particularly important given that the highest rates of urbanization are now in low-income countries (UN-Habitat 2016). In practice, this means, first of all, ensuring equitable access to housing, energy, transportation, water, sewage, and education, but also providing equitable and safe access to a supportive local economy, green infrastructure, and recreational services.

Future cities have to be re-imagined from dystopian and polluted landscapes of chaotic aggregation where people try to scrape a living, to healthy human habitats where all life can co-exist and thrive. Public support is readily available and post COVID-19 investments are and will be made to stimulate the economy. The question is whether these investments will be used to create a landscape that will promote people’s health wellbeing, that will help us enjoy the smell of flowers and the songs of birds, and that will ensure us with a healthy, sustainable, and resilient future. Alternatively, we go back to what our “normal” business-as-usual way of building cities. With urban solutions that externalise air, noise, and environmental pollution as public costs, maximise unequal financial gains, hide the need for everyday nature interactions, and make us wonder why the air is so clear after a week of lockdown.

Matteo Giusti
Gävle

On The Nature of Cities

 

References:

Beard, Victoria A, Anjali Mahendra, and Michael I Westphal. 2016. “Towards a More Equal City: Framing the Challenges and Opportunities.” World Resources Institute.

Cacioppo, John T., and William Patrick. 2008. Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection.Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. New York,  NY,  US: W W Norton & Co.

Colding, Johan, Magnus Colding, and Stephan Barthel. 2018. “The Smart City Model: A New Panacea for Urban Sustainability or Unmanageable Complexity?” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, March, 239980831876316. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399808318763164.

Cox, Daniel T.C., Danielle F. Shanahan, Hannah L. Hudson, Richard A. Fuller, and Kevin J. Gaston. 2018. “The Impact of Urbanisation on Nature Dose and the Implications for Human Health.” Landscape and Urban Planning 179 (November): 72–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2018.07.013.

Engemann, Kristine, Carsten Bøcker Pedersen, Lars Arge, Constantinos Tsirogiannis, Preben Bo Mortensen, and Jens-Christian Svenning. 2019. “Residential Green Space in Childhood Is Associated with Lower Risk of Psychiatric Disorders from Adolescence into Adulthood.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116 (11): 5188–93. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1807504116.

Giusti, Matteo, Stephan Barthel, and Lars Marcus. 2014. “Nature Routines and Affinity with the Biosphere: A Case Study of Preschool Children in Stockholm.” Children, Youth and Environments 24 (3): 16. https://doi.org/10.7721/chilyoutenvi.24.3.0016.

Giusti, Matteo, Ulrika Svane, Christopher M. Raymond, and Thomas Beery. 2018. “A Framework to Assess Where and How Children Connect to Nature.” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (January). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02283.

Hartig, Terry, and Peter H. Jr Kahn. 2016. “Living in Cities, Naturally.” Science 352 (6288).

Hartig, Terry, Richard Mitchell, Sjerp de Vries, and Howard Frumkin. 2014. “Nature and Health.” Annual Review of Public Health 35 (December 2013): 207–28. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-032013-182443.

He, Guojun, Yuhang Pan, and Takanao Tanaka. 2020. “The Short-Term Impacts of COVID-19 Lockdown on Urban Air Pollution in China.” Nature Sustainability, July. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0581-y.

Jennings, Viniece, and Omoshalewa Bamkole. 2019. “The Relationship between Social Cohesion and Urban Green Space: An Avenue for Health Promotion.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16 (3): 452. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16030452.

Kellert, Stephen R., and Edward O. Wilson. 1993. The Biophilia Hypothesis. Edited by Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Mayer, Helmut. 1999. “Air Pollution in Cities.” Atmospheric Environment 33 (24–25): 4029–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1352-2310(99)00144-2.

Pyle, Robert Michael. 1993. The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Rafiemanzelat, Reihaneh, Maryam Imani Emadi, and Aida Jalal Kamali. 2017. “City Sustainability: The Influence of Walkability on Built Environments.” Transportation Research Procedia 24: 97–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trpro.2017.05.074.

UN-Habitat. 2016. Urbanization and Development: Emerging Futures. World Cities Report 2016. Nairobi, Kenya: UN-Habitat.

United Nations Human Settlements Programme. 2013. “Streets as Public Spaces and Drivers of Urban Prosperity.” Nairobi, Kenya: UN-Habitat.

The Nurtured Golem: A Nantes Neighborhood Transforms Environmental Bad into Good

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Art, Science, Action: Cities Re-imagined

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 At the end of my last post, Unintended Consequences: When Environmental “Goods” Turn Bad, I raised the idea that sometimes environmental “bads” can also turn good, and that it usually works better when nobody “looks”. I mean that this process works better when the inhabitants take ownership of their living environment and transform it outside of any legal framework or official urban project, as the remarkable history of La Fournillère illustrates: there, inhabitants of the area turned a wasteland for squatters into a very popular park, combining leisure amenities and urban agriculture by the will of the people and with their own priorities. In the end, they manipulated the local authorities to enact their initiative—which was first reputed as “illegal”—into an official amenity.

Let’s start at the beginning and go back to the 19th century, when La Fournillère was just a village west of Nantes, in France. Indeed, La Fournillère was a small village, but it was on the verge of becoming an industrial suburb of fruit and vegetable canneries. Why did canneries decided to locate there? Well, the soil was rich, and the climate permitted cultivation of early vegetables with high added value, such as field peas, baby carrots, or asparagus. These canneries developed a policy of industrial paternalism and provided kitchen gardens to their workers. By 1908, La Fournillère was annexed to the city of Nantes; in the fifties, social housing complexes were built.

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La Fournillère in 1962. Image: Archives de Nantes

The kitchen gardens were still there, and the plot where they were established finally took the name of La Fournillère, while the former village vanished from the collective memory. Now, in 2015, as all the other kitchen gardens of the agglomeration of Nantes disappeared under the growing pressure from real estate development, La Fournillère is still alive and kicking: the plot now covers 3 hectares (7.5 acres) and has become a natural and cultural landmark for Nantes and its region.

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Situation Map Downtown Nantes. Image: Google Maps
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“Still Alive and Kicking”: The Jardins Potagers. Image: Google Maps

What happened? First, a fortunate conjunction of circumstances, then, local people’s initiative and creativity, converged to preserve this improbable greenery in the middle of the city. Together with the social housing complexes came successive infrastructure projects that were supposed to be built, in the spirit of the post-war boom, on the site of the kitchen gardens of La Fournillère; the first one planned was an access highway to downtown Nantes. But as soon as they were designed, they were abandoned one after the other due to local political turmoil. The workers had been evicted from their kitchen gardens, but nothing happened after and the place turned into wasteland.

But the people living nearby—especially those from the social housing, who didn’t have access to nature—had their eyes on this abandoned land and its rich soils. After enough time had elapsed, they made their move! In the mid-seventies and later, one after the other, first at night, next in broad daylight, they progressively occupied La Fournillère. By the end of the nineties, there were more than 70 squatting gardeners at La Fournillère. To get a piece of land there “you simply have to start digging the ground somewhere—a corner that looks vacant—and wait. If nobody’s coming at you, you keep digging and tending your future garden. A few days more, or a week, without any hostility from your neighbors, means that this piece of land is ostensibly yours: you can start fencing, sowing, and socializing with your neighbors, as mentioned by Elisabeth Pasquier, who wrote a seminal book about La Fournillère. Today, two categories of squatting gardeners coexist at La Fournillère.

On the one side, some of the former evicted gardeners—or their children—came back. They are locals, who descended from Brittany or Vendée (French regions).  They are few and they stick together in La Fournillère. They keep closely connected via common emblematic activities, such as pétanque (bocce tournament), aperitif (before-dinner drinks), or barbecues. This category of gardeners is made of poor but not marginalized people. They live in substandard one-family houses: usually old people with a small retirement pension or younger poor workers. They know how to cultivate a small piece of land.

On the other side is a completely different category. These gardeners come from the disadvantaged social housing complexes around La Fournillère. The new ones have different origins and ethnic backgrounds, being mainly Portuguese and North Africans. They are usually unemployed and live on social benefits. For them, “owning” a piece of land at La Fournillère is a way of getting of keeping active: in these new gardens they can develop a social network inside, but also outside, their own community. It is not all about vegetables and fruits, really. These gardeners are called “les autres” (the others) by the “local” gardeners that form the first category, but they represent an overwhelming majority, with nearly 4 gardeners out of 5. For them, La Fournillère is a place were they can settle symbolically—a “circulatory area” (territoire circulatoire), within the meaning of Alain Tarrius, and a place where they can grow roots literally.

Usually, both groups ignore each other. But there is, nonetheless, an element of solidarity that brings them together: they all are fully aware of how precarious and uncertain the future of La Fournillère is. They are squatters and they can be expelled at any time. These gardens don’t exist officially. Both groups know they have to be united to respond effectively to any of the many menaces that threaten their plot—a new urban project, theft and vandalism in their gardens from people from outside, etc. Such a situation fosters social links.

In the early 90s, the new city council of Nantes took interest again in La Fournillère, but this time with the project of creating a neighborhood park there. First, the gardeners were in shock. Most of them went claiming that if the city were going to stick its nose in their gardens, they’d rather leave the garden. But then, something happened. In a sudden about-face, both groups of gardeners—the original and the new gardeners, the “locals” and the “others”—started uniting their forces and organizing themselves collectively to impose their view on this project: they wanted their seat at the decision-making table and went for it. They also knew that the game of illegally occupying pieces of land couldn’t go on forever: it was time for them to make their situation legal, preferably in their own terms. A form of collective intelligence emerged, and with it the seeds of a collective identity.

Rather than making demands and organizing protests, they decided to draw out an in-depth report on the actual situation at La Fournillère, providing an exact overview with maps of the different pieces of land, including the spatial pattern of the different gardens and their history, all of which was realized with the help of Elisabeth Pasquier. The report displayed the long work of clearing and planting that they had done as well the public goods they had created, and illustrated the social and ecological value of these gardens for the whole city. They demonstrated that La Fournillère worked quite well as it was, whereas the project developed by the municipality could very well fail and destroy the whole site, unless it took into account their experiences and included the organization of La Fournillère as it currently stood. And finally, they claimed that they wanted to be decision-making partners in the project.

This time, the planners of the city of Nantes played smart. They understood that the opposition of the gardeners to the project was not just a negative NIMBY reaction, but the expression of collective knowledge and skills. Once they saw that what was happening—the emergence of an alternative proposal with strong local community (and, therefore, elector) support, they agreed to discuss with the gardener’s collective. According to both parties, the negotiations were no picnic, but at the end of a long process—and against all odds—the city council decided to support the gardeners’ alternative project and to abandon its own proposal. The alternative project envisioned a park organized around the existing kitchen gardens and organized under the form of islets or patches. Paths for walkers and runners entwined with these islets, connecting them. In the very center of the park would be a venue for initiating visitors to the recycling of material and waste in urban gardening, including waste sorting and composting to enhance biomass and biodiversity. The gardeners determined themselves what would be the rules for living together in the park: more frugal and wiser water-management; a ban on cutting any tree in one’s own gardens, since trees are considered to be common resources; etc.

Photo 4-min
A shack and a garden at La Fournillère. Image: Miraorti

What was the outcome of such a mysterious alchemy?

Photo 5
Paths… Image: Miraorti

Let’s pay a visit to La Fournillère today. Placed in the middle of the city, La Fournillère is a particularly charming and unusually large urban greenspace. In essence, it is a weird farming plot that you can only reach by walking: to get there, one must take two narrow lanes that lead to a kind of huge clearing covered by gardens, scattered trees, and bushes. There, large, colored water tanks surround shacks made out of recycled materials, isolated or gathered in small patches. Plastic strips flapping in the wind form a strange parody of fencing. A maze of service alleys spreads around five key items: three wells, a pond, and an improvised pétanque court. Two larger paths cross the whole area. They were created by the footsteps of thousands of people: traversing La Fournillère is a shortcut for many men and women going to school, to work, or simply to the market in Nantes. And such a lovely shortcut it is, with flowers, trees, birds everywhere, wonderful scents, and friendly people. As a bonus, it gives the thrill of crossing a no man’s land without any official regulation, outside the world of master plans—a brief taste of freedom in an otherwise ordered life.

Photo 6
…And shortcuts. Image: Miraorti

La Fournillère is also a social theater, where the gardeners perpetually reinvent values and attitudes to live together, as well as learn new agricultural skills. These kitchen gardens—predominately maintained by men, though a bit less recently—give these grown-ups a place where they can get away from it all and become kids again, a gang of Tom Sawyers playing in the wild, a modest parenthesis in their ordinary lives, since at the end of the day they’ll go back home. At La Fournillère, they mimic their household environment to better subvert it: a painting is clamped to the wall of a shack, but outdoors; a former doormat is turned into a blackout curtain, while an old curtain becomes a doormat. They indulge themselves by putting things in the garden that wouldn’t be permitted anywhere else in the city: a doll’s head impaled on a pole, a teddy bear crucified on a picket fence, pinup posters stuck to the walls of the shacks with the mention “beware of the bitch” (“Attention pute méchante”), etc.

Photo 7-min
Recycling of material and waste. Image: Miraorti
Photo 8
A scarecrow, or something else? Image: Aredius44
Photo 9-min
Gateway Park (Huntington Station). Image: villagetattler.com
Photo 10
Who will find the “kamkokola”? Image: Miraorti

Gateway Park (Huntington Station) – source villagetattler.com

Naturally, when you ask them why they do these things, the gardeners always have a rational explanation: the doll was found in a garbage can and is used to protect the tip of the stake; the teddy bear is used as a scarecrow; and so on. Sometimes the explanation is: “It is just fun”, as with the pinup posters. But hidden behind these simple explanations, developed so matter-of-factly, are some really weird and meaningful features: why are all these figures—the doll’s head, the teddy bear, the pinup—always positioned so as to look outwards, right in the eyes of the visitors? Why doesn’t the gardener cover all his stakes, if it is a matter of protection—especially considering that the tip of the unique covered pole protrudes from the doll’s head? Why is there such a proliferation of human and animal figures among the installations exhibited in the gardens (I previously spared you the description of a huge inflatable Casimir, an anthropomorphic orange dinosaur, which was the main character of a French kids’ TV show in the beginning of the 80s) or of big toy soldiers? Are these anthropomorphic setups there to protect the gardens when the gardeners are not there? Curiously enough, it appears that painted anthropomorphic figures are frequent at the entrance of the community gardens like in New York, for example at Gateway Park in Huntington Station. Are they some kind of kamkokolas? (The inhabitants of the Trobriand islands in Papua New Guinea fitted kamkokolas—vertical poles on which two smaller diagonal poles rest, where spirits are supposed to live and watch over the gardens— at every corner of their gardens). All these figures can be seen as attempts by the gardeners to take ownership of the gardens and protect them.

Apart from the magic of the place and its beauty, the gardens of La Fournillère also are kitchen gardens and have, as such, straightforward economic interests: cabbages, potatoes, and other vegetables are planted to feed the family year-round. Protecting this interest is a good reason to erect the gate-keepers discussed above, even though they are mostly symbolic.

One of the many merits of La Fournillère is surely that, in marginal lands, very different people found a way to build something really beautiful, to live together there and, finally, to stand up together to bring their views to the planners of the city in a very constructive way. As such, it is a symbol of what can be done when everybody gets involved in the planning procedures. La Fournillère is about the right to decide and the power to create, renewing and deepening what Henri Lefebvre calls Le Droit à la Ville (Lefebvre 1968).

The example of La Fournillère also gives us insight into how interstitial abandoned urban areas may be one of cities’ main seedbeds of creative innovation. To return to my opening point, it is about how environmental “bads” can be turned into environmental goods: in this case, an environmental that gives consistency to the whole urban fabric of Nantes emerged from what otherwise might have been a space of environmental bad. Though it may have been unwittingly, the gardeners’ actions contributed to the preservation of Nantes’s urban identity.

As I discussed in a recent paper (Mancebo 2015) a city does not arise from the sole will and skill of architects, planners, surveyors, and politicians. Like a golem, a city has to be nurtured and molded by its inhabitants, which finally put their values in its mouth to bring it to life. And such a process needs time. Quite differently from the frenetic timeline and knee-jerk reactions to any opposition that elected officials and planners, guided by their own short-term interests (the next election, compliance with construction deadlines etc.), impose on urban policies, La Fournillère is a wonderful example of the proper use of slowness (Le bon usage de la lenteur) in urban planning, as depicted by Pierre Sansot (Sansot 2000). Grasping what happened at La Fournillère eventually means deciphering the eternal game between what the authorities, whatever their form, try to impose on the social fabric, and what the social fabric—here, the gardeners—impose on the authorities, through deception or force, through confrontation or bargaining. It is all about how people take ownership over their own city.

François Mancebo
Paris

On The Nature of Cities

Works Cited

1. Lefebvre H., 1968, Le droit à la ville, Editions Anthropos, Paris.

2. Mancebo F., 2015, “Insights for a Better Future in an Unfair World – Combining Social Justice with Sustainability”, in Transitions to Sustainability, Mancebo F., Sachs I. eds, pp. 105-116, Springer.

3. Sansot P., 2000, Du bon usage de la lenteur, Rivages Poche.

The Palo Verde in My Backyard

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My view of nature in the city is often informed by my own experiences in my part of the world: Los Angeles, California.  About 5 years ago I was given a Palo Verde tree which my husband and I planted in a strategic location to provide shade and beauty in the back of our four unit apartment building (each of the owners owns their apartment).  In the U.S. such a situation requires a Home Owner’s Association (HOA) to manage the property together, along with a set of adopted rules — Covenants, Conventions, Conditions and Restrictions (CC&Rs).  When we moved in with our current co-owners (minus my mother who passed away), we all agreed on a car free backspace.  Consequently much money and labor was spent jackhammering out the concrete pad and converting the “garages” to non-car use space: a party/bedroom, my husband’s office, and a tool shop…and creating a garden.

L1040265The Palo Verde has been quite a surprise.  It shot up rapidly and has created an exceptional umbrella canopy that in the spring is covered with yellow blossoms that attract beautiful black and brown bumble bees, honeybees, wasps and birds.  Other times of the year small finches seem to find sustenance on the bark and needle like leaves that I can’t figure out.  They make lovely small chirping noises.  Unintentionally, we have the daily benefit of looking out onto its canopy from our bedroom on the second floor due to its location; leaving the windows open we hear the birds chirping while foraging.

But this tree, like plants in our front planting strip, has rather unexpectedly become the center of controversy in our building, provoking a close scrutiny of the HOA CC&Rs — what exactly were the rules we adapted when we each bought our unit from the collective pool of ownership?  The CC&Rs had been found on the internet and adopted without too much close reading, and upon scrutiny revealed a series of potential “violations” one member of the HOA is concerned about, as will be explained.  The plants in the planting strip were the subjects of a neighbor’s wrath last year.

L1040264Old habits are hard to change.  The Palo Verde makes it difficult to access one of the converted garages if the designated owner of the garage wished to park in it regularly.  That building owner — whose garage is now more difficult to access — now would like to park a car in the garage for the six months of the year during which they are absent.  Because the tree blocks easy access it has been cast as potentially causing “adverse possession” by that owner.  Fellow building owners have offered to switch garages or to pay for off site garaging.  The car can be parked, but it requires skill and maneuvering to do so.  Moreover, the driveway is now lined by small boulders and is a gardening space, the back area is covered with pavers that are not well embedded in the soil, so moving a car across these areas is not easy and would damage the people centric and oriented new infrastructure.  The owner who would like to park the car has suggested either moving the Palo Verde (now 30 feet tall), or planting another at the edge of the property and when it has grown, cutting this one down.  Or failing compromise (that is, the acceptance of one of these options), cutting the tree down by fiat.

These issues have also had repercussions on who “gets” to park in the remaining driveway.  As the commercial strip on next street expands and becomes more successful, adjacent street parking is at a premium, and at times residents must park a block away.  Such inconvenience has added insult to injury, and then generated parking claims on the driveway as well.  To date, there has been little contention over my husband and I parking in the driveway.

L1040253Similar reactivity to nature replacing car space is found in the note from the neighbor about our plants in the front planting strip.  The 8 foot tall Echium attracts pollinators, like the Palo Verde; its blue flowers are the admiration of others of our neighbors.  And in a drought-prone region, our planting strip vegetation needs little water while the Palo Verde seems to have found plenty of water by itself.  But the Echium makes getting in and out of a parked car more difficult, and is seen to obstruct general access.

These trivial, but ubiquitous examples illustrate the degree to which a car-oriented infrastructure remains dominant in people’s deep priorities.  Despite good intentions, and verbal agreements (as in our case), it seems that those get swept away when it comes to one’s own car needs.  I suggest that underneath the car-priority arguments is really the way in which property rights and values are co-dependent with the car, as I will discuss below.

L1040254These incidents make me aware of profound difficulties in changing neighborhoods to less car dependency and the car rights mentalities, as well as instituting plant pallates that are out of the ordinary.  Our neighbor was clearly advocating we recreate the planting strip lawn to be more in harmony with the rest of the street.  Our building neighbor is more divided about things.  Acknowledging the beauty of the tree and the pleasantness of the back area, the owner is attempting to finesse a situation that probably cannot be.  We can have the tree and plants, or remake a car infrastructure, but not both.  This is hard to admit.

Turning to the HOA, it prohibits drying clothes outside.  The beneficence of solar radiation in the case of our building, must be captured by our solar collectors, sent through the grid, and then sent back to us through the meter to run the clothes dryer, if the HOA “rules” were enforced.  Either that, or I dry clothes on racks in my apartment.  Here again, nature in the city, in the form of direct solar energy, is not appreciated and taken advantage of in a commonsense manner.

Codification of energy use can be found in many subtle and hidden nooks and crannies of daily life, from HOAs to notions of the value of property and “property rights,” and implicit assumptions about how convenient automobile access — and car use — should be.  At the same time, California’s laws — SB 375 and AB 32 — are desperately attempting to reduce GHG emissions by reducing vehicle miles travel and car dependency.  And there are many calls for climate appropriate landscaping, pollinator refuges and biodiversity friendly habitats in cities due to the drought, and disappearance of pollinators and local biodiversity.

L1040268While my examples may seem petty, they are emblematic of the attitudinal issues, reinforced by 20th century codes and conventions and infrastructure, that make current cities hard to change.  We have coevolved hard and soft infrastructures that reinforce one another to harden pathways that then reinforce each other.  Soft infrastructures include the rules — street widths, sidewalk widths, planting regulations, parking provisions and regulations.  Hard infrastructures are the product of those soft infrastructures, but then reinforce them because they become normalized and an architecture of dependence gets erected upon them.  These include the conflation of car access with property values.  The challenges of the 21st century will include unraveling the knot of this reinforcing interaction between hard and soft infrastructures in our urban areas.  To make friendly spaces for nature, the most obvious open space is that devoted to cars.  Car infrastructure — parking lots, parking garages, parking garages, parking spaces, streets — create multiple negative externalities.  These include polluted run off, lack of permeable filtration areas, heat islands, unwalkable urban spaces, not to mention facilitating cars that produce air pollution and GHGs; the list is long.  To reduce energy use in urban areas, we must also begin to use readily available nature’s services like direct sunlight to dry clothes!

I do not believe the hostility to the Palo Verde, hanging clothes outside, or to our planting strips is out of ill will or ill intention per se.  It emanates from a historically informed and culturally passed on sense of order and priority.  It also is a reaction against something different that does not fall into the existing codes, norms and conventions.  What if our building co-owner wanted to sell?  Would the prospective buyer be put off by not being able to easily park his or her car?  Would they be offended by the sight of drying clothes (actually the clothes line is in the driveway, and not visible from the back yard).  Would the prospective buyer see the planting strip as unattractive, hence not willing to pay “full market value” for the unit?  These are unknowable, and there might even be the exact opposite effect — a heightened value for the unit.

Creative solutions like using a commercial parking garage for overnight parking has not caught on in this part of the world, though in places like Paris, they are a normal matter of course since the city was built pre-automobile.  Walking a couple of blocks with packages, children or pets, is simple part of the course of a normal day in pre-auto cities. Concentrating the car in common parking structures, reducing parking requirements and enhancing yet more transit opportunities and bicycling, would free up the car-devoted space in back areas for plants, gardens and human leisure, and facilitate the creation of complete streets.

But in the city of the car — Los Angeles — the culture shift is difficult.  Los Angeles was built during a time of abundance of land, energy, water, building materials.  We were profligate, though now, perhaps counter intuitively, L.A. is (depending on the source), either the first or second most dense metropolitan area of the United States.  Our transit ridership is right behind Chicago.  Our transit system is huge, growing and heavily used.  Bike lanes are being built and there are more bike riders.  People are planting edible plants in parking strips and fighting their cities (there are 88 in Los Angeles County) as well as their neighbors.  Change is happening, but it is a slow, step-by-step, person-by-person, building-by-building effort.

Seems like there should be a better way; do we really have time for this process?

Here are a few suggestions that are suitable to Los Angeles:

— Create “alternative” HOA CC&R boilerplates accessible on the internet and fully vetted by the legal community that explicitly encourage drying clothes outside and disallow cars in common areas, encourage gardening including landscaping planting strips.  Such restrictions are common, and are preventing people from behaviors more appropriate to a changing climate

— Dramatically reduce city parking requirements.

— Require commercial parking garages to offer neighborhood parking from 6 pm – 10 am.

— For the Southwest region in general, forbid planting of lawns and require installation of indoor and outdoor water meters.

— Legalize garage conversions.

— Work with the nursery industry to phase out water loving outdoor plants.

— Create city policy to encourage planting pollinators and to create habitat refuges.

Rules, codes, conventions and habits emerge from particular times.  In the U.S., as people had more appliances and energy was inexpensive, people bought washing machines and clothes driers (this was also a result of clever and instant marketing by appliance makers, and energy utilities to grow their markets).  Gradually the perception grew that hanging clothes outside was unsightly.  (I recently spoke to a colleague who told me that in new housing developments in Jakarta, outside clothes drying is now banned).  And these ideas became codified in Covenants, Codes and Restrictions (CC&Rs) of housing developments, similarly to the requirement for lawns.  These have been widely discussed over the past several decades, but no alternatives seem to have emerged.

CC&Rs, a soft infrastructure of rules, create hard infrastructures on the ground: more natural gas lines, or electricity provision to dry clothes; more need for water infrastructure to keep lawns green and more fuel to maintain those lawns with mowers, blowers and edgers.  City rules require garages for cars, and increase the amount of urban space devoted to the automobile rather than to other uses, like plants and trees.  There are no provisions for sharing existing parking rather than building new, individual parking for each building.  The alternatives exist, but the fear of the reduction of property values that people perceive as protected by these rules, makes change difficult.  Unless all property owners are subject to the same rule changes, individuals will find change risky and will resist it.  But new rules would create a level playing field, and new habits would form.  A new normal would develop.

We can do this, we just need the framework to facilitate the change.

 Stephanie Pincetl
Los Angeles

 

On The Nature of Cities

 

The Place of Nature in Cities: Taking Inspiration from Singapore

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What is the place of nature in cities? As the COVID-19 pandemic challenged societal norms, this question took a new turn for professionals and the public alike. Having recently moved to Singapore I’m sharing here a few thoughts as I’m learning how the city-state designs our relationship with nature.

Taking lessons from Singapore seems difficult as cities in each have their own strengths and legacies. What seems safer to say, however, is that Singapore’s long history of urban ecological experiment can inspire others in the region and around the world.
Singapore is often praised for its forward-looking approach to greenery planning. The “city in a garden” and aspiring “city in nature” can pride itself with a number of world-acclaimed initiatives, from designing buildings with nature to pioneering a biodiversity management index and educating the public and professionals at home and abroad. Does that mean the island is a model of for other cities regionally and globally?

Planning for people and nature

Greening efforts in Singapore date back to the 1960s and are still going strong today. An integral part of the city’s branding, recent “biophilic projects” illustrate how Singaporeans can enjoy the benefits of nature in multiple ways. Beyond the highly-publicised Jewel Changi Airport and Gardens by the Bay, recent noteworthy achievements include Kampung Admiralty (a mixed-use apartment complex with multiple green terraces provide shade and comfort to its elderly residents); the Khoo Teck Puat Hospital (which was designed to maximize beneficial interactions between patients and nature); and the Oasia Hotel Downtown, an example of vertical landscaping that opens new horizons for reconciling compacity and greenery.

Gardens by the Bay, one of the most well-known symbols of Singapore’s greening efforts. Credit:https://pixabay.com/photos/singapore-gardens-by-the-bay-4482158/

The private sector significantly contributes to the impression of greenery, but government planning should get much of the credit for the place of nature in the city. From high-level visions for the future of Singapore to the minutiae of roadside design, government agencies spearhead and oversee much of the efforts to protect or restore nature in the city. Singapore does not have much more total green space than other major high-density cities, but each amount of greenery seems to be designed to count—both in terms of human perception and biodiversity.

And it’s not only manicured parks and green roofs. The story of hornbills, birds once extirpated in Singapore, certainly demonstrates that careful planning and design can successfully support urban biodiversity. At the city scale, several plans guide conservation and restoration activities, including the Nature Conservation Masterplan and the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan. These plans effectively guide action on the ground, such as the recent creation of a nature park (Thomson NP), or the extension of the Park Connector Network. With Singapore’s determination to become “smarter” through technology, these plans can be effectively integrated in nation-wide planning (for example in digital twin models) to optimize outcomes for both urban nature and other services.

Biophilic planning does not stop at infrastructure and some initiatives engaging Singaporeans should also be highlighted. Therapeutic gardens, designed to heal visitors, are great examples given their relative low cost and the increased attention paid to the connection between nature and mental health. There are also new ways government agencies start engaging a dialogue with residents, reflected in the “Build a playground” initiatives or the creation of community gardens throughout the island.

Khoo Teck Puat hospital in Singapore. Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jui-media/6701507463

An increasing need to plan with people and nature

The trend to engage the public in the design phase is relatively recent in Singapore. It is reflected in the recent aspiration to shift from a “whole of government” to a “whole of nation” approach to governance. As observers have noted, this shift will be critical to negotiate as the social and political landscape is changing [1] . Singapore’s demography is evolving and challenges of the 21st century do not resemble the threats that the nation faced in its first 50 years.

One major dimension of this change is the rising inequalities in Singapore. The spectacular economic growth over the last decades has benefited the overwhelming majority of Singaporeans—in part due to unique policies to promote access to housing. Yet recent years have seen the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of the population increase, and the expected increase in highly educated foreigners over the next few decades does little to ease concerns from the Singaporean middle class [1].

The spike in the number of COVID cases in Singapore has shed a particular light on the issue of inequalities by drawing due attention to an important part of Singapore’s migrant workforce. Not only the workers’ living conditions makes them more vulnerable during the crisis, but they face injustices in access to some public spaces as their needs are scarcely acknowledged in planning. Therefore, while top-down planning has generally preserved Singapore from gentrification, inequalities in access and benefits of public goods do exist, and there is certainly room for improvement in how lower-income populations are considered—not only in times of crisis.

Another dimension of the recent socio-political change is the active demands to take part in shaping Singapore. The young generation, in particular, increasingly requests to be heard, which may impact the way planning is conducted. The Singaporean General Elections earlier this month confirmed a mounting questioning of the ruling party, which has held power since independence in 1965 with a broad popular support. An example of how this rising contestation may affect nature planning is that of Bukit Brown, where plans for development of the cemetery in the early 2010s met with unprecedented resistance from the local population. More recently, the development of the Tengah Forest was criticised for an insufficiently considering the value of biodiversity. Perhaps the best sign of success for a city-state that promotes education as a key value, these examples illustrate that the public can become the most effective safeguard and steward of urban nature—and why not help bring back some wilderness.

Hornbills. Photo: Perrine Hamel.

Singapore’s experiment as an inspiration

Overall, there is no denying that Singapore’s greening efforts are a great source of inspiration. They demonstrate that with ambitious top-down policies and a vision that incorporates urban nature, substantial outcomes can be reached: the examples above, among many others, can certainly inspire cities around the planet.

Yet three important points should be kept in mind before elevating Singapore as a model. First, the top-down approach that was possible in the first 50 years may not be sustainable in the future, as society in Singapore and beyond changes. The examples of democratic demand and inequality concerns presented above suggest that a more balanced, less top-down governance approach, will be essential to push urban developments that benefit both people and nature.

Second, building Singapore does not come without its environmental impacts. Direct impacts include the continuing development on high-biodiversity areas, such as the aforementioned Tengah secondary forest.  In addition to the large carbon footprint, especially compared to its neighbours, indirect impacts of sand mining driven by Singapore are also an increasing area of concern. Not every city faces the island’s land scarcity challenges, which have led to important land reclamations, but the high demand for sand from current construction practices does question the sustainability of the model.

Finally, considering Singapore as a model may have unintended consequences, as the cities’ fight to be on the world scene may lead to net negative social and environmental impacts. This is perhaps the most dangerous part of elevating Singapore as a model for others: that the philosophy behind (some of) the current greening efforts is lost in translation. Green buildings that only “look” green do little to advance urban sustainability, and careful consideration of the context and local strengths should prevail when considering the place of urban nature. With now over two decades of experience, urban biodiversity and ecosystem services scientists, who study the ecological and social benefits of urban nature, will be well positioned to facilitate this conversation.

Thus taking lessons from Singapore seems difficult as cities in each have their own strengths and legacies. No one knows if the Singapore approach to urban greening will be optimal in the future, nor if other cities should or could take lessons from Singapore. What seems safer to say, however, is that Singapore’s long history of urban ecological experimentation can inspireothers in the region and around the world. I certainly feel inspired as, in writing these last lines, a couple of hornbills gracefully land on my windowsill.

Perrine Hamel
Singapore

On The Nature of Cities

Note:

[1] To read more on this topic, see the Chapter: Re-Examining Singapore’s Urban Planning and Governance Framework, by Tan Shin Bin and Donald Low) In Planning Singapore: The Experimental City, Hamnett, S. and Yuen, B. (Eds) https://www.routledge.com/Planning-Singapore-The-Experimental-City/Hamnett-Yuen/p/book/9781138482340

The Planet’s Gift to Humans: Soil Uncovered

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As countries lose their topsoil, they eventually lose the capacity to feed themselves. When looking for solutions to address the loss of plant and animal species across the world, soil biodiversity is key in restoring the balance for all living beings on earth
Soil is a unique living ecosystem that provides a wide range of services to people. It is the foundation of life on the planet, home to biodiversity, it regulates the water cycle, stores and filters water, is the basis for producing food and fuel, it facilitates the natural recycling of waste, eliminates pollutants and stores CO2. One teaspoon of soil contains more living organisms than there are people in the world (United States Department of Agriculture). There would be no life without soil, we depend on it for our very existence. If planet earth is our mother, then soil must be our father.

As we have only one planet, soil is a finite resource, so we have to take good care of its health and wellbeing to ensure it can continue to deliver the many services it provides to humans.

Barefoot path, Belgium. Photo: Chantal van Ham

The secrets of soil

Soil is a living complex made up of roots, bacteria, fungi, rocks, sand and clay particles, and animals. Toby Query, ecologist with the City of Portland’s Watershed Revegetation Program, talks about the magic of earthworms in his essay “Earthworms can awaken us to ecological change”. He describes how their life in the soil interconnected with all living organisms, provides the many wonderful functions humans benefit from every day. He explains that earthworms are doing a lot of work in the city. They are decomposers and nutrient recyclers. They aerate and mix the soil by creating tunnels and move nutrients and organic matter up and down. They turn leaves and food scraps into soil. Amazingly, they also help process and degrade our toxins. Earthworms have been found to degrade petroleum products, extract heavy metals, and break down man-made organic chemicals, such as PCBs. Toby rightfully points out that soil can help us to learn about changes taking place in our cities and how well we take care of our natural environment.

Soil supports 98% of biodiversity, provides 99% of human food, filters 100% of rainfall for drinking water and stores more active carbon than the air, forests or seas combined; yet it is the most neglected biome (UN, 2018). To deliver all of these services, soil needs to be healthy. However, one third of our global soils are already degraded(UN, 2018)and we risk losing more due to soil pollution. With a growing world population, soil pollution is a worldwide problem as degrading the quality of our soil, means we are poisoning the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe along with it (UN, 2018).

Sonnentor Marc Boutavant

Human actions, such as deforestation, large scale industrial farming, climate change and urbanisation are destroying soil rapidly. A growing challenge is that fertile soil becomes scarcer as cities expand. According to a recent report entitled, Nature in the Urban Century, by 2050 humanity will urbanize an area larger than the country of Colombia—approximately 1.2 million km2. Many growing cities in the world face problems with hazardous waste from industry, polluting the soil and drinking water resources. Others face major issues with soil erosion resulting from large scale deforestation and the transformation of forested land for agriculture resulting in depleted and dried-out soil that is easily washed away by rain or floodwater.

The thin layer of topsoil that covers the earth’s land surface was formed over long stretches of geological time as new soil formation exceeded the natural rate of erosion. Soil that was formed on a geological time scale, is now being lost on a human time scale (Lester R. Brown, 2012). Sometime within the last century, soil erosion began to exceed new soil formation. In the last 150 years, half of the world’s top soil has been lost (WWF). As healthy and productive land erodes and the population grows, competition for land is intensifying.

As countries lose their topsoil, they eventually lose the capacity to feed themselves. When looking for solutions to address the loss of plant and animal species across the world, soil biodiversity is key in restoring the balance for all living beings on earth. There is clearly a need for immediate action, creating awareness of how we use soil, manage land and why it is so important for our life.

Botanic garden Vienna. Photo: Chantal van Ham

Soil, a natural ally in combatting climate change

As world leaders just gathered in Poland for UNFCCC’s 24thConference of the Parties (COP 24) to agree on measures for keeping global warming below the “safe” threshold of 1.5 degrees, it’s apparent now more than ever that nature is a critical part of the solution to avoiding the dangers of climate change. Not only civil society organisations, but also governments and business representatives are becoming more and more aware of the power of nature in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, maximising carbon sequestration and adapting to the effects of a changing climate. Even the actor Leonardo Di Caprio is raising awareness for this important matter. Often considered a “forgotten solution”, soil is the biggest terrestrial carbon sink, but land degradation is reducing its ability to mitigate climate change.

As soils degrade, they lose their ability to hold carbon, releasing enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, along with nitrous oxide, making land degradation one of the biggest contributors to climate change. An estimated two-thirds of all terrestrial carbon stores from soils and vegetation have been lost since the 19th century through land degradation. Agriculture, forest and other land-use sectors generate roughly a quarter of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (IUCN, 2015).

The world’s soils contain 1,500 billion tons of carbon in the form of organic matter – two to three times more carbon than is present in the atmosphere. This represents a significant contribution to man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Increasing the quantity of carbon contained in soil, for example through agriculture and pasture management practices which increase soil organic matter, can reduce the annual increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is estimated that improved livestock rangeland management could potentially sequester a further 1,300-2,000 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030 (IUCN, 2015). Reversing land degradation and increasing soil organic carbon provides one of the surest and lowest-cost multiple-wins: climate change mitigation and adaptation, conservation of biodiversity, and increased food production (IUCN, 2015).

Agriculture and land management practices seem to be an issue distant from the priorities of cities, but considering the potential that soil regeneration has for reducing global carbon emissions, as well as the link with food production, drinking water provision and many other benefits to urban citizens, a strong case can be made for strengthening the connection between the city and the natural systems it depends on for creating a healthy and resilient living environment.

Valencia. Photo: Chantal van Ham

The business case for investment in soil health

It is promising that the World Business Council for Sustainable Development with a wide range of partners launched a new publication, “The Business Case for Investing in Soil Health, which recognises that soil health is the foundation of our food system. This is underlined by case studies from 10 companies across the agricultural value-chain on five continents which demonstrate that investment is already happening and returns are being made.

The publication explains that investing to improve soil health is an opportunity to increase crop productivity, secure supply chains and meet the growing food needs of our global population, to protect and improve our precious water and biodiversity resources, and enhance the livelihoods of the one in three people worldwide who work in agriculture.

One case study, from India, describes how Mahindra, a global federation of companies with an operational presence in over 100 countries, has been acting on soils to improve water availability in its operational regions and local communities. Improved land management practices, such as the establishment of sediment traps and ponds, have demonstrated they can help slow the flow of water, reducing soil erosion and resultant silting of water infrastructures downstream. As a result of the initiative, more than 4,000 farmers benefited from a two-meter rise in average groundwater levels, whilst allowing a doubling of land under irrigation and as a result, a doubling of per capita income.

If we bring this approach to an urban context, a valuable case for investing in soil can be made to slow water flow, control erosion and carefully select plant and tree species that will thrive in existing soil conditions. For example, degraded soils are a big concern in New York, where lead contamination levels can be high (NYT, July 2018). Soil is needed to fight flooding and to create new coastal wetlands that can help buffer the impact of future storms. The PUREsoil NYC program was launched, which in addition to pursuing environmental goals intends to focus on cleaning contaminated community gardens. It will make it possible to use native soils and reduce costs of transporting excavated materials elsewhere and bringing clean soil into the city from remote areas. Municipalities in other parts of the world are considering similar solutions.

 Let the earth breathe

In light of the global discussions to determine concrete action for the protection of biodiversity, sustain life on earth and to strengthen the response to the threat of climate change, the work and cooperation to protect and restore soil represents a common denominator for cities as well as rural and agricultural landscapes. It means working with nature, not against it, by bringing the needs of people in balance with the needs of ecosystems.

The major challenge soil is facing is its invisibility. However, we benefit from a growing knowledge base among scientists, governments, business and the public that soil is the motor of life. We also have the technological capacity to identify very precisely the priority locations for stopping soil erosion, improving agricultural production, and restoring ecosystem, and mapping the benefits this brings.

The future of land and natural resources will depend on the extent to which we will be able to establish appropriate incentives and rewards for responsible land management practices that support the integration of biodiversity and ecosystems in decision making and investment at all levels. Restoring soil, should become a top priority for cities, national governments, businesses, and society at large to move from seeing soil as an object from which profit can be extracted, towards one that recognises the interdependence of people and nature.

We see the development of a wide range of inspiring local actions for sustainably growing food in cities and villages led by indigenous groups and communities in cities around the world. Examples are: “Incredible edible” in the UK, which creates connected communities through the power of sustainable local food growing, micro-gardening, aquaponics and urban farming in Africa, which enables soilless horticultural production in small urban spaces, such as flat roofs, balconies, yards and even in tyres or small recycled boxes, the “Slow Food” movement and the “Global Ecovillage Network” worldwide. It is these many unsung heroes who will increase the attention for the value of healthy soil and help shape the new future and encourage others to join in the action.

The private sector is an important partner in protecting and restoring soil through greening the supply chain, helping to prevent pollution and overexploitation. Activities, such as setting environmental standards that all suppliers must meet, creating performance goals for verification of the reduction of impacts on soil across the supply chain as well as partnerships to create new ways to improve environmental performance, can make a big difference. The Healthy Ecosystem Metric is a simple decision support tool designed to help companies understand their impacts on biodiversity, soil and water. It helps to identify high-risk locations where a company is most likely to experience biodiversity, soil and water risks or create negative impacts and informs strategies to safeguard natural capital and drive improved business performance.

Initiatives like these show how much we can benefit from having more champions to help in making the soil visible in boardrooms, landscape planning and design, the farming community, as well as among public and private land managers, in the media and in education at all levels.

“From here on, the primary judgment of all human institutions, professions, programs and activities will be determined by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually-enhancing human/Earth relationship”– Thomas Berry, author of The Dream of the Earth.

Chantal van Ham
Brussels

On The Nature of Cities

References

Lester R. Brown, 2012, Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity

IUCN, 2015, Issues brief on land degradation and climate change, the multiple benefits of sustainable land management in the drylands

Robert I. McDonald, M’Lisa Colbert, Maike Hamann, Rohan Simkin, Brenna Walsh, 2018, Nature in the Urban Century, The Nature Conservancy

Richard Schiffman, July 2018, New York Times, The city’s buried treasure isn’t under the dirt, it is the dirt

UN World Soil Day, http://www.un.org/en/events/soilday/

UN, 2018, Polluting our soils is polluting our future

 

 

The Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework

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The team working for the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework – EU Support project implemented by Expertise France participated to the international summit The Nature of Cities (TNOC) from the 4th to the 7th of June at the University of Paris Sorbonne of which the objective is to mobilize cities, metropolitan areas and subnational governments.

See the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework – EU Support Project’s video of the event below.

TNOC Summit represented a unique opportunity for the project team to engage stakeholders on the establishment of a common roadmap for cities, metropolitan areas and subnational governments, in close collaboration with the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability), with the perspective to support an ambitious international agreement for biodiversity at the COP 15 of the CBD which will be held in Kunming, China, in October 2020.

For more information about the project: http://www.4post2020bd.net.

Oliver Hillel

About the Writer:
Oliver Hillel

Oliver Hillel has been a Programme Officer at the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (SCBD, administered by the United Nations Environment Programme) in Montreal, Canada, for the last 6 years. He is responsible for the issues of South-South cooperation, sub-national implementation (involvement of States, Regions and cities), Sustainable Tourism, and Island Biodiversity.

Elisabeth Chouraki

About the Writer:
Elisabeth Chouraki

Elisabeth Chouraki coordinates the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework - EU support project implemented by Expertise France and funded by the European Union.

The Power of N

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A review of Vitamin N, by Richard Louv. 2016. ISBN:1616205784. Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill. 304 pages. Buy the book.

The fact that we have come to the point where we must be instructed on how to build a sandcastle is disconcerting, and something of which we need to sit up and take note.
Combating nature-deficit disorder—the new self-help fad, or something really useful?

When I stumbled on Richard Louv’s book Vitamin N (2016 Algoquin Books) my initial reaction was one of shock. Have we really come to this, the point where we have to instruct people how to engage with nature? Is the ease of being in nature so lost to us that it has now become the realm of self-help books? Louv, a well-known figure in the United States as co-founder of the Children and Nature Network and author of several nature and children related books has recently published Vitamin N, lauded as “the essential guide to a nature-rich life: 500 ways to enrich your family’s health and happiness”.

I must admit his work was relatively new to me, and I was immediately intrigued. The point of departure for Vitamin N is the familiar notion that we have become increasingly distanced from nature and are missing out on all the significant health and wellbeing benefits, and suffering from “nature-deficit disorder” (Tim Beatley has written on his work in TNOC before and for more on Louv’s previous work, and on biophila more generally have a look at this article).

The great joy of popular writing such as Louv’s is the freedom with which authors can peg their colors to the post and I envy his confident stand on the significant role of nature in growing healthier and better adjusted children and adults. This is something most of us know, but as scientists we are constantly looking for the numbers, the proof, and the validity and while the evidence is certainly there and growing, Louv does not waste his time in justifying his point of departure.

Don’t get me wrong, a brief glance at some background on Louv suggests he has earned his stripes in the realm of matters urban and ecological. My point is simply that I find reading urban ecology in this popular genre disquieting for me. As an academic based at a university, and in the scientific discipline of ecology, I am generally bound to strictly evidence-based writing where we build on each other’s work in tiny increments. Simultaneously I am always left with a good streak of jealousy too for the faith and ease of expression.

So, do we in fact need “Vitamin N” in our lives and on our bookshelves?

I found the book a delight. The range of advice and insights offered is extensive. Examples runs from the somewhat mundane, to the well-informed, and to the downright whacky. On the mundane side are things like “go fishing” and “build a fort” and I guess here one has to be sympathetic to his desire to reach as broad an audience as possible and I had to acknowledge and park my own nature privilege. I guess if one was truly new to nature, or perhaps to a place, these kinds of guidelines could instill just the kind of confidence needed to initiate an outdoor activity.

To this end Louv gives gentle assurance on what to watch out for and what is generally allowed. The book is richly rewarding in offering up well-informed and eclectic ideas, and I found these particularly rewarding. Louv draws on a wealth of personal experience, insight and knowledge for example invoking Sara St. Antoine’s understanding of child”s play in “plot the escape of the dolls” in promoting standard play ideas out of doors. Another example is the “find your inner bloodhound” where Louv draws on research from the University of California, Berkeley, on human scent-tracking and suggests a related activity for children. Almost every idea or activity proposed includes suggested material for the interested reader to follow up.

The supporting bibliography is extensive. On the more whacky end of the spectrum is the story of the guy who weighted the cost of a truck load of dirt against the cost of another video game for his kids and went with the load of dirt. Another is the “create a sandcastle or village, and sand people, and then crown yourself. Naturally”. We are taken from the mundane to the frivolous, and it is enchanting (subjects not included)!

Missed opportunities and knowledge gaps. Does this speak to the insta-everything generation?

The book takes a stab at the matter of engaging the technology-savvy, on-line kids of today in a chapter titled “High-Tech, High-Nature?”. I feel for my generation (40+) here as I honestly think we do not “get it”. When my 14 year old son explains something funny to me he has seen or read on the internet, a meme, or a comment from a prominent YouTuber, I am often left frankly bewildered. The suggestions offered here are laudable and range from the techno-visual to “sound catching”.

I do not think however that it is enough, and it all feels too solitary. Where is the audience? Perhaps the message is simply that if we don’t catch our youth and nature-infuse them before they become young teenagers it is simply too late (#simplytoolate). Making nature sexy to young adults is an ongoing concern of mine, and while the activities and suggestions here are great, I am not sure this is something that Louv resolves in his book. That said, throughout the text concerted effort is made to be inclusive, and in general it works. There is reference to the disabled, the young, the old, the new-to-nature, those with particular conditions, and direct engagement with different cultures. In addition to these overt references there are numerous points in the text where the “voices of others” are included with quotes from parents, caregivers, teachers and other members of society, all of which serve to set the reader at ease. It is a generosity on the part of the author too, to share the joy of making the point he sets out to, and it is well received.

 How might this look in a Global South context?

The book is unapologetically situated in the Global North, with regular reference to North American and United Kingdom circumstances, species, clubs, resources and opportunities. I stumbled on one reference to South Africa and Australia, which notes the potential dangers of snake hunting in these countries.

I think an equivalent book speaking to the global South would look very different. In South Africa, my home, it would have to include attention to encountering and engaging with the homeless, concerns around water health, animal-related safety, a diversity of experience with nature among participating members often related to socio-economic circumstance, and watching out for edgy property owners who may be hostile to unexplained adventurers on their land. That said, these are just the kinds of things that keep many South African youth indoors and I think a book like Louv’s Vitamin N is just as necessary here as elsewhere in the world.

Before I head out to rub my toes in the dirt, some final thoughts

Louv’s Vitamin N certainly got me thinking. The fact that we have come to the point where we must be instructed on how to build a sandcastle is disconcerting, and something of which we need to sit up and take note. I enjoyed the book, and did feel it sought a breadth of engagement to be as inclusive as possible, or certainly as it set out to be.

It did however raised questions for me, like “Whose interests are not met in this book?”, and “How do we really engage with these on-line beings that are the children of today?” I am not sure we have answers here, and while Louv’s efforts are to be applauded, there is still certainly work to be done.

My final question to myself of course is, “How can I too write like this?” Louv achieves something akin to a friendly fireside chat. His information is substantive and eclectic making for interesting ideas, all presented in wonderfully succinct prose.

Pippin Anderson
Cape Town

On The Nature of Cities

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

The Power of Unkempt Wilderness in the Hearts of Berlin and Buenos Aires

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Today I would like to celebrate the First Congress of the Society for Urban Ecology (SURE), which took place at the end of July in Berlin, just in the place where urban ecology emerged as a discipline. And also I’ll consider what our discipline of urban ecology has to say to people in cities such as Berlin and my hometown, Buenos Aires.

The conference brought together more than 300 people from different continents, who spoke in keynote presentations and symposia. It was an encouraging opportunity to meet old friends, members of The Nature of Cities blog who only knew each other through their posted essays, and also some Urban Ecology “celebrities” (those famous guys of the literature).

Twenty-five speakers participated in the symposium entitled “The Nature of Cities: The diverse roots of coupled social-ecological research that leads to design of urban environments” giving credit to the excellent idea conceived one year ago by ​​David Maddox, encouraging readers to reconnect to nature and to think about the necessity to maintain urban nature and biodiversity.

The conference reinforced ideas that have been discussed in the last decades in the context of disciplines like Urban and Landscape Ecology, Geography, Landscape Architecture, Urbanism, Sociology, among others, showing that cities are complex socio-techno-ecological systems impacted by external drivers at different scales (as discussed by Nancy Grimm). That each city has a distinctive cultural heritage, development history, planning tradition and social structure, offering at the same time opportunities to reimagine and reinvent a sustainable future for all species (Thomas Elmqvist).

Naturalistic plantings resembling native meadows in Southern Germany. Photo: Ana Faggi
Naturalistic plantings resembling native meadows in Southern Germany. Photo: Ana Faggi

As expected in times of climate and demographic change, special attention was placed on the relevance to livability, resilience and sustainability of green and blue infrastructure in densely built-up areas (Giovanni Sanesi). As many presentations showed, investments in such infrastructure represent win-win ways to reconcile urbanization with the protection of ecosystems, landscape ecological functions and processes (Cecilia Herzog).

Nonetheless, other evidence showed that in many cases urban park designs frequently do not reflect the necessary full spectrum of ecosystem services that we care about considering needs, values and perceptions (Jürgen Breuste) and that global trends in urban design and planning are responsible for sadly homogenous flora in gardens across latitudes, when in fact native plantings would easily support biodiversity and be more locally relevant (Maria Ignatieva).

Naturalistic plantings resembling native meadows in Southern Germany. Photo: Ana Faggi
Naturalistic plantings resembling native meadows in Southern Germany. Photo: Ana Faggi

The Congress’ message was this: people want cities that are livable, resilient and smart (Christiane Weber), in which they can appreciate, be aware and celebrate worthy things. What works in nature to produce healthy and resilient systems? What works in communities of people to make heathy and livable cities? Let’s (re)discover these things and apply them in our cities and towns. Wei-Ning Xiang offered useful advice in a keynote presentation: learn from the past. This is a fundamental principle in all ecological restoration projects!

A livable street in the old Erfurt, Germany. Photo: Ana Faggi
A livable street in the old Erfurt, Germany. Photo: Ana Faggi

A resilient building in Aying, Germany. Photo: Ana Faggi
A resilient building in Aying, Germany. Photo: Ana Faggi

Smart Meran, Italy. Urban Agriculture downtown. Photo: Ana Faggi
Smart Meran, Italy. Urban Agriculture downtown. Photo: Ana Faggi

At the end of the day, on the way to my accommodation in the Steglitz neighborhood, I tried to recognize in the urban matrix of Berlin evidence of our discussions during the conference. They were hot days and suburban train travellers showed signs of climate discomfort, showing the importance of the urban green and the need of improvements in transport conditions in the heat waves that are likely to be more frequent. Such simple things as windows that would open, makes us realize that good design is secured by cultural norms and at the same time by environmental realities and imagination. On the other hand, the massive turnout of people in the parks and lakes in the late afternoons confirmed how they profit from the existing green and blue infrastructure within the city. The appearance of mammals — a fox between parked cars, squirrels and porcupines in a front garden — was to me a sign of a livable, green Berlin unlike the everyday in the Buenos Aires metropolis, where I live.

Berlin Botanic Garden. Photo: Ana Faggi
Berlin Botanic Garden. Photo: Ana Faggi

Buenos Aires is a good example demonstrating that cities are products of history and therefore socially conditioned. The European immigration in the late 19th century shaped the city.  Today we can recognise the Spanish and Italian Heritage in the city grid and design and, at the same time, the French and English influence in the signature of green areas.

Tres de Febrero Park, Buenos Aires. Photo: Ana Faggi
Tres de Febrero Park, Buenos Aires. Photo: Ana Faggi

Plaza Dorrego, downtown Buenos Aires. Photo: Ana Faggi
Plaza Dorrego, downtown Buenos Aires. Photo: Ana Faggi

The city has a high population density, which comes at the expense of green space — just 6 square metres of green space per person within the city area. In trying to regreen the city, today the local government is revitalising green spaces, creating at the same time a network of green corridors with bicycle lanes that connect parks, plazas, the waterfront and an urban ecological reserve.

Micaela Bastidas Park in Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires. Photo: Ana Faggi
Micaela Bastidas Park in Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires. Photo: Ana Faggi

Costanera Sur reserve, Buenos Aires. Photo: Ana Faggi
Costanera Sur reserve, Buenos Aires. Photo: Ana Faggi

This reserve is an important focus for environmental conservation and education downtown and resembles the conservation area Schöneberger Südgelände, one of the excursion destinations offered during the SURE conference.

In Buenos Aires the 370 hectares reclaimed from the river were very soon spontaneously colonized by humid forests, grasslands, scrublands and wetlands. The new landscape offered shelter and food to many bird species and other animals. By the early 1980s the lagoons and grasslands attracted the attention of bird watchers and the place also became a meeting point for joggers, cyclists, students and naturalists. In 1986, the City Council granted protection to the area in response to claims from many local Non-Governmental Organizations. Since 2005 the natural reserve “Costanera Sur” is included in the Ramsar list of important wetlands for bird conservation.

The Schöneberger Südgelände, was an originally desolate freight railyard built between 1880–1890, mostly abandoned since1952. Photo: Ana Faggi
The Schöneberger Südgelände, was an originally desolate freight railyard built between 1880–1890, mostly abandoned since1952. Photo: Ana Faggi

On the majority of the Schöneberger Südgelände site, also natural development began to take place, which, by 1981, had led to a richly structured mosaic of dry grasslands, tall herbs, shrub vegetation and individual woodlands, then for over four decades an almost untouched new wilderness (Kowarik & Lager 2005).

Schöneberger Südgelände, Berlin. Photo: Ana Faggi
Schöneberger Südgelände, Berlin. Photo: Ana Faggi

Schöneberger Südgelände, Berlin. Photo: Ana Faggi
Schöneberger Südgelände, Berlin. Photo: Ana Faggi

The Buenos Aires ecological reserve, on the other hand, is a landfill area created in the La Plata estuary using the Dutch “polder” system, which was invented in 1978. A few blocks away from downtown, the embankments were built with demolition materials brought from highway construction works. The polders were filled with silt and sand from the river and drained. However, as in the Schöneberger Südgelände in Berlin, the area was abandoned and the spontaneous sucession resulted in an extraordinary urban wilderness. In both brownfields regeneration areas, visitors are surprised at the beauty of spontaneous vegetation and the force of Nature in reconquering land.

Both cases are good triggers for debate, especially talking about restoration in complex socio-techno-ecological systems as cities are. Ecological restoration is defined by the process of repairing damage caused by humans to the diversity and dynamics of native ecosystems. What is going on in the new urban wilderness is more inclusive, covering reclamation projects, replacements, ecosystem creation and naturalized areas. In general, the challenges of restoration are difficult if not impossible; this is particularly true in cities where the intentional ecological manipulation of ecosystems is subject to variables that go beyond the ecological understanding.

Schöneberger Südgelände is an example of a brownfield reclamation; Costanera Reserve of the creation of a terrestrial ecosystem in a river bed. Both areas have received relatively little systematic stewardship and have become, over time, naturalized. Both are threatened or — depending our values and perceptions — modified by invasions, and are living examples of the New Nature in cities. As exemplary biodiversity urban bastions they mirror the stories that gave them life.

In many ways, they show us that we are living in a new time, where old assumptions — including the ecological ones but also societal choices — must be reconsidered, looking for a compromise in restoration projects where the main objectives should be to improve ecosystem services while reconnecting people with local, native, and spontaneous nature.

Ana Faggi
Buenos Aires

On The Nature of Cities

 

I. Kowarik, A. Langer 2005. Natur-Park Südgelände: Linking Conservation and Recreation in an Abandoned Railyard in Berlin.

 

 

 

 

 

The Promise of the Big City: Migrants and Refugees Will Come to Your City. It’s Not a Novel Idea, but Cities Act Like it Is

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“My husband is in Moscow.”

“My son and his wife moved to Moscow a few years ago.”

“My brother and sister work in Moscow.”

“I want to go to Moscow. I can find a job there, and make more money than here.”

Cities in Central Asia and around the world that turn a blind eye to migrant issues are potentially missing a big opportunity for themselves.

We heard all sorts of versions of this story for almost three months while we collected visas in Kyrgyzstan and walked through the Pamirs, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

Nearly every time we spoke with a local family, which was frequently over tea, questions about our day-to-day lives inevitably circled around to their relatives living abroad. It seemed like most people we spoke with had at least one close family member in Russia who sent money back home.

That’s not surprising, given the region of the world we’re walking in. For many families living in these former Soviet countries, independence some 25 years ago has unraveled into a different kind of dependency, one still hinged to its richer big brother.

tajik-horseman
Many people in Central Asia have limited opportunities for work. Their animals are their main source of income. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot

Integrating migrants

Clearly, this is not a story that unfolds only between Russia and its neighbors. It’s the same yarn woven throughout history. People are always moving around the planet looking for better lives, or they have been forced to leave their homelands for one reason or another. It is playing out today as Central Americans head north into the U.S.; in Germany, with its large Turkish community; and anywhere else in Europe now dealing with the issue of accepting large waves of migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa.

Migrants and human migration are not novel ideas, but countries and cities often act like they are. They are surprised when big groups of people arrive, and fall into some state of fear-driven paralysis that hampers efforts to quickly integrate newcomers into their new urban lives.

It’s a strange dynamic considering how long this has been happening historically, and how it is likely to continue into the foreseeable future. In a world filled with uncertainty, one thing is almost sure: cities will continue to be the place where migrants land. The age of the megacity is upon us, and millions more people from everywhere will flock to these places for their promise and possibility. These newcomers may be wanted or not, they may be skilled or unskilled, they may weave themselves into their new societies or they may be marginalized—but they will keep coming.

central-asia-landscape
Farmers do the best they can to use whatever flat land they can find in between the mountainous areas of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot

So, how are cities going to integrate these migrants? When will cities and the people who run them stop pretending that the current system is good enough? When will restrictive laws that keep outsiders out be turned around to celebrate diversity, inclusiveness, and the global community? How are employers in cities going to learn what hidden talents or skills these migrants have and how their natural potential can be used for something other than building high rise apartments, washing dishes, picking vegetables, or scrubbing toilets?

There’s an opposite view worth considering, as well. How can cities stay globally competitive with the local talent they have while also developing a strategy to attract and absorb migrants who want to be there? How are cities going to keep families together and stop losing their people to the dream towns across the border? How can they reinvent the conversation that often centers on the “lack of resources and opportunities” to one that adopts an abundance, “there’s-enough-for-all-of-us-to-grow-and-prosper” mentality? How can cities use their young generation’s enthusiasm, curiosity, and social connectivity skills to generate wealth and stability in their regional surroundings?

Cities that turn a blind eye to these issues are potentially missing a big opportunity for themselves.

tajik-family3
While families wait for their loved ones to come home, many of them are dependent on the funds relatives send from Russia, Turkey or other countries. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot

Pamir Park waiting. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
Pamir Park waiting. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot

Young Tajik woman. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot
Young Tajik woman. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot

The Kirghiz family spending the summer in the mountain with their livestock. Photo: Pierre Noel
The Kirghiz family spending the summer in the mountain with their livestock. Photo: Pierre Noel

We met young men and women, students and recent university graduates, who spoke their local languages, Russian, English, maybe some Turkish or Persian, and even a little bit of Korean. They were studying or earning degrees in accounting, business, biology, chemistry, economics, finance, management, marketing, teaching, and tourism. They see so few options at home. Some may get okay work after graduation in their field study. Many will marry young and start families without adequate financial means, causing the cycle of poverty to repeat. And, at some point, they may have to leave and go where the money is; inevitably, that probably means a move west.

The westward gaze

To Central Asians, the first step west usually means getting a job in their capital cities, and then using those credentials to jump to Russia, Europe or Turkey. A move to North America may also be on the wish list, but many know that’s a faraway dream steeped in visa-collecting complexity.

Previously, when Russian’s centralized power distributed wealth regionally (whether it was justly distributed is an altogether different topic), people had security in the form of jobs (reflective of the “everyone works” dictates that fanned out from Moscow), education until the 11th grade, and access to some amount of health care. There were factories, agriculture, and opportunities in-country—and there were ways people could stay near home and their families, a woman told me in Khorog, the biggest town in the mountainous Pamirs region in eastern Tajikistan. People struggled then, but they struggle more now, she added, with a tinge of remorse. “We work for bread. There’s not much money for anything else,” she said.

Today, although the growing capital cities of Bishkek, Dushanbe, and Tashkent are budding places for an increasing number of university students, blue- and white-collar workers, construction sites, housing projects, commercial centers, and even tourists (especially European cyclists crisscrossing Asia), there’s too much competition for too few jobs, and the career and income trajectory is limited. Leaving is frequently the only logical option.

For now, it’s still Russia that people here have their sights on. This yearning comes down to the basic principles of human well-being: people want the better quality of life money can buy, and they believe they will earn more money abroad than at home.

figure
Total amount of remittance sent from Russia for 2012-2015 and Q1 2015 – Q12016.

Word on the street is that the average person in the cities we visited earns less than $500 a month in their home countries; $200-$300 was frequently mentioned as a monthly wage in more rural parts of the countries. According to the World Bank, the 2015 annual gross national income (or GNI) per capita (formerly GNP per capita) was $1,170 for Kyrgyzstan, $1,240 for Tajikistan, and $2,150 for Uzbekistan.

Central Asians told us they can and are willing to trade the good, but low-paying, jobs here for less skilled, better-paying work abroad, primarily in Moscow. That was the dominant idea until Russia recently passed new mandates for work patents that give migrants permission to work legally, as well as its recent economic slowdown and the depreciation of the ruble against the dollar, which started making the country less attractive and directly hit local families’ pocketbooks.

The World Bank reported that remittance flows (money sent by migrant workers back to their home countries) to Europe and Central Asia were severely affected in 2015, contracting by 20.3 percent because of Russia’s downturn. The organization expects to see a recovery in 2016, with remittances expected to grow by 5.1 percent to $36.3 billion, from $34.6 billion in 2015.

The Eurasian Research Institute, an Almaty, Kazakhstan branch of Akhmet Yassawi University, reported that more than 60 percent of the remittance inflow to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan comes from Russia. In 2015, the amount of remittances sent from Russia, which hosts 12 million international migrants, to Uzbekistan decreased by 57 percent; for Tajikistan, this number dropped by 66 percent, and Kyrgyzstan saw a 46 percent fall.

tajik-family4
Family members, usually grandparents or older aunts and uncles, take care of young children whose parents are working in Moscow. Photo: Bangkok Barcelona On Foot

Again, though, this not an issue Central Asian cities should struggle through alone. It is a world issue needing a global conversation that involves words such as “equal” and “fair access to resources”, “just livelihoods” and “sustainable inclusiveness.” The thought process really needs to shift from “How can we keep people out” to “How can we help each other earn more than enough for a loaf of bread.”

The magnetic pull of urban environments puts cities in a unique position to rethink their own boundaries. Getting masses of migrants to love their hometowns and adopted cities even more will help bridge communities near and far.

Jenn Baljko

See more about the trip here.

***

We asked locals many questions about national and city development and progress. The conversations we had with locals, however, are not unique to this region. Countries and cities around the world are dealing with gender issues, managing shadow economies and informal trading practices, and building a grassroots activist movement to create more livable and sustainable cities. We’ll explore these topics in another upcoming essay and several future podcasts.

The Puzzle of Delhi’s Air Pollution

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The recent World Health Organisation (WHO) report on Ambient Air Pollution for 2014 showcases a variety of alarming results: across 1600 cities from 91 countries, and covering the period from 2008 to 2013, the cities with the lowest levels of urban air quality in the world lie in India. Delhi ranks as the worst globally for the highest measurement of fine particulate matter, PM 2.5 (smaller than 2.5 microns) of 153 micrograms (one-millionth of a gram) per cubic meter of air. For particulate matter with less than a 10 micron-meter aerodynamic diameter, PM 10, the cities of Gwalior, Raipur and Delhi rank amongst the highest in the world.

These are startling results, which corroborate the anecdotal evidence that populace in Delhi are beginning to experience through the deteriorating respiratory health especially of babies and infants. There have been a range of official reactions to this statistic, including suggestions that pollution levels are being overestimated. Irrespective, the fact that air pollution in Delhi is a growing and serious problem is unambiguously understood and acknowledged by a range of experts. The graphic below shows that Delhi’s air quality is now even worse than Beijing’s, a city which has battled with high pollution levels in the last decade. It is imperative that we unveil the reasons and analysis behind Delhi’s pollution puzzle — an issue that is slowly gaining relevance amongst the government and civil society.

Source: Scientific American, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/files/2014/03/Air-Pollution-Action-China-vs-Delhi.jpg
Source: Scientific American, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/files/2014/03/Air-Pollution-Action-China-vs-Delhi.jpg

India’s Central Pollution Control Board categorises respirable particulate matter (PM10), fine particulate matter (PM2.5), oxides of nitrogen, ozone, sulphur dioxide, lead, carbon monoxide, benzene and ammonia as pollutants, with national threshold values set for each. Data is currently collected at stations across Delhi by multiple agencies like the Central Pollution Control Board, the Delhi Pollution Control Committee, and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. A first step to understanding the city’s pollution levels requires a deeper look into its changing pollution loads.

Vehicular pollution, industrial pollution, waste burning, and construction-sector related activities are all important pollutant sources for the city — in spite of the often held belief that the transportation sector in itself is the only major contributor to Delhi’s pollution problem.

A street in Delhi. Photo: David Maddox
A street in Delhi. Photo: David Maddox

The pollution problem is also tied in with the energy crisis that the city faces. The production of power is outpaced by its demand from Delhi and its suburbs’ rising energy needs as a result of rapidly developing infrastructure, large real estate investments of commercial complexes, hotels, malls, hospitals and high-rise residential buildings. The inability of the grid to currently meet this demand coupled with the customer ability to pay for high-end, modern working and living conditions has resulted in a proliferation of diesel generators that provide electricity often to entire neighbourhoods in the city and its vicinity. The combustion from diesel is a significant source of ambient air pollution which the residents are increasingly inhaling. Further, the burning of post-harvest rice stalks from surrounding states is another reason for the smog that permeates Delhi during the winter time.

While the knowledge of these various sources exists, there is a limited understanding about the details of pollution source apportionments and their changing nature. Over the last decade various policy drivers have contributed to a shifting pollution load. While the relocation of industry to the outskirts of the city after Supreme Court orders temporarily cleared up the air, industry surrounding the city is still a significant source of pollution. The benefits of the switch to CNG-based vehicles about a decade ago too have now diminished with the large increase in the number of vehicles on the road in the duration since the policy change. A re-evaluation of the different sources and their weighted contributions to Delhi’s air quality is required to map out the extent of the pollution conundrum at hand.

Creating such a source-apportioned map however requires a rigorous database to work with. The National Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Programme reports air quality data from manual stations. As per the 2011-12, there were 523 operational stations and 700 sanctioned stations, and a Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Programme which consists of 16 stations. The data generated by these stations are disseminated online to the public. For automatic stations, the Central Pollution Control Board allows a real time data search, which can be used for downloading time-weighted average data for a number of intervals less than 24 hours. Currently, this is linked to 38 stations across the country although data is only available from 23 stations. Various degrees of analysis exist using these readings, particularly for major cities in the country. However, the lack of protocols for standardised data collection and monitoring have resulted in a fragmented database which make it difficult to draw long-term results with confidence. Further, the capacity for real-time data monitoring is heavily skewed towards urban centres, with little data collection taking place in rural areas – the latter of which are estimated to have pollution levels which are as high as urban areas if not more.

It is not unusual to slip into a comparison between Delhi and Beijing, the latter which until recently bore the burden of being the most polluted city in the world. There is an interesting and stark difference between the two cities though in terms of the response to this statistic. In Beijing, the deteriorating air quality became a central issue for the outcry from civil society ultimately leading to the reforms currently put in place. By contrast, the concern by Delhi’s inhabitants has at best been meek. Air pollution has a different place in the hierarchy of problems faced by the two geographies, and in Indian cities such as Delhi, the issue is slotted amongst other more immediate urgencies such as the availability and governance of electricity and water; waste disposal; other health concerns including sanitation; and crime. The city’s deteriorating air pollution and its grave health impacts have consequently failed to mobilize the kind of public outcry and response that could have been expected.

Breaking this gridlock of apathy will require undertaking rigorous data assessment and monitoring of pollution levels and their associated health impacts — a database that at present remains fragmented. The response from the government itself has been mixed, with some immediate responses critiquing the WHO report for incorrectly representing Delhi’s pollutant levels as opposed to thinking ahead to the solutions required for what is clearly a serious health concern. According to the Public Health Foundation of India, exposure to fine particulates on a sustained basis can cause a range of upper and lower respiratory ailments, including chronic bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, and acute lower respiratory infections. World Bank (2012) estimates show that exposure to PM is estimated to contribute to over 100,000 premature deaths annually in the country. Additionally, high levels of ambient air pollution result in over 48,000 new cases of bronchitis every year and approximately 370,000 hospital admissions.The lack of widespread awareness of the health-impact assessments from high pollution levels has prolonged the public apathy within the city.

Turning back to China’s case provides some examples of the steps which can be taken to tackle air pollution. China announced setting a budget and targets for air quality improvements and ten national-level measures, some of which are: reduced emission of multi-pollutants; promotion of industry upgrades and restructuring; acceleration of companies’ technology upgrading; acceleration of energy restructuring; enforcement of energy-saving and environmental protection in market entrance requirements; application of market-oriented instruments and environmental economic policies; establishment of regional collaboration mechanisms; establishment of monitoring, alerting and emergency response systems for air pollution episodes. A third of air pollution in Beijing is calculated to come from vehicle exhaust fumes and to tackle this China plans to remove six million vehicles that do not meet exhaust emission standards and strength control on gas and diesel vehicle emissions.

As India gathers expertise to address its own air pollution concerns, there are a number of recommended actions, analogous with working towards increasing political will and decreasing public apathy. Understanding the impact of ambient air particulate pollution on health — as it stands in different cities — and communicating these results so that they are part of the larger citizen consciousness is essential to an ownership of the city’s health by its inhabitants. Pollutant thresholds and standards for vehicles, industry, waste management and power plants are to be re-examined with a built-in framework for regular updates, and monitoring and evaluation of the policies and standards.

Nature-based solutions such as incorporating urban green spaces into city planning are also important for a longer-term maintenance of air quality. Rural monitoring stations to enable informed policy making for non-urban areas are equally essential. The effort will need to involve a cross-ministerial intervention, spanning officials from environment, health, transportation, industry, and energy-related ministries. A concerted government, scientific and civil society push can change the quality of air — and life — for all of Delhi’s residents. In spite of this being an environmental-health hazard which cuts across the categories of class and location amongst others, the perceived indifference to the issue is unfortunate. One hopes that the efforts being taken in this direction will lead to a larger coordinated effort for a more liveable city.

Radhika Khosla
Delhi

On The Nature of Cities

 

The Quest for Governance Modes on Sustainable Urbanization

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However complex the urban sustainability question is, the facts are clear to all. Over the next four decades, the global urban population is expected to nearly double, with the vast majority of this happening in Asian and African cities; if we do not rethink and coalesce our approaches and practices, there will be rising urban inequality and conflicts, underpinned by accelerated resource scarcity and uncontainable environmental impacts.

What modes of urban governance are emerging across the developed and developing world that demonstrate that it is possible to tackle the underlying challenges of urban growth, urban poverty, and environmental unsustainability? 

This was the question that brought the authors of this essay together. We write as a group of 18 world social science fellows on urban governance, gathered by the International Social Science Council (ISSC) and Cities Alliance, from Sept. 8-13, 2015 the in Durban, South Africa, hosted by the University of KwaZulu Natal and the Municipal Institute of Learning of eThekwini Municipality, under the professorial guidance of Mark Swilling (Sustainability Institute-Stellenbosch University South Africa) and Etienne Nel (Comparative Research Programme on Poverty, CROP), University of Otago-New Zealand.

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Extreme weather and flooding are risks that cities face from climate change.

The task at hand was not to formulate a mode of urbanization governance for urban sustainability, but rather to draw on our differing disciplines—sociology, land management, architecture, political science, social and environmental justice, gender studies, urban geography, anthropology, spatial planning, economics, and environmental science—to generate insights around one question that knitted our case studies: the question delineated above.

Firstly, the question enabled us to realize that demonstrating the type(s) of urban governance that would potentially lead cities into a sustainable future is a task that no single theory or approach can claim to have researched extensively and infinitively, and therefore what works at multiple scales and in different contexts is something that is yet to be established. We reasoned that transformation via adapting to pressures such as climate change, globalization, social fluidity, or relocation projects is not a linear process that would necessarily be inscribed into a model to ultimately have a technical fix.

Therefore we all had, and continue to have, a mutual responsibility to break the disciplinary walls and become transdiciplinarians who can provide useful leads to tackling today’s global urban challenges, majorly: urban poverty, climate change, inequality, social injustice, infectious disease, violence, informal settlement, and the gradual extinction of urban biodiversity.

The case studies

Our case studies were structured around six themes, including: 1) climate change and governance; 2) environmental justice and sustainability; 3) land use, agriculture, and governance; 4) inclusive urban development; 5) urban poverty; and 6) urban environmental sustainability and housing. Although these themes shed light on the nature, extent, and dimensions of sustainability challenges and the implication for urban governance, the general observation was that these consisted of same script, but with different casts. What cut across the different themes is that urban environmental and socio-economic challenges are not site-specific (a feature that the case studies attempted to indicate) and, therefore, are global in nature, thus generating the term glocalities—meaning local examples and evidence that reflect global realities.

IMG_0359
The urban heat island effect is most powerful in the densest parts of cities.

Climate change and governance: The overarching concern under this theme was to explore, with data and examples from Delhi, India; Cape Town, South Africa; and Dhaka, Bangladesh, the role of national governments and municipal authorities in tackling climate change in cities. In Delhi, the inter-linkages between land use/cover, air pollution, urban heat island, and human health have become a clear threat to urban health, which requires enhancing disaster management capabilities within government.

This can be realized through complementing the traditional role of regulating and taxing carbon-intensive activities with data-based pathways to draw the attention and influence of decision-makers and by investment in waste recycling and re-use to avert the impending ecological crisis. This discussion was followed by the case from Cape Town, which sought to understand what enables local governments to initiate and follow through with the process of mainstreaming climate change adaptation. In Cape Town, the author found that the enabling factors included: access to a knowledge base, the availability of resources, political stability, and the presence of dense social networks, which all positively affect adaptation mainstreaming (Lorena Pasquini, 2014). On the one hand, it is such factors that different levels of government and stakeholders need to support with a varied set of interventions, while acknowledging the effects of social network characteristics on facilitating institutional change.

On the other hand, the case on Bangladeshi cities pondered the ways through which urban governance systems make resilience to climate change possible. The evidence presented suggested that a city’s ability to conceive and implement resilience plans is dependent on circumventing cyclical political stalemates, with the purpose of creating situations where national, state and city ruling parties can work together quickly and effectively to implement policies and programmes.

Environmental justice and sustainability: Environmental justice for urban sustainability is context-dependent, but this theme focused on: i) transformative urban politics in the megacities of the global south; ii) inclusive approaches to urban climate adaptation planning and implementation; and iii) evaluating equity and governance in sustainable cities. The initial presentation centered on the environmental justice movement in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the series of statist endeavors to use a deeply militant police force to stall the advocacy agendas of metropolitan solidarities. The evidence illustrated that civic environmentalism is a form of urban politics characterized by social discontent, and that it is often perceived as a facilitator of urban crime and insecurity, thus requiring state intervention.

On one hand, the social and political landscape is one characterized by formally elected city councilors and a metropolitan police force that is accountable to parliament, whereas, on the other, there is continued statist control over environmental civil society groups through the use of strict legislations and intelligence services, thus making cities areas where people’s options are constrained by fear and intolerance for popular movements. By drawing on experiences from Quito (Ecuador) and Surat (India), the next case study laid emphasis on the participation of experts, affected communities, and a wide array of citizens to sustain inclusivity in programmes that incorporate local needs and concerns into adaptation processes and outcomes.

The other approach offered by the discussant was on building targeted partnerships between key government, private, and civil society actors to institutionalize robust decision-making structures, enhance abilities to raise funds, and increase means to directly engage with local community and international actors (Eric Chua, 2015). The presentation that followed gave insight on the importance of institutional synergies in delivering on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11: make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Achieving this goal depends heavily on how coherent national and international efforts are in designing criteria for evaluating equity and governance for city sustainability, meaning that indicators for SDG 11 ought to enable countries to adapt global urban targets to their own national contexts.

Land use, agriculture and governance: Urban land use planning, if based on sustainable development principles, can help address the challenge of informal settlement, tenure insecurity, and—ultimately—urban poverty. This is the premise from which discussants emerged to talk about three topics: i) relocation or renewal? The case of Mona Commons, Jamaica; ii) collaborative sub-urban transformation for land use compatibility in Kampala city; and iii) tackling the challenges of urban poverty through “land-use planning for tenure security”: steps and activities for action in Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

Evidence across the three case studies provided participants with an integrated understanding of the dynamics in urban land use and demonstrated how to effectively utilize policies and planning instruments to manage urban growth and achieve sustainable, equitable, and efficient development outcomes. It was acknowledged, however, that sustainable land use planning for tenure security and poverty reduction is frequently a political act characterized by material interests amongst land administrators in national and municipal offices, land lords, and tenants, with forces that operate not only at different geographical and institutional levels but that are also interlocked in nature. The availability of spatial information is often an obstacle, alongside widespread corruption and an inadequate skills, which pose institutional challenges for planning, forecasting, modelling and monitoring land use change and supporting land use decisions, especially in developing countries (Chigbu, 2015).

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Urban development strategies must address urban poverty

 Inclusive urban development: Due to global capital flows for infrastructure development, economic productivity and affluence have become the manifestations of urban development: special economic zones, office towers, rapid transport corridors, transport terminals, shopping malls, luxury and storied housing projects. Although urbanites at the lowest income scales may seem to have benefited from the economic opportunities that have accompany such growth agendas, the evidence presented by the fellows showed that wealth production in cities has not necessarily contributed to improved living conditions for the vast majority of the urban population.

This urban trend was illustrated across four case studies including: i) avenues in the tropics: trans-disciplinary tools for emerging cities; ii) retrospection of private-state-citizen spatial planning financing model in the global South: potentials and limitations; iii) trajectories of peri-urban futures: mapping spaces of inequality, social justice and sustainability in Manila’s Peri-Urban Fringe; iv) challenges of china’s urbanization and the promise of new-type urbanization. The governance challenge posed by the discussants was how to provide infrastructure and services for rapidly growing populations, how to address multiple issues relating to slums and squatter settlements, and how to deal with the adverse impacts of climate change.

Addressing urban issues, according to the fellows, requires an integrated approach that specifically targets the poor, promotes economic development, treats cities as living ecosystems, and fosters the participation of the private sector and civil society. The role of research and researchers was also questioned in terms of fostering transdisciplinary approaches to generate the knowledge needed to solve urban poverty and to improve the social and environmental living conditions of the vulnerable. The possibilities and benefits of putting the transdisciplinary approach into operation were discussed extensively as a way of enabling researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and urbanites to come together and coproduce knowledge that leads to more collaborative and effective interventions, all in a bid to confront the complexity of solving urban problems.

Urban poverty and governance: What institutions of city governance do impacts poverty, and the fellows under this theme were not referring only to municipal government, but to all agencies of the state that have an interest in the city, as well as private businesses and NGOs. The session illustrated this by centering on two cases: i) urban poverty, neighborhood, and social capital in NYC; and ii) from dumpsite scavenging to waste management systems: political implications for urban governance in the interior of Argentina. In NYC, the evidence indicated that disadvantaged neigbourhoods are characterized by lack of safety and limited resources (low quality housing, low level of trust in neighbors, abandoned public space, limited food resources, limited access to health services and education), which has led to a break down in social capital in three ways: i) bonding (limited contact with neighbors due to lack of trust); iii) bridging (limited contact with persons not experiencing poverty); and linking (limited contact with persons in power). The discussant noted that success in addressing this neigbourhood challenge depends on context, but largely requires anti-poverty interventions that diagnose and act on the three levels of social capital (bridging, bonding, and linking).

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Waste management is a challenge for urban governance.

Conversely, the Argentina case, featuring the cities of Mendoza, Cordoba, and La Plata, focused on the different strategies for the inclusion of informal scavengers into formalized waste management systems. In the presentation, several factors were identified as improving the chances of producing effective, sustainable inclusion, namely: political credibility of the leaders, program stability, and step-by-step formal entitlement of the scavengers and their organizations. At the level of program implementation, evidence stressed the need to articulate public and private interests if the value chain of different materials (plastic, glass, cardboard, etc.) are to be streamlined (Zapata et al. 2013). We used the discussant’s example of waste management to delve into the relationship between the state and suburban governments and capital. Fellows were concerned about whose interests are advanced in city sustainability agendas, and whether the power of capital encourages the state to flout agenda setting and policy making to the disadvantage of the poor.

Urban environmental sustainability and housing: Attention under this theme was drawn to: i) reducing inequality, ramping up environmental quality: Just sustainability in coproduced informal settlement upgrading in Johannesburg; ii) Towards environmental sustainability in African cities: addressing the governance inefficiencies on urban green spaces in Kumasi, Ghana; and iii) Local authority responses to climate change and urban challenges in South Africa – transcending administrative boundaries. Key emphasis in this discussion was on exploring governance modes through which cities can deliver and support environmentally sustainable and equitable housing, as well as the attendant services. The discussants noted that housing and the environmental impact on each other in a number of significant ways, including in terms of water usage, biophysical impacts, sewerage, and flooding.

A major dilemma is how responses to the increasing demand for housing, due to rapidly growing urban populations, can be achieved in an environmentally sustainable and just manner. Policy and planning frameworks, according to one of the fellows, should deliver assistance to low-income households on improving the environmental performance of their homes, and also engaging communities in greening projects at neigbourhood to city levels. In particular, the fellows concluded that city visions and policies for more environmentally sustainable housing have to work with—and not seek to displace—poor households. During this session, the multi-level governance approaches and the growing interest in the role that local governments can play in transformative development and climate change adaptation was also considered by one of the fellows. Particular attention was drawn to the role of collaboration between local governments, especially across urban and rural regions for developing and implementing climate change actions, land use planning, and other elements that are central to achieving sustainable development goals (Leck and Simon, 2014).

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Transforming urban governance requires experts to become transdiciplinarians

Concluding reflections

After presenting the case studies, the concluding reflection for the urban sustainability question was to search for appropriate governance modes that use an incremental approach and that create relationships that facilitate the coproduction of knowledge through joint work with academics of different disciplines in collaboration with policy makers, practitioners and urbanites of different socio-economic backgrounds. In order to provide more insight to this concluding reflection, three questions emerged:

  1. How can urban theory from the Global South shine light on urban transformation? This is a question that needs answers from different fields of urban studies and, therefore, requires a transdisciplinary approach.
  2. Within a number of complex urban crises, what emerging processes can we identify across our case studies?
  3. Rethinking truth to power: what role/position is there for the researcher within urban transformation? What models of coproduction of knowledge are emerging and how effective are they? How can we enhance/measure coproduction of knowledge?

Buyana Kareem
Kampala
with…Olumuyiwa Adegun (Johannesburg), Collins Adjei Mensah (Cape Coast), Saleh Ahmed (Tucson), Isabelle Anguelovski (Barcelona), Ruishan Chen (Shanghai), Uchendu Eugene Chigbu (Munich), Aakriti Grover (Delhi), Alice Hertzog (Zurich), Tracy–Ann Hyman (West Indies), George Frank Kinyashi (Dodoma), Hayley Leck (London), Karolina Łukasiewicz (Kraków), Martin Maldonado (Cordoba), André Ortega (Manila), Lorena Pasquini (Cape Town), Alisa Zomer (New Haven)

On The Nature of Cities

References

Chigbu, U.E., Masum, F., Leitmeier, A., Mabikke, S., Antonio, D., Espinoza, J. and Hernig, A. (2015). Securing tenure through land use planning: conceptual framework, evidences and experiences from selected countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Presented at the World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, March 23-27, Washington DC.

Eric Chua, I. A. (2015). Inclusive approaches to urban climate adaptation planning and implementation in the Global South. Climate Policy.

Lorena Pasquini, G. Z. (2014). What enables local governments to mainstream climate change adaptation? Lessons learned from two municipal case studies in the Western Cape, South Africa. Climate and Development.

Simon, D. & Leck, H. (2014) Understanding urban adaptation challenges in diverse contexts: Editorial introduction: Special issue on Urban Adaptation to Climate/Environmental Change : Urban Climate. 7, p. 1-5

Zapata C., María J., and Patrik Z., (2013). Switching Managua on! Connecting informal settlements to the formal city through household waste collection. Environment and Urbanization 2013 25: 225.


Olumuyiwa Adegun

About the Writer:
Olumuyiwa Adegun

Olumuyiwa Adegun is presently writing up his PhD thesis at the School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The thesis is based on his exploration of just sustainability in informal settlement intervention and green infrastructure in Johannesburg.


Collins Adjei Mensah

About the Writer:
Collins Adjei Mensah

Collins Adjei Mensah is a Principal Research Assistant at the Department of Geography and Regional Planning, University of Cape Coast (UCC), Ghana. He is a strong advocate for sustainable urban development, especially integrating natural vegetation into the physical landscape of cities.


Saleh Ahmed

About the Writer:
Saleh Ahmed

Saleh Ahmed is a Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona’s Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Arid Lands Resource Sciences.


Isabelle Michele Sophie Anguelovski

About the Writer:
Isabelle Anguelovski

Isabelle Anguelovski is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is a social scientist trained in urban and environmental planning and coordinator of the research line Cities and Environmental Justice.


Ruishan Chen

About the Writer:
Ruishan Chen

Ruishan Chen is an associate professor of geography at School of Geographic Sciences of East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai, China. He examines how urbanization and climate change results in inequalities in urban China and how to achieve urban sustainability.


Uchendu Chigbu

About the Writer:
Uchendu Chigbu

Uchendu Eugene Chigbu is a multidisciplinary researcher in land management at the Technical University of Munich. Specific areas of his research are in land governance, policies and actions for transformations in urban, peri-urban and rural settlements.


Aakriti Grover

About the Writer:
Aakriti Grover

Aakriti Grover, a young geographer, is research scholar at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India. She specializes in urban remote sensing, microclimate, urban health and disaster management.


Alice Hertzog-Fraser

About the Writer:
Alice Hertzog-Fraser

Alice Hertzog is an urban anthropologist working at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Her main research interests are in urban migration – exploring how migrants contribute to and transform the city.


Tracy-Ann Hyman

About the Writer:
Tracy-Ann Hyman

Tracy-Ann Hyman is a recipient of a Japanese Government scholarship where she pursued a Masters in Sustainability Science in Environment Systems. She is currently pursuing a PhD on Debris Floods and their impact on communities with no early warning systems.


George Kinyashi

About the Writer:
George Kinyashi

George Frank Kinyashi is a Lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning at the Institute of Rural Development Planning in Tanzania. He is currently working on urban economic development focusing on sustainable urbanization in developing countries.


Hayley Leck

About the Writer:
Hayley Leck

Hayley Leck is a Research Associate in the Geography Department at King’s College London. She is particularly interested in understanding how individuals and societies in diverse contexts perceive and respond to environmental change and disasters.


Karolina Łukasiewicz

About the Writer:
Karolina Łukasiewicz

Karolina Lukasiewicz is a sociologist specialized in migration studies, urban poverty and policy analysis. Lukasiewicz has nearly ten years’ research experience in analyzing public policies.


Martin Maldonado

About the Writer:
Martin Maldonado

Martin Maldonado is Assistant Researcher at the Argentine National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research, where he focuses his research on the different measurements of poverty and on the mechanisms that produce and reproduce marginality among the argentine youth.


Andre Ortega

About the Writer:
Andre Ortega

André Ortega is a spatial demographer and urban geographer with research interests on spatial politics of peri-urban transformations, dispossession and gentrification, transnational migration, and critical demography.


Lorena Pasquini

About the Writer:
Lorena Pasquini

Lorena Pasquini works at the University of Cape Town, where she is a Lecturer for the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences and the Research Coordinator for the African Climate & Development Initiative.


Alisa Zomer

About the Writer:
Alisa Zomer

Alisa Zomer is a Research Fellow at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. Her research focuses on urban climate change governance and sustainability policy at both local and international scales.


The Real Dirt on Urban Compost

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“Why isn’t every city doing this?” Dave Vella asks as he intently massages a handful of succulent compost from the towering pile freshly deposited onto his vineyard’s gravel thoroughfare. Dressed in jeans and denim shirt, the veteran Grape Manager of Chateau Montelena is about as casual as can be for someone whose vineyard shocked the wine world in 1973 when Parisian judges scored its Chardonnay above all French wines and put Napa Valley on the global map for good.

San Francisco and its surrounding farms are reconnecting the natural cycle, reducing waste, restoring soils, and reversing climate change one food scrap at a time.

A native of California’s agricultural Central Valley who says he has watched farmers screw up a lot of land using synthetic fertilizers, Vella isn’t afraid to get down in the dirt. It doesn’t take much prodding by Robert Reed, San Francisco waste management company Recology’s spokesman and the person responsible for bringing a truckload of ”The Mix” that afternoon—along with a French television film crew to document the groundbreaking effects of urban composting on organic farming—to get Vella to spill the beans on the secret ingredient for his award-winning soil.

“The soil microbes flourish on humus,” Vella explains. “If you have soils low in organic matter and humus, you can tell just by the weeds that aren’t growing out there for whatever crop it might be on. Humus is an extremely important part of your soil makeup, and recycling urban food scraps instead of burying them in a landfill is such a non-brainer, as it makes such great compost.” Like a professor trying to make sure his students will at least remember the main thesis of his research, he kicks up the fluffy topsoil with his leather boot. “It’s the black stuff, right under these leaves. If it’s wet you can actually see it.”

Chateau Montelena’s Dave Vella digging the San Francisco Mix. Photo: Sven Eberlein

Growing up with a gardening mother, I’ve always had an affinity for compost piles in the backyard. As a metropolitan denizen sensitive to human consumption, I have also had a longstanding fascination with material flows in and out of the urban organism, resulting in field trips to transfer stations and recycling facilities. But it wasn’t until I wrote an article about San Francisco’s efforts to achieve zero waste a few years ago when I realized that my adopted hometown was on to something beyond just reducing waste: by making the collection and composting of every disposed scrap of organic matter the linchpin of its garbage policy, it had tapped into a deeper reservoir of transformation through which a city could not only reduce its harmfulness to nature but instead have its urban metabolism mimic the life-supporting ecosystems on which all life on Earth depends, thus restoring—rather than depleting—nature’s innate biocapacity. In other words, San Francisco was becoming more ecocity-like in the way it was treating its resources.

Soil is the solution

My curiosity about how the treatment of municipal organic waste could address a whole range of hot-button issues facing humanity on a global scale had been piqued further when I received an email from Robert Reed in response to my article, with the subject line “Soil is the Solution.” In it, Reed touted the obvious benefits of a robust green bin program, such as the reduction of landfill and the creation of a marketable product: organic fertilizer. But what stopped me in my tracks was his plea to look at the treasure chest of big picture benefits inherent in urban composting, ranging from its potential to conserve water, restore soils, and—the big enchilada—sequester climate change-causing carbon out of the atmosphere.

Citing one of the findings from Rodale Institute’s Farming Systems Trial (or FST)—America’s longest running, side-by-side comparison of organic and chemical agriculture—that the application of food scrap compost to one acre of land might add as much as 12,000 pounds of carbon to the soil in one year (while conventional farming releases 3,700 pounds of it into the atmosphere!), Recology’s Food Rebel explained how the world could offset more than 20 percent of carbon emissions if all cities instituted urban compost collection programs and the organic fertilizer were applied to local farms, especially through the addition of cover crops. “These crops deliver two charges of carbon 14 inches into the soil. The first charge is carbon we preserve in the finished compost. The second charge is carbon the plants pull out of the atmosphere.”

Reed ended his note with the kind of impassioned, bare-knuckled challenge I would come to love and expect from him. “Sven, ‘Soil is the Solution’ might be the most important environmental story you’ll ever write. It is part of the solution to our environmental challenges. The story belongs on the front of the New York Times and on 60 Minutes.” No pressure there, Robert.

Robert Reed zooming in on a row of cover crops powered by urban compost. Photo: Sven Eberlein

Since that first email exchange with Reed, trips like the one to Chateau Montelena to document the various stages of the city’s organic waste on its way back to residents’ dinner tables have become regular events on my travel calendar. In the past two years alone, I’ve witnessed what used to be dirty napkins, banana peels, and greasy take-out boxes discarded from my own kitchen resurface as precious compost on farms and vineyards in the surrounding hinterlands of the San Francisco Bay Area.

I’ve walked 10 acres of diversified salad mix fertilized by SF compost with Paul Wirtz, production manager for Oak Hill Farm in Glen Ellen, CA. I’ve stood in the field next to Nigel Walker, founder and owner of Eatwell Farm, a 105-acre certified organic farm with a thriving CSA program in the Sacramento Valley, as he explained how he had to scale back on “The Mix” because “the fertility was getting too big.” I’ve gotten lost in a sea of shining mustard, stringy bean, and hairy vetch with Ross Cannard of Enterprise Vineyard Management in Sonoma, learning about the extraordinary capacity of cover crops in fixing nitrogen and storing carbon.

Ross Cannard showing off the purple flowered hairy vetch. Used as a winter cover crop, it has been known to add 60-70 lbs. nitrogen to the soil. Photo: Sven Eberlein

A lot of these visits have been arranged by Bob Shaffer, a Hawaii-based agronomist whom Reed connected me with. Shaffer works as a composting consultant for farms and vineyards across the Western United States and has become a pivotal liaison between Recology and the rising number of growers in search of just the right kind of urban compost mix for their respective soils, micro-climates, and crop rotations. During our initial phone conversation, this living, breathing encyclopedia of soil recapped for me how the high density of protein, oils, complex carbohydrates, and minerals inherent in recycled food provides soil microbes with the nutrition essential for creating Dave Vella and his fellow carbon farmers’ beloved humus. He also pointed out the heavy price humanity is paying for the temporary convenience of the chemical fertilizers used in conventional farming.

“Letting all the carbon that’s supposed to be in our soils go up into the air is causing us not only environmental pollution and the threat of atmospheric warming, but it’s devastating our ability to produce healthy crops. If we keep wasting our nutrients like we have for the past fifty plus years, not only are we filling up our landfills, which we don’t have any room for, and poisoning ourselves with methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas, but we’re not getting the most precious thing that we raise—high mineral value food—back into the soil where it belongs. Now that’s a full-blown crisis.”

Bob Shaffer doing soil quality control at Sonoma Valley Worm Farm. Photo: Sven Eberlein

The good news, according to Shaffer, is that there is a simple, inexpensive, and effective way to revive the broken cycle, rooted in three basic areas of carbon-based, biological farming. “If we want to feed our soils again, we need to manage organic matter, we need to manage minerals, and we need to manage tillage. By recognizing the incredible synergism at work between compost, cover crops, and mulch, we can grow large volumes of organic matter and return it to the soil.”

Nothing but a bug’s life.

Just how simple and effective this is in practice would come into focus for me a few weeks later, when I was invited to tour some of the farms Shaffer had been working with outside the small town of Sonoma, 50 miles north of San Francisco. We met at Fowler Creek, where Ross Cannard and his partners are experimenting with cover crops as nutrient producers as well as pest control. After a quick introduction to a gaggle of chattering hens (that have made a name for themselves by laying a variety of beautifully colored eggs for such illustrious restaurants as Chez Panisse in Berkeley and Boulette’s Larder in San Francisco), we quickly found ourselves in the middle of a field of twirling greenery.

Bob Shaffer looking for resident bugs at Fowler Creek Farm. Photo: Sven Eberlein

“Check out the buckwheat over there, nestled between the bell beans and oats,” Shaffer pointed at the shimmering curtain of white dotting across the lush field of tall grass between two rolling hills. “That’s what you get when you put the compost on the cover crop. If you feed the roots of these plants you allow the microscopic bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa to accelerate their full food web below ground. Those plants are not only stronger nutrition-wise, but they have built-in disease prevention.”

He bent down to pull up one of the buckwheat blossoms. “See these dark spots clustered around the bud and stem? These aphids have now piled up right here to take advantage of nectar and other pasture juices. By having them over here we’re keeping their more mobile ladybug predators all over the field in large enough numbers to help take care of the crop plants. I know, the fearful mind is thinking, ‘Oh my god, kill all the aphids.’ But no, that would be like killing off all of the mice. You need to have a few mice. Either that, or you have to buy cat food.”

Aphids are good fits. Photo: Sven Eberlein

It’s this kind of economic calculus that gives Shaffer his biggest opening for selling a radically different way of farming to a trade he knows and understands to be on the cautious side. “There’s a couple thousand pounds or more of insects that come and die here simply because of this plant,” he reckons. “Now let’s convert that to dollars. That’s 35 percent protein and 12 percent nitrogen in the insect’s body, plus other services that are going on. If you go down to the store right now and buy 2,000 pounds of protein, you’re not gonna like it, it’s gonna cost big money. And you have to haul it and apply it.”

Pulling out his magnifying glass, he motioned for me to take a closer look at the tiny critters. “These guys are doing it on their own, they may as well be Bob’s Bug Manure,” he mused about his de facto business partners. “The bottom line is, you raise cover crops with your high nutrient food scraps, you’re gonna get lots of bugs. And they’re gonna end up as part of the fertility in our soil.”

Talking on eggshells

Still buzzing (pun!) from my “bug’s life” exploration with Shaffer, I returned home to a call from a producer at The PBS News Hour, the nightly newscast on American public television. They were doing a story on San Francisco’s progress in becoming a zero waste city and, after finding my article online, figured I might know a person who could show them first-hand how this whole composting thing works at the beginning of the cycle—in a residence. Seeing that my wife and I had been meticulous separators of all living things in our outbound material flow since SF became the first city in the U.S. to make composting mandatory in 2009, the logical outcome of that conversation was a camera crew in our kitchen a week later.

PBS’ Spencer Michels talking trash in my kitchen. Photo: Sven Eberlein

After whipping up a scrambled egg breakfast and tossing a bunch of egg shells, onion scraps and tea bags in our compost bin for the cameraman, we got to share our personal experience of recycling food scraps with PBS reporter Spencer Michels. We went from the technical (kitchen bin is lined with either bio produce bags from our local food coop or just compostable paper bags and wraps from delis and bakeries) to the educational (composting at home is not yucky at all—the exact opposite, by keeping food out of your trash you are keeping your source of potential odor easily identified and separated) to the political (we don’t care whether we’re 70 percent or 80 percent of the way toward our zero waste goal as long as we are getting closer) to the philosophical (composting is fun, engages us as citizens with a stake in our city’s future, and connects a daily routine with the Earth’s ecosystems we depend and thrive on), before finishing with a dramatic live action shot of me depositing the precious scraps in the green bin that serves our multi-unit building.

Me taking out the compost while the world watches. Photos: Debra Baida

Speaking of getting closer, now that I had seen with my own eyes the economic and environmental value of urban compost and shared with a major news network how eminently achievable it is to set up a city-wide green bin program, I was curious as to why it hadn’t yet become more commonly instituted in municipalities across the country, and the globe. While San Francisco is now collecting 600 tons of compostables every day (219,000 tons per year), the EPA’s latest Sustainable Materials Management Report shows only a slight overall increase of food composting in the United States, from a total of 1.84 million tons in 2013 (5.0 percent) to 1.94 million tons in 2014 (5.1 percent). This means not only that 95 percent of uneaten American food is still being thrown away, but that San Francisco alone is responsible for almost one out of every ten tons of what small percentage does get composted.

The bottleneck, I thought, must surely be in the one link of the organics recycling chain I had not yet inspected more thoroughly: the composting facility. I remembered my mom’s warnings of yore to refrain from tossing anything besides fruit and veggie peels or coffee grounds on her compost pile, and it occurred to me that perhaps the pizza cartons and chicken bones Recology was encouraging us to add to our green bins were responsible for making the composting process too complex and prohibitively expensive for most other municipalities to replicate.

There was only one way to find out, so the next time I was riding my bike past Recology’s headquarters near San Francisco Bay, I stopped in to ask Robert Reed about their flagship composting operation, Jepson Prairie Organics. “Funny you should ask,” he said as I was peeling the tangerine he handed me as a welcome-to-his-office gift. “I’ve got thirteen visitors from agricultural cooperatives and food companies in France coming to see Jepson Prairie. What are you doing next Tuesday?”

Bringing the Coquille back to the farm

We got to the town of Vacaville about half way between San Francisco and Sacramento at around 9:15 am. Reed, who had picked me up in his Prius an hour earlier bearing coffee and apples for breakfast en route, turned onto a straight country road before pulling into what looked like an empty construction lot a few miles ahead. “This is it.” He pointed at a basin of about 50 acres that looked a bit like a quarry, with some trucks, equipment, and a bunch of piles of dirt. “The French aren’t here yet, so go ahead and check out some of the finished compost piles by the office.” I wandered behind the unassuming single story building and discovered my first big piles of virgin San Francisco Mix.

Genuine San Francisco Blend. Photo: Sven Eberlein

“That’s our premium compost blend of food scraps and yard trimmings. Took just about 30 days to cure and has another 15 to 30 days to go until it’s a mature, finished product.” Reed had sneaked up behind me, joined in neon-yellow Recology safety vests by a middle-aged gentleman with a robust frame and a healthy farmer’s tan. “Sven, I want you to meet Greg Pryor. Greg oversees all eight of our compost facilities and has unique insights into the art of making fine urban compost and its benefits for topsoil. Lucky for us, he will lead our tour today.” Pryor was about to launch into a story about how he was first tasked in 1994 by Recology’s previous incarnation to set up an experimental compost collection program when we heard two vans pull up. “That must be our French delegation,” Reed interjected. “Let’s say bonjours.”

Greg Pryor giving “the compost talk” to the French delegation, with Robert Reed looking on. Photo: Sven Eberlein

With everyone gathered, Pryor gave us a quick rundown of how the operation had evolved since its early days, adapting to an ever-increasing volume of compost while complying with California’s steadily tightening air quality regulations. “We had to meet specific criteria that quantified emissions from when we received the material, while it’s being processed, while it’s actively composting, to the finished product.” Finding the right technology that would drastically reduce Volatile Organic Compounds (also called VOC) while also keeping things competitive with the (too) low cost of dumping everything in landfill led Jepson Prairie from giant Ag Bags to Aerated Static Piles (or ASP) to their current state-of-the-art negative ASP. “Rather than forcing air up through the compost and blowing all the emissions into the atmosphere the way we used to do it with the positive ASP, we’re now drawing air down where it’s collected in a series of ducts and pipes and then exhausted out through a biofilter. The negative ASP is giving us a 97 percent destruction of VOC.”

Lots of hot air going through the ducts and pipes of a Negative ASP. Photo: Sven Eberlein

Filled with some good technical nutrients, everyone was ready to smell the dirt (though mostly in the metaphorical sense of the word, as the early morning arrival of the compost trucks coupled with the rapid breakdown of materials through the teamwork of bacteria, fungi, and lots of air renders the place largely odorless during the day). We walked the facility in sort of a “reverse rot” direction, from the pristine finished piles near the office, to the in-progress aerated static piles transected by a geometrically sculpted system of aluminum piping, to the beginning of the chain where the grinder, trommel, and conveyor belt were rattling along, doing the busy work of cutting yard trimmings to size and picking unwanted objects from the coveted organics nectar.

Grinding up yard trimmings. Photo: Sven Eberlein

Pryor tells us that they process about 375 tons of finished product every day, sold to over 350 farms, vineyards, orchards, and landscapers in the region. “We have four standard blends, but a lot of our customers prefer their compost made to order with custom nutrients and minerals. Everyone has different crops and conditions, so the personalized aspect is really what makes our mixes so popular.” The biggest challenge, other than removing non-compostable items (and educating citizens to separate at the source), is that the demand for good compost is growing so fast, while most facilities like Jepson Prairie are already at capacity. According to Pryor, getting the land and permits to run a composting operation in California is prohibitively expensive, with little incentive by the powerful chemical fertilizer industry to lobby the state government to streamline and speed up the costly regulatory red tape.

How hard can it be to get a few more of these? Photo: Sven Eberlein

So there’s one of our bottlenecks in the quest to get more of our food scraps composted. The good news that I gleaned from both Pryor and in my conversations with Bob Shaffer is that a growing number of the bigger players in the agriculture business are currently experimenting with compost, which, ironically, is contributing to the supply shortage. This, of course, makes perfect sense, as depleted soils aren’t only bad for the planet, but—as with everything else when previously externalized ecological bills come due—their ever-diminishing returns will ultimately impact the bottom line. Synthetic fertilizers worked great for a while to squeeze everything out of existing soils, but at some point you have to replenish them with nutrients if you want to keep growing and selling food that actually feeds. As more industrial farms realize the value of this product and how technologically advanced the composting process has become, the hope is that the labyrinth of archaic regulations can be disentangled more quickly.

Selling like steaming hotcakes. Photo: Sven Eberlein

“You want to know a secret?” Robert Reed interrupts our silent sniffing and caressing of the various piles of compost with a one word epiphany that remind me of Mr. McGuire in The Graduate.

“Shellfish.”

I could tell by the ensuing murmur that the French visitors did not want to miss what was obviously going to be a teachable moment that day.

“You know all the crabs and mussels that get fished and eaten at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco?” he asks rhetorically. “The shells contain chitin, a great source of nitrogen, phosphorous, calcium, and magnesium. It’s a superb cleansing agent and exactly the kind of ingredient that makes our compost so rich. So when people throw these shells in the trash after their crab feast, it’s like they’re throwing away gold without even knowing it. That’s why education is such an important component of composting. ”

Reed turns to one of the bilingual members of the group. “What’s ‘shell’ in French?” Someone yells “Coquille” and Recology’s intrepid resource recognition slam poet improvises the most memorable line of the day.

“We have to bring the Coquille to the farm!”

Coquille freshly delivered to the farm. Photo: Sven Eberlein

Since returning home from that afternoon, I’ve been feeling pretty optimistic about the prospects of looping our cities into the natural systems that have sustained us since the beginning of the agricultural age. If we can reactivate some of the wisdom and practices that worked for us before the industrial revolution while recalibrating the many insights and advances we’ve gained since then to align with the Earth’s naturally self-sustaining processes, the vision of cities becoming part of the solution, instead of being major problems, is not that far-fetched.

It’s true, there’s a long way to go. But I’m encouraged that there are now over 150 communities (and growing!) across the United States with source separated organics programs, spreading across a total of 16 states. I’m thrilled that over 100,000 New Yorkers are now composting their coffee cups and bagel wrappers. I’m heartened that communities from British Columbia to Vermont are getting serious about keeping their organic assets invested in the natural loop. And fresh off the presses, I am ecstatic that Paris, which—like most of France—had thought until recently that it was prudent to just burn all its resources—just announced its new compost collection program for the 2nd and 12th arrondissements, with the intention to service the whole city soon.

Now that’s what I call bringing the Coquille back to the farm.

Sven Eberlein
Oakland

On The Nature of Cities

The Relation Between Cities and Nature: Searching for More Sensitive Laws

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Art, Science, Action: Cities Re-imagined

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The idea under these law proposals—for urban wetlands, for the coast, and for city resilience—is to deepen our understanding of nature by specifying its meanings, dynamics, and services in a context of urbanization, in land under high demand for real estate development and private business.
Today, people tend to prefer to live in the same places where the hotspots of biodiversity are located. Many of these hotspots are found in places with a Mediterranean climate, which provide fertile soils for food production and water. As a result, cities are sprawling in areas of high ecological value, which are threatened by real estate agencies’ control of the land and by the lack of planning that regulates how cities and nature interact.

It is ironic that real estate agencies search for lands with natural values to build high standard suburbs and holiday houses when, after construction, nature is often depleted (due to intensive land manipulation), or replaced by artificial green areas and non-native species (both plants and animals). Not only does the beauty of biodiversity disappear, ecosystem services such as flood regulation, provision of water, food, building materials, resilience resources and climate change mitigation are diminished.

The lack of linkage between territorial planning instruments and the ecological values of the land is highly worrying. Ecosystems do not have physical limits as rigid as cities do. Ecosystems have rather dynamic boundaries, and transition zones between ecosystems (or ecotones) usually do not coincide with the urban limits of cities. This situation makes it difficult to regulate nature in and around the city, since such regulation must not only modify the urban planning of a single city, but also the planning among different cities within a region, and between cities and rural areas. Without binding territorial planning, this is practically impossible. There are regional development plans and intercommunal plans that regulate an entire region or a set of communes. However, these plans are usually indicative, or guidelines—that is, they give suggestions of what should be done, but finally, the decisions are made at the local level based on land use plans.

This condition, in which biodiversity is increasingly threatened by the rapid and intense occupation of the natural landscape by cities, is today of high concern in the Chilean territory. This is why citizenry and the academic sphere have begun to develop local movements to regulate this problem through law. Laws, unlike the regional and intercommunal planning instruments, are normative—that is, they must be complied with.

A law for urban wetlands

During 2018, the Chilean parliament, inspired by the continuing damage and neglect of urban wetlands, started to discuss a new law to protect wetlands in Chilean cities. The disregard of natural spaces in urban planning resulted from prioritizing urban sprawl. The discussion and initiative was begun by the senator of the city of Valdivia. Valdivia is recognized as having a system of urban wetlands high in biodiversity, but which are threatened by increasing urbanization, density, and expansion. The law was supported by an academic of the city of Concepción, where large urban wetlands are located within this metropolitan area, surrounded by urban sprawl.

The senator and the academic argue that urban wetlands are relevant to the future of cities, and indeed, the community is very conscious about its role in sustainability and resilience, as shown by research. Wetlands are prized lands, not wasteland. They provide beauty to the urban space and several other ecosystems services, such as flood control, drinking water, filtering of waste, improvement of air quality, and the promotion of human well-being, enabling healthy living. The proposal includes a general definition of “urban wetland” in the Law of Urbanism and Construction and in the Law of Environment.

The images show the Los Batros Wetland in the Concepción Metropolitan area. Due to the lack of regulations, it is used for placing trash, as an agricultural field, and as a source for water extraction. Besides, the connection with the neighborhood is poor as it lacks of a clear access, both physical and visual. Photos: Paula Villagra

While the first law regulates organizations, officials, professionals and individuals in the actions of urban planning, urbanization and construction, the second law regulates the environment in general, which is consistent with the idea of creating binding regulations. In addition, they suggest that the local government is the key author in the creation of general guidelines for the rational use of urban wetlands located in their community, and that the community can give observations and modifications to such guidelines to improve the regulation. This is in line with the idea of empowering local people, and creating tight bonds between people and nature.

The expectations are that the law can preserve the quality of wetlands and respectfully restore and manage those already damaged, to assure healthy urban landscapes for future generations. In this sense, the new law can make it possible to regulate these natural spaces in Chilean cities by allowing their recognition in both extended urban territorial planning and also by the local community.

A law for the coast

In Chile, the Coastal Edge (Borde Costero) is understood to be the 80 meter strip between the highest tide line and inland, or upland area. This strip extends throughout the country and includes all the islands, archipelagos, channels, and fjords of the Chilean sea, as well as a static strip—also 80 meters—in navigable lakes. The Coastal Edge—a national “good” for public use (therefore, property of all Chileans), rich in biodiversity, cultural values, historic spots and beautiful landscapes—extends for 83,400 linear kilometers and covers a total area of ​​6.5 million hectares. However, the contemporary dynamics of urbanization of the Coastal Edge brings real estate development, mainly of holiday homes, and has produced great changes in this area. In particular, the promotion of hotels and holiday homes has been a very profitable for various real estate sectors and a way to urbanize without building a city. Such development can result in drastic degradation of the environment and the landscape, and have deep and negative social consequences.

A new law under examination has the effect of accentuating this problem. Until today, the Coastal Edge has been administered by the Ministry of Defense through the Secretariat for the Armed Forces, and the General Direction of the Maritime Territory and Merchant Marine (DIRECTEMAR, dependent on the Navy). The new law would transfer its administration to the Ministry of National Assets, which is nothing more than the response to the interest of the private sector in this coastal strip for real estate development.

Playa amarilla is an example of how the real state agencies are occupying the coast in central Chile. This region is the most affected. Photo: unknown

Due to the threats that this zone will suffer if this new law is approved—in the social, economic and ecosystem aspects—the concept of the Coastal Zone is being adopted by academics and the community with the intention to reshape the law under evaluation. A Coastal Zone is understood as the zone where the interaction of the earth, the sea, and the atmosphere is ecologically manifested. According to the Paipa Protocol 1989, this zone should be determined by each country according to relevant technical and scientific criteria.

This is what is sought by academics with a Coastal Law in Chile: first, to change the concept of the coastal esge, including the ecosystemic vision; and second, to be able to define a territory based on local conditions, understanding the coast as a relative and dynamic system rather than a static zone. With a Coast Law, for example, the concept of a “green area”—a designation used in Land Use Plans to protect beaches and dunes from the real estate boom— would not be necessary, since the Coastal Law would include the clarification of coastal ecosystems in terms of their concept and needs.

A law for urban resilience

Since 2005, after signing the Hyogo protocol, Chile has committed to make cities more resilient to disasters of natural origin. This initiative became even more necessary after the 2010 earthquake and tsunami (Mw 8.8), during which whole cities were devastated. To date, several investigations have been carried out on the resilience of Chilean cities in order to make them more resilient.

Although many actions have been taken at mitigating and preparing against disasters of natural origin, the necessary measures for increasing city resilience, that is for assuring the adaptation capacity of cities and their inhabitants, are still missing. It is known that the instruments of territorial planning define actions that influence the resilience of Chilean cities both positively and negatively. However, this has not been the product of an action oriented towards resilience, but rather the product of a random consequence. This has been mainly due to the lack of a clear definition of resilience that unifies and guides all the parties involved in territorial planning.

The images show resilience resources around a small city in the south of Chile called Mehuín. This city is threatened by tsunami hazard, but its resilience capacity is high because around it, it has elevations, native forests and water resources; however, these natural areas are not regulated, hence they can disappear because of the demand of land for holiday houses. Photos: Paula Villagra

Accordingly, a law for the resilience of Chilean cities should start by providing a single definition that guides the action of all parties involved in the regulation of planning and also emergency instruments used during and after a catastrophe. On the other hand, research in the field has revealed that the planning instruments mainly affect the natural areas that contribute to the resilience of cities. Areas such as dunes, forests, wetlands, and others are those that disappear or change as the city sprawls.

However, in case of an emergency, it is such areas that provide water, firewood, and free areas to take refuge and wait until adequate help arrives with the basic necessities for life. In this case, a law for resilience should ensure the protection of these areas and at the same time its flexibility. They should be prepared and conditioned to fulfill the emergency functions without altering their natural condition.

Given that many of these areas are located inside the urban environment, the Law of Urbanism and Construction can be a good platform for its incorporation. However, some of these useful areas for city resilience are located outside the urban environment and are being threatened by private business interests. These natural areas are of high interest for the Chilean tourist industry which contributes over 11% of the national gross domestic product (GDP). This industry promotes nature tourism, in particular for foreigners. The natural areas are also of interest for several industries that provide basic services for the country. For example, hydroelectric power stations look for rivers and marine edges where they can locate their facilities to generate energy. For these situations, the Law of the Environment can be a good platform also. In both cases the type, location and characteristics of the infrastructure included in the natural areas should be carefully studied so they do not loose the ecological values that support their functioning and city resilience. By this, it is expected that cities assure resilience resources based in ecosystems that are both preserved and implemented in the event of a catastrophe.

The idea under these law proposals—for urban wetlands, for the coast, and for city resilience—is to deepen our understanding of nature by specifying its meanings, dynamics and services in a context of urbanization, in land in high demand for real estate development and private business. Understanding what is nature and how it works can facilitate the regulation of the landscapes we live in, as well as improving the relationships among nature, people and economic development.

Paula Villagra and Carolina Rojas
Los Rios and Concepción

On The Nature of Cities


Carolina Rojas

About the Writer:
Carolina Rojas

Carolina is an Associate Professor at the Universidad de Concepción, Chile. She is particularly interested in understanding how the urban growth and transport systems affect the provision and the accessibility to open spaces such as wetlands and parks in cities.