(Una versión en español sigue inmediatamente después de la versión en Inglés.)
Urban green areas and public spaces are key elements in urban infrastructure, mitigating environmental challenges, fulfilling social functions, and contributing to the ecosystems of the surrounding region. In Bogota, the concept of the Ecological Network (Van der Hammen and Andrade 2003)—green spaces integrated within and beyond the city—has appeared as a central element of urban planning in recent years. However, these ideas have not been easy to implement and still the debate persists about the relative merits of development and conservation.
Áreas recreativas Bogotá, Foto IDRD.
The vision of conservation isolated from urban dynamics, without an understanding of the social reality of the territory, has hindered the development of a Principal Ecological Structure or a natural system that ensures public space and connectivity. Additionally, the mechanism for their application is largely limited to zoning laws, rather than a wider scale view that it is founded on watersheds as a principal driver of the ecological system.
Urban public areas represent a chance to build resilient, secure, and healthy biodiverse areas that can also result be poetic and beautiful spaces. In the Colombian reality, great examples of public spaces are fewer and fewer, replaced instead by standardized designs that focus on functional aspects rather than local identities or ecosystemic functions. Implementation of sterile standards and formulas results in the hardening of surfaces and loss of trees in the main parks of the towns; hardened embankments are “decorated” with isolated palms that are incompatible with local style and climate conditions. Additionally, urban developments that seek to be efficient in land use often neglect the notion of neighborhood, and community spaces are diminished by generalized public use.
This dislocation has become evident also at the ecological level. In the case of proposals for large areas of new urban development at the edges of southern Bogotá, grids extend beyond local and community scales and dynamics, creating large homogeneous urban areas without identity and with little ecological wealth. These designs forget the meaning of the neighborhood. Family and social life in such homogenous, diffuse, poorly connected “neighborhoods” is diminished. Further, the trend to seek planning to turn cities into “sustainable” areas remains questionable because urban areas cannot be considered isolated, but must necessarily be associated with the surrounding territory and region.
Development in Colombian cities is often planned with imported parameters and designs, without considering the cultural and geographic realities. Fashions and stereotypes that are created under the umbrella of sustainability encourage super specialized groups of professionals seeking quantifiable standards and checklists on how to be “sustainable”. In the maze of “certifications” of urban ideals they forget the history and realities of the lives of the people who live there, who have everyday problems to solve, and, finally, what matters and what is vital in the life of a citizen.
Altos de la Estancia, Bogotá. Foto D Wiesner.
Plans seek ideals that do not consider the multiplicity of social stories that make up the rhythms of urban life. Many planners in Colombia, and specifically in the case of Bogotá, make great projections without knowing the territory and freeze them onto fixed maps with prohibitive rules. Such plans turn out to be difficult to execute or impossible to maintain—they don’t fit the realities of the ecological and social landscape.
I propose that we perform more regenerative planning strategies with living maps at various scales: well-articulated plans achieved through participatory methodologies and implemented through the comprehensive work of various disciplines involved in the agreements and vision. Disciplines derived from conservation science, as well as those of architecture, design, and landscape architecture converge in a renewed concept of green infrastructure, eco-urbanism, and urban sustainability. Such a convergence occurs today within landscape ecology, a discipline that now recognizes the concept of design in the landscape as a research topic and as a practical application of principles, and which Nausauer and Opdam (2008) defined as a directed transformation of a landscape in order to meet human needs in the management of ecosystem services (Andrade, Remolina, Wiesner 2013).
Parque Entrenubes, Bogotá. Foto Daniel Pineda.
Moreover, in the evolution of the concept of urban biodiversity, we no longer speak of “nature” threatened by man but rather recognize the wild and domestic, the natural and the built, cultural and adapted species represented in urban areas with particular identities in the landscape (Clergeau 2007). Architecture and urbanism have evolved beyond merely functional consideration of the city and its form, making way towards the integration of ecological and social functions that transcend isolated and “efficient” urban structure and discover cultural and ecological functions, allowing integration of the concept of green space in the urban landscape and essential form (Andrade et al).
Cerros de Bogotá.
This integration can inspire planners to address some specific challenges. The dynamics of cities progress and change at rates with which formal plans fail to keep pace. New working methods in line with this reality must emerge, creatively and urgently. It is a challenge that must be realized in synchronization among organizations, businesses and citizen initiatives. What must be achieved is the refinement of comprehensive participatory methodologies of work, synchronized among the tempos of city officials, the community, business, planners, designers, scientists and political cycles.
Diversos enfoques, Foto San Victorino.
We must move forward in a search for quality spaces focused on human beings, improving local conditions, environmental quality and equitable provision of services, consistent with the needs of the community without too much eagerness for stereotypical aesthetics or forms. This demands that dialogue about sustainable urban development does not remain distant from the majority and language converges on forms in which the population can participate.
Corredor Ecológico de los Cerros Orientales. Montaje sobre fotografía.
Joint citizen action is needed to record the processes and experience of self-management. Restore human connections that have been weakened with mobilization based on trust and support. Generate living maps that reflect actions and strategies consistent with the land. Living maps that record processes, changes, adjustments and collaborative actions must be recognized and encouraged.
Planning cannot be reduced to the sum of finished studies that are immediately obsolete. They are static and unresponsive. We need living maps and plans, which are renewed according to processes, progress based on achievements, and learn from observation and error.
Altos de la Estancia, foto D.Wiesner.
For this, it is important to involve and revive the social role of schools and universities, where students should concentrate on methods of observation, participation, and change. Promote comprehensive professionals with skills in land management to ensure that the projects become visible and tangible. Train professionals who do not seek the limelight but work as part of a team, where satisfaction is when synchronicity is achieved.
Work holistically, listen without pontificating, learn and multiply knowledge with living planning, and increase the number of caring, happy, resilient, and included citizens.
Translated into English from the original Spanish by David Maddox
References
Andrade GI (2011) Estado y Presión sobre la Estructura Ecológica Principal. In: Ajustes Ambientales al Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial de Bogotá. Secretaria Distrital de Ambiente. Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá. Bogotá
Nassauer JI, Opdam P (2008) Design in science: extending the landscape ecology paradigm. Landsc Ecol 23:633–644
Andrade, G; Remolina F, Wiesner D. Urban Ecosystems. Assembling the pieces: a framework for the integration of multi-functional ecological main structure in the emerging urban region of Bogotá, Colombia
Clergeau P (2007) Une écologie du paysage urbain. Editions Apogée, France
PLANIFICACION VIVA , CIUDADANOS RESILIENTES Y FELICES
Las áreas verdes urbanas y el Espacio público son elementos clave en la estructura urbana, enfrentan retos ambientales y cumplen funciones sociales y ecosistemicas en su región circundante. En Bogotá, el concepto de Estructura Ecológica Principal (Van der Hammen y Andrade 2003), aparece incorporado como elemento central de la planificación urbana en los últimos años en Colombia. Sin embargo, su consolidación no ha sido fácil de implementar y aún persiste el debate de conciliar desarrollo y conservación.
La visión de la conservación aislada de las dinámicas urbanas, sin un entendimiento de la realidad social del territorio ha dificultado el proceso en la generación de la mencionada Estructura Ecológica Principal o bien de un sistema natural de Espacio Público que garantice funciones y conectividad. Adicionalmente los mecanismos de su generación se ven limitados a la aplicación de una reglamentación urbanística más que a una visión macro que se estructure desde sus cuencas hidrográficas y que contemple el agua como estructurante del ordenamiento.
Las áreas publicas urbanas son la oportunidad de generar espacios resilientes, seguros, biodiversos y sanos lo que debe traducirse igualmente en espacios poéticos y bellos. En la realidad colombiana grandes ejemplos de espacio público se siguen reduciendo a aplicaciones de cartillas estandarizadas que se centran en aspectos funcionales por encima de las identidades locales o de las funciones eco sistémicas. La implementación de cartillas y formulas en las diversas realidades geográficas colombianas se traduce en el endurecimiento y tala de árboles de los principales parques principales de los poblados; en malecones endurecidos y “adornados” con palmas aisladas que no se compadecen con las condiciones atmosféricas ni ofrecen condiciones de bienestar climático a quien las recorre. Adicionalmente, los desarrollos urbanos que buscan ser muy eficientes en el uso del suelo olvidan la noción de barrio y la colectividad se desdibuja en espacios de uso público excluyentes. Esta desarticulación se ha hecho evidente también a nivel ecológico. Es el caso de propuestas de extensas zonas de nuevos desarrollos urbanos en los bordes urbanos de la zona sur de Bogotá, en cuadrículas que se extienden ajenas a escalas y dinámicas locales creando grandes áreas urbanas homogéneas, sin identidad y con poca riqueza ecológica olvidando lo que significa la vida de barrio. Por lo anterior, la vida en familia en un barrio con amigos y conocidos que forman su red primaria se deshace en urbanismos ajenos a su productividad, a su movilidad y a una vida urbana rica en experiencias.
La tendencia en la búsqueda de la planificación de convertir a las ciudades en “sostenibles”, sigue siendo cuestionable pues el ámbito de sostenibilidad no se reduce a las áreas urbanas sino que necesariamente debe estar asociado a la noción de territorio y región.
El concepto de desarrollo en las ciudades colombianas se asocia en muchos casos, a una planeación con parámetros importados, sin contemplar las realidades culturales y geográficas. Las modas y estereotipos que se crean bajo el paraguas de la sostenibilidad termina reduciéndose a grupos de profesionales súper especializados que buscan cumplir estándares cuantitavos y listas de chequeo sobre como ser “sostenibles”. Por lo tanto, en el laberinto de las “certificaciones” los ideales urbanos olvidan la historia de vida de personas que lo habitan, que tienen problemas cotidianos que resolver y que finalmente, lo que importa y lo que es vital en la vida de un ciudadano se olvida.
Los planes buscan ideales que no consideran la multiplicidad de historias sociales que van a otros ritmos. Mucha de la planificación en Colombia, y en caso concreto de Bogotá, los urbanistas realizan grandes proyecciones sin recorrer el territorio y se plasman en mapas en realidades congeladas cargadas de normas prohibitivas y en planes difíciles de ejecutar o eventualmente imposibles de mantener.
Se propone entonces realizar estrategias de planeación regenerativa con cartografías vivas de diversas escalas. Lograr planes realmente articulados a través de lograr metodologías de participación en la planificación y la implementación de trabajo integral de diversas disciplinas que convergen en una visión y en acuerdos. Las disciplinas derivadas de las ciencias de la conservación; y aquellas de la arquitectura y el diseño y la arquitectura del paisaje, convergen en un concepto renovado de infraestructura verde, eco urbanismo o sostenibilidad urbana. Una convergencia que se presenta en la actualidad en el seno de la ecología del paisaje, disciplina que hoy reconoce el concepto de diseño en el paisaje, como un tema de investigación y como una forma de aplicación práctica de sus principios, y que Nausauer y Opdam (2008) definen como una transformación dirigida de un paisaje con el fin de satisfacer las necesidades humanas de gestión de los servicios ecosistémicos. (Andrade, Remolina, Wiesner 2013)
De otra parte, la evolución del concepto de biodiversidad urbana, no habla de la “naturaleza” amenazada por el hombre sino del reconocimiento de lo silvestre y lo domestico, lo natural y lo construido, lo cultural y lo adaptado representado en especies y espacios urbanos con identidades particulares en el paisaje (Clergeau 2007). De otra parte, la arquitectura y urbanismo, han evolucionado desde la consideración funcional de la ciudad, de la forma, hacia la integración de las funciones ecológicas y sociales, que sobrepasan las estructura urbana aislada y eficiente y descubre las funciones culturales y ecológicas, permitiendo integrar el concepto de espacios verdes en el ámbito urbano y de paisaje de forma integral (Andrade et al).
Por lo cual se busca inspirar a los planificadores para hacer frente a algunos retos específicos: la dinámica de la ciudad va a un ritmo que los planes no logran seguir y nuevas metodologías de trabajo acordes a esta realidad deben surgir de forma creativa y urgente. Es un reto que debe concretarse en una sincronía entre entidades, empresas e iniciativas ciudadanas. Lo que se debe lograr es afinar las metodologías de trabajo participativo, que sincronice los tiempos del funcionario, con los de la comunidad, con los de los consultores y los tiempos políticos.
Se esta avanzando hacia la búsqueda por cualificar el espacio centrado en el ser humano, mejorando condiciones de proximidad, calidad ambiental y una oferta equitativa consecuente con las necesidades de la comunidad vecina sin tanto afán por estereotipos estéticos o formales.
Se exige entonces, que el desarrollo urbano sostenible no siga siendo un discurso alejado de la mayoría, y que converja en un lenguaje en donde la población se sienta interlocutora.
Se propone también articular las acciones ciudadanas y registrar esos procesos desde la experiencia y la autogestión. Restablecer los tejidos humanos que se han debilitado mediante estrategias de acción articuladas en grupos de movilización basados en la confianza y apoyo. La generación de cartografías vivas que reflejen acciones y estrategias con el territorio. Cartografías vivas que van registrando los procesos, los cambios, los ajustes y articulan acciones de trabajo de colaboración que deben ser reconocidas y fomentadas.
La planificación no puede reducirse a la suma de estudios que cuando terminan ya son obsoletos sino en cartografías y planes vivos, que se van renovando acorde a los procesos avanzando sobre lo realizado y aprendiendo también de la observación y del error.
Para esto, es importante involucrar y reactivar el rol social de colegios y Universidades, donde los estudiantes deben estar centrados en observatorios de participación y cambio. Promover profesionales integrales con habilidades en gestión del territorio, para lograr que los proyectos se hagan visibles y tangibles.
Formar profesionales que no buscan protagonismos sino hacer parte un trabajo en equipo, donde la satisfacción se da cuando se logra la sincronía. Trabajar de forma holística, escuchar sin pontificar, aprender y multiplicar el conocimiento en una planificación viva, aumenta la cantidad de ciudadanos mas solidarios, felices, incluyentes y resilientes.
From red foxes in London and wild boars in Berlin to cockroaches in New York City and slugs in Miami, Feral Cities is full of stories of urban wildlife. Some of the animals are familiar ones, such as the fruit flies you can’t keep away from your bananas, while others, such as Monk Parakeets in the middle of Brooklyn, are surprises. Until recently, cities were widely regarded as bereft of value for wildlife, but Donovan turns that belief on its head with his tales of both urban animals and the people who interact with them on a daily basis.
The book opens with the story of a day spent with Bryan, a rattlesnake catcher in Phoenix, Arizona. A web designer during the day, Bryan spends his spare time serving as a snake-removal service for the serpent-infested homes and businesses of the desert city. Bryan’s stories of wrangling snakes in suburban garages and gardens and his interactions with residents reveal how little some people know about these creatures, despite living in close proximity with them. During one such episode, a homeowner who found a gopher snake in a sprinkler lid asks, “Do they have bones?” Another story—of a diamondback rattlesnake in the garage of a terrified family—exhibits the high levels of fear that encounters with urban wildlife can elicit. Overcoming this aversion to wildlife in our cities is of major concern. As cities continue expanding into natural habitats, close encounters with wildlife will only increase in frequency. Human urbanites will have intimate experiences with animals they never noticed or even knew about.
Donovan says that he “wanted to show people who barely even think about urban wildlife what was there in their midst.” The book certainly accomplishes this goal. After introducing Bryan, the urban snake wrangler, the book expands to stories from locales as diverse as Berlin, Miami, Cape Town, Mumbai, and Los Angeles. These stories capture the truly multifaceted nature of the urban wildlife question. Topics as varied as economics, culture, architecture, and politics, in addition to biology, influence the study of wildlife in cities.
One of the most complicated of these factors is human attitudes toward urban wildlife. Donovan does well when portraying the varied relationships between urban wildlife and people. In India, monkeys are viewed as an incarnation of the Hindu god Hanuman. Therefore, Indian authorities are reluctant to wage war on urban populations of these mischievous city inhabitants, even though they have caused multiple deaths, including that of Mumbai’s deputy mayor in 2007. In another sympathetic case, teams of volunteers in Chicago sacrifice their early morning hours roaming the streets of downtown, rescuing migratory birds that have collided with high-rises.
On the other end of the spectrum are the almost militaristic efforts of the city of Miami against feral chickens and snails. Brought to the Americas by Europeans, chickens have taken to urban, suburban and rural areas via escapes from captivity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Miami; some neighborhoods have literally thousands of chickens roaming the streets. The city has made multiple attempts at freeing the city from the clutches of these urban-adjusted birds, which are capable of ripping up a lawn in a matter of hours. Teams of chicken-hunters respond to complaints, chasing down and catching chickens in nets. Miami is also infested by the African land snail. Eight inches long when fully grown, these snails eat stucco off houses, lay hundreds of eggs per month (and can self-fertilize!), carry a meningitis-causing nematode, and eat five hundred different crop plants. Donovan describes them as “giant potentially deadly hermaphrodite house-eating terrorist snails that breed fast.” These snails are a threat to homes, public health, and Florida’s economy, which is largely supported by agriculture. Accordingly, the African land snail has jumpstarted the largest pest-control response in Florida’s history, which appears to have slowed the spread of this monster. Donovan’s portrayal of varying human reactions to urban wildlife makes Feral Cities truly representative of issues surrounding urbanization’s effects on wildlife.
Aside from the attitudes of the general public, some of Donovan’s stories give an up-close account of the scientists who study the complicated lives of urban wildlife. Studying animals in urban areas presents a number of challenges. Coyote researchers in Chicago sometimes have to do some light trespassing, using private driveways in order to track animals living in residential areas. Wildlife officials in India are often forced to remove or put down jaguars that become accustomed to urban living.
Urban wildlife scientists are also usually the people responsible for communicating with the public about urban wildlife. Los Angeles, California harbors one of the United States’ most famous urban wildlife examples—the mountain lion, P-22. Making his home in L.A.’s Griffith Park, P-22 has brought the issues associated with urban wildlife to the fore in one of the country’s largest cities. Some residents are proud of P-22, while others readily accuse him and his ilk of attacking household pets, although, in reality, this is rare. It often falls to scientists to communicate facts about urban wildlife aimed at increasing acceptance of sharing our homes with non-human residents.
The book concludes with a message of hope. Designing wildlife-friendly cities will be a major focus in the future of studies of urban wildlife, architecture, and urban design. Donovan uses the Nature Boardwalk at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo as an example of how these efforts have already begun. After reseeding, a concrete pond was transformed into a veritable urban oasis, harboring a multitude of native plants. Nest boxes are supplied for Black-capped Chickadees, while native fish swim in the pond below droves of native dragonflies. Turtles have found their way to the pond, as has the Black-crowned Night Heron, an endangered species in Illinois. Chicago is a leader in wildlife-friendly urban design, but other cities are following suit, such as Berlin, Germany, which has initiated efforts to connect all the city’s green space to serve as wildlife corridors. Donovan also highlights the non-conservation benefits of urban wildlife: improvements to human health and increased exposure to nature, to name a few. Donovan calls for all of us to open our eyes to the wildlife that lives around us in cities, from rare endangered birds to common squirrels to sidewalk ants to the spiders roaming our apartments.
Donovan hopes that his book will excite people about urban wildlife or, at least, prompt them to be more appreciative of it, much as he has been over the years. As a student at Plymouth University in the UK, Donovan worked on surveys of urban lichens, but a volunteer stint at a magazine convinced him to become a journalist. Despite the change in his career path, Donovan remained interested in ecology and always hoped to write about it. The inspiration for Feral Cities finally arrived in the form of London’s red foxes. After reading newspaper columns about the foxes, Donovan came up with the idea for a book about urban wildlife, which became Feral Cities. For Donovan, urban ecology is more than animals alone—“it’s ecology meets evolution meets architecture meets planning meets psychology meets social policy”.
This interdisciplinary understanding of the issue is certainly apparent in the excellent Feral Cities. Although not an analytical, scientific text, the book provides a unique look into the lives of both urban wildlife and its human counterpart. For anyone interested in any of the many aspects of urban wildlife, Feral Cities will be a vastly entertaining read.
On May 22, 2011, a devastating EF-5 tornado forever changed the Midwestern cities of Joplin and Duquesne. The tornado was ½ mile to ¾ of a mile wide and traveled nearly thirteen miles, with winds estimated at 200 mph. The tornado took 161 lives and destroyed homes, businesses, churches, hospitals, and landscapes, generating nearly 3 million cubic yards of residential debris throughout the disaster area. In addition to devastated homes and infrastructure, Joplin’s urban forest was destroyed in this disaster (at least 10,000 mature trees were lost). This urban forest was part of the everyday landscape that refreshed residents on a daily basis and contributed to a local sense of place. Government agencies and community groups have since committed to creating a sacred green space where the tornado touched down at Cunningham Park, a beloved open space that became the city’s first park in the late 1800s. Since the tornado, the nine-acre park has been a meeting place and rallying point, serving as the site of annual memorial tributes, among many other functions. These acts only scratch the surface in describing the resilient people of Joplin and Duquesne; the recovery of the area is nothing short of miraculous and is truly inspiring, a result of a nimble and responsive local government that was able to adapt to the shock and surprise of the tornado and harness a release of energy and goodwill for the betterment of the social-ecological system. Four years later, we can see Joplin and Dusquesne as examples of resilience, resolve, and realization. And we can see how principles of civic ecology were demonstrated in this Midwestern community.
The first principle of civic ecology is that civic ecology practices emerge in injured, damaged, or broken places, or red zones, such as Joplin and Dusquesne after the tornado. When a sudden shock or surprise, such as a disaster like a tornado, brings death, destruction, and despair, we can expect to see civic ecology practices emerge shortly thereafter.
The second principle describes how, because of their love for life and love for the places they have lost, civic ecology stewards defy, reclaim, and recreate these injured, damaged, or broken places. My work in Joplin documented that, beyond the deep loss and mourning of friends, families and community members, people in Joplin felt the loss of their trees deeply, and were disturbed by the visceral “tree corpses” still standing throughout the city. These trees, stripped of branches and bark by the force of the tornado, generally died. However, some survived and became inspirations to “never give up,” while others were “repurposed” as hopeful and cheerful community art installations.
Depiction of the transformation of debarked trees in Joplin, Missouri from depressing reminders of tragedy to hopeful statements of rebirth and recovery. For more, see Tidball, K. G. 2014. Seeing the forest for the trees: hybridity and social-ecological symbols, rituals and resilience in postdisaster contexts. Ecology and Society 19(4): 25.
The third principle shows us how in recreating place, civic ecology practices recreate community. My colleague, Nancy Falxa Sonti, from the US Forest Service, and I participated in the 2012 Memorial Walk of Unity, a 3.7 mile walk along the path of the tornado, along with literally thousands of other community members and well-wishers. We observed cheering throngs as a steeple was put back on a church, ground-breaking ceremonies to replace the destroyed high school and elementary school, and a ceremony at the terminus of the walk, Cunningham Park, which included a very moving moment of silence at 5:41 pm. Community was being recreated as leaders pointed out the memorial trees, the TKF funded Butterfly Garden and Overlook at Cunningham Park, and the progress in recovering from the storm.
Thousands of participants on the 2012 Day of Unity in Joplin. For more, see http://joplintornadoanniversary.com.
The fourth principle sheds light on how civic ecology stewards draw on social-ecological memories to recreate places and communities. Joplin City officials responded to the grief over lost family members coupled with the grief over destroyed trees and worked with civic ecology stewards to initiate a planting program in Cunningham Park to plant one tree for every lost human life; the final tree was planted on the one year anniversary of the storm, as described above.
Memorial trees planted at Cunningham Park in Joplin, MO. For more, see Tidball, K. G. 2014. Seeing the forest for the trees: hybridity and social-ecological symbols, rituals and resilience in postdisaster contexts. Ecology and Society 19(4): 25.
The fifth principle alludes to how civic ecology practices produce ecosystems services. In addition to the memorial trees planted in Cunningham Park, civic ecology stewards engaged in large scale urban tree planting. Storm water retention by urban forests is worth significant sums and could save on cost-intensive technical solutions. The filtration of air pollutants, carbon sequestration, increased property values, and maintenance of drinking water by urban ecosystems provide further significant benefits, all as a result of the actions of tree planters in post-tornado Joplin.
The above tree planting discussion also incorporates the eighth principle, that civic ecology practices start out as local, small-scale innovations and expand to encompass multiple partnerships. After the first two years post-storm and the immense number of trees planted by civic ecology stewards, the city of Joplin realized the need and hired a full-time city forester.
Civic ecology practices are embedded in cycles of chaos and renewal, which in turn are nested in social-ecological systems. This is the ninth principle, and in Joplin we can clearly see this principle at work as leaders responded to ongoing cycles of disturbance. Resilience enables systems to adapt to change and bounce back. One particularly hard-hit church near Cunningham Park adapted and overcame by rebuilding, but that was not the full extent of their adaptation. The congregation also later took their experiences of recovery and disaster relief to another Midwestern town in Oklahoma in 2013 after they experienced a deadly tornado, and brought both their generosity and experiential knowledge to bear, allowing for a kind of empathy, commiseration, and solidarity not uncommon among civic ecology practitioners.
Pair of crosses in the sanctuary of the rebuilt St. Paul’s Methodist Church in Joplin, MO. The larger cross is made from debris collected by church members while doing relief work after the Moore, OK tornado in 2013, to be presented to the rebuilt First United Methodist Church in Moore, OK. Photo: Keith G. Tidball.
As we saw in Joplin and Duquesne, policymakers have a role to play in growing civic ecology practices. This is the tenth civic ecology practice, and was evident from the first moments after the tornado. Mark Rohr, then city manager in Joplin, took extraordinary leadership during and after the storm. “We will rebuild Joplin,” he declared at a public rally as the national television cameras rolled. “You have my word on it. Go out; do not forget the miracle of the human spirit as you go from here today. Remember the miracle of the human spirit.”
The phrase resonated nation-wide. Rohr wrote a book called Joplin: The Miracle of the Human Spirit. When the Kansas City Chiefs came to help shovel, they left with blue wristbands that said, “The Miracle of the Human Spirit.” A country band called LiveWire recorded a song called “Miracle of the Human Spirit.”
In an increasingly urbanised world, there is a growing disconnect between the people who live in cities and the natural environment. Urbanites tend to have less contact with natural habitats and biodiversity than their country or rural counterparts, and in some cases have been known to develop a disinterest or distaste for natural settings. This “Nature-Deficit Disorder”, as described by Richard Louv in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods, is hypothesised to contribute to a range of behavioural problems, particularly in children. While Singapore is often considered to exemplify urban greenery, it is undeniably an urban city where this disconnect is manifested in much of the population. Most citizens are hard-pressed to identify even the most common of bird species, and it is not unusual to hear a child refer to the outdoors as ‘dirty’.
Singapore is a society in which nature conservation is not part of the public psyche, and much has to be done to improve general awareness of, as well as to encourage participation and stewardship in, nature conservation. While a large majority of Singaporeans recognise the value of nature, less than half is keen in participating in nature conservation efforts. The National Biodiversity Centre of the National Parks Board has developed a Community in Nature (CIN) initiative as part of a national strategy to conserve Singapore’s natural heritage. This initiative aims to synergise and coordinate all nature-related events, activities, and programmes to better reach out to the community to encourage them to bond over and with nature. To cater to the various needs of different segments of the community, CIN programmes are currently tailored to target schools, families, and citizen scientists.
Schools
As educational institutions, schools are natural targets to increase awareness of biodiversity and environmental education. As ecology and environmental education is scarce in the Singapore curriculum, enrichment programmes provide an alternative avenue for students to learn about our biodiversity. While such programmes have been around for a long time, newer programmes have made use of recent developments in pedagogy and technology to enhance the learning experience.
Greening Schools for Biodiversity
The Greening Schools for Biodiversity programme was initiated in 2014 to encourage student participation in caring for their school grounds and the environment. Open to students between the ages of 10 to 18, the programme promotes the targeted planting of bird-, butterfly-, and/or dragonfly-attracting plants guided by results from student-led biodiversity audits. Through this programme, not only are habitats created for animals, bringing the entire school population closer to nature, the resultant green network of schools also has the potential to act as link-ways for wildlife movement between nature areas across the whole of Singapore. Participants of the programme are also encouraged to learn about, appreciate, and support local biodiversity.
Students conducting a biodiversity audit as part of the Greening Schools for Biodiversity programme.
The training programme equips students with the skills to enhance biodiversity on their school grounds. Over the course of the programme, students learn to use Google Earth to create vegetation maps and conduct land-use surveys. Subsequently, students learn to survey the flora and fauna in their school during the biodiversity audit, where they gain hands-on experience in conducting wildlife surveys while honing their observational skills. Guided by information collected from the first biodiversity audit, students identify potential green areas to plant by evaluating the site conditions around the school. They also brainstorm outreach ideas aimed to increase appreciation and raise awareness of biodiversity in their school among their peers, teachers, and beyond. Finally, as outlined in their action plan, students carry out targeted planting in their selected plots, creating new biodiversity-friendly habitats on their school grounds. Through these steps, they learn to be more aware of the biodiversity in their immediate surroundings, as well as the ecological linkages between species.
Biodiversity Week for Schools
Between 18 – 22 May, the inaugural Biodiversity Week for School 2015, was organised in observance of the International Day of Biological Diversity (IDB). Under this programme, schools could sign up for a suite of different activities, each targeted at different age groups, to celebrate our natural heritage and IDB. Here, we discuss in more detail the Green Wave initiative, the Playtime with Paddy the Flying Pulai workshop, and the All about our Trees e-learning module.
The Green Wave initiative is a worldwide biodiversity campaign that educates children and youths on the importance of protecting our natural environment. Students from around the world will plant locally important trees in their school compounds at 10 am on 22 May each year. This creates a figurative “green wave” that begins in the Far East before eventually rippling globally. This year, NParks continues to encourage schools to plant new trees within their school grounds as a way of participating in this event. In addition, existing schools are encouraged to perform mulching on their existing trees to promote their health. By participating in this symbolic international initiative, students recognise the far reaching impacts of their actions and are inspired to take the lead in conserving our natural heritage.
Preschool children displaying their completed artwork.
The Playtime with Paddy the Flying Pulai workshop was undertaken in collaboration with the Raffles Institution Ecological Literacy programme, which seeks to instill a sense of curiosity and exploration in their students to encourage environmental advocacy. Under this programme, students are encouraged to find ways to share their learning and insights with the community at large; most recently, this has taken the form of storybooks for younger learners. Due to the effectiveness of this medium in communicating environmental messages to young children, NParks has adapted the publication, Paddy the Flying Pulai, into a crafts workshop for preschool students to learn about some of the flora and fauna in Singapore’s forests. This workshop comes with an animated short following the adventures of Paddy the Flying Pulai and concludes with a folding craft activity where students assemble various characters to reconstruct the habitat depicted in the book.
The All about our Trees e-learning module makes use of information technology to communicate the importance of our trees to a new generation of IT-savvy youths. The e-learning module contains two short videos, A History of Trees in Singapore and Common Trees of Singapore, along with interactive quizzes to assess the student’s understanding of the module. Illustrated in the style of fast-motion whiteboard animation, which is popular on several educational channels on YouTube, this e-learning module carries an important message to youths in a medium with which they can identify. Many of these resources are created by student volunteers and young adults, who know best what captures the interest of their peers.
A close-up of the Playtime with Paddy the Flying Pulai folding craft.
Families
Family groups have enormous potential for connecting and involving parents and children alike in the conservation of our natural heritage. Research into significant life experiences (SLEs) shows that early experiences in nature have a disproportionately large impact in shaping one’s interest in natural history. As families are always seeking meaningful and fun recreational activities to bond over, encouraging nature appreciation among families provides opportunities for parents to spend quality time with their children while inculcating nature ethics into their children at the same time.
My Family’s Nature Pledge is a programme which encourages families to experience nature and learn more about our biodiversity through exciting events and activities organised under the CIN initiative. Under this programme, nature appreciation is promoted as a healthy, social activity for the family to bond over. As part of the programme, families are invited to complete a series of 10 activities in our customised activity-poster and to submit a photograph of their completed work. These activities are carefully crafted to promote nature experiences and learning about our biodiversity in a fun, yet educational, way.
Family participants at the Art in Nature workshop creating their nature collage.
In addition to these activities, participants are invited to various workshops and guided walks. One recent workshop was the Art in Nature workshop, conducted in the Singapore Botanic Gardens. During the workshop, participants were led on a guided tour around the Gardens and invited to collect fallen plant materials to create their own nature collages. Through the workshop, parents and children alike learnt to appreciate the varied forms of plants around us. The session was extremely well received due to the interactive and creative nature of the activities.
Citizen science
With increasing education and awareness, we see a growing interest in volunteers to gain more knowledge or to make a more meaningful impact through their efforts. One way to enhance the volunteer experience is to participate in Citizen Science, a decades-old movement that has intensified in recent years. In Citizen Science: Public Participation in Environmental Research, Janis Dickinson and Rock Bonney define citizen science as ‘public participation in organised research efforts’. Recognising that the public has a significant role to play in research, scientists and academics have been harnessing the power of the people to collect large amounts of data. These citizen science programmes have the potential to achieve more than conventional outreach initiatives, as the crowd-sourced data can be used to inform management strategies and decision making.
NParks has rolled out several programmes aimed at the segment of society more geared towards such active participation. On 16 April 2015, NParks launched a 10-day long nationwide bird count that saw more than 400 volunteers conducting point counts at 60 parks and nature areas. Given the relatively small birding community and a lack of birding tradition in Singapore, a large proportion of the volunteers had little or no experience with bird watching. Volunteers were thus required to attend a training session to familiarise them with 30 common birds in Singapore that formed the baseline comparison across all sites. They were also trained with basic skills necessary to conduct a point count, and were tested in the field during the training sessions. This was to ensure that data collected by both amateur and experienced volunteers could be compared across all sites, if only for the selected bird species. This programme will subsequently be run twice a year to cover both the breeding season (in April) and the migratory season (in November).
One consideration of creating programmes for a relatively nascent nature community such as the one Singapore is the lack of knowledge and awareness prior to volunteering. It is thus crucial to ensure adequate training is provided, particularly for programmes where data needs to be collected rigorously. Another birding programme, Heron Watch, teams up experienced bird-watchers with new volunteers to survey designated transects for water birds such as herons, bitterns, and egrets. This transfer of knowledge ‘on the job’ is the model followed by many large-scale bird surveys elsewhere, and forms the foundation of many established birding communities.
CIN Citizen Science programmes are not limited to birds or to the terrestrial environment. TeamSeaGrass, is a collaboration between NParks and international Seagrass-Watch, the largest scientific, non-destructive seagrass assessment and monitoring program in the world. The team actively monitors three key seagrass meadows in Singapore, which provides the baseline data necessary to identify important trends relating to the health of the meadows. This small but dedicated group of volunteers have even presented their data at a local scientific symposium, proving that citizen scientists can yield useful and reliable information.
Seagrass monitoring at Chek Jawa by TeamSeaGrass.
With the growth and proliferation of smartphones, there has been a growth in the number of mobile applications for citizen science purposes. CIN has tapped into this mode of crowd-sourced information by developing a new app to map the distribution of flora and fauna throughout the country. The SGBioAtlas app allows users to easily record and identify biodiversity sightings which contribute towards an existing online database (BIOME), which the public can use to analyse spatial trends or to search for the reported locations of specific species. Over time, this Atlas will become a database of biodiversity distribution that can be used as a management and research tool.
Festival of biodiversity
Inaugurated in 2012 by Singapore’s President Tony Tan Keng Yam, the Festival of Biodiversity is an annual signature CIN event organised by NParks in collaboration with the Biodiversity Roundtable (a group comprising local non-governmental organisations involved in local biodiversity issues) for the conservation of Singapore’s natural heritage. It is a national effort to communicate the importance of biodiversity and its conservation to Singaporeans and residents of Singapore.
The two-day educational event involved some 100 volunteers and 40 partners comprising nature groups, biodiversity experts, schools, corporate organisations, and government agencies, each contributing to the Festival’s programme and exhibits.
Through the Festival, the biodiversity community, public agencies, corporate groups, school groups, and individuals are galvanised to contribute to a common goal: the conservation of Singapore’s natural heritage. All the partners involved bring to the Festival their knowledge, expertise, and resources to create greater awareness and interest in our natural heritage and to instill a sense of national pride to sustain our rich biodiversity for future generations.
Booths and workshops at the 2014 Festival of Biodiversity.
The first Festival, held in Singapore Botanic Gardens, attracted some 3,000 visitors; the second and third Festivals, which were held at a shopping mall, attracted at least 10,000 and 15,000 visitors respectively. Bringing biodiversity into the heart of a popular shopping mall also allows us to proactively reach out to the ‘unconverted’ passing shoppers, touching hearts and minds through the passionate volunteers showcasing a plethora of plant and animal specimens and sharing interesting nuggets of information about our biodiversity. Many young children were also given an opportunity to interact with biodiversity-related activities
Effects and Future Efforts
Even though CIN is still in its early stages, feedback to the programmes has been favorable. More data has to be collected to fully understand the impact of the CIN initiative, but responses on the ground have been encouraging. Many participants have expressed surprise at the amount of biodiversity that can be found in their surroundings and are keen to pursue nature activities in Singapore. By intensifying public awareness programmes and incorporating biodiversity into school curricula, we can enhance people’s appreciation of our native biodiversity and increase active participation in nature conservation activities. In the long run, CIN aims to cater to a wider audience with a greater variety of programming options, while also increasing presence in schools where education is most impactful. With time, we can begin to reconnect Singapore’s urbanites with their natural heritage, and safeguard it for generations to come.
Lena Chan, Linda Goh, Samantha Lai, and Zhou Boyi
Singapore
Seek the silent places where no jarring sound is heard and nothing breaks the stillness but the singing of a bird. Nature tells her secrets not to those who hurry by, but to those who walk with quiet heart and seeing eye. —Chinese proverb
I recently discovered that the word ‘resilience’ in my native language, Dutch, is ‘veerkracht’, which literally means ‘the strength of a feather’. I cannot think of a more beautiful and symbolic way to say how powerful nature is. While a feather may appear delicate, it is incredibly strong, each feather ultimately giving birds the strength to fly and move freely between earth and sky.
Over the past few years, I have been carefully exploring connections between IUCN’s work on biodiversity protection and the promotion of the value of nature within urban development. I have met many passionate experts, became part of new and exciting partnerships, discovered impressive scientific information on urban ecosystems, and found great examples which showcase the untapped potential of nature to enrich urban life.
Looking into the potential of unconventional partnerships and innovative ways to connect cities and urban dwellers to natural landscapes can provide significant benefits in their day-to-day lives. Protecting nature in and around cities can help secure natural resources and turn our current economic challenges into opportunities to achieve a sustainable and resilient urban future.
Pigeon feather. Photo: Chantal van Ham
The benefits of nature protected areas for economy and wellbeing
Investing in nature within and, particularly, beyond urban boundaries can offer a valuable economic return for cities—a value that is often underestimated. Increasing the understanding of the benefits of healthy natural systems and the services they provide, and subsequently integrating them into urban planning and decision-making, can help to strengthen water, energy, and food security; can promote health and wellbeing; can decrease disaster risk; and can reduce the impacts of climate change.
We’ve started to see these ideas catching on. Last year, over 6,000 participants from more than 170 countries met at the IUCN World Parks Congress in Sydney to celebrate an enormous variety of inspiring ways to address the challenges facing the planet through protected area approaches that respect and conserve nature while benefitting human health and prosperity. The Congress made clear that rebalancing the relationship between human society and nature is essential, and took stock of challenges and innovative ways in which ecosystems support our existence, cultural and spiritual identity, economies, and well-being.
A striking example is that a third of the world’s largest cities obtain a significant proportion of their drinking water from forest protected areas, which serve not only as a supplier, but also provide filtration services that lead to clean water and substantial cost savings. For instance, over the last few decades, Beijing has been facing a progressively worsening water crisis. Much of the original broadleaf forest in the Miyun watershed had disappeared. The IUCN Livelihoods and Landscapes (LLS) project in the Miyun watershed responded to the paradox of a landscape dominated by forests and impoverished local communities. Because there was little or no active management of the forests, the livelihood of these communities was under threat. The situation stressed the ever more urgent need to ensure that the source of Beijing’s rapidly dwindling water supplies—the forest—was protected. The project introduced a sustainable use and active management of the forests to be undertaken by local communities and made considerable efforts to find other ways to strengthen livelihoods, to promote sustainable forest use, and to add value at the local level.
This project shows just how immensely valuable, the connections between people and nature are.
Unconventional partnerships
New forms of collaboration will be required to mainstream natural solutions into urban and regional sustainable development and investment decisions. These partnerships will allow citizens to be reunited with nature, will allow our natural capital to be protected, and will optimize the values and benefits of ecosystem services.
A key partner to engage with to achieve this transition is the private sector. Whether knowingly or not, businesses rely on natural resources for their production processes and depend on healthy ecosystems to remove waste and to maintain soil, water, and air quality. At the same time, businesses can have major negative impacts on biodiversity. While the private sector is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution—it can offer innovative answers to conservation issues.
Innovative business models that combine ecology and the economy already exist, as we learned during a dialogue on the contribution of green infrastructure to the circular economy. The Ford River Rouge Truck factory in Michigan, for example, has green roofs (providing a dynamic ecosystem with over 35 insect, spider, and bird species and 11 plant species) that filter 20 billion gallons of water per year, thereby contributing to storm water regulation and water filtration—all with substantial cost savings.
A partnership between The Nature Conservancy and Dow Chemical demonstrates how valuing natural capital can benefit business and the environment. At a large Dow facility in south Texas, the company, with the help of environmental scientists, has calculated that investing in natural resources such as marshes and mangroves can deliver environmental and financial benefits that are equal to or higher than those generated by conventional pollution controls. A Dow project in Seadrift, Texas, that cost about US 1.2 million and utilizes a wetland would have cost US 40 million if the company had built a traditional engineered wastewater treatment plant. The wetland also provides habitat for deer, bobcat, birds, and even alligators.
Another interesting example of creating business opportunities through investing in green spaces in urban areas is the Green Infrastructure Audit, which was developed in London’s Victoria Business District to identify options for installing new green spaces and improving existing areas. By mapping green infrastructure potential, this audit has revealed that enhancing the natural environment not only has the potential to improve worker satisfaction and increase local property values, but also to reduce peak summer temperatures and the costs to local businesses resulting from flooding, as well as to create further business opportunities.
The European Centre for Nature Conservation (ECNC), an IUCN NGO member organization in the Netherlands, has joined forces with two companies to tackle the problem of marine litter. Healthy Seas recovers abandoned fish nets that pollute our seas and regenerates them into high quality yarn, which is then turned into new gear, such as socks, swimwear and carpets. While producing new products from used materials, the initiative raises awareness about the importance of healthy seas, the removal of abandoned fishing nets from oceans and seas, and the financing of local coastal and marine projects to promote the protection of seas across Europe.
Leaders for Nature is the IUCN Netherlands’ business engagement network of twenty multinationals and major Dutch enterprises working together to green the economy. Its annual forum brings together private sector, government, and civil society stakeholders to identify ways of integrating natural capital into business management and practices. One of the challenges enumerated at this year’s forum was how to identify nature-based solutions for three sites in the Rotterdam and Amsterdam area. It turned out to be an inspiring exchange between unconventional partners on neigbourhood action to prevent flooding and urban heat, as well as to discuss plans for a Green Climate Corridor in the Amsterdam area—an innovative example of potentially larger, landscape-scale, replicable, nature-based action.
Green Cities Challenge, IUCN Leaders for Nature Forum 2015
A new initiative recently launched by IUCN, World Environmental Hubs, aims to create a global platform for recognition of cities and regions showing leadership in using nature to overcome the challenges they are facing and to help secure citizen wellbeing. This platform will bring together subnational governments with international environmental organizations, scientists, economists, and NGOs to increase cooperation, capacity-building, and knowledge-sharing for promoting and implementing nature-based solutions.
The connection between cities and the surrounding natural landscape
The need for increased awareness of the opportunities related to protection of nature is not just of importance for the business community. Many city dwellers do not have a clear understanding of the support that nature provides of their day-to-day lives. Encouraging the enhancement of biodiversity in cities, such as planting species of native plants in our backyards or creating places where butterflies or birds feel at home, can revive nature in even the most densely populated city. This helps people living in urban environments to reconnect with nature and learn about the fascinating relationship that exists between humans and the natural landscape surrounding them.
Shkodra, Albania. Photo: C. van Ham
Many cities have extensive green spaces; sometimes these areas are part of an integrated network linking urban green areas to forests and other natural ecosystems quite far outside the city. In Oslo, almost all citizens live within 300 meters of a green area or park. Helsinki’s 10 km long Central Park extends from the city centre north into an old growth forest, providing multiple benefits for people and biodiversity.
In 2003, the Metropolitan Government in Seoul, South Korea, uncovered and restored parts of the historic Cheonggyecheon River because the infrastructure covering it posed safety risks to citizens, meaning that it had to be either removed or repaired. The restoration of the river has led to an increase in fish and bird populations and an overall increase in biodiversity. The river also helps to cool temperatures by 3-5 degrees ((Yang and Cervero 2009) compared to surrounding areas and attracts an average of 64,000 visitors daily, all of whom contribute to Seoul’s economy. The restoration has served as a catalyst for an estimated US 1.98 billion worth of capital investment in Cheonggyecheon-area redevelopment (Kim et al. 2009).
Gyeongyecheon river, Seoul. Photo: C. van Ham
Vitoria Gasteiz, in the North of Spain, has invested in its natural capital by establishing a green belt, naturally connecting the city with the river and mountain ecosystems in its surroundings. Restoring these connections is essential for maintaining water flow, preventing soil erosion and flooding, reducing the urban heat island effect, creating habitat for a diversity of plant and animal species, offering opportunities for citizens and visitors to learn about nature and providing areas for recreation. Vitoria Gasteiz has been awarded the European Green Capital in 2012 for showing true leadership when it comes to protecting biodiversity and restoring the functions of the natural ecosystems within and around the city. It is an inspiring example for cities around the world.
Connecting people with nature
I believe, as many of The Nature of Cities bloggers do, that a sustainable future is in the hands of urban citizens and their perspectives on nature. The value of biodiversity and ecosystems for life is essential to making the transition towards a sustainable future.
As David Maddox pictures so clearly in his beautiful story ‘It is difficult to take in the glory of the dandelion’, we can decide as societies what we value, what we want the places we live in to look like, and what to do with the financial resources available to our planners, developers, and citizens.
It remains a real challenge to convince those used to traditional investment models and current economic thinking that nature is not a cost, but an investment offering good rates of return. Creating solutions via unconventional partnerships with a long-term vision, a sense of commitment, and a willingness to find ways to share, learn, and promote successful stories is key to transforming nature’s economic role into an asset for business and society. More work is required to establish a comprehensive understanding of when, where, and how investment in natural capital makes good social and economic sense. Like Dow and The Nature Conservancy, finding a common language and shared goals, while building on complementary knowledge, can serve as a strong foundation.
Seeing nature as an essential provider of ecosystem services and key contributor to economic prosperity and social wellbeing starts with considering nature as part of one’s own life, especially if that is in an urban environment.
Faucons peregrines Images cameras IRSNB
Integrating nature into people’s lives can be done in many ways. One of my personal favourites is the Peregrine falcons nesting on the top of one of the towers of the St. Michael and St. Gudula Cathedral in the heart of Brussels, where I live. With the use of modern technology, we can follow the chicks from when they hatch until they spread their wings, ready for their first flight.
I hope that all of us will find new inspiration and value in bringing nature close to our homes, as well as in more remote green spaces and protected areas, so that the understanding of the connection between healthy ecosystems, lands, communities, and economies will place the same value in natural capital as in social and financial capital.
Kang C.D., and R. Cervero (2009). From Elevated Freeway to Urban Greenway: Land Value Impacts 31 of the CGC Project in Seoul, Korea. Urban Studies 46, 2771–2794.
Kim, H.S., T.G. Koh, and K.W. Kwon. 2009. The Cheonggyecheon (Stream) Restoration Project – Effects of the restoration work. Cheonggyecheon Management Team, Seoul Metropolitan Facilities Management Corporation. Seoul, South Korea.
A review of Still the Same Hawk, edited by John Waldman. 2012. ISBN: 9780823249893. Fordham University Press, New York. 160 pages.
“Dualism is the defining quality of urban nature.”
Thus begins John Waldman’s introduction to Still the Same Hawk, a grab bag book of “reflections on nature and New York” from eleven different authors. For some readers new to the topic, the very notion of “urban nature” may be a dualism in and of itself: a pair of words missing a conjunction to make them make sense. Urban and nature. Urban or nature. But urban nature? What on earth is that? Waldman and his colleagues set out to find out.
Robert Sullivan literally wrote the book on what he calls “nature that people would rather not think about”—a 256-page meditation on a horde of rats living in an alley at the southern tip of Manhattan. Sullivan’s essay focuses on the nature that thrives and prospers in cities, “…the nature that everyone is not looking at, the nature that Ansel Adams avoided, that people don’t use as screensavers or put on the side of their coffee mugs.” Nature isn’t missing from cities, Sullivan argues. We just refuse to acknowledge it because it’s unexceptional or unappealing. Rats and roaches, rotting trash and roosting pigeons. He challenges us to pay closer attention and, in doing so, transform the unexceptional into the sublime.
The book takes its title from Sullivan’s observation that a hawk nesting on the windowsill of an Upper East Side apartment is a newsworthy event, while a hawk perched on a cliff in the Catskills is, well, just another hawk. And yet, as the book’s title tells us, it’s “still the same hawk.” Same species, different context. We humans choose to focus on the former and shrug at the latter. Our expectations shape our perceptions, and vice versa. In short, we can choose to see nature and the city in a different light. If there’s one theme that runs through all the essays in this potluck collection, it’s probably summed up by two simple words: pay attention.
William Kornblum, a researcher and writer based at the City University of New York, struggles to craft a coherent “land ethic for the city” in his essay on teaching undergraduate environmental sociology at Queens College. His class wanders outside to explore the landscape surrounding the campus. They discover a tight grid of row houses overlooking the sunken six-lane Long Island Expressway before scurrying along to find a patch of urban greenery in nearby Kissena Park. Like an ersatz Socrates strolling outside the walls of Athens, Kornblum peppers his students with questions as they make their way through the neighborhood: “Why is the land here so elevated?” “What happens when it rains or snows and the water runs off the streets?” “What do land uses at three of these corners have in common?”
The students, Kornblum admits, “seem perplexed” by his questions. So, too, is this reviewer. It hardly seems fair to ask questions that most students are unlikely to be able to answer without some prior knowledge of the topic. This isn’t maieutic teaching; it’s uninformed guesswork. These students may see the things Kornblum points out, but, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, they aren’t invited to observe. Though his meanderings are well meaning, Kornblum fails to deliver a cohesive land ethic for urban life by the end of his essay—an unfortunate disappointment, given how beautifully he writes about New York harbor in his 2002 book At Sea in the City.
David Rosane, another educator, recollects a series of personal interactions with New Yorkers confronting the dualism of urban nature. He casts a spotlight on three New Yorkers in a mini-drama with a raccoon in Central Park: an uptight white woman from the Upper East Side who frets about rabies, a sharp-tongued and world-weary Latina who shrugs off the white woman’s warnings, and a timid Asian woman who wonders aloud if raccoon meat makes for good soup. Rosane is well-meaning in his enthusiasm for New York City’s multiethnic mosaic—we all discover nature in our own unique ways!—but the stereotypes are distracting and do little to advance his message.
Devin Zuber’s essay redeems the theme on teaching and learning that pops up again and again throughout Still the Same Hawk. Good teaching often follows the same rules as good writing, and the axiom “show, don’t tell” aptly summarizes Zuber’s strategy as he invites students at the City University of New York to investigate and interpret the city on their own terms. They find arresting moments of beauty in their everyday experiences of the city, linking small and tangible objects to big and abstract ideas about urban ecology. Like Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Zuber’s students venture out in search of the sublime and come back having transcended the divide between nature and the city.
Zuber argues that imagination and an appreciation for beauty are integral to understanding the complexity and richness of nature in unnatural settings. It takes a wild mind to see the ghost of Minetta Stream still trickling under the asphalt of Downing Street in the West Village; to see a line of street trees in Midtown as a single small copse in a sprawling rectilinear urban forest; to see the whole of New York City as a palimpsest landscape first etched upon more than twenty thousand years ago by a massive ice sheet travelling south from the Arctic Circle. Imagination, in this sense, is the practice of speculative transformation, of picturing what could be and what could have been.
In her Corner Garden, Dara Ross recalls a small group of imaginative neighbors in Brooklyn that transformed a garbage-strewn vacant lot into a lush community garden. Ross offers a dialogue-driven glimpse at mundane moments in the garden’s history. We overhear Zora and Alma, two of her neighbors, reflecting on the day the garden got started:
“R.C. was out there cleaning up that nasty-ass mess but so was JoJo, Liliana, Lester, Calvin, Sherrie, NayNay, and even that lazybones Willie…” Zora recalls.
“Shoot girl, now I know that was a lot of work,” Alma replies.
“Sho’ nuff it was,” Zora confirms.
These aren’t caricatures like the ones we find in Rosane’s essay; they’re full-blooded characters, each unique and fully alive on the page. We eavesdrop on their chitchat and discover the truest value of community gardens in their deliberations and debates, reminiscences and remonstrations.
Kelly McMasters offers up a similar mini-memoir of her time living in a basement apartment near an abandoned moonscape in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Her essay inventories the utopian schemes projected onto a parcel of land contaminated by the residue of a manufactured gas plant from the Gilded Age. This “section of land in Brooklyn where the Gowanus Canal curves like a comma” would see plans come and go for a public park, a high-tech vertical farm, and any number of competing proposals for new housing. The winner, in the end, was a hybrid of sorts: gardens, parks, and a cluster of condos slated to open in 2017. “This block will be the most expensive in the neighborhood soon,” McMasters’ landlord declares, his imagination running free. “You watch.”
Phillip Lopate tackles one of the most enduring contradictions between American environmentalism and urban design: our love/hate relationship with the sort of dense development currently sprouting up along the Gowanus Canal. Lopate argues that naturalists and urbanists should be friends—that high-density cities are more energy efficient and take up less space than the suburbs designed to replace them. “I don’t know when God declared that there should be no skyscrapers in Brooklyn,” Lopate writes, challenging high-minded NIMBYists in a low-rise borough of brownstones to think of the benefits that come with well-planned density. That’s the kicker, though. In the rush to redevelop, cities like New York have seen density increase without a corresponding investment in infrastructure and municipal services. Skyscrapers are fine, but without affordable rental units, reliable subways, well-maintained parks, excellent schools, and access to a decent grocery store, city dwellers may end up striking out for the suburbs after all.
In Monarchs of the Urban Mind, Betsy McCully focuses her imagination backward to “mentally excavate layers of time and space ever deeper” to discover a New York where “continents docked and drifted, mountains rose and eroded, glaciers advanced and retreated.” McCully sees a region that was already on the move long before Henry Hudson floated into the harbor or Peter Minuit put a down payment on the island of Manhattan. “It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it,” O. Henry wrote about New York more than a hundred years ago, long before skyscrapers and superblocks. McCully, reflecting on the cyclical rhythms of butterflies and horseshoe crabs migrating in and out of the city’s harbor, helps us see that New York is a great place because they never finish it—they being the gods of old who cause mountains to rise and fall and rivers to change their course and the demigods who’ve built canyons of concrete and steel, highways and harbors and railroads and acres and acres of parks.
Stewart Brand, an iconoclastic environmental thinker with an unapologetic love for cities, calls this sort of perspective “long now” thinking. It forces you to look past the trivia of daily life and situate yourself in a broader, more consequential view of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. While McCully digs deep into the long now of New York’s past, Anne Matthews scans and summarizes a stack of scholarly reports forecasting the city’s future and identifies four basic scenarios. The first is a “dystopian battleground of civic chaos and decay, a Bladerunner vision of New York” in a warming and increasingly crowded world. The second is a “milder edition of this chaotic future”—a sprawling megalopolis with creaking infrastructure and ecosystems on life support. Things get better in the fourth scenario: the city is retrofitted for environmental sustainability and resilience in the face of climate change. The fourth is a mix of the preceding three: New York as an archipelago city, surviving though its geography and its infrastructure are altered by rising seas. Which scenario will become a reality?
If McCully and Matthews bring the “long now,” then essayists Tony Hiss and Christopher Meier bring the “big here.” In their Welcome to the H20 Region, Hiss and Meier invite residents of New York to think of the region surrounding the city’s harbor as a “second address” filled with rivers and streams, beaches and wetlands, forests and mountains and valleys to rival any National Park way out west. If the residents of San Francisco and Berkeley and San Jose and Sausalito can all claim the “Bay Area” as their home, why can’t the people of Middletown and Newark and Fort Lee and White Plains picture themselves belonging to a larger “Harbor Area” with New York City at its center?
Frederick Buell does a fine job of summing up the book in his essay on the cultural history of nature in New York. Buell argues that we are living through a slow motion environmental apocalypse. There’s no going back to the way things were, and surviving the future will likely involve exploring and appropriating the contradictions between cities and nature that governed our thinking in the past. In the future, nature will be both nowhere and everywhere—not just because of the radical changes from climate change that already in the pipeline, but because we will have learned to think of nature in a different way.
Still the Same Hawk raises more questions than it answers—a fitting tribute to the complexity and chaos of an urban ecosystem that refuses to settle down into anything vaguely resembling a climax community. Though the quality of the essays varies, the book includes some truly thought-provoking treasures that are easily paired with longer classics such as Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon or The Granite Garden by Anne Whiston Spirn. Sullivan’s essay, for example, deserves a place on any undergraduate environmental studies syllabus. Ross’s essay should be required reading for anyone in the ever-growing urban agriculture movement.
Waldman deserves credit for compiling the first approachable attempt at deconstructing the idea of nature in the context of New York. Every big American city should have a similar collection of essays to call its own. So who’s next?
Among the many lessons learned over my decades-long career in urban conservation is that iconography matters. Icons have proven to be powerful catalysts in the conservation arena, particularly in the urban context.
Chinook Salmon. Photo: Michael Wilhelm, Wilhelm Photography
Salmon, for example, are the quintessential representative of the natural world throughout the Pacific Northwest in both urban and rural areas. Salmon are especially central to the life ways of indigenous peoples; constitute the basis for much of the region’s cuisine; and are a keystone species for watersheds ranging from the vast Columbia River to the smallest urban waterway in cities like Seattle and Portland.
Camas (Camassia quamash) and Oregon white oak are both indicators of the now imperiled oak savannah habitat that once dominated the pre-settlement Willamette Valley in Oregon, a habitat maintained by active management of native tribes. Both the salmon and oak savannah are the focus of much of the ecosystem restoration efforts throughout the Pacific Northwest for reasons that go beyond their formal status as threatened or endangered, owing to their cultural significance.
Camas. Photo: Mike HouckCamassia Nature Conservancy Preserve, oak savannah. Photo: Mike HouckGreat Blue Heron. Photo: Mike Houck
The Great Blue Heron: Urban Nature Icon
When I assumed the title of Urban Naturalist in Portland in the early 1980s, taking a cue from the attention given salmon and oak savannah, I wondered if we might establish an icon from the natural world to rally urban nature conservation in the Portland metropolitan region. I had read that around sunrise on March 15th of every year since 1957 Hinckley, Ohio celebrated the concurrent return of spring and the Turkey Vulture to the “Buzzards’ Roost” at the Hinckley Reservation, part of the Cleveland’s Metroparks system. That tradition, initiated by Hinckley’s “official buzzard spotter”, Dr. Bob Hinkle who was a naturalist ranger for the park district, was even taken up by the Cleveland rock station—WMMS refers to itself as “The Buzzard”—and more recently by the local Chamber of Commerce, which hosts an official Facebook page complete with Buzzard Day Countdown.
Hinckley Ohio Buzzard Days. Source: the Internet
Berkeley, California also has a city bird, the Barn Owl, which instigator Lisa Owens Viani says was inspired by Portland’s heron. Her passion for Barn Owls began soon after moving to Berkeley in 2003. As she and a friend strolled around their neighborhood they heard a hissing noise that sounded like, what she describes as a respirator. On closer inspection the sound emanated from a palm tree. Unfortunately, not everyone in the neighborhood shared Lisa’s passion for the owl and the palm was shortly thereafter felled.
Her concern for Barn Owl habitat and the fact that the owls predate on unwanted mammals led her to led her to the The Hungry Owl Project in Marin County and Raptors Are The Solution. She was surprised to learn that a dozen pair of owls nested in Berkeley, most in the Canary Island palm trees, such as the one in which she saw her first Berkeley owl. In what she describes as “the least controversial Berkeley Council resolution ever”, the Barn Owl was designated at the city’s official city bird. For more information check out Keep Barn Owls in Berkeley.
Barn Owl. Photo: Bob Lewis
Threatened Portland heron colony
As with Berkeley’s Barn Owls, the plight of a Great Blue Heron nesting colony that lay in the path of a proposed roadway realignment sparked a pitched battle against a roadway that would have been routed through several acres of wetlands and within a short distance of a public golf course. I got to wondering if elevating the heron’s status in Portland might draw attention to loss of habitat generally and at the golf course specifically. We had already engaged in a heron related land use issue in the late 1970s involving a sand and gravel operation at Ross Island on the Willamette River in downtown Portland. It seemed to me that herons were likely to remain in the cross-hairs of proposed developments for years to come and perhaps the time had come to enlist the bird in a public relations campaign.
Great Blue Heron Colony, Ross Island. Photo: Mike Houck
The Great Blue Heron, it seemed to me, was the perfect icon, being one of our most charismatic megafauna. They’re impossible to miss, standing over three feet tall, with a wingspan over six feet. No animal, save the salmon, is so representative of Portland’s urban nature scene. Its image is everywhere: blue heron cheese, blue heron condominiums, blue heron bowling lanes, even blue heron music festivals. They live year-round in the Pacific Northwest and can be found virtually anywhere there is water, from the smallest tributary to the Willamette and Columbia Rivers.
Herondipity
Portland’s former mayor, Bud Clark noted for many eccentricities, including being a political novice tavern owner having deposed one of Portland’s most right-wing politicians, wearing Lederhosen and yelling “whoop, whoop” on late night TV, and his daily commute city hall in his suit and on his tricked-out bike. But, he was and still is an advocate for nature in the city. In the spring of 1986 Clark was asked to give the welcoming address at the downtown Hilton ballroom to a conference of Western fish and wildlife managers. Bud was also an avid canoeist and duck hunter. During his presentation he gave impassioned descriptions of observing great blue herons from his canoe and as they glided by downtown skyscrapers.
Portland Mayor Bud Clark with Great Blue Heron
Voila, I thought! Given Bud’s impulsive nature, love of nature, and mayoral authority, I grabbed him by the arm as he exited the Hilton and suggested he declare the heron Portland’s official city bird. A few “Whoop, whoops” and two weeks later he issued a proclamation before City Council declaring the Great Blue Heron Portland’s official bird. The golf course, by the way, was renamed from West Delta Golf Course to Heron lakes Golf Course. Ironically, the eighteen holes adjacent to the heronry was named Greenback after what was then called the Green-backed Heron and the second 18 holes were Great Blue.
LEFT: City of Portland official proclamation,courtesy City of Portland) RIGHT: Flyer for Portland’s City BirdThe author (with Heron) with the Portland City Council and Bob Sallinger (with proclamation), of the Audubon Society of Portland, 2011
Leveraging icons
While adopting an official city bird may sound frivolous, the process of establishing an official city bird when combined with an annual celebration and mayoral proclamation provides a great opportunity to encourage local elected officials to “re-up” their commitment to ensuring that symbol of the city’s environmental quality. In Portland we have celebrated Great Blue Heron Week the last week of May and first week of June every year since 1986. Portland’s mayor reads, and the city council adopts, a new proclamation with numerous clauses establishing why Portland cares that herons live in our midst. The annual proclamation ends with city commitments to undertake habitat acquisition, restoration, and management during the coming year to protect and improve heron habitat and, by extension, fish and wildlife habitat generally throughout the city.
And, then of course, depending how creative and expansive you want to get, there are always leveraging opportunities. Having just returned from city hall after the first proclamation to one of our favorite watering holes, Bridgeport Brewpub, the brew master walked by and asked how our urban conservation efforts were going. I recounted the fact that we’d just adopted a city bird and he responded he’d just brewed a new ale which he had not yet named. Blue Heron Ale was launched that afternoon. Again, what may sound frivolous to some turned out to be a significant “oiling the gears” of urban conservation. Bridgeport became the gathering place for elected officials, agency naturalists, and park advocates where relationships were spawned and plans were hatched for increasing the region’s system of parks, trails, and natural areas and creating healthier watersheds and urban ecosystems.
Great Blue Heron Ale label. Photo Mike HouckOregon City mayor with Blue Heron Ale. Photo: Mike Houck
Five years after the heron became our city bird I approached a muralist who agreed to create a seventy-foot high, fifty-foot wide heron mural on a mausoleum overlooking one of the city’s most beloved wetlands, 160-acre Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. Twenty years later we collaborated to expand the original mural with a 55,000 square foot wetland motif to draw the public’s attention to the Bottoms, hoping to accelerate public support for its care and restoration.
Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. Photo: Mike HouckPortland Memorial Mausoleum and mural.Oregon Poet Laureate, William Stafford original hand written poem, Spirit of Place
Berkeley’s Joe Eaton, in Keep Barn Owls in Berkeley, reports other examples of city’s having adopted official city birds, including San Francisco (California Quail; Seattle (also the Great Blue Heron);Chicago (Peregrine Falcon); and Port Aransas, Texas (Roseate Spoonbill).
Internationally Eaton reports the following cities and their official bird: Seoul, South Korea (Magpie); Xiamen, China (Egret); Keelung, Taiwan (Eagle); and in Japan Hamamatsu’s Swallow; Morioka’s Wagtail, and Chiba’s Little Tern. There apparently quite a few other Japanese cities with city birds as well.
As we prepare for this May’s Great Blue Heron Week and our annual trek to Portland City Council, I have been re-reading William Stafford’s Spirit of Place poem, which I asked him to write for the first heron week while he was still Oregon’s poet laureate, twenty-nine years ago. With all of the toasting of Blue Heron Ale, countless city proclamations, and other events, nothing comes close to capturing the intent of creating an iconic representative of the natural world that informs our efforts to create a livable, lovable, and ecologically sustainable city as Stafford’s, Spirit of Place.
Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron
Out of their loneliness for each other two reeds, or maybe two shadows, lurch forward and become suddenly a life lifted from dawn or the rain. It is the wilderness come back again, a lagoon with our city reflected in its eye. We live by faith in such presences. It is a test for us, that thin but real, undulating figure that promises, “If you keep faith I will exist at the edge, where your vision joins the sunlight and the rain: heads in the light, feet that go down in the mud where the truth is.”
—William Stafford, 1986
Timothy Beatley, a recognized environmental urbanist and planner, has recently been working on the concept of sustainable communities and resilient cities. In particular, the author’s focus is on the possibilities and scope of cities and their residents to cope with environmental challenges, including mitigating climate change and reducing ecological footprints. While these environmental challenges are burning topics acknowledged by society, it seems that time and again, a nature enthusiast needs to remind the citizens of planet Earth how important these issues really are. With the alarming increase in pollution, sea level rise, and global temperature changes, books on fighting and mitigating these events should be published more often and distributed widely, starting with schools and local communities.
People living in cities—coastal and land locked—depend heavily on the sea as a food source and for transportation to sites of employment, recreation, and leisure. Unlike many urbanists who focus only on land boundaries of cities, Beatley takes one big step forward in this book: he extends the boundaries of cities not only to coastal areas, but to the deep blue sea, even to parts inaccessible to an ordinary person. Because coastal cities constantly use marine resources, it is only logical to include the vast marine ecosystems of the world in cities’ boundaries. Beatley gives us a new perspective in viewing water masses (rivers, lakes, seas and oceans) as an extension of our cities and, in the end, an extension of ourselves.
Beatley often argues in his books that cities should be designed in a way to enable citizens to have daily contact with the natural world, which would reactivate the lost but permanent connection of all living things on the planet. Although connectedness to green belts is more “natural” and easier, we have to remember that we are 70% water and that seas and oceans are already an intrinsic and inseparable part of us. Still, in urban areas, there is more focus on green belts due to easier accessibility. Beatley tries to bring the blue belt closer to us through amazing examples and practical suggestions from all over the world. With just a little imagination, bringing the “big blue” to even inland cities and creating connection between people and the blue belt has shown amazing results, many of which are presented in Beatley’s book.
Images of the Taputeranga Marine Reserve
The book is written in straightforward language designed for the broader public, from children and students to everyone interested in learning a bit more about the blue environment and our connectedness to it. Even local and regional authorities can find examples of and means for bringing aquatic life into the everyday lives of citizens, thereby expanding the boundaries of their cities into the blue. Everyone, even with limited knowledge of marine ecosystems and urban planning, can understand the problems that are occurring with overuse of marine resources. Through the book, Beatley evokes emotions and a will to action amongst his readers. The author describes examples of different approaches that bring marine life closer to cities, including the role of local governments in catalyzing this transition, from San Francisco, USA to Wellington, New Zealand. Further, Beatley has made the effort to personally investigate the examples he describes, lending credibility to his accounts in the book.
This book is intended as a handbook of blue urbanism, a short introduction into the vast possibilities of actions that can expand our vision of cities and help create sense of connectedness to the vast marine area. Beatley does not go into the details and magnitude of the environmental issues concerning marine ecosystems and the problems of current urban planning. Rather, the solutions and examples that are enlisted represent the overall effort of one city or community in bringing marine life into the everyday life of citizens. His examples include all aspects of human actions, from legislative examples of banning plastic bags that eventually harm marine organisms, to architectural solutions that embed the sea into urban planning, to recreational and educational activities of many cities that introduce aquatic life forms in marine parks and aquariums to awaken sensibility within all age groups. The examples of local and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are only given as examples of good practices without deeper development of the ideas behind these efforts. This book is intended as a handbook of blue urbanism, a short introduction into the vast possibilities of actions that can expand our vision of cities and help create sense of connectedness to the vast marine area.
The book is written in a concise way and is easy to follow. Beatley opens with an introduction to the urban-ocean connection before taking his reader on a journey through urban life and the incorporation of marine life into urban planning and practical and existing ideas of connecting oceans and cities. In the end, he gives us a glimpse of a blue urban future and recommendations for future work and actions. Beatley supplements his book with pictures; however, it would have been much better if the pictures were in color, since marine life is spectacularly colorful. Nevertheless, this minor glitch can be overlooked in light of the substantial content of the book.
I would recommend this book to my friends, students and people interested in sustainable cities and connecting urban life with nature, both on land and at the sea. This could be a good start up material for getting engaged in local NGOs or civil initiatives that are focused on protection of marine life and ecosystem and brining it closer to general public. Blue Urbanism has the potential to inspire decision makers to start thinking out of the box and making changes–now!
Efficient land use for urban development is crucial for limiting urban sprawl, conserving nature around a city, and improving the livability of the city itself. In China, the unprecedented speed of urbanization over the past three decades has unfortunately resulted in widespread inefficient land use, creating problems that only some cities are trying to solve today.
China is already home to the world’s largest urban population of 758 million, which is predicted to reach 1 billion by 2030. With an average of 15 million Chinese rural farmers becoming urban residents every year, there is no question that urban areas in China will continue to feed what may seem to be an insatiable appetite for land. How Chinese cities can satisfy the needs of a growing urban population while expanding sustainably is a critical question that affects so much of the Chinese landscape, from biodiversity to urban carbon emissions.
One of these issues is of particular concern to the central government—the dramatic loss of arable land.
Urban development encroaching upon farmland. Source: China Economy Net “Economic Daily” 中国经济网—《经济日报》
Hungry for land
China has had an agriculture-based society for thousands of years, so cities and towns have usually sprung up among large swaths of farmland. Over time, urban expansion encroaches into more and more farmland, displacing farmers and reducing China’s total arable land. With a staggering 1.3-billion denizens, China’s arable land is already limited and extremely precious; its arable land per capita is only one tenth that of the US.
However, China’s inefficient land use has seen the nation’s total arable land area drop drastically, especially in recent years (see the figure below). The transition of large amounts of relatively lower-carbon-emitting agricultural land into urban areas has not only removed the carbon sink created by the original vegetation and soil, but has also enhanced carbon emission intensity largely due to construction of roads and buildings.
Changes in China’s arable land area from 1996-2008. Source: China’s national condition profile
China now has 121 million hectares of arable land, only slightly higher than the central government’s target of 120 million hectares of protected farmland. Almost every city has enthusiasm for development of industrial parks, places with drastically lower building and population densities compared to old urban areas. Since 2006, the central government has started to designate economic development zones (EDZs) across the nation, with increasingly more rigorous control over the newer EDZs. However, demand for land remains overwhelming and inefficient land use is still prevalent for several reasons, including tax systems and government coordination issues.
Then there’s the complicated issue of carbon emissions. How land is used determines how much carbon is emitted, both during the rural-to-urban conversion process and through urban land use and transportation planning. Emissions generated from China’s farmland represented only 1.84% of China’s land-based carbon emissions in 2008, meaning that farms have a carbon emission intensity of only 3 tons/km2. Converting farmland into developed urban or industrial spaces drastically increases carbon emission intensity to 3,364 ton/km2 and 4,781 ton/km2, respectively (Lu 2011). Common disregard for long-term urban infrastructure planning creates another problem down the line. Roads and buildings built without considering long-term effects have made construction materials and long-term usage of built infrastructure, large sources of carbon emissions themselves. For example, while the construction process and materials required for making a wide road produce carbon emissions, the same road allows for more motorized vehicles to travel and thus generates even more carbon emissions.
Sources of the rapid decline in arable land and increase in carbon emissions from urbanization can often be linked with poor development management systems at different government levels and ministries. Until major reforms are effective, these worrying trends will likely remain unchanged.
A glimpse of rural China (top) and urban China (bottom). Sources: top: Samuel Vigier, Creative Commons; bottom: Robert S. Donovan, Creative Commons
The Chinese tax regime: a major culprit
When the central government divided its taxes into central and local collection in 1994, easily collected taxes from stable sources became central government taxes, while local taxes were left with taxes from scattered sources that were costly to collect and difficult to administer. As a result, tax revenues for local governments became, and still are, very limited. However, local governments were given the key to a hidden treasure chest—the authorization to convert rural collectively-owned land into urban land for development. This is a huge opportunity given the context that there is no private land ownership In China.
Rural land is owned collectively by local farmers, while urban lands belong to the nation. Local governments can authorize the use of a particular section of land in their jurisdictions. Local governments began to sell the land rights to developers in exchange for land concession revenues. Thus, local governments have been appropriating rural land for urban construction and then using the land concession revenues to address their own fiscal deficits. From 2001 to 2003, China’s land concession revenues amounted to a massive 910 billion RMB, or 35% of local revenues. In 2010, this figure rose to 69% of local revenues. In 2012, land concession revenues climbed to a whopping 2,690 billion RMB (Huang and Cai, 2013). With so much money to be made in rural to urban land conversion and not much to rely on for stable revenue, local governments had no incentive to develop land efficiently. In contrast, this system is largely responsible for the low-density and wasteful land use practices of the past three decades.
Fortunately, the National Audit Office recently launched a nationwide campaign targeting the finances and debts of local governments. Moreover, the politburo just passed the General Plan for Fiscal and Tax Reform. China’s minister of finance indicated that one objective of this reform is to create a tax regime that will level the playing field and unify the market environment, but the details of this plan have not been disclosed yet.
A dance of four ministries
Spatial planning coordination and the creation of a streamlined planning system are gradually gaining more attention in the eyes of the Chinese government. Unlike streamlined planning systems used in most Western countries, China’s spatial planning system is a confusing, “multi-regulation” parallel planning system between four central government ministries. Since the origins, objectives, methods, standards, and implementation periods, etc. of these different programs differ, the agencies get tied up with overlapping, contradictory, and even conflicting issues. This disorganization detracts from the effective allocation of resources and management, negatively affecting land use efficiency.
In August 2014, the four ministries jointly issued a notice calling for a “regulation merger” and selected 33 pilot cities. Prior to this, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangdong, Beijing and other cities already performed a “regulation merger” trial run, gaining valuable and practical experience. Like the recent tax reform, we still have yet to see how effective this new “regulation merger” will be.
The shining stars
Despite the challenges, there are always some shining examples of progressive cities in China making the shift towards more efficient land use. In our work, we like to highlight these cities’ good practices to encourage other cities to follow their lead. Here are a few of our favorites:
“Landless investment” in Shanghai:
A populous city with a limited carrying capacity, Shanghai is constrained by land availability. Since 2004, some districts have adopted the “landless investment” strategy to develop even where additional land was unavailable.
The goal: to renovate and transform industrial areas while improving the downtown economy and ushering in high rise buildings and the modern service industry.
Qingpu Industrial Zone digital rendering (above) and green space (below). Source for both: Shanghai Qingpu Industrial Zone
To transform old industrial parks, investments were given to old companies with excess land to upgrade facilities and increase efficiency. Enterprises with low output per unit of land, high energy consumption, and high pollution emissions were shut down, freeing up land for new, more efficient enterprises. From 2004 to 2005, Shanghai removed 250 enterprises with high energy consumption, low output, and heavy pollution, resulting in 6,875 acres of freed land. The selection process that determined which enterprises could move into the industrial park involved a comprehensive assessment of industry orientation, environmental protection, land demand, and other indicators. Therefore, only enterprises with intensive land use were allowed to establish.
One of the industrial parks participating, Qingpu Industrial Park, developed regulations preventing new investments of less than $300 million/km from establishing, and now requires the expected output to be no less than 3 billion yuan/square kilometer. These regulations clearly define the minimum standards for building density and floor area ratio of land for each project. In Jiading district, 72 prospective projects were assessed, and 32 of the candidates were approved with the average investment per acre at $312,300. These investments across Shanghai’s participating industrial parks also promoted industrial upgrades, resulting in overall economic benefits. With Shanghai leading the way, the minimum capital intensity of land and land use efficiency of the entire Yangtze River Delta region increased.
Redesigning core areas of Chenggong, Kunming:
When Chenggong New Town began construction in 2003, the original plan was covered in superblocks and single land-use patterns, two of the most common yet inefficient urban development patterns in China. Much of the area became packed with buildings of similar appearances and functionality. Excessively wide superblock roads decreased pedestrian safety and bicycle accessibility. Thanks to noise and pollution issues from increased vehicle traffic on the road, buildings were being built further from the road, making pedestrians walk farther just to enter the buildings. These obstacles not only undermined street retail prices, but also reduced transit accessibility and livability of the Chenggong New Town. In 2011, the US Energy Foundation and MoHURD collaborated to launch an urban low-carbon development pilot project.
The goal: to redesign core areas of Chenggong New Town into a transit-oriented hub with mixed land use to create a low-carbon city.
By the time the pilot project was launched in 2011, the original Chenggong New Town plan was partially completed and many projects were under construction. The new plan therefore needed to cooperate with already constructed roads, existing sites, local culture and regulations. Superblocks were replaced by small-scale neighborhoods, which included a multi-functional blend of residential and other buildings. In addition, small-scale neighborhoods favor cycling and walking, reducing the demand for motorized vehicles and increasing the efficiency of buses and private cars. Starting from the transit-dense city center, comprehensive development of offices, retail, entertainment and residential areas have been developed within walking distance. Finally, mixed use neighborhoods encourage walking, which is beneficial for the local economy since walkable cities ultimately increase vitality of local businesses.
Comparison of superblock design in the original plan (left) and smaller mixed neighborhood design in the new plan (right) for Chenggong New Town. Source: China Sustainable Energy Program of the Energy Foundation and Calthorpe Associates (2011).
Chenggong’s core areas transformed from a network of superblocks into a compact grid of smaller neighborhoods. The new design, with a multi-modal transportation infrastructure, greatly improved land use efficiency and created a more convenient, user-friendly urban living environment. Environmental benefits expected from these results include reductions in vehicle emissions by 72%, greenhouse gas emissions by 59%, and total motor vehicle kilometers traveled by 67%.
Integrated planning in Tianjin Binhai New Area:
In 1994, the Tianjin Municipal Government decided to build upon the foundation of the Tianjin Economic and Technological Development Zone and the Tianjin Free Trade Zone to create the Binhai New Area.
The goal: to develop Binhai New Area as a thriving economic hub and livable ecological city for residents.
Tianjin Binhai New Area Source: CNRadio.com
Binhai New Area’s success was largely due to its efficient and pragmatic planning and implementation system. First, Binhai New Area established a first-class unified planning system and a master plan with functional area planning, urban planning, and land use planning with a planning period of 20-50 years. The master plan stresses equal importance of environmental protection and urban planning within overall land planning. Secondly, it established unified technical standards for the planning system, which unified land size and standards, along with basic planning details (Wang, 2009). Third, the planning was implemented by the newly created Binhai New Area Administrative Committee for more efficient coordination between different departments. This new district administrative system was much more effective than the old systems were for working within this new model. The Binhai New Area has been wildly successful and has since become the gateway to northern China’s open development. Known as “China’s third economic growth pole”, it is now an advanced manufacturing and R&D hub, a northern international shipping and logistics center, and an ecological city for residents. Tianjin Binhai New Area’s integrated planning model has since become a template for other new district development to follow.
Moving forward
While there are some good examples of more sustainable land use in China, the reality is that the vast majority of Chinese cities are still struggling to use land efficiently, causing the rapid decrease in arable land while increasing carbon emissions. To make the cases of Shanghai, Chenggong New Town, and Binhai New Area more common, key steps that China should take include: 1) universalizing high-density land development; 2) adjusting tax policies to encourage land conservation and intensive utilization; and 3) promoting integrated and coordinated government administration on spatial planning.
The Chinese central government has already launched its fiscal and tax reform, and there is already coordination in efficient land use practices and spatial planning in several Chinese cities. However, China will still need to go above and beyond on a much larger scale and use more diversified methods to reduce its appetite for massive expansion and to develop sustainably for more low-carbon and livable cities.
Note: The content of this blog was extracted from “Climate Change and Urbanization: Challenges and Progress in China”, a report written by NRDC’s China Sustainable Cities Project. The report was endorsed and jointly released by the China Coalition on Urban Sustainability.
References
Lu, N.(2011). Research on Carbon Emission Effects of Land Use Change. Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing.
Huang, G. and Cai, J. (2013). Divided Taxation System as a Root Course for Land-based Local Government Revenue – Strategies for Correction 土地财政的分税制根源及其对策, Macroeconomics Research, June 2013.
Wang, CH. (2009). Discussion on Binhai New Area’s implementation of “Regulation Merge”. Port Economy. 2009(8):8-12.
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Keren Bolter, Fort Lauderdale Resilience requires two things: awareness and being in action. Be aware of what is occurring and what the risks are, and then take actions to reduce risks and increase capacity.
Cezar Busatto, Porto AlegreIt’s crucial to know whether a community is more or less resilient to evaluate its culture of participation and collaboration and its social cohesion and civic engagement.
Lorenzo Chelleri, L’Aquila Resilience is a socio-political choice, implying trade-offs. Metrics help, but won’t save us from the development of risk-washing strategies.
William Dunbar, TokyoResilience assessment via communities’ own perceptions, through Indicators of Resilience in Socio-ecological Production Landscapes and Seascapes.
Thomas Elmqvist, StockholmIncreasing efficiency is viewed as critical for achieving sustainability, but a too strong emphasis on efficiency may erode resilience making the urban system vulnerable, through insufficient overlap in critical functions should some fail.
Antoine Faye, DakarIn my understanding, if the process is aimed at fusing a “resilience” agenda with the mainstream urbanization agenda, then it should be a continuous learning process. In that sense, the concept is not a “stock” but rather a “flow”.
Richard Friend, BangkokIf we take resilience as being the ability to learn and reorganize in the face of changing circumstances and risks, then the need to measure resilience becomes a learning exercise.
Lance Gunderson, AtlantaIt is better to understand and assess resilience in urban areas, than to try and measure it for at least two reasons: difficulties in measurement due to different definitions of resilience; and attempts to measure such a property creates spurious certitude to a complex issue.
Tom Henfrey, BristolAll talk of resilience these days is highly politicised, and it’s important to take this into account when considering whether and how to measure resilience in cities.
Patricia Holly, Barcelona+NairobiFrom the metaphorical world of ‘resilience’ writ large, is an emerging consensus around the means of addressing through concrete, reliable, and comprehensive urban engagement, the visions, aims and goals of cities to become safer, more resilient places for the people, businesses, and organizations that live there.
Dan Lewis, Barcelona+NairobiFrom the metaphorical world of ‘resilience’ writ large, is an emerging consensus around the means of addressing through concrete, reliable, and comprehensive urban engagement, the visions, aims and goals of cities to become safer, more resilient places for the people, businesses, and organizations that live there.
Rachna LévêqueResilience at strategic city scale requires collective governance that looks beyond the specifics to respond to intricately linked urban stresses.
Shuaib Lwasa, KampalaMeasuring resilience in cities is locale and context specific. Context to the risk profile and local conditions that shape the risk but also provides the levers for making cities resilient.
Timon McPhearson, New YorkResilience is a property of a system. Cities are systems, so on the surface it makes sense to think of building “urban resilience”. But cities are complex entities that have multiple social, ecological, and technical systems, so it’s difficult to interpret the meaning of terms like “resilient city”, let alone evaluate them.
Franco Montalto, VeniceResilient cities will be as diverse in form and function as we are diverse as an urban populace. Resilience plans will morph and change as we learn and grow. Resilience solutions are local and diverse, not monolithic and standardized.
Henk Ovink, The HagueThe key question is not how to measure resilience, but how to get to resilience in an accountable and transparent way?
Elisabeth Peyroux, ParisMeasuring resilience should be considered both as a (very difficult) methodological and a political problem.
Catherine Sutherland, DurbanWhat needs to be measured is the entanglement of state policy and practice with the practices evident in the lives of ordinary people and how these together contribute to greater resilience. This is much harder to measure, as these entanglements emerge in multiple ways along multiple paths at different scales.
Pakamas Thinphanga, BangkokIf we take resilience as being the ability to learn and reorganize in the face of changing circumstances and risks, then the need to measure resilience becomes a learning exercise.
Claire Weisz, New YorkThe value of scientific data and metrics to track losses and gains across many variables and factors could be the engine to realize the resilient communities that we are currently unable to achieve.
Dan Zarrilli, New YorkReady to withstand and emerge stronger from the impacts of climate change and other 21st century threats.
David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director. David's dad told him once that he needed a back up plan, something to "fall back on". So he bought a tuba.
Introduction
Resilience is one of three in a trinity of key urban design values: resilience, sustainability, and livability. Yet, of the three, resilience seems to reside the most in metaphor. Many are trying to build resilient cities and communities all over the world, and “resilience” works wonderfully (for the most part*) as a metaphor. Having a “resilient city” sounds like a great idea that everyone could support. No? But to design for resilience suggests we can identify it, plan for it. There are many definitions, each addressing different sectors of thought or action: ecological resilience, economic resilience, community resilience, engineering resilience, psychological resilience, and so on. When we descend from the heights of metaphor we are quickly faced with four key questions, practical questions: resilience to what, resilience of what, resilience for whom, and decided by whom? In addition, the answers generally must be specified locally. As a metaphor, resilience is deeply susceptible to risk-washing and cynical politics. As a grounded concept, it has the potential to address serious human and ecological problems. It’s a steep challenge, community by community.
(*And then there are the social patterns and systems that we wish were less resilient: social systems that seem to tolerate or even perpetuate corruption, racism, injustice and poverty come to mind.)
Of the 21 respondents to this roundtable, some are working on direct or indirect metrics. What makes them relevant and validated? Some are measurement skeptics. If it can’t be measured then how can we construct resilience (in an adaptive management sense)? Some are actively engaged in city building and policy. How is resilience an actionable concept?
In a time of gathering stresses from climate and ecological change, economic stress, and the persistent challenges of sustainability, justice and livability, resilience is a key area of thought with enormous potential. We must continue to work to bring it down from the 10,000 meters of metaphor to functional concepts on the ground. As we build and improve the cities of world, how can we act on the core ideas and promise of resilience?
Dr. Bolter has planned and collaborated on several projects including the MIT Sea Level Rise Scenario Planning and Alternative Futures project and an Anglo-Floridian partnership to exchange adaptation strategies between the UK and the US. For the Southeast Florida Regional Planning Council, Keren helped create a Guide for Adaptation Action Areas, in order to identify areas that experience coastal flooding due to extreme high tides and storm surges.
Keren Bolter
Resilience requires two things: awareness and being in action. Be aware of what is occurring and what the risks are, and then take actions to reduce risks and increase capacity. In a completed design for resilience, you must go beyond planning to implementation. This transition can have many obstacles, but creativity, inspiration and leadership can overcome resistance. You can measure changes in resilience by monitoring unique indicators of performance over time.
Let’s move from these abstract ideas to focus on examples in my city, Fort Lauderdale, located in Broward County, Florida. Sea level rise risks here are increasing dramatically in many dimensions, including physical, social, and economic. The Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact has a unified projection which predicts 7-18 centimeters of sea level rise by 2030 and 17-61 centimeters by 2060. The City of Fort Lauderdale already experiences tidal flooding (see picture). With the majority of the City’s land sitting at elevations between 1.2 and 1.8 meters above sea level, there is significant risk to storm surge. In addition, the porous limestone aquifer is just a meter below the ground surface during the wet season. Increasing sea levels will continue to compromise drainage and reduce our capacity to store ground water. With these increases in flooding, water management issues will impact more people and more property due to increased growth in the city. There are a variety of health impacts from threats such as seepage from septic tanks, vector-borne diseases, and mold. Financial risks include increased insurance rates driving down property values, in turn reducing the tax base, which will limit infrastructure and drainage improvements. What about vulnerable populations, and issues such as lack of a vehicle and public transportation options during hurricane evacuations?
Now that we understand the risks, how can we measure resilience? I will explore qualitatively. Adaptation to sea level rise tends to be classified in three ways: accommodate (modify structures, for example by elevating, floodproofing), protect (seawalls, living shorelines), and retreat (or at least stop developing in those high-risk areas!).
Flood risk into the future. Credit: Keren BolterLow water, Broward County, Florida.
There are policy actions, design standards, and outreach strategies which can prioritize adaptation. Fort Lauderdale has been a champion in all three of these arenas. In 2011, Florida’s Community Planning Act (HB 720) was created, providing Adaptation Action Area language at the state level. Broward County was the first local government in the state adopt Adaptation Action Areas (AAAs). Last June, Fort Lauderdale integrated the language as well. AAAs are a designation in the Coastal Management Element of a local government comprehensive plan which identifies one or more areas that experience coastal flooding due to extreme high tides and storm surge, and that are vulnerable to the related impacts of rising sea levels for the purpose of prioritizing funding for infrastructure needs and adaptation planning.
High water, Broward County, Florida.
Leadership from the local government had driven up awareness and action, working hard to inform residents and municipal employees with education workshops and promotional materials.
In one neighborhood, Las Olas Isles, which frequently experiences tidal flooding, drainage improvement plans include 50 tidal control valves and 48 baffles with an anticipated City budget of US$8.5 million over the next 5 years. In addition to government action, there are private businesses which are investing in awareness and action. As part of Coastal Risk Consulting, I have been helping to provide Coastal Rapid Risk Assessments which inform residents about the risks of nuisance flooding and storm surge at the parcel level over a 30-year mortgage period. These are specific examples of actions which reduce impacts which provide a foundation which we can ramp up as risks increase.
Cezar Busatto is married, father of twins, Leonardo and Carlos Ernesto, born in Veranópolis city and an Economist from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).
Cezar Busatto
Resilience is a complex approach to complex problems we have not been able to deal with in our cities and societies. Therefore, I understand resilience as a new hollistic approach that tries to reconnect knowledge that has been imprisoned in silos in the last centuries.
The one dimension type of solution is the origin of unsustainability. Gross National Product measuers economic growth but is not able to measure sustainable development. The United Nations made a big paradigm change introducing Human Development as a new measure of development. But it’s still short, if we consider the need to take into account the measurement of environmental, cultural, political, institutional and other dimensions of development.
How to begin that paradigm change?
In my opinion, we need to consider two basic concepts: territory and collaboration. Territory is where people live, grow their families and communiites, have their public spaces and social equipments. It’s the space of convivience. Collaboration is a way common people connect to each other in their informal networks on everyday life.
Bringing together collaboration and territory, we begin to restablish the necessary connections of knowlwdge to create innovative approaches to solve old problems.
Innovative and plural apporaches take into account different ideas and dimensions of a given situation, helping to build more complex, sustainable and resilient answers to it.
We are talking about articulating multistakeholder networks getting together people from communities, private sector, government and academy to deal with real problems local communities have to face with. These person-to-person (p2p) networks are real democratic experiences of dialogue and conversation among common citizens and foster better convivience and quality of life.
This is not a localist type of proposal. Local challenges are very offen connected to global ones. Let’s take a city, for instance: the challenges people face in a neighborhood are very often connected to challenges in the whole city. And it’s difficult to imagine that challenges found in a city would be disconnected from challenges at a broader scale. Besides, the p2p conversations and connections through new technologies connect local to global, bring new knoledge to the table and give more sustainable and resilient answers to local issues.
Moreover, collaborative territorial networks dealing with real and everyday challenges assure people’s motivation and mobilization. To achieve this purpose, the commitment of government staff in the dynamics of these networks is also very important.
That’s the social methodology we conceived in developing Porto Alegre’s resilient strategy. The core of our strategy is the articulation of local resilient networks in each of the 17 territories in which the city is divided. These networks define their main challenges and the way to face with them in a multistakeholder type of commitment. When the answer depends on public money, the local network of Participatory Budgeting is called to place a priority on the specific project in order to be included in the Public Budget. Each local resilient network will finally have an action plan to strenghten resilience in a given territory.
At the same time, all these local resilience networks come together to define the main challenges for the city as a whole. In a collaborative workshop we select what we call the focal areas to make Porto Alegre more resilient. Working groups are then organized to get deeper in the diagnosis and formulation of a plan of acction for each focal area. The consolidation of the territorial and focal plans will result in the resilient plan for the city.
In order to measure resilience, we will also need an innovative approach. We must of course take into account wellbeing conditions like the meeting of basic needs, public services provision and economic opportunities. But I understand it is crucial to know whether a community is more or less resilient to evaluate its culture of participation and collaboration and its development of social cohesion and civic engagement.
Lorenzo is the Director of the International Master Degree City Resilience Design and Management and Chair of the Urban Resilience Research Network (URNet) at the International University of Catalonia (UIC). With a background in urban and regional planning, environmental policy and urban geography, his research and teaching activities critically address the governance and planning processes related to city resilience governance.
Lorenzo Chelleri
City resilience? Take resilience thinking (the theory) and apply it to cities. “Nonsense”. As an urban planner, this is what came to my mind when I first came across the definition of resilience 10 years ago. Indeed, if defined as the capacity to overcome threats, retaining system structure, functions and identity, to me this was nonsense if were to be translated to cities. Why? Because a part from Lewis Mumford teaching us that “the need for social life” and “the commodities exchange opportunities” always represented the eternal core identity and function of any metropolis, city or settlements, the real capacities of cities, evident through history as the most durable (or resilient) human artifacts, resides in their transformational capacities.
Measuring city resilience? This is of course necessary and useful, and makes a lot of sense. This is not at all contradictory. The application of resilience thinking to cities, the metaphor of resilience (or “dealing with change”) has the positive effect of inspiring planners to tackle some specific urban challenges. It became worth finding measures to address resilience to disasters (recovery capacities), to climate impacts (adaptive capacities) to carbon emissions (mitigation capacities), etc. As presented from various colleagues within this roundtable, there are different valuable metrics and methods to measure such necessary and specific aspects of resilience related to urban development.
However, while I do agree on the need to assess, measure, and enhance city specific resiliences, my main concern is related to the emergence of a new overall paradigm, framing resilience per se as an imperative urban goal, a label potentially fitting within business as usual development agendas and promoting resilient cities rankings thanks to its indicators and metrics.
How can this be the case? We have now reached a general consensus on the need, normative compliance and positive outcomes related to resilience building. However, notwithstanding agreeing on resilience being a multifaced concept, many efforts have been spent on framing, promoting and measuring specific resiliences, while less attention has been spent in critically assessing and evaluating the trade-offs between resilience and other development goals. For instance, the “overcoming change” normative paradigm, should be operationalized through three very different approaches, namely “maintaining – adapting – transforming” (respectively aiming to build robustness, introduce incremental change or introducing long term disruptive change within the system).
The three coexisting and conflictive approaches through which is possible to operationalize resilience by “overcome change”. Credits: adapted from Chelleri et al (2015) “Resilience trade-offs: addressing multiple scales and temporal aspects of urban resilience”, Environment and Urbanization (27)-1: 181-198.
These coexisting but conflictive approaches, which could be operationalized through hundreds of different actions building resilience, can imply specific or strategic trade-offs. For instance, how would one frame long term transformational resilience synergies with enhancing the robustness and business continuity of current critical infrastructures? How to build resilience through community led initiatives (enhancing local self-sufficiency) in synergy with the need of growing the international competitiveness of a city? The main issue is that resilience, as sustainability, should be a social and political choice, about how and which substantial change, or incremental change, or asset to be maintained through robustness, promote. Green-washing experiences are a warning of the potential manipulation of metaphorically positive concepts, like sustainability. While our unsustainable urbanization process takes place, we should carefully avoid the rise of Risk-washing development strategies, manipulating the normative message of resilience building. The assumption of the normativity of resilience hides the issue of who is building it, for whom, and possibly replacing urban sustainability outcomes with urban (un-sustainable) durability.
Within the academic debate, it is clear to us that resilience is not just the flipside of vulnerability, and that in cities these three approaches related to resilience building (figure above) should coexist within the emerging urban resilience thinking. However, on the ground, resilience and its metrics, do not provide practitioners with any guide on how to prioritize or manage the process of building development pathways accounting possible resilience trade-offs. For instance, if we take resilience metrics and assess both the renewable energy distributed network of a very sustainable community, and the redundancy and modularity of a decentralized fossil fuel energy network, owned from a big company, they could eventually score the same level of resilience, in providing a reliable energy service. But what about their embedded trade-offs respect to sustainability, or social justice, or economic implications of such resilience metrics?
As Aristotle said, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For urban resilience I think we should learn and frame our thinking following this quote. Urban resilience is not just the sum of its parts. Measuring its social, economic, infrastructures or disaster facets performance is key. It is key only once we are clear on the city overall goals (like achieving sustainability, or inclusiveness, enhancing people quality of life, etc.) in order to frame how each of the resilience facets could support or impede the path to achieve them.
William Dunbar is Communications Coordinator for the International Satoyama Initiative project at the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS) in Tokyo, Japan.
William Dunbar
A community-based approach to measuring resilience in peri-urban areas
“Resilience” has gained increasing attention in recent years, to the extent that it seems to be rivaling “sustainability” as the word of the day in many fields. This makes it increasingly important to study resilience systematically; otherwise there is a risk of the term becoming overused and therefore essentially meaningless. Effectively measuring resilience is one step toward systematic study, keeping in mind that the goal is not just to study resilience but to optimize it.
Defining a community’s resilience loosely as its ability to withstand various types of changes, shocks and disturbances, unfortunately the only way to directly measure resilience is to subject a community to shocks and disturbances and see if it withstands them, which is obviously not practical. So we are left with estimating or measuring indirectly. One way to do this is by using elements that are thought to contribute to resilience and can be measured directly as indicators.
Ideally, it would be possible to use these to produce hard, quantitative data that could then be used in some sort of universal index of resilience. The fact that different communities exist in different ecological and cultural contexts, however, means that various responses to related challenges may contribute to or undermine resilience differently in different places. This can make it difficult if not impossible to identify and correctly weight quantitative elements of resilience. An alternative approach is to rely on qualitative, perception-based data. This roundtable entry presents an example of the latter approach.
The “Indicators of Resilience in Socio-ecological Production Landscapes and Seascapes (SEPLS)” were developed through a collaborative activity carried out under the International Partnership for the Satoyama Initative (IPSI) by Bioversity International and the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS). After extensive field-testing around the world, they were further refined and updated in a Toolkit publication in collaboration with UNDP and the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), providing guidance on how to apply the indicators. Much of the indicators framework applies to peri-urban areas, particularly where a significant amount of food production takes place. As was pointed out in a recent TNOC essay, peri-urban areas can provide connections between people living in urban areas and rural areas and can see benefits in resilience through effective management.
The process outlined in the Toolkit involves engaging a community in “resilience assessment workshops”, in which participants provide scores for the 20 indicators based on their own perceptions of their community and landscape. Example indicators include: “The landscape or seascape is composed of a diversity/mosaic of natural ecosystems and land uses”; “Common resources are managed sustainably in order to avoid overexploitation”; and “Rights and access to resources and opportunities for education, information and decision-making are fair and equitable for all community members, including women.”
Perhaps more important than the numerical scoring of the indicators is the process of having the community gather to discuss their resilience. Many participants have never considered resilience as a concept before, and it can be eye-opening for them to think about how different kinds of resource management in their landscape affect the community’s prospects. This can then feed into a long-term process of holistic resource management including repeated assessments and actions based on their results.
There are trade-offs involved in measuring resilience with either a purely quantitative approach or a qualitative, perception-based approach like the one introduced here. The former may provide the sort of comparable numerical data preferred for making decisions about resource allocation, but that same data may be less useful to those on the ground in any landscape. The latter, on the other hand, may not provide comparable data, but may pay off in secondary benefits like improved communication, understanding and motivation to work toward a resilient community.
Measuring resilience is a problematic but extremely important issue for urban as well as other communities, and I hope the Indicators of Resilience in Socio-ecological Production Landscapes and Seascapes (SEPLS) will help forward the process. I encourage readers to download the Toolkit publication, and I would like to thank TNOC for the opportunity to take part in this roundtable and discuss these issues.
Community members scoring the Indicators of Resilience at a workshop in Ondangwa, Namibia: Photo: William Dunbar
Thomas Elmqvist is a professor in Natural Resource Management at Stockholm University and Theme Leader at the Stockholm Resilience Center. His research is on ecosystem services, land use change, natural disturbances and components of resilience including the role of social institutions.
Thomas Elmqvist
On measuring urban resilience
To start out, I will make two statements about resilience. Firstly, my view is that resilience represents a systems approach (non-normative) to meet the challenges of sustainable development (normative goal). So at the outset, resilience could be either good or bad depending on the context. We certainly struggle with undesired resilience (e.g. dictatorships and corruption are examples of systems often being resilient but undesired by most). Secondly, resilience is a property of a system not of a locality. There are many instances where resilience has been linked to particular city or small geographic region. But this may lead to many unintended consequences, for example, building (desired) resilience in one city may lead to erosion of resilience or create undesired resilience elsewhere. Only if we view resilience as being a non-normative systems approach where cities are viewed as open systems connected to the rest of the world in many ways, may we be able to design appropriate indicators of urban resilience and measure some of its components.
Although we are still far from identifying such measures I will suggest two areas where we should start developing these, admitting the large challenge we have ahead of making any such measure operational.
The first starts out from the common view that increasing efficiency in urban functions (transport, energy, governance) is critical for achieving sustainability. However, in some instances a too strong emphasis on efficiency (maximizing outputs) can erode resilience through a deliberate reduction in redundancy and connectivity. The loss of redundancy and connectivity might create vulnerabilities in the urban system as a result of an increased dependence on a few sources and the entire system might become unstable having insufficient overlap in functions. In the figure below there is an evident difference between a self-organized system/network (to the left), having high redundancy in connections between different parts (many alternative pathways if one fails) and designed systems/networks (to the right).
There is empirical and theoretical evidence for that the trade-off between efficiency and resilience is real, and thus it would be worthwhile developing a measure of redundancy or degree of overlap for critical urban functions to avoid loosing desired redundancy. Such a measure could for example be based on some rather simple metrics developed in network theory.
Secondly, to build resilience, urban regions must take increased responsibility for and take into account their profound connections with, and impacts on, the rest of the planet. Collaboration across a global system of cities could and should provide a new framework to sustainably manage resource chains. Here a measure is needed that capture the intensity and type of such collaborations across multiple scales.
So combined, such measures could provide us with guidance for where and how much we should invest in redundancy in urban functions and in governance and institutions and for engaging in collaboration across a global system of cities. The outcome would likely also help us understand some of the true costs of sustainability.
However, it is still uncertain if we will succeed in finding such measures that truly could become operational and used in urban regions across the world. Perhaps we may alternatively view resilience as a concept that brings new dimensions and insight into urban planning. Insights from resilience thinking provide urban planning with a new language and metaphors for the dynamics of change and new tools and methods for analysis and synthesis. Most importantly, a resilience approach confronts modes of governance based on assumptions of predictability and controllability with a mode based on dynamics and non-linearity. However, resilience thinking provides planning with little guidance in prioritizing or addressing tradeoffs between different development strategies, highlighting the inherently political character of urban governance. Perhaps these insights from resilience thinking into urban planning combined with the acknowledgement of the limitations of these in addressing trade-offs, e.g. among different groups of people, is perhaps still the important contribution resilience can make to a sustainable urban and socially equitable future.
Antoine is the Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) of the city of Dakar in Senegal, West Africa, where he oversees the elaboration of a Dakar Resilience Strategy.
Antoine Faye
The idea of “resilience” is gaining ground in urban policy circles. Although differently defined, the concept is commonly accepted as being the process from which, cities as complexes systems “of individuals, communities, institutions and businesses”, would be able to gain “the capacity to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience” (100 RC of the Rockefeller Foundation).
On one hand, provided that above definition hold true and is widely shared, we will at least success in taking “resilience” out of the realm of metaphor and avoid that every actor gives a meaning to the concept depending on the trajectory that that actor wants to adopt.
On the other hand, in my personal understanding, if the process is aimed at fusing a “resilience” agenda with the mainstream urbanization agenda, then it should be a continuous learning process. In that sense, the concept is not a “stock” but rather a “flow”. Legitimately, the question of “how do you measure resilience in cities? How would you know if your city or your community was resilient?” makes sense only if we encompass that “resilience” is not acquired, but rather sought.
Indeed, the commitment towards resilience is accompanied with challenges that open to opportunities. Both, perspectives depend on various factors. These factors can ease or deepen the challenges while maximizing or annihilating the opportunities. For instance, in Africa, the present context of that of rapidly growing cities has produced two key figures, namely; informality and entrenched inequality. A prerequisite for building resilience in this part of the world is to understand how informality and entrenched poverty interact and are intertwined.
We are not without knowing that informality manifests itself with settlement on unplanned land without public services and bulk infrastructures, unregistered and or transfers of constructions, insecure job, unregulated trade and service provision; all of such widening the already existing inequality between the “have” and the “have not” and deepening the vulnerability of the later to resist to shocks and stresses.
However, above all that precedes, what born out of informality is perhaps the inability for the institutional (systems) of the city to capture data from these constituents in order to build a base line to inform the prerequisite status with which to depart from in elaborating a resilience strategy. Thus, the most difficult aspect of building resilience in city like Dakar in Senegal is the unavailability of reliable data to form solid hypothesis and assumptions based on reliable indicators. In such case, “measuring resilience to know if your city or your community was resilient” will be just hazardous since there are no indicators to assess the real impacts of policies and infrastructure investments.
According to the World Council on Cities Data (WCCD), cities are subject to complex dynamics forcing us to dwell upon a necessary framework if we are to understand the interaction of natural and human system within that specific space. In that view, the WCCD adds that the resilience of cities to withstand the impacts of natural and social evolution and changes depends predominantly on the flow and efficient management of resources. I sense that better indicators can enable us to better measure the resources flows and interactions towards holding governments and communities accountable to their targets and goals which is the ultimate objective of resilience.
Richard Friend is in the Environment Department, University of York, and member of the management group of the University’s International Development Network.
Richard Friend and Pakamas Thinphanga
Measuring resilience through self-assessment and public dialogue
If we take resilience as being the ability to learn and reorganize in the face of changing circumstances and risks, then the need to measure resilience becomes a learning exercise. Given the nature of urbanization as a deeply contested process of change entwined with issues of power, knowledge and rights, promoting such learning around measurements of resilience becomes a process of social learning and dialogue. Yet it also needs to be a process that can accommodate different values and interests in ways that allow for innovation, and ideally, for socially just and ecologically viable outcomes. The major challenge has been in getting issues of climate change and resilience on the policy agenda.
Our work on promoting urban climate resilience in South-east Asia has been based on a framework that is grounded in Shared Learning Dialogue (SLD) processes—essentially spaces for informed public dialogue that bring diverse urban stakeholders together. Combined with this, we have approached urban systems as comprising:
infrastructure, technology, ecosystems,
institutions and
agents (organizations, individuals).
Measurement of urban resilience requires consideration of these three elements and the ways in which they interact.
We have experimented with different approaches to measuring resilience; the jury is still out on which approaches work best but certainly different approaches serve different ends.
From our perspective from city level engagement in Thailand and Vietnam, we have had greatest success adopting self-assessment methods. For example, the UNISDR Local Government Self Assessment Tool (LGSAT) is based around the Hyogo Framework for Action key essentials, providing a kind of global standard. It is framed largely around disaster risk reduction rather than climate change, although elements of climate resilience do appear in some of the questions. These generally have to separated out into two discussion points—for example, assessment around disaster risk reduction in many circumstances is far more positive than around climate resilience.
The questions in the LGSAT are efforts at defining key elements of resilience. This is also requires further refinement around characteristics of resilience which we have taken as being—diversity, flexibility, redundancy, safe failure, access to information and participation in decision-making.
By adapting this framework, and focusing in on core elements or urban resilience around governance, institutional coordination, land use planning etc.—we have been able to facilitate dialogue among state and non-state actors that has identified key areas of weakness (and in rare cases strengths!), and also the very different, conflicting perspectives of different actors. In this way we are able to open up for public debate, issues around resilience of what, for whom – and critically, who defines ‘resilience’.
The focus of this effort has been less concerned with the score and more with the dialogue. Even so, the record of the dialogue becomes a point of reference for city stakeholders to monitor progress in improving resilience. However the challenge still remains in actually achieving degrees of urban resilience that are also socially just.
Pakamas has a technical background in biological sciences and coastal ecology with a Ph.D. from James Cook University, Australia and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oxford. She joined TEI in late 2008.
Lance Gunderson is a systems ecologist who is interested in how people understand, assess, and manage large-scale ecosystems of people and nature
Lance Gunderson
I think it is better to understand and assess resilience in urban areas, than to try and measure this property for at least two reasons. These reasons include 1) difficulties in measurement due to different definitions of resilience, 2) and that by attempting to measure such a property creates spurious certitude to a complex issue.
The word resilience has been defined and applied in at least three different ways by different scholars or scholarly fields. Such different definitions imply not only different metrics and approaches to measurement, but also the feasibility of measurement. One definition, used by physical scientists and engineers is referred to as engineering resilience. For such systems, there is an assumption of a single configuration (regime, state or identity) and resilience is defined as the magnitude of a disturbance and the capacity of the system to recover from that disturbance. For the engineering type of resilience a variety of quantitative metrics have been proposed which relate to the rate at which the system recovers to a pre-disturbance state. Such metrics may be a recovery of processes or structures, such as restoration of power outages, or rebuilding buildings. Even with this type of resilience, there seems to be little agreement on which of the many attributes should be measured in practice.
Another type of resilience is called ecological resilience. Ecological resilience refers to the shifts in controlling variables that mediate or control the transition from one state or regime to another regime. Moreover, the variables that influence such shifts generally operate at different scales of space and time. Because of the dynamic nature of these thresholds, and difficulties in measuring such slow and fast dynamics, this type of resilience may be assessed, but is (for all intents and purposes) not quantifiable or measureable.
The third type of resilience has been described as community resilience. Some social scientists reject the notion or existence of social systems and hence community resilience. For those who do recognize community resilience, it can be characterized as the capacity of a group or organization to function with respect to specific disturbances or crises. Due to the novelty of configurations, ranges of functions, a large and complex number of variables that define a community’s capacity to respond to a specific disturbance, such resilience is also (for all intents and purposes), not computable or measureable.
When faced with a new type of collective problem, we try to gather information in order to develop an understanding that helps direct how we act or intervene. In this case, trying to understand and direct trajectories of cities or urban centers over time, the concept of resilience has become part of the discourse. In efforts such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities, or NOAA’s Coastal Resilience program, resilience is the central organizing theme. Implicit in these programs is the use of resilience as a normative term (as in a city or coast should be resilient). Yet there are a number of resilient facets of cities, such as slums, impoverished economic zones, or air-pollution zones that are very resilient. Such areas can be quite resilient, yet are not desirable.
Attempting to measure or index resilience (and there are lots of folks that say they can measure resilience) creates a spurious certitude that is likely to drive maladaptive actions and constrain creative and productive actions that may help change unwanted trajectories.
Tom Henfrey is a researcher, educator, activist and social entrepreneur on community action for resilience and sustainability based in Bristol, UK.
Tom Henfrey
Measurement and power: The political ecology of urban resilience
All talk of resilience these days is highly politicised, and it’s important to take this into account when considering whether and how to measure resilience in cities. Most treatments of urban resilience are overtly or covertly complicit with the appropriation of the concept by conservative forces seeking to reinforce inequalities of wealth and power. The essence of this neoliberal discourse is to conflate resilience with persistence, as an outcome whose necessity needs no qualification. Urban resilience, therefore, is presented as the ongoing existence of cities in something like their present form: nonwithstanding either its desirability or wider consequences.
Although ill-informed and inchoate—for reasons I’ll explain shortly—this narrative is implicit in almost all mainstream discourse on resilience. It is abetted by an ingenuous and academically fashionable postmodern notion that resilience is not a well-defined quality of complex systems, but a purely normative concept that can and does mean all things to all people. Created and sustained largely by social scientists lacking any familiarity with relevant scientific theory—and often any apparent notion that the possibility that such theory exists—this notion is blind to, among many other things, the effects of power relations on the dynamics of social systems.
Resilience is neither the mere fact of persistence; nor does the latter reliably imply the former. Resilience is a quality: a capacity to negotiate change through creative responses, including the prospect of transformation to a radically different form when conditions demand. In their current form, cities inherently lack resilience. They depend on throughputs of matter and energy that are utterly unsustainable, and consequently endure only because they externalise the consequent social and ecological damage: in other words by systematically undermining resilience elsewhere. Their primary function—reflecting the main, unstated, policy goal of almost every government in the world—is to ensure that wealth and power accrue disproportionately to those who already have both in excess, at everyone else’s expense. An inevitable consequence of increasing inequity is to intensify resource flows to even less sustainable levels, further undermining resilience in the city itself, its constituent subsystems, and connected systems elsewhere. All centralised initiatives on ‘resilience’ of which I am aware are actually concerned with perpetuating this state of affairs.
For this reason, no city in existence can plausibly claim to be resilient. Nor, limited by present conditions and mindsets, do we have any solid idea what a resilient city would look like. There are some inspiring visions, and some good ideas of how to get there, but little prospect of progress under present urban governance and planning regimes. Each disruption experienced by a city is a signal of its fundamental lack of resilience, and hence an opportunity to identify routes towards transformative change. Urban resilience strategies that emphasise maintaining the status quo ignore these signals and dismiss these opportunities. In doing so, they force change in exactly the wrong direction. Where such strategies form the basis of measurement, the results will be useless at best, and more likely counterproductive.
Resilience theory shows that, in ecological systems at least, when resilience changes it does so abruptly and without warning. The indicators that a system is approaching such a threshold bear no predictable relationship to the changes that take place when it is reached, and are evident only in retrospect, if at all. Rather than seeking to measure either progress to resilience or resilience itself, what in my view is needed is a more qualitative approach to fostering the conditions that can enable such a transformation. This requires political commitment to dismantle existing political, economic and financial institutions, and support for meaningful efforts (pretty much all by grassroots actors too marginal with respect to these institutions to have vested interests in their perpetuation) to replace them with flexible and adaptive structures able to transform in whatever way necessary to allow resilience. Only then can begin the work of building genuinely resilient cities and societies—that sustain themselves, grow and flourish in ways that allow interdependent social-ecological systems to do the same.
As a civil engineer and private consultant, Dan Lewis has worked in urban reconstruction and housing programmes in South Africa and Chile as well as with First Nations communities in his home region on Vancouver Island, Canada since 1987.
Dan Lewis and Patricia Holly
Resilience as a metaphor? A journey from intuition to logic
The journey from concept to concrete is observable in the dozens, maybe hundreds of resilience-based dialogues currently underway. Everything from food security to kinder-garden care; ‘community’ to global; climate change to criminality; and metrics to ‘zeitgeist’ are being explored, debated, calculated, and sometimes even acted upon. Perhaps this is the foundation of the metaphor—resilience described by chaotic, disjointed, soup-to-nuts type interests.
Sifting through the varia however, is non-ending, often incredibly interesting, and virtually impossible to isolate the gems within the limitations of time and growing demand for understandable, reliable, and strategic action. Nowhere is the pressure more acute than from the cities and towns throughout the world asking for guidance and seeking support to introduce new planning, development, and management paradigms that (ultimately) result in better capacity to withstand the shocks and stresses they face daily. Our journey within UN Habitat’s urban resilience programming begins from this point.
Key words shaping the approach include: ‘cities and towns – understandable, reliable, strategic – planning, development and management – and action’. In the best case, the manner in which cities—all cities—change, is through the functions of planning, development and management. These functions, when they are undertaken in a strategic, reliable and understandable manner can positively re-shape cities over time.
The implications are huge however. Planning in the 21st century hasn’t changed since the beginning of the 20th century, and the inertia is enormous. Development patterns, driven by grossly unsustainable, real-estate driven, land use, has produced urban sprawl (and trillions in profits…and losses) that will take decades to undo. Urban management practice continues in the silo’d bureaucratic models that seem timeless and ubiquitous. In spite of this; that there is demand for creating more resilient cities and towns, is indicative—not conclusive—of a desire for change, and gives us the first milestone in the journey from metaphorical to literal.
The challenge now begins to take shape—introducing comprehensible, reliable and strategic action through urban planning, development and management to achieve—over time—better resilience to both acute and longer term shocks and stresses.
Breaking down these key words or ‘elements’ was essential to getting from concept to concrete, and finding a comprehensive approach to meeting the challenge. It began simply with the who, what, where, when and how interrogation which rapidly blossomed into a pretty complex array of interdependent, multi-stakeholder, multi-sector, multi-hazard ingredients in the mix. However, even this helps move the journey forward.
Accepting, for example, that an urban ‘planning’ process must be ‘comprehensible’ we understand implicitly that this means different things to different people—in other words, it demands ‘reliable’ translation giving meaning to all stakeholders from politicians to bankers, community members to utility operators, and so on. The same applies to urban ‘development’ and ‘management’ processes, and we have access to methodologies for consultation, collaboration and engagement that are well developed and tested throughout the world. Introducing new content—knowledge and process that delivers elements of resilient urban development—and strategically re-orients how a city or town develops, benefits from these tools and ensures that all stakeholders contribute, own and support both short, and long term aims.
Similarly, understanding that cities are incredibly complex, complicated, dynamic and unique systems; creating understandable and reliable baselines from which to plan, develop and manage within a resilience-based strategy, requires layered communication that provides meaning to that same diverse group of stakeholders. Moreover, developing an approach that is applicable in all cities and towns demands standardizing both the urban systems model, and the language and meaning of resilience-based planning, development and management.
Why? Try and find out how many cities there are in the world today. Wikipedia ridiculously defines 85, most of them in China. Other sources range from 4,000 to 3 million cities and towns…bottom line is no one knows. In any case, far too many to suggest a customized process for each, which achieves little in terms of building understanding, or standardizing reliability, or achieving greater, global strategic aims of meeting demand for more resilient cities and towns.
Now we’re getting somewhere—we have a clear challenge, we understand the means to meet that challenge, and are well on our way developing the models, metrics, standards, and systems through which to deliver. We’re not alone—organizations participating in the Medellin Collaboration on Urban Resilience for example represent the largest community of practice engaging with cities, and have agreed to a set of common aims to meet increasing demand. Resources, both knowledge-based, and knowledge generating, are emerging from academia, and analysis of implementation, and political commitment at all scales is freeing up financial support directly for cities, and for the support institutions they rely on.
From the metaphorical world of ‘resilience’ writ large, is an emerging consensus around the means of addressing through concrete, reliable, and comprehensive urban engagement, the visions, aims and goals of cities to become safer, more resilient places for the people, businesses, and organizations that live there.
Patricia Holly Purcell, a US and British National, is the Senior Strategic Partnerships Advisor at the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), based in their Nairobi Headquarters, focusing on the Agency’s City Resilience Profiling Programme.
Rachna Lévêque is an urban and regional planner with global experience on projects ranging from buildings and public space to strategic city planning and policy making.
Rachna Lévêque
Cities need generic resilience
The dominant approach to resilience in cities takes the approach of specific resilience – by focussing, for example, on resilience to disasters (natural or manmade) and resilience of communities. This approach, of building resilience of this to that and under these circumstances, enables resilience to be measured to some extent and therefore operationalized. However, focussing on specific resilience risks losing the overview of the entire city as an intricately connected social-ecological system (our economic systems being a subset of the ‘social’ of the social-ecological system). Hence, it raises questions like: who decides whether the resilience of one community is at the expense of another?
Decision makers taking a long-term strategic perspective of the city often have to judge various priorities against one another and pave a way forward, often in an environment of changing social, political, environmental, economic and technological influences locally and globally. Hence, their occupation is predominantly with generic resilience. In this respect, it is more meaningful to think of resilience as the ability of diverse stakeholders to collectively influence their social-ecological system (or sub-system) to be in a state of (desirable) resilience. In terms of city-level decision-making, this relates to three things: the ability of stakeholders to get involved (or connect into wider system dynamics), the ability of stakeholders to have or gain knowledge of the system, and the ability of stakeholders to take meaningful action (i.e., to have influence). The debates on power and the politics of inclusion and exclusion are interweaved through each of these: who is involved in what, why and in what way; which stakeholders have what access to the various discussions that take place at strategic level; what opportunities do stakeholders have to find common solutions; what opportunities do they have to question and present new ideas, and what potential do the stakeholders’ propositions have to ‘revolt’ to strategic decision making levels. It is important to remember that stakeholders comprise not just resident communities, but also workers, businesses, developers, utility providers, and various governmental and non-governmental authorities and agencies including those operating at regional and national level.
Based on the above, it seems obvious that greater transparency and participation in decision-making would lead to (desired) resilience. However, at city-regional level one has to consider whether the mechanisms for transparency and participation actually allow diverse stakeholders to have influence while also allowing the city to decide how to move forward. To take a recent example, in Mumbai, the draft Development Plan developed after three years of participatory workshops and consultations was recently scrapped by the state government in the wake of citizen protests. Is this the ability of citizen groups to have influence? Perhaps. Is it the exercise of veto by the state government? Yes. Is it a desirable state of resilience for the city? For some communities negatively influenced by the Development Plan, it provides another window of opportunity, however slight. However, for the city as a whole, spending further time and effort on a Development Plan which will probably have little influence on what actually gets built in the city is quite meaningless in the absence of other systems which support transparency and public participation. Not being able to have a say over its own development trajectory probably does not equate to a desirable state of resilience either. Nonetheless, Mumbai perhaps needs to consider whether its diverse needs (needs of its diverse communities and needs of the city region) are reconcilable at city scale in a document such as the Development Plan, and make provision for more local and regional initiatives which will incorporate its specific and dynamic needs.
The dangers for urban resilience at strategic city scale are likely to be different in different contexts. In a city with well-established systems of reporting and mechanisms for participation, involving the same stakeholders who get involved every time conserves knowledge of the system but could lead to a diminishing set of ideas and experiments to learn from. It is also easy to follow the protocol in any public consultation without actually taking on board the issues raised. The regular mechanisms of information transfer (websites) often exclude the most vulnerable, excluding their needs and points of view in the direction that the city takes; this frequently places the burden of resilience on NGO’s to transmit the information, collate input and present ideas in a convincing manner. Of course, actually implementing anything that is proposed requires both political will and capability, and may require collaboration and cooperation between agencies at different scales and with different priorities.
I therefore see resilience for the whole city not as an issue of robust infrastructure or community coping strategies, but as one of good collective governance that allows diverse stakeholders from multiple scales to come together, interact and share ideas in a fairly power-balanced manner, and find common ground on a variety of issues in a way that allows the city to move forward. This might mean ‘agreeing to disagree’ on certain issues and agreeing to experiment on other issues with a view to learning for the future. However, governance for resilience requires more than collaborative dialogue, it requires stakeholders to move their focus from specific sectors, scales or interests, to the interlinkages in the complex social-ecological system that are our cities.
Shuaib Lwasa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Makerere University. Shuaib has over 15 years of experience in university teaching and research working on interdisciplinary projects related to urban sustainability.
Shuaib Lwasa
As the debate on the Sustainable Development Goals by UN member countries reaches its final lap for approval, there is general consensus about the transition from development at as measurable progress in terms of economic growth, improved social services, employment and incomes, trade and human wellbeing to development that encompasses nature, resource use in consideration of the planetary boundaries.
The most daunting of legs in achievement of sustainable development is the implementation of actions for the proposed 17 Goals and 168 targets. The debate about sustainable development is yet to reach consensus on how to achieve these goals and targets and how to measure progress. Parallel but very closely related debates have been going on in regard to climate change and disaster risk reduction. These three global debates are yet to resolve the challenge of making resilience an actionable concept and therefore measurable to address the inherently constructed, cumulative and extensive risk in various contexts. This calls for alternative conceptual frameworks, methodologies, data and tools to measure progress in achieving sustainable development goals.
Whereas the debates are global, the challenges are also local and these three issues of sustainable development, climate change and disaster risk reduction form the grand challenges of the century. This is because sustainable development is likely to be undermined by increasing risk and disasters, and or, progress so far made in terms of development will most likely be reversed by the increasing disasters. With intensive disasters notwithstanding, the case for extensive risk and associated disasters is a risk profile for much of Africa and particularly Urban Africa.
Kampala flood. Photo: Shuaib Lwasa.
Amidst closing the urban infrastructure deficit, sustaining the economic growth while reducing or avoiding emissions and adapting to a changing climate, cities in Africa present diverse risk profiles that define the city resilience challenge. In my opinion, climate risk and other risks, form the cornerstones of defining and achieving resilience in cities of Africa.
Achieving resilience in cities of Africa will most likely occur through three ways: first, the understanding of current risk rooted in historically constructed risk such that recovery from unavoidable disasters minimizes loss and damage; secondly, that future risk is anticipated and strategies implemented to reduce, the creation of new risk, potential loss and damage; thirdly, that current and future risk would have to be addressed in context of reduced impact on livelihoods and wellbeing in cities to enable building back better that reduces creation of new risk.
There are synergies and tough choices to make in building resilient cities. These tough choices are potentially the basis for measuring resilient cities, which is a difficult issue to achieve. Measuring resilience in cities is locale and context specific. Context to the risk profile and local conditions that shape the risk but also provides the levers for making cities resilient.
I would like to point to a few issues, which in my opinion can potentially be progress markers for resilience in cities like Kampala:
• There are tough choices around proofing urban infrastructure to risks given the path dependencies of urban development in Africa. This can be length or size of proofed infrastructure, proof-constructed infrastructure
• The possibility of harnessing synergies around reducing urban risk and curbing losses as a trade-off of increasing risk especially extensive risk
• Cities in Africa will continue their roles as production zones therefore there are tough choices around transforming production processes and infrastructure that is resilient to all forms of risk
• Cities are also zones for provisioning implying natural resource base that provides food, fiber, water, biomass, timber and therefore enhancing urban ecosystems is crucial for resilience in cities
• Cities and human development opportunities for the urban population is crucial especially the kind which increases opportunities for the urban poor
• A resilient city would have features that harness opportunities related to scalable resource efficiency, decentralized services and infrastructure, local employment and expanded markets and strategies that eradicate urban poverty
Dr. Timon McPhearson works with designers, planners, and local government to foster sustainable, resilient and just cities. He is Associate Professor of Urban Ecology and Director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School and Research Fellow at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Timon McPhearson
Urban social, ecological, and technical-built system (SETS) resilience
With cities taking climate change adaptation seriously, building resilience in cities to effects of climate change and other urban challenges has become an increasing priority among urban policymakers, planners, designers, and managers. Coastal cities facing severe sea level rise, for example, are learning to “live with water” and thus build resilience to flooding into multiple aspects of planning and development.
Phoenix, Arizona USA was brought to a halt by a single storm on September 8th, 2014. Local climatologists called it a 500-year event when it rained 10-15cm in less than 24 hours. Photo: Twitter/Michael Chow
Resilience is a property of a system. Cities are systems, so on the surface it makes sense to think of building “urban resilience”, or designing “resilient cities”. However, cities are complex entities (McHale et al. 2015) that have multiple social, ecological, and technical systems (SETS), which interrelate and feedback on each other, making it difficult to interpret the meaning of terms like “resilient city” or “urban resilience” that apply to the city scale, let alone evaluate them.
Additionally, resilience is a multidisciplinary concept that encompasses persistence, recovery, and the adaptive and transformative capacities of urban systems and their subsystems (McPhearson et al. 2015). Improving resilience at both small and large system scales depends on answering the question of resilience “of what, to what” and, perhaps especially in urban areas, resilience “for whom”. It also means recognizing that resilience at one scale may positively or negatively impact resilience at larger scales. Additionally, resilience to flooding in one part of the city, for example, may have no, little, or a large impact on resilience in another part of the city.
Despite the need to think in systems to deal with the very real equity, livability, and climate change challenges we face, defining, measuring, and evaluating resilience in the urban context means, for the moment anyway, breaking apart our complex urban systems into their parts.
What I mean is this: We can develop metrics and indicators to evaluate social resilience, ecological resilience, and technical/built infrastructure resilience for particular challenges in a particular location, but we don’t have robust methods for evaluating resilience of a complex multi-scale system like a city. Even evaluating resilience in the social, ecological, or technical domains is not a simple task, but it is certainly doable. Engineers and product designers have been doing this for a long time and can provide reasonable methods and metrics for evaluating the resilience of a building, or bridge, or energy supply system to particular risks, such as flooding, storms surge, high winds, or power outages.
Though we still have a long way to go, we can develop these kinds of metrics for evaluating social resilience as well. Take heat waves as an example. Following both the Chicago heat wave in 1995 and the European heat wave in 2003, analyses found in both cases that people who were better connected socially were less prone to heat-related death (Klinenberg 2003). We can learn a lot by comparing how disasters differentially affect different communities. Developing indicators for social connectedness, social cohesion and other potential indicators for social resilience must become an area of active research, especially since cities are already asking for these indicators in urban planning and policymaking. Built and technological infrastructure may even be developed as potential social resilience indicators in so much as they may tend to increase or decrease the potential for social cohesion and other attributes of local communities that allow them to be more or less resilient.
Difference in average temperature (2000, 2001, 2002 and 2004) from 2003, covering the date range of 20 July – 20 August. Image credit: NASA
Developing methods for assessing ecological resilience is already an active area of research with good progress developing indicators to various ecological stressors and pressures. For example, ecologists can utilize biodiversity data combined with species trait data to develop functional response indicators. The assumption, backed up by research (though primarily in rural contexts), is that if species in an ecological community have a high diversity of traits that can respond to stress, disturbance, pollution, or other ecological challenges, then they are more likely to be resilient than a community with a lower diversity of response traits. Additionally, the importance of redundancy to resilience is important to keep in mind since communities with many species that have a particular trait useful for dealing with stress will fare better than communities that may have only one or few species with that particular trait. Though these kinds of ecological resilience indicators are beginning to be developed, we have yet to test this approach for multiple taxa and in multiple urban contexts.
The resilience research community has much left to do to not only better develop the various indicators for resilience in the social, ecological, and technical domains of our urban systems, since this remains all very new, but also to learn from each other in the process. For example, research approaches in ecology could inform development of social resilience indicators, and visa versa. The goal should be that the rise of resilience will serve to develop a broader understanding of the systems nature of planning, governing, and design while also driving greater interdisciplinary approaches and scholarship to foster the cities we want.
References
Klinenberg, Erik. 2003. Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. University of Chicago Press.
McHale, Melissa R., Steward TA Pickett, Olga Barbosa, David N Bunn, Mary L Cadenasso, Daniel L Childers, Meredith Gartin, George Hess, David M Iwaniec, Timon McPhearson, M. Nils Peterson, Alexandria K. Poole, Louie Rivers III, Shade T Shutters, Weiqi Zhou. “The New Global Urban Realm: Complex, Connected, Diffuse, and Diverse Social-Ecological Systems.” Sustainability (Special Issue) 7: 5211-5240, doi:10.3390/su7055211
McPhearson, Timon, Erik Andersson, Thomas Elmqvist, and Niki Frantzeskaki. 2015. “Resilience Of and Through Urban Ecosystem Services,“ Ecosystem Services (Special Issue) 12:152-156, DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoser.2014.07.012
Dr. Montalto, PE is a licensed civil/environmental engineer and hydrologist with 20 years of experience working in urban and urbanizing ecosystems as both a designer and researcher. His experience includes planning, design, implementation, and analysis of various natural area restoration and green infrastructure projects.
Franco Montalto
Decentralized resilience
Not unlike natural ecosystems, cities provide us with a wide range of functions and services. In the words of Harris and Ullman (1945) they are “…focal points in the occupation and utilization of the earth by man. Both a product of and an influence on surrounding regions, they develop in definite patterns in response to economic and social needs.” Cities are housing; they host new economic opportunities; they promote social interaction and cultural advancement. Cities free up a certain fraction of the human population from having to work the land directly, critical since according to Jane Jacobs (1970) “agriculture is not even tolerably productive unless it incorporates many goods and services produced in cities or transplanted from cities.” Cities are thus integral components of local, regional, and global economies.
When subjected to different kinds of disturbances, resilient cities continue to provide these valuable functions, though their form may change as a result. Subjected to a storm surge, they absorb energy but convert it into a reconfigured coastline; having become the destination for a particular group of refugees, they provide shelter and work, possibly through the repurposing of vacant buildings and neighborhoods; when global investors have shifted attention elsewhere, they cultivate local resources to fund local needs and initiatives, often through the generation of new businesses. Anti-fragile (Taleb 2014) and dynamic, resilient cities are both physically and culturally prepared to adapt to a range of uncertain futures. In so doing, they persist, while their brittle and inflexible cousins are gradually abandoned, dismantled, or destroyed by the same, or similar, events.
The question that many planners are asking is whether we can create this kind of resilience in both new and redeveloping cities that are challenged by contemporary trends in population growth, coastal development, climate change, and other perverse local realities associated with globalization. I would argue that where it exists, resilience is tightly woven into the cultural and physical fabric of a city, but is not easily superimposed on top of it. Resilience, in my view, is the outcome of diffuse grass-roots, micro-scale activities that collectively and gradually create a culture and place that can change in response to diverse and unpredictable stimuli, so as to continue providing the services needed by its population. To design resilience, we need to think small and diffuse, not big and centralized.
I offer three comparative examples. A new, regional storm surge barrier might protect certain coastal communities from certain types of storm surge; but its value pales in comparison to a city populated by individuals who, cognizant of the fact that they live in a flood plain, can easily move to higher ground temporarily when a flood is predicted. The latter requires an efficient means of diffusing information about imminent risks, a widely understood and multifaceted response plan, and an efficient transport network that can support relocation of different people in different directions at almost any time to a decentralized network of safe havens.
For the second example, think Baltimore, Maryland. Tourists and multinational corporations may initially be attracted to a fancy downtown, but if residents of the surrounding neighborhoods are barely getting by, and suffer from high crime, poor schools, corruption, crumbling infrastructure and high drug traffic, how resilient will this city be, for example to economic shifts that raise unemployment, or media reports that begin to spoil the glossy public image and brand that the local elites had been attempting to disseminate of the city center? A resilient Baltimore needs widespread attention, not just a fancy waterfront.
And finally, considering that each year the world wastes about 1/3 of the food it produces (FAO 2015) while global obesity, one of the leading causes of preventable depth, has doubled since 1980 (CDC 2015, WHO 2015), let’s consider resilience as it pertains to food choices. We can continue to subsidize industrial agriculture practices that, often located in increasingly drought prone areas, require massive application of pesticides and fertilizers, and generate extensive carbon emissions to transport highly processed agricultural commodities 1500-2500 miles (Worldwatch Institute 2015) before showing up, mysteriously, in your bodega in some highly processed form. Or we clear the way for the growing local and urban agricultural movement that enables urban dwellers to see more readily where their food comes from, and to choose to participate in its production, while creating new uses for post-industrial landscapes, new economic opportunities, and old-fashioned backyard learning. As the international development adage goes, the hungry man who is given a meal asks for another, while the one who knows how to fish feeds himself.
If urban resilience arises from decentralized grass-roots choices and actions that allow cities to provide valuable functions and services to the various populations that live in, or are linked to them, we can measure it by interacting with urban people. Resilience planners need to seek to understand why we, the urban population, do what we do; they need to better understand what motivates us and what hinders us; they need to remove the barriers (often historical and/or imposed from afar) that prevent us from solving our own problems. Resilient cities will be as diverse in form and function as we are diverse as an urban populace. Resilience plans will morph and change as we learn and grow. Resilience solutions are local and diverse, not monolithic and standardized.
Luciana Nery is Deputy Chief Resilience Officer of Rio de Janeiro and wishes to incorporate the lessons learned at the Olympics for the resilience of the city.
Luciana Nery
We must measure survival and prosperity
In theory, it is not difficult to measure the evolution of resilience in time: to the same shock, there must be less impact. This means that if a strong earthquake hits a city twice, the city is more resilient if by the second time it suffers less damage and fewer casualties. Or if the shock is an economic downturn, then the city is more resilient if the next recession is milder and its consequences are short-lived.
A 40mm/hour rain in Rio de Janeiro usually means that landslides will happen in the mountain slopes, threatening entire communities and claiming many lives. Since 2010, 40mm/h is the threshold to evaluate the need to activate the early warning system in the high-risk areas. In the meantime, the city built extensive slope contention infrastructure, resettled families in high-risk areas and established frequent evacuation drills. A recent study conducted by GeoRio of all landslides related to extreme weather events between 2010-2013 concluded that the threshold to initiating action can be safely raised to 55mm/h. More importantly, in that same period, no life was lost due to landslides in the city. This means that Rio de Janeiro is verifiably more resilient to heavy rains.
In this specific instance, that of rains and landslides in Rio, the scope is limited, the variables are well-known and the data are reliable. This is seldom the case in many other aspects of resilience. In the real world, how often can we establish parameters to determine cause and consequence? More than that, some consequences must be avoided entirely—and then being resilient is not allowing the shock to happen in the first place, like pandemics or terrorist attacks. In those cases, investments in prevention and the monitoring of trends is what fosters resilience, and then measuring the (non) consequences can feel substantial to policymakers, and yet seem diaphanous to the general population.
Then perhaps resilience must be measured not solely ad hoc, in terms of measuring impacts and its consequences, but also contextually and at the community and individual level. To what extent is a city, community or person exposed to a certain vulnerability, be it natural or manmade?
As the concept of resilience grows in importance for cities, so does the search for comprehensive and yet pragmatic indicators and measurement tools. The World Resource Institute, in partnership with the City of Rio, is developing a set of indicators for resilience. The work is in progress but we have already reached some conclusions.
The poor are disproportionately affected by shocks and chronic stresses, and a high proportion of socially vulnerable people will certainly make a city more fragile to all kinds of shocks. Measuring their resilience, thus, entails assessing their social vulnerability: educational level, employment status, access to basic services like sanitation, clean water, garbage collection, health, etc.
Another conclusion is that measuring self-reliance and preparedness of the general population is essential, so that efforts for fostering a culture of prevention can be assessed. Self-reliance and preparedness also depend heavily on the social cohesion of a community—when it comes to safety and awareness, the individual and the community are virtually indistinguishable. It is, therefore, the job of resilience practitioners worldwide to engage people in finding how they feel, respond and act more resiliently. It is this self-reliance and preparedness of citizens that, in addition to public policies and city resources, can prepare a city to face not only its recurrent risks, but also the unexpected ones, the black swans.
The efforts are ongoing. Cities and institutions around the world are working on resilience indicators. More than ever, cities are collaborating with each other. Big Data is more readily available. Indicators and units of measurement will be tested, improved upon and shared; then they will become widespread and continue to evolve. After all, it is not a simple task: if we are setting out to measure resilience in cities, we are also measuring our survival and prosperity. Let the challenge begin!
Henk Ovink is Special Envoy for International Water Affairs, Kingdom of The Netherlands.
Henk Ovink
The transformative capacity of a resilient process
Disasters are terrible. I always use the image of “I hate you Sandy” painted on a wall somewhere on the Jersey beach, to stress that whatever happens and how bold and big government and private sector can come in, it is still all about the human scale. Bridging the gap between public and private also means bridging the gap between the institutional world and the people, the communities and the informal world. Because there is not only a disconnect between politics and people, there is also a disconnect between professionals and people.
Poor people live in poor places all over the world. They are hit hardest when disasters strike, fully dependent on others to get back on their feet. Some say resilience is all about the capacity to bounce back after a disaster. But I say that is not enough. Resilience is a progressive term, it is about bouncing back different and smarter, through collaboration, innovation and the best of science.
In the Netherlands we have a long long tradition of managing risks and uncertainties and deliberately started to built our country in the Delta of the rivers Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt. A delta prosperous and vulnerable at the same time. Public private partnerships were key from the beginning. Nowadays we manage these risks and uncertainties in a cross governmental long term Delta approach, where public, business and knowledge sector join forces in a joined approach.
This year’s WEF Report put the impact of Water Crises as #1 risk, at last we acknowledge as businesses, ngo’s, academia and governments that water is the #1 risk and also its number one opportunity! Water is the global connecting task. Two billion people will be devastated by 2050, four billion in 2080 if we continue with our current practices. Of all worldwide disasters 90% is water-related. Global urbanization gives us growth, prosperity, emancipation and development opportunities, but climate change, sea level rise and increasing impacts of these risks put a lot of pressure on our cities, societies and citizens, on our economy and ecology. If we don’t act the system will collapse and then we are the victims of our own failure and missed opportunity.
Water is at the heart of this uncertain future, it is through water that we feel the impact of climate change the most. Water is essential for our economy, our social and cultural well being. Water quality defines our economic and societal prosperity and water risks—too much or too little—define our society’s vulnerability. Water is an urban matter, an asset if right, a severe risk if not. And while urbanization has this emancipatory capacity—women work and kids learn—it is the collective water issues that puts these urbanizing places at higher risk and thus stressing—again—the emancipatory curve. Water connects economy and ecology and on the urban regional scale we can adapt and mitigate and thus strengthen our cities and our communities world wide By collaborating across silos, bridge gaps and use new ways for public private partnerships to get to such an approach.
The WEF’s Global Risks Perception Survey’s showcase over again that future risks (climate change, water crises, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, extreme weather events, natural catastrophes, man made environmental catastrophes, etc) are increasing in frequency and impact. At the same time these risks show a clear and strong interdependency on a regional, most often urban scale. Although this increases the complexity of these risks and their impacts this is also the scale where we (mankind) can adapt to and mitigate these risks! This is where we can and must act.
Resilience is not a condition nor a passive state, it is a truly dynamic and societal process, progressive and in flux all the time. So when it comes to this question of measurement the key question is not how to measure resilience but how to get to resilience in an accountable an transparent way? A process where not only the outcome is at stake but the strategy and interventions are pre-assessed by truly comprehensive BCA’s, the process is monitored, and the outcomes both on strategy, governance and the actual interventions are evaluated. And that evaluation is brought back into the institutional domain for capturing reform. An not only in the public domain, but in this societal force of public and private partnerships. For that we need a comprehensive approach and I’d like to address the six critical points for that:
1. A resilience process of trust, inclusive collaboration and without negotiations:
Create a process of trust where it is not about negotiations (to get the most out of it) but about collaboration (to get the best out of it);
Truly collaborative and inclusive: From the start this should be about including all stakeholders through the phases of assessment and analysis all the way towards planning and implementation;
No negotiations towards agreements on paper, but collaboration in practice and ensure that that collaboration leads us to agreements. Negotiations never build projects, the experience helps to agree.
2. Better instruments: Benefit Cost Analysis, Monitoring and Evaluation instruments are critical but often are different, non-comparable nor cross applicable and lack the capacity to capture comprehensive long term integrated resilience approaches.
We have to share all our global knowledge we built up over the years to ensure that worldwide there is a better common understanding on how transparency and accountability can be strengthened both in public as well private environments through the development of new and better models and instruments.
3. Programmatic long term: next to our short term project based assessments where it is fairly easy to calculate benefits and bring in the private sector, we need a better understanding on how to assess and evaluate and thus build trust and commonality on a long term, comprehensive, programmatic investment approach.
4. Innovation: we need new models to address innovation. The Rebuild by Design competition I developed and led for the former US Presidential Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, created a sabbatical detour, on the edge of the institutional world, collaborating across all partners, design driven, focused on resilience in light of future risks. We delivered 41 opportunities with coalitions and ended with awarding 6 strikingly innovative proposals for resilience investments across the NY region. UNISDR just acknowledged the Hoboken proposal as Model for the World.
5. Prevention pays! We all know this. The questions remain on:
How to capture future value and future revenues through upfront investments;
How to use the process of collaboration and innovation to get to comprehensive approaches and implementable projects based on partnerships and trust, like the Rebuild by Design competition;
How to incorporate lessons learned, for example the current Dutch Delta program agreed upon by our congress that addresses future risks for the next 100 years, with secured funding for the next 35 years.
6. Start now by building a platform for collaboration and innovation:
No time to waste. We have to start now, in a transparent and accountable way, use principles of collaboration for developing long term, comprehensive approaches to capture revenues and ensure upfront public and private investments.
We need to use this testing as the inspiration, as the new standard, as the way to replicate for a better tomorrow and bring these learnings back into our institutional worlds, both public and private and by doing so really innovate and reform. This is really about capacity building not only within those vulnerable communities but as much within our institutions of governments, businesses and research institutes. The reform of the institutional world is key for resilience success.
Right now no one in this world is ready, no one, no place, no system is fit for the future. We have to collaborate world wide to tackle these challenges together. This collaboration is different than any collaboration before. This is not about negotiating the best parts for ourselves, this is really about securing the world for generations to come. Not by fixing it, but by changing the culture. And with that changing our systems so they can become more resilient, more adaptive and empowered in embracing and dealing with complexity.
Elisabeth Peyroux is an urban geographer at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), based at the UMR Prodig in Paris. She works on urban development issues in Johannesburg.
Elisabeth Peyroux
I engaged with the debates on resilience while doing research on urban planning in Johannesburg. In 2011 the Johannesburg 2040 Growth and Development Strategy (GDS) committed itself to provide “improved quality of life and development-driven resilience for all”, “a resilient, liveable, sustainable urban environment” and “an inclusive, job-intensive, resilient and competitive economy that harnesses the potential of citizens” (City of Johannesburg, 2011, p. 9).
I think the context of South African cities’ transformative agenda provides an interesting starting point to reflect on the idea of measuring resilience.
As opposed to the so-called conservative “bounce back” perspective, resilience entails a dynamic process set in motion by a transformative action whose aim is to promote a more “inclusive” development pathway: “Resilience is the capacity of a system to continually change and adapt, yet remain within critical thresholds – even when confronted with the unexpected” (City of Johannesburg 2011, p. 25). The GDS shows that some of the critiques made towards complex adaptive system related to resilience thinking can be partially overcome, at least discursively: by stressing human agency, by assigning social values to development goals, and addressing issues of inequalities and injustice.
Writing from a political economy perspective I am critical towards the notion of resilience and its translation in policy making (in line with Davoudi, 2012; Joseph, 2013; Welsh, 2014). Measuring resilience in cities poses, to my eyes, overwhelming challenges. This undermines the very idea that it can be usefully mobilised in urban planning.
Measuring resilience in cities means that we can identify it and provide an accurate characterisation and quantification of it (Carpenter et al. 2001). This also means that resilience can be monitored in such a way that it can inform policy-making.
The first challenge for policy makers is to identify the factors that give rise to resilience in a complex environment: a highly diverse population, an heightened sense of uncertainty and unpredictability, the need to consider the intertwined effects of internal and external factors, the interdependencies between ecological and social systems, time scales and cross-scale dynamics. In addition, in a city as unequal as Johannesburg the challenge entails developing “a relational understanding of resilience” (Prior and Hagmann, 2013, p. 14) that can support a targeted allocation of funding in line with developmental goals.
Second, measuring resilience implies measuring both the capacity of the system to achieve resilience (a process of capacity building) and the outcomes resulting from this capacity (a change of state of being). The difficulty, in addition to developing adequate quantitative and qualitative indicators, lies in assessing how these processes and outcomes are directly or indirectly linked in order to draw lessons on “what works” and “what doesn’t work”.
Third, some indicators of change of state of being are observable and quantifiable: in Johannesburg an expanded Human Development Index that is closely associated to asset and protective factors linked to resilience is used to measure the improvement in the quality of life, wellbeing and development. Other factors connected with resilience, such as social cohesion and inclusion and social justice (“A society that is cohesive and inclusive can withstand change and extreme shocks (…)” (City of Johannesburg, 2011, p. 29), “Pursuing just distributions of benefits, to improve the adaptive and resilient capacities of vulnerable groups and the citizenry of Johannesburg as a whole, is central to resilience and to sustainability” (City of Johannesburg 2011, p. 32), are difficult to observe empirically and to quantify.
Finally, measuring resilience should be considered both as a methodological and a political problem (Prior and Hagemann, 2013). Through the neoliberal rhetoric of responsabilization, self-sufficiency and self-sustainability resilience thinking serves as a way to justify the withdrawal of long term, permanent state support exposing the ambivalence of the concept of local developmental state in South Africa. By favouring the constant adaption of the subject to current situation over the resistance to the conditions of its suffering (Welsh, 2014) resilience thinking can eventually seem at odds with the Johannesburg social transformative agenda, as such approach forecloses the possibility for people to challenge the structural foundations of unequal power relationships that cause poverty, deprivation and inequality, the very sources of the so-called “lack of resilience” of the population.
References
Carpenter , S., Walker, B., Anderies, J.M., Abel, N. (2001) From metaphor ro measurement: Resilience of what to What? Ecosystems 4: 765-781.
City of Johannesburg (2011) Joburg 2040 GDS, October 2011.
Davoudi, S. (2012) Resilience: A bridging concept or a dead end? Planning Theory and Practice 13 (2): 299-333.
Joseph, J. (2013) Resilience as embedded neoliberalism: a governmentality approach. International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1 (1): 38-52.
Prior, T., Hagmann, J. (2013) Measuring resilience: methodological and political challenges of a trend security concept, Journal of Risk Research, DOI:10.1080/13669877.2013.808686.
Welsh, M. (2014) Resilience and responsibility: governing uncertainty in a complex world. The Geographical Journal 180 (1): 15-26.
Catherine Sutherland is a lecturer in the School of Built Environment and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is an urban geographer who focuses on urban sustainability and environmental governance.
Catherine Sutherland
Resilience is a contested term, as its definition and transformative value depends on from whose perspective it is viewed. The emergence of resilience as a ‘new’ way of approaching the economic, social and environmental crises we face, particularly in light of climate risk, reminds me of other moments when new ways of thinking about environmental challenges rose to the fore. In the 1960s ‘limits to growth’ became the dominant discourse framing environmental politics. In the 1980s ‘ecological modernisation’ and ‘sustainable development’ emerged as dominant discourses. Within each era of new ideas, scientists focused on ways to measure how far we had travelled in meeting the principles and goals of each discourse, with their indicators showing progress in some areas and failure in others. Some of the measures were universal and general, while others revealed that the measurement of environmental sustainability needs to be context specific.
Most of these measures were developed by scientists.
The measurement of resilience concerns me as it appears that those developing measures for it have not learnt from, or engaged with, other ‘moments’ in the history of the environmental movement. One of the main questions that have been asked in the critical reflection of these approaches is from whose perspective sustainability/ecological modernisation/resilience are being measured and for what purpose. This is important as it raises the issue of who has the power to define and shape each discourse and whose interests are being served in defining and measuring the relations between society and the environment in this way. Is ‘resilience’ acting in the interests of the poor and vulnerable and in the interests of highly degraded environmental systems, or is it just another way for those in power to mask the real reasons for poverty, inequality and environmental destruction and to move away from the just transformations that are required to change the world and the power imbalances in it? Resilience is about adapting, coping and learning to live through shocks and risks—it is therefore about ‘managing the dangers’ not challenging or changing them. It is about making people resilient, which is important when disaster strikes, but in so doing, it undermines the social protests and social movements that are required to change the world, as it makes it possible for the status quo to remain. It makes ‘coping’ a way of life for those who are tasked with managing environmental challenges and those that live through them. It does not question nor address the politics or power relations in cities and hence it cannot be fully transformative.
Another issue I have with measuring resilience is that much of this new discourse implies that people become resilient because of the policy and action of some outside agent and through the rationalities of government. It is the impact of these interventions that are measured. In other words, they were not resilient before. This notion needs to be strongly criticised as it does not recognise that the poor and vulnerable are continually being resilient, as that is how they live their lives. What needs to be measured is the entanglement of state policy and practice and the practices evident in the everyday lived worlds of ordinary people and how these together, through their relations, contribute to greater resilience. This is much harder to measure as these entanglements emerge in multiple ways along multiple paths at different scales.
For me, the value of ‘resilience’ lies in the lessons learnt from it. This learning is achieved by tracking resilience along its multiple trajectories as it emerges in different places within different contexts. Resilience is present in so many different forms. We need to start in local spaces, with local people, following ‘resilience’ and critically analysing it together so that it can reveal why and how people are having to be resilient and what this tells us about the power relations in the world between people and between people and the environment. And then we can begin to think about how we can change these relations, measure these transformative shifts and move towards a better world.
Claire Weisz, FAIA, is the founding principal of WXY, an architecture and planning firm based in NYC. Recently one of 10 Rebuild by Design finalists, her current work includes designing the new Rockaway Boardwalk post-Sandy.
Claire Weisz
Imagine this scenario; you live in a dense urban community along a vulnerable coastline, a catastrophic event occurs with only 6 hours warning, but since a web of communication exists to locate and reposition people, critical assets and provide alternative places to live and work short term. Issues have been worked out so that the time of recovery is minimized to 24 hours and there has been no loss of life and livelihood. In this community individuals and everyone around them are constantly reminded through notations on the physical surfaces of the city, their environmental history and through this the dynamic nature of where they are standing. Through these simple set of graphic interfaces, that are constantly kept current by real time data from scientists, people are able to learn as they go through their daily lives their risk level in a very subconscious yet concrete way. In the event of a climate related extreme events and conditions, these citizens, when they get critical warnings, via their devices or through media, understand in a visceral way where they are and therefore what they need to do. Because of the level of individual awareness, government and businesses alike have had to agree on a system and plan in the case of sudden and extreme climate related events. Although change is difficult, likely the increase in public and environmental knowledge has resulted in increases cultural and social capital spread across income levels.
New York City under Hurricane Sandy.
Designing shared civic and communication spaces and systems by connecting individuals to larger urban common webs and linkages is also about aligning values. By designing viable shared systems through a transparent process a need will emerge to evaluate longer term investments with the greatest chance of social equity and least environmental loss. More people than ever before are challenged by lack of leverage and access to power structures and at the same time more vulnerable to living in a degraded environment. If insurance and funding mechanisms are tied to minimizing unintended negative effects and maximizing individual and neighborhood autonomy, projects like zero energy neighborhoods, district renewable energy, zero waste districts, pooled investments in regional storm protection projects, shared regional risk analysis tying all local projects together, become important to pilot and advance.
Working this way the mechanisms of design and planning are the means to understand actual places, guiding policy and thus funding projects to reflect the way people behave both as individuals and in aggregate. Building soft and hard systems; from signage, to floating communities, new public transit and public spaces, to new places for habitat, wind turbines and water resource management, that help us adapt, model and test new ways of living and producing, are critical to a future of competing priorities and fluctuating risk levels.
A resilient and adaptable response as described in this snapshot is only achievable by design. This means designers and scientist being at the table together. Without the will to design both the process and the implementation of a multi-layered meaningful and responsive system, there will be stop gap, insufficient and less resilient communities. Without scientifically driven and ecologically understood design goals, there will be investments in expensive solutions and systems that are difficult if not impossible to update, that don’t take into consideration the flux of daily existence, that fail under the stress of people’s constant changes in priorities.
“What if?” the inevitability of the “internet of things” along with advances in the dialogue between scientists and designers could be catalytic in unexpected ways. Potentially what has started with foundation funding and private research initiatives might spawn new types of entities—public/ private partnerships—whose values demand that improving social, economic and environment conditions be aligned. These new ways of doing business and playing politics would avoid the zero sum game of choosing who benefits and who doesn’t by having changed where the goal posts are. Then the value of scientific data and metrics to track losses and gains across many variables and factors would be the engine to realize the resilient communities that we are currently unable to achieve.
Daniel Zarrilli was appointed in March 2014 by Mayor Bill de Blasio as the Director of the Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency for the City of New York. In this position, he is leading the development and implementation of the City’s OneNYC resiliency program.
Dan Zarrilli
Urban resiliency for climate change and other 21st Century threats
Our resiliency challenge
Hurricane Sandy was the worst natural disaster to ever strike New York City, claiming 44 lives and causing over $19 billion in damages and lost economic activity. As we continue to recover from its effects, we have also recognized the need to prepare for a wide range of future risks, not just ‘the next Sandy,’ as we continue to build a stronger, more resilient city.
In fact, just in the past fifteen years, New York City has faced a varied set of threats, including terrorist acts, an Ebola outbreak, hurricanes, an earthquake, a blackout, and a global economic downturn—all events that could challenge our ability to cope as a city and as an urban system. The only certainty is that the future is uncertain and the next threat won’t look like the last.
That’s why we have recently taken stock of our existing challenges. Our population will grow to 9 million by 2040; our infrastructure is aging; inequality is increasing; and, of course, our risks from a changing climate and other threats are growing.
With climate change in particular, Sandy certainly highlighted the city’s vulnerabilities, and those vulnerabilities are projected to get worse. According to the New York City Panel on Climate Change, sea levels are expected to rise 11 inches to 21 inches by the 2050s, and 22 to 50 inches by 2100. With this projected rise in sea levels, the city’s floodplain will continue to expand, creating more frequent and intense flooding. A similar Sandy-like event in 2050 could cause $90 billion in damage and lost economic activity—compared to Sandy’s $19 billion—due to the rise in sea levels alone.
The good news is that the City is acting to address these challenges.
Our resiliency vision
In April, Mayor Bill de Blasio released One New York: The Plan for a Strong and Just City. The OneNYC action plan guides the City’s investments in four strategic themes of growth, equity, sustainability, and resiliency. For us, resiliency is not just a metaphor.
But what does it mean? Our vision for resiliency is that our neighborhoods, economy, and public services will be ready to withstand and emerge stronger from the impacts of climate change and other 21st century threats.
To achieve this vision, the city and its partners are investing over $20 billion in a multilayered approach to resiliency, because there is no single silver bullet solution to our resiliency challenges:
1. Every neighborhood will be safer by strengthening community, social, and economic resiliency. This means we will improve neighborhoods by strengthening local organizations, expanding economic opportunities, and mitigating the effects of heat.
2. The city’s buildings will be upgraded against changing climate impacts, such as floods, wind, and heat waves.
3. Infrastructure systems will adapt to maintain continued services in the face of projected disruptions and impacts.
4. Our coastal defenses will be strengthened against flooding and sea level rise using a mixture of locally-tailored measures.
How will we know if we’ve succeeded? Measuring resiliency is no easy task. We intend to monitor several key performance indicators over time, including the Social Vulnerability Index for neighborhoods across the city, and our average annual economic losses resulting from climate-related events. These are the highest level indicators toward our goal of eliminating disaster-related long-term displacement of New Yorkers from homes by 2050.
By continuing to implement our full resiliency program – its physical, social, and economic measures – New York City is committed to achieving this goal, enabling us to fulfill our vision to withstand and emerge stronger from the impacts of climate change and other 21st century threats.
Frameworks for understanding the gendered nature of urban waste management have yet to emerge and analyses on the relationship between sustainable urban resource management and waste re-use and recycling at the neigbourhood-level are few. Those that do exist are more focused on city-level industry and infrastructure. This article illustrates how gender relations differentiate the ways in which women as compared to men manage urban waste, and how urban waste management impacts the underlying inequalities and relations between women and men. By presenting a gender perspective, the article gives a starting point for understanding how neigbourhood-level innovation around the re-use and recycling of wastes can be re-framed to promote equal participation in sustainable urban resource management and contribute to gender inclusive socio-economic transformation in cities of Africa.
Unlike other productive resources such as land, energy, and water that are subject to the prevailing forces of demand and supply in the city, waste materials in much of urban Africa are usually unclaimed, lying free on the streets, in restaurants, and in homes in anticipation of utility maximizers motivated by the costs and benefits of marketing discarded materials. However, much of the neigbourhood-scale innovations that seek to balance the need for household income enhancement and urban environmental protection through organic and inorganic waste re-use and recycling have not been sufficiently written about and shared internationally. Yet, innovations within the urban waste economy can be up-scaled to help developing cities in Africa increase resource productivity and adapt to a future of resource limitations and climate uncertainty.
In Kampala city, Uganda, where I have lived and pursued most of my research, dwellers in the low-lying and less economically advantaged neigbourhoods are increasingly motivated by an intersecting set of socio-economic and environmental factors to add value to discarded materials. The observable types of waste vendors include: i) regular waste vendors, ii) wholesale waste dealers, and iii) home to home waste dealers. Regular waste vendors own permanent spaces in markets, under a shed roof constructed by the authorities, for which they pay monthly rent, selling banana peelings, sacks, lint, and chicken litter as their commodities. These vendors collect waste materials from households and communities in the evening and bring them to the market early in the morning. Wholesale dealers, conversely, largely sell inorganic wastes which include plastic tins; bottles; and metal and glassware, which have a long shelf-life when compared to what regular waste vendors deal in.
Regular waste dealers. Image: Living Earth Uganda
Unlike the regular vendors, wholesale dealers can access or control or own land and housing spaces where they can collect and sort large volumes of waste. A case in point is a demonstration center in a suburb known as Kasubi-Kawaala, in the northwestern part of Kampala city, which occupies approximately 50 x 60 square feet for the collection of banana peelings, plastic bottles, tins, sawdust, cow dung and metal. Wholesale dealers also have access to external markets (outside the community). But the challenge is that prices for commodities are not usually set locally, but are set by marketplaces in China and Southern Sudan, for example. Wholesale dealers usually ‘step down’ from the external market price to allow for the collection, handling, storage and transportation of the materials to the nearest, most advantageous buyer outside the community.
Wholesale dealer of Plastic Bottles in Kampala City. Image: Living Earth Uganda
Home to home waste vendors collect plastic and soda bottles, tins, newspapers, food stuffs, saw dust, cow dung and banana peelings from restaurants, marketplaces, retail shops and residential premises in all parts of the city. From the responses given, these vendors can carry 30 to 40 kg of waste depending on the type of item they have collected. From empirical observations, these vendors are usually male youth (aged between 18-30 years) and boys (aged between 10-16 years); they are frequently associated with illegal waste dumping. These vendors walk long distances between the upland and low-lying areas of Kampala city in search for the desired volumes of waste materials. They have no designated distribution points like wholesale dealers and regular waste vendors do. The most common waste innovation marketed by all these types of vendor are garbage briquettes. These are created when banana peels and other dried organic material are put into a large bin and burned at high heat and low oxygen, which creates a kind of charcoal material made of garbage. This is then crushed and mixed with clay and cassava flour (as a glue) and rolled into balls to create briquettes that can be used instead of charcoal.
Garbage briquettes burning on a locally-made charcoal stove. Image: a family kitchen in Kampala
Gender relations as an urban phenomenon that socially defines individual roles, needs, and expectations within a network of human interactions shape socio-economic routines in the urban waste economy from a number of fronts. First, waste is a heterogeneous material and difficult to describe or classify. This is because the definition of waste can be very subjective: what represents waste to one person may represent a valuable resource to another. For example, oily milk packages may be used as fuel; leftover food may be fed to pigs and goats; discarded cardboard may serve as walls and roofs of houses. The classification of discarded materials may be influenced by the gender of the person making the judgment. What looks like ‘junk’ to women may be motorcycle parts to men; what looks like ‘dirt’ to men may be compost or fertilizer to women; there are myriad examples of different sexes “seeing” things differently (Muller, 1998). This means that waste needs to have a strict gender sensitive legal definition to comply with the law; such strict definitions have financial and legal implications for private businesses, local authorities, communities, and central governments.
Second, experiences from the communities have shown that as men and women participate (or not) in managing waste within the household, their relationship to discarded materials may depend on who they are, as much or more than on what they do. In particular, the frequently subordinate status of women may affect their general access to and control of resources, so that the “waste” materials or waste related activities may be the only ones which are available to them. This implies that new schemes for managing waste materials, which are blind to women compared to men’s activities, may destroy fragile livelihoods. Third, the household/social arrangement surrounding the use of waste reduction/recycling technologies must be innovated for proper waste management options. Reduction involves good practice, input material changes, and technological changes for environmental cost savings arising from producing less waste, which include savings in energy costs, waste storage space, transport costs, and lower emissions into the air, the water, and on land.
Waste reduction or recycling techniques, however, are often seen in highly limited terms as particular mechanical, chemical, or biological processes used in making one good for another. The extremely narrow view of technology that emerges from such a limited outlook does little justice to the “social content” of technology. The making of things involves not merely the relationship between, say, raw materials and final products, but also with the social organization that permits the use of specific techniques of production in homes, factories, or workshops. This means that the so-called “productive” activities that technology does, may be parasitic on other work being done, such as housework and food preparation, cleaning, and the care of children and adults as a source of labor for the operations. Technology in waste management is, in this regard, not only about equipment and its operational characteristics but also about social arrangements that permit the usage of equipment and the so-called productive processes carried out.
Technology for sanitation in public places—that is, waste collection and recycling machinery—has gender related questions that are critical for success in the targeted communities. For example, can women-owned enterprises as well as men-owned enterprises afford the investment? Are women-owned enterprises able to generate a higher work volume to pay for such investments, to the same extent as men-owned or mixed enterprises? Do women as well as men have equal access to the necessary training? Can women as well as men continue with related income earning activities, such as sorting the waste? How does new technology affect the health of women compared to men? Does it create equal risks or offer equal protection against health risks? Leaving such issues to the existing forces of competition and inequality in society may reinforce, or even increase, women’s social-economic disadvantage.
The re-use of ‘waste’ involves using a product or package more than once or re-using it in another application. Examples of re-use include re-using supermarket consumer bags, glass milk and water bottles, re-trading partly won tires or selling car scrap to merchants. Reusing extends the life of the material used and therefore reduces the waste quantity requiring treatment and disposal. However, waste re-use can be affected by consumer preferences that may be different in the case of women compared to men. Men and women value waste materials differently and see their usefulness for different purposes, such as domestic utility, saving on household expenditure, earning money or other purposes. Such issues are at stake in the field of gender and urban natural/social resources important in local livelihoods. Who uses which resources? Who controls decisions about how resources are used? Who is helping to sustain local resources and who benefits from this? How is the situation changing? Answers to these questions must be sought through gender-focused research in waste management.
Lastly, public gatherings and committee meetings at the neighborhood and community levels and at city councils are often the means of consulting the community about development priorities, and are increasingly a key ingredient in setting urban development agendas. In an era of intensifying pressure on municipalities for cost recovery and fiscal discipline, such consultations are also likely to be seen as means of securing a public commitment to pay for private waste management services. Here, too, gender considerations are important, as women and men may differ in their priorities for new or improved services, preferences for the type of service, and willingness and ability to pay. Several elements are at play when a community is consulted about waste services. The first is that women and men are likely to have different interests regarding environmental improvement, based on the different uses they make of the immediate environment. The second is the nature of the consultation process itself. This concerns the composition of the committees that take decisions and the forms of representation between the lower level and higher level committees. The ways in which the negotiation with the city council is structured, and the time and setting of the meetings may define the environment as “men’s” space, an environment in which women are not comfortable or free to express their opinions. Community consultation also concerns the degree to which a process of empowerment takes place among community groups. Do men and women, and members of different social groups, have equal opportunity to understand issues involved, to express their opinions and influence the outcomes? Simple but crucial decisions in this respect might concern the choice of the meeting place and time, language used, and division of representative tasks, such as negotiating with the local authorities.
This gendered understanding of the urban waste economy is advantageous to interventions that seek to achieve a balance between urban economic development, long-term ecological sustainability and social justice through the following ways:
Studies – disaggregating waste management modes and preferences by sex, and undertaking environmental health impact assessments by comparing vulnerability using gender-based variables such as what roles women play compared to men in collecting, sorting, disposing, storing, reuse and recycling of waste at multiple scales (household to community to city levels).
Capacity development – training opportunities on sustainable urban waste management are offered to an equal number of female and male change agents/ambassadors to promote practices that not only safeguard communities against waste-related hazards but also offer economic opportunities through re-use and recycling. This can be vital to the empowerment of communities, especially when participants acknowledge and acquire the ability to transform the household/neigbourhood waste activities into credible and environmentally sound businesses, and are capable of negotiating for enabling standards, regulations, and partnerships with formal institutions, mainly the private sector and local government authorities.
Incubation centers for cleaner technologies – gendered innovations as the process of integrating gender analysis around women’s and men’s roles, and research into technology development for commercial and non-commercial management of urban waste, can enhance the quality of outcomes. This research can be completed through interdisciplinary collaborations between gender experts, natural scientists, urban economists, and engineers working together to reform research agendas and institutions.
Most people would agree that honeybees need help. Concerns about their dwindling numbers and the pesticides used on the food they eat have rallied environmental activists around the save-the-bees cause.
Photo: Jennifer Baljko
That increased awareness, combined with a host of other reasons including a movement to buy and produce local-made, organic honey, has spurred another noticeable trend: a rise in urban beekeeping, something we discuss in this podcast.
The increased number of beehives we’re hearing about in cities around the world brings with it another conversation about regulation. How are cities striking a balance between wanting to engage with sustainable, green efforts that support a healthy pollinator ecosystem while also protecting their citizens from pesky flying insects that swarm and sting when threatened?
It’s not always an easy question to answer. City rules on this topic are as diverse as the beehives taking up residence on rooftops. In some places, it’s illegal for an individual to have a beehive on his apartment building balcony because of the risk the bees pose to the general population. In other places, beehives are illegal in urban spaces in much the same way that keeping cows, goats and sheep is illegal. Other cities are incredibly lenient in regulating beekeeping practices, and anyone who wants a hive can set one up. Some municipalities require beekeepers to register their hives, like dog owners who have to register their pups. And elsewhere, the idea of urban beekeeping is so new that the city council hasn’t had to deal with regulating it yet.
New York, for instance, lifted a ban on beekeeping in 2010, and amended a city health code to allow residents to keep hives of the common, nonaggressive honeybee. Beekeepers must register their hives and adhere to other standards, such as maintaining a certain distance from property lines, providing water sources, and being able to control swarms, said Andrew Coté, president of the New York City Beekeepers Association.
City bees in Barcelona. Photo: Jennifer Baljko
“I think things need to be regulated to some extent. We need licenses for our dogs, or to drive a car, or to operate a hotdog cart,” he said. “And, I think when you’re talking about a box of 75,000 flying, stinging, venomous insects, I think, it’s reasonable that they’re registered and that there is some sort of regulation because not everyone is as courteous as perhaps they need to be.”
City officials in San Francisco, a city where social leanings traditionally bend to the left and city-improvement ideas are experimented with more liberally, foster an open dialog about urban beekeeping, said Terry Oxford, a San Francisco beekeeper, artist, and environmental activist.
“San Francisco is a joy and a gift. It’s so advanced and ahead of the curve in terms of really understanding really important issues and in offering a platform for those issues. Sustainability is part of the local conversation all the time,” she said. “Beekeeping is not illegal here. The way it’s written in the books is that if someone complains, you have to move your bees. So, what I’ve learned, is how to be very, very nimble as a rooftop beekeeper and how to get 60,000 bees off a roof if I have to.”
Barcelona’s local government and the Catalan regional parliament are also reviewing the issue, said Jaume Clotet, a beekeeper who runs Mel.lis Serveis Apícoles.
Photo: Jennifer Baljko
Clotet manages 90 beehives in Barcelona’s metropolitan area and nearby rural areas, and, in addition to the Museu de Ciències Naturals’ (Museum of Natural Sciences) rooftop hives, he helps manage Barcelona’s two municipal-run apiaries at a city park and community garden. Along with Apicultura Urbana, Clotet has proposed plans to Barcelona city officials to install hives in eight other locations around the city.
Recently, there has been increased sensitivity around expanding an urban beekeeping footprint, he added. Barcelona has a law that protects bees, and the city is collaborating with beekeeping advocates to better understand how more beekeeping efforts can work within the city limits. Also, in March 2014 the Generalitat (the Catalan government) changed a regulation prohibiting animal-production activity within 400 meters of a city; the original rule included all sorts of animals such as cows, chicken, pig, sheep, and, yes, bees. Now, residents can ask each city hall for permission to install beehives; if permission is granted, beekeeping efforts can move forward without the province’s minimum distance requirement, Clotet said.
“Individuals citizens shouldn’t be the ones deciding if they can keep beehives at home. This should be controlled. The ones who should be primarily concerned about this—and who should set the first examples of how it could work within a city—should be the local authorities and local city halls,” he said. “They should start with this and check how it goes and how it grows, and how much it grows. Hopefully, next year, there will be one or two new beehive facilities in the city. Of course, I would like to install as many beehives as possible, but, like everywhere, we live in cities and towns, and the opinions of citizens should absolutely be considered.”
What is your city’s approach to monitoring and regulating beekeeping activities? Tell us on Twitter (@TNatureOfCities) or in the comments section below.
Do you believe city governments should regulate urban beekeeping?
When it comes to urban beekeeping, would you prefer… —Strict regulation? —A minimum amount of regulation?
—No regulation at all?
—Something in the middle?
Should urban beekeeping regulations lean more toward…
—Supporting sustainable city pollination efforts?
—Protecting humans?
—Protecting bees?
—None of these things?
—Something else?
Story notes: (See the companion essay here.) Bees have always been a part of the city landscape. But something is happening in the world today that’s making their presence more noticeable. Whether it’s because people love honey or want to better understand bee behavior or are looking for sustainable ways to support the vital pollinator ecosystem, people’s interest in bees is on the rise. As a result, more beehives are popping up in cities around the world.
This podcast episode, produced by Jennifer Baljko, profiles beekeeping projects in Barcelona, Beijing, New York and San Francisco to get a better idea of how this trend is evolving. As she finds out, each project—and each beekeeper—started in a different way, and each has a sweet story to tell.
Sahra Malik, co-founder and chief executive officer of the social enterprise Shangrila Farms, explains how her family’s interest in rural beekeeping led to the creation of a yearlong urban beekeeping training program in Beijing.
Meanwhile, in Barcelona, Jaume Clotet, a mechanical engineer-turned-beekeeper who runs Mel.lis Serveis Apícoles, discusses how urban beekeeping initiatives can expand beyond honey production and into artistic, cultural, educational, and research applications. OpenBeeResearch is one such example, and in this case, a hive on a museum rooftop has been hooked up with sensors. It’s a perfect citizen science project that will provide insight into the health of the cities and the bees, says Josep Perelló, an associate professor with the Physics Faculty at the Universitat de Barcelona and the project leader for the university’s multi-disciplinary OpenSystems research group.
And, lastly, San Francisco-based Terry Oxford—a beekeeper, an artist and an environmental activist—advocates for supporting the vital pollinator ecosystem, in which honeybees play a critical role. Through her UrbanBeeSF project, Oxford promotes sustainable, environmentally friendly urban beekeeping and city pollination practices, and provides practical tips for people who want to help keep urban bees healthy.
This episode was produced by:
Jennifer Baljko Barcelona
David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director. David's dad told him once that he needed a back up plan, something to "fall back on". So he bought a tuba.
A new energy is emerging around the importance and relevance of connecting urban dwellers with nearby nature to realize a full range of human and environmental benefits. In this sense, there is a real willingness among park professionals and supporters to try new approaches, to learn from each other, and to forge a stronger relationship between cities and nature. This openness was reflected in the diversity of presentations on this subject at the recent 2015 George Wright Society conference in Oakland, California.
The George Wright Society (GWS) is an international non-profit association composed of researchers, resource managers, educators, administrators, and activists working in parks, other types of protected areas, and cultural and historic sites. Founded in 1980, the goal of the GWS is to advance protected area stewardship by bringing practitioners together to share their expertise. One of the ways the GWS does this is by organizing a bi-annual interdisciplinary conference dedicated to advancing thought and practice in natural and cultural resource management, research, protection, and interpretation. The conference attracts practitioners from across the entire spectrum of disciplines and activities that are necessary for successful protected areas management.
From March 29-April 3, 2015, the GWS held its 18th bi-annual conference in Oakland, California (GWS2015). Entitled “Engagement, Education & Expectations—The Future of Parks & Protected Areas”, this year’s conference attracted more than 700 participants representing land management agencies in the USA and Canada, affiliated non-profit organizations, academia, recipients of the GWS Indigenous Participant Travel Grant Program and George Melendez Wright Student Travel Scholarships, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA).
From my perspective, the GWS2015 conference was highly successful. Of particular interest to me was the strong emphasis on urban nature conservation and initiatives. This is an emerging direction for GWS conferences, which have traditionally focused more on federal land management agencies. Also, the conference’s location in the San Francisco Bay Area was a big advantage because it enabled a number of local agencies and organizations to showcase the innovative work they are doing to conserve nature and connect diverse urban populations to that nature. This blog looks at some of the highlights of the GWS2015 conference from these two perspectives.
The Plenary Sessions
The conference opened with an outstanding plenary session on “Parks as a Key to Preventive Healthcare: The Power of Partnerships between Park and Health Professionals” (available on YouTube). Led by Mariajose Alcantara and Fatima Colindres, Interpretive Park Rangers at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area; Raymond Baxter, Kaiser Permanente’s senior vice president for Community Benefit, Research and Health Policy; Jonathan Jarvis, Director of the National Park Service; and Kristin Wheeler, Program Director at the Institute at the Golden Gate, the presentation showcased the innovative work being done in the Bay Area to improve health outcomes among people of all backgrounds and abilities by using local parks as a low or no-cost preventative health choice. Although much work has been done in this regard through the Healthy Parks Healthy People movement, what is especially exciting in the Bay Area is how the medical profession has been embracing this concept through the Parks Prescription Program.
In this example, the Parks Rx Program provides resources and support for medical doctors to prescribe spending time outdoors in nature as a way to improve health outcomes with the help of locally specific and culturally relevant outreach materials. Parks prescriptions are tracked, improvements to patient health monitored, and new users to parks in the community observed. This exciting approach builds on a partnership started in 2013 between more than a dozen Bay Area health departments and parks agencies from six Bay Area counties that sought to improve health outcomes for communities with high health needs.
Dr. Kathleen Moore
The second GWS2015 plenary focused on a problem which seems to be growing with each new generation—that of the sliding ecological baseline. Presented by Kathleen Dean Moore, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Oregon State University, the talk, titled “Watching the World Go Away: Sliding Baselines, Diminished Expectations, and the Future of Protected Places” (available on YouTube), presented a sobering look at how unrelenting pressures on the natural world over many generations is also resulting in a sliding moral baseline—where, in the words of Dr. Moore, “we ask so little of ourselves, caught up in an astonishing disregard for the quietly vanishing creatures and landscapes. But who can grieve the loss of what they never knew?” This, in turn, shifts into a sliding baseline of the imagination, where Dr. Moore asks “who can imagine a truly healthy ecosystem, who lives in a landscape of loss and no longer notices? Even our sense of possibility has been strip-mined.” Through Dr. Moore’s powerful, moving, lyrical, and yet hopeful words, she asks each of us to live as witnesses and activists, standing up for the earth and safeguarding our irreplaceable common natural heritage.
During this plenary, Ernesto Enkerlin Hoeflich, Chair IUCN WCPA and Alan Latourelle, Chief Executive Officer, Parks Canada Agency, both spoke eloquently about the future of parks and protected areas in North America, and they urged everyone to continue working towards the realization of the Promise of Sydney. They also spoke of the critical importance of a strong voice in support of parks and protected areas at the WCC. They noted this can only happen if people get involved with helping to set the agenda for the WCC. These agenda-setting meetings are starting to take place around the world this year. A good way to connect to the WCC is by joining the WCPA and bringing your perspectives to the forefront of the discussions.
From wilderness to city edge: the role of urban protected areas in metropolitan regions and protected area systems
Although it is not the intent of this blog to review all the presentations that focused on urban nature at GWS2015, what follows are highlights of a few of the presentations that represent a global to local perspective of the role and growing importance of urban protected areas. The presentations focus on various aspects of urban protected areas including human health, environmental protection, governance, public policy, changing values, strategic and land use planning, stewardship and partnerships, and changing demographics.
The session “Urban protected areas: A global perspective” by Ted Trzyna, Chair, Urban Specialist Group, IUCN WCPA, focused on the newly released (2014) IUCN volume Urban Protected Areas. This volume is a significant contribution to the field of urban protected areas studies, providing context and concepts of urban nature protection and explaining their importance. According to Ted, “protected areas situated in or at the edge of metropolitan areas have a crucial role that sets them apart from other protected areas. They provide opportunities for large numbers of urban people to experience nature, including many people who may not be able to visit more remote places.” He explained that regular contact with nature is good for people, and that urban people are crucial for nature conservation, nationally and globally, because of the support they provide for nature through their votes, donations, and their communications. And yet, he explained, people living in cities tend to have diminishing contact with nature. The Urban Protected Areas volume tries to address this through its thirty best practice guidelines that demonstrate how to promote, create, and improve urban protected areas, as well as improve the connections between urban protected areas and people, places, and institutions.
One of the Urban Protected Areas profiles: Golden Gate National Recreation Area, San Francisco, California, USA.Mike Walton (left) and Jeff Ward (right) surveying a regional park wilderness landscape next to Victoria, BC.
Mike Walton, Senior Manager of the Capital Regional District, Regional Parks Department, in Victoria, British Columbia, made a presentation on “Near wilderness and its relevancy to our nations’ park systems.” Mike pointed out that in Canada and the United States, wilderness has long been a symbol of national identity, but that today, “meaningful wilderness can’t be only distant and vast—it needs to be nearby and familiar.” He stated that this challenges the foundation of what inspired nations to designate lands as wilderness areas. In this sense, nearby wilderness has the opportunity to connect people of all ages and abilities with the natural world, helping to improve mental and physical health, and creating engaged citizens who understand that “all things are connected.” However, competing interests and political priorities can conspire to divest people from parks and protected areas. The task is to make protected (wilderness) areas real for urban citizens, which can require shared power and decision-making.
Designing governance structures to achieve this requires difficult changes in the powers conferred upon park agencies. Mike’s presentation contributed to the idea that near wilderness—its establishment and management—contributes to shared decision-making so that wilderness around the world might be protected.
Where is wilderness today? For many, it is just outside our doors, within walking, running, or cycling distance.
I gave a presentation on “Achieving regional metropolitan area nature conservation: ingredients for success.” I talked about how urban areas are rapidly expanding as a growing percentage of the world’s population is choosing to live in cities, and how this rapid expansion has resulted in significant negative environmental and human health impacts as formerly wild and natural areas have become fragmented, degraded, or developed. This process has resulted in a growing global recognition that focused attention needs to be paid to nature conservation in urban areas. One aspect of this effort is to develop strategies and best practices for conserving nature in metropolitan environments. I posited that four key attributes have become evident as necessary ingredients for successful urban nature conservation:
Presence of a regional vision for nature conservation
Political commitment to that vision
Organizational capacity to achieve the vision
Consensus-building capacity to build support for the vision
The Chicago Wilderness vision to protect 1.9 million acres of land connected to people and place.
I then introduced the idea that the Collective Impact model was one successful approach to achieving these four attributes for regional nature conservation, especially as implemented by the members of the Metropolitan Greenspaces Alliance (MGA). I highlighted two MGA members, Chicago Wilderness and the Intertwine Alliance (Portland, Oregon) for their truly significant achievements in creating outstanding regional protected areas systems and for successfully involving people with those areas. Chicago Wilderness is especially notable for their aspirational vision of protecting, connecting, and restoring 1.9 million acres of greenspace in and around the Chicago metropolitan area, while the Intertwine Alliance has excelled at building support for nature conservation and restoration by successfully tapping into the consciousness and self-image of Portland area residents and visitors through innovative and fun marketing and branding strategies.
The Intertwine Alliance has produced a number of outstanding communications pieces that build a strong public identity with the local environment and emphasize the accessibility and fun of being out in nature.A satellite view of the San Francisco Bay Area with its 1.4 million acres of protected lands.
Annie Burke, Deputy Director of the Bay Area Open Space Council, gave a very interesting presentation on “The Bay Area’s protected lands and changing demographics.” A member of the Metropolitan Greenspaces Alliance, the Bay Area Open Space Council is a network of 65 NGOs and public agencies that conserve, steward and connect people to the Bay Area’s system of world-class parks, trails, and working lands. With nearly 1.4 million acres of protected land and 1 million acres of publicly accessible parks and trails ranging from the 70,000 acres of wilderness around Mount Diablo, the Presidio of San Francisco, working ranches, and the strawberry fields along the San Mateo coast, many opportunities exist for engaging city dwellers in the movement to protect these natural areas for the benefit of all.
Bay Area youth enjoying a hike in a protected open space near the city.
As Annie pointed out, “the Bay Area is a fascinating study in the connection of land and people. There’s a long history of a strong environmental ethic in the region that is undergoing a major shift. As the demographics change, so are the people interested in protecting our natural areas.” Annie’s presentation highlighted several new leaders and innovative initiatives that are now contributing to the ongoing protection of “this biodiversity hotspot, world famous travel destination, and place we call home.”
The Capital Regional District is on southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.
Jeff Ward, Regional Parks Manager of Planning, Resource Management and Development for the Capital Regional District, Victoria, British Columbia, presented another view of regional nature conservation in his talk, “Planning for a system of regional protected areas in the Capital Region of British Columbia.” Jeff explained that the Capital Regional District (CRD) is the second most populated metropolitan area in British Columbia and is a very desirable place to live. The region’s population is expected to increase over the next 25 years by approximately 110,000; from 365,000 to 475,000. This increasing regionalfootprint is putting more pressure on existing protected areas and is resulting in the unrelenting conversion of natural area to settlement areas.
The CRD Regional Parks Strategic Plan sets out a vision of protecting regionally significant natural areas and providing opportunities for people to sustainably enjoy these areas.
Jeff explained that the idea of establishing a system of regional protected areas in the CRD dates back to the 1950s, and that through successive regional parks strategic planning initiatives, the CRD has addressed the need for establishing a connected system of protected areas in this growing metropolitan region. Through CRD Regional Parks, the region has taken action to plan for a system of protected areas and acquire land before it is lost forever. CRD Regional Parks currently manages 33 regional parks and trails on over 13,000 hectares on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, and the department has a land acquisition fund that generates approximately $3.4 million a year through 2019.
Public response to the question: “At least 50% of the Growth Management Planning Area land and water base is managed and connected for the conservation of nature?”
A significant initiative for CRD Regional Parks, as articulated in its Strategic Plan, is promoting the concept of “Nature Needs Half”—or the protection and management of at least fifty percent of the CRD’s land base for the conservation of nature. This concept has been taken up by CRD Regional Planning in its provincially mandated regional growth strategy (renamed the Regional Sustainability Strategy [RSS]), where a recent public poll found overwhelming support for the concept.
Jeff’s presentation also highlighted key lessons learned about protected area planning in a metropolitan region, which include:
Have a vision —have a clear idea and “expression of purpose.”
Be patient — the system will develop over decades.
Planning matters — it requires ongoing planning with community involvement.
Connect with your colleagues —work across disciplines and with all levels of government and non-government organizations.
Citizens experience and learn — protected areas become part of their daily life.
Finally, Robert Doyle, General Manager, East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD), made a presentation on “Using park partnerships to keep parks relevant to urban communities.” Robert explained that the EBRPD is the nation’s largest and oldest urban regional park system. Established in 1934 to buy and protect natural lands and provide a system of regional parks, the District now manages 118,000 acres in 65 diverse parks and operates a 1,200 mile trail system with an interconnected urban bike trail system. With an annual budget of over $200,000,000 a year, it has 1,000 employees (it is one of the largest employers of youth in the Bay Area) and receives 22,000,000 visitors a year.
Important land acquisition in the Concord Hills made possible through conservation partnerships.
The EBRPD completed its Master Plan update in 2013 and it now has a renewed emphasis on natural resource protection through adaptive management, environmental education, outreach to underserved populations, youth engagement, public health, and access for everyone. Robert emphasized that the EBRPD continues to prioritize open space protection, safe and well maintained parks, and creative partnerships. Robert highlighted specific examples for remaining relevant to the populations the EBRPD serves in a changing urban and natural environment. These include:
Public outreach through ethnic media and environmental and recreation programming;
Unique partnerships for promoting healthy parks and healthy people;
Adapting to climate change through urban shoreline restoration projects;
Involvement in multi-agency endangered species habitat acquisitions;
Management agreements with state and federal agencies; and
Partnering with transportation agencies to create an urban bicycle system that serves both transportation and recreation.
Summary
The GWS2015 offered a wide range of topics relating to urban and regional nature conservation, only some of which have been covered here. All of the conference presenters were engaged, knowledgeable and eager to share their experiences and perspectives on how to design, manage, and generate support for regional metropolitan area parks and protected areas. They emphasized the importance of such systems for the health and wellbeing of local residents and visitors, as well as contributing to broader social, economic, and environmental goals.
An edited Conference Proceedings will be published by the George Wright Society as a record of the conference. The Proceedings will be published as a PDF e-book on the GWS website. Certain papers from the conference will also be published in the GWS’s journal, The George Wright Forum. Check the GWS website for availability of these documents later in 2015.
There was a definite call among many participants to become more active in promoting the value and necessity of nature protection, and to not back down on the need to protect significant environmental features and landscapes before they are lost to development pressures forever. The idea of protecting at least fifty percent of the global land base for the conservation of nature (Nature Needs Half) was repeatedly heard—this is in sharp contrast to the usual 12% to 15% protected area target that has been accepted by many governments around the world. There seems to be a sense of urgency and activism in the air that is growing stronger among participants who anticipate what is likely coming if we don’t take strong action now to protect and connect people with nature, especially in our urban cores.
So, although I am surely talking to the already converted, I still encourage each of us to do what we can to actively defend, promote, and champion a greener future for our urban areas and for our planet. Perhaps consider supporting the George Wright Society and sharing your work at the next conference (GSW2017). Also, think about joining the WCPA and try to influence the agenda for the upcoming World Conservation Congress to include a strong emphasis on urban nature. And, think about actually participating in the WCC in Honolulu, Hawaii in 2016. These global events are often life-changing, and wouldn’t it be great for a whole contingent of urban nature activists to be there? Together we could advance the incorporation of abundant and easily accessible nature into each of our cities as a solution to pressing global environmental and development challenges. I hope to see you there!
Panoramic view from Makapuu, Oahu, Hawaii. Honolulu, Hawaii will be the site of the 2016 World Conservation Congress which is being hosted by the United States for the first time in the WCC’s 66-year history.
In his essay published on The Nature of Cities in 2013, Keitaro Ito asked what seems at first to be a simple question: “Where will children learn about nature?” Yet it is actually an incredibly complex question, caught up in adult ideas that romanticize both childhood and nature. Children’s understanding and experiences of the world have a diverse set of influences from birth, including parents, siblings, caregivers, playmates, media, school, religion and material spaces. Research in the field of childhood studies (psychology, education, sociology, neurosciences) has shown that not only is the socialisation of children complex, it is also impossible to determine what behaviours are innate and which are learned (Aitken, 2001; James et al., 1998; Taylor, 2013).
Why is this important for those of us concerned about environmental issues and the future of the planet? Because the ways in which we represent, talk about, and produce natures for children perpetuate the assumption that children are innately connected to nature. Yet just as children are socialised in gender roles, so too are they socialised to understand and interact in ways that reproduce dominant society-nature relations: human as external to nature, urban as antithesis to nature, and women and children as closer to nature than men because of biology and age. The essays on The Nature of Cities challenge these perspectives, but prevailing ideas about society and nature persist. Mainstream media, in particular, plays a critical role in reproducing these dominant ideas.
In this article, I am concerned with how popular children’s media represents natures. I want to make connections between popular TV shows aimed specifically at boys or girls and a particular event that took place in my home in Montréal. Media plays a large role in shaping children’s knowledge of natures, and therefore how they interact and play in ‘natures’. The ways in which nature is represented in and interacted with in children’s TV shows can be powerful. TV shows create affective atmospheres(Anderson, 2009); that is, they create an ambiance that is both real (material—the TV show itself) and emotional (feeling —how the TV show makes one feel about certain things). An atmosphere is ephemeral, affecting one’s life by enveloping it without a person really feeling it or being completely aware of the process. In this way, affective atmospheres create collective effects and emotional responses. And emotional responses are a key way that we produce and comprehend knowledge. Affective atmospheres are ubiquitous, but some are more powerful than others. At present, mainstream media is one of the most powerful affective atmospheres because of its pervasiveness.
Affective atmospheres in children’s media landscapes (film, TV, internet) now form an intimate part of a child’s everyday life-world, in some cases starting at birth. The children’s media landscape is much more complex and diverse than in previous decades, and now consists of multiple media platforms such that stories are told across different forms of media (Vossen, Piotrowski & Valkenburg, 2014). The affective atmospheres in children’s media reproduce and perpetuate all sorts of binaries—rural-urban, female-male, emotion-rational, culture-nature—and the persistence of these binaries makes it difficult for those of us seeking to rethink natures (urban and beyond). In this post, I explore the affective atmospheres in two children’s TV shows—My Little Pony: Friendship is Magicand Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles(2012 to current series)—and make links to a real life event involving birds, squirrels, and two children.
A house, some birds, a squirrel, and two kids
During the summer of 2013, the side and back of my home (a duplex in Montréal) was covered with ivy, which served as the habitat of at least a dozen birds. There were also two children living in the duplex: a four-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy. The girl (my daughter), Chloe, lived in the upper duplex and the boy, Antoine, lived with his family in the lower duplex. The vines and birds fascinated Chloe. She would sit on the deck and watch the birds fly in and out, using binoculars to find their nests in the vines. One day Chloe commented that it was very cool to have bird apartments on the building. The co-habitation with these birds became lessons for learning not only about ecology, but also about difference. The new baby birds enthralled Chloe, and she had a desire to identify with them. She would put special bowls of seeds out for them and get frustrated by their inability to share with each other. Chloe quizzed me about birds: did they have families; did the baby birds attend day care and kindergarten; did they fly to the park to play like she did; do they tell stories at bedtime; what time did they go to bed; why did they get up so early; etc.? While exasperating, her questions were important for her to understand interspecies difference and similarities. From the start she identified, to a certain extent, with the birds–they lived in the same house! And she wanted to find more ways that she and the birds were the same.
Unfortunately, at the end of the summer, the owner of our building (Antoine’s father, who lived in the ground floor of the duplex) decided that he was tired of the bird poop on the basement stairs and flowerbeds. So one weekend he and Antoine started cutting down the vines at the base. The son was very excited; he cheered his dad on, yelling for the birds to go back to the trees where they belong. Chloe watched in horror as the birds fled very quickly from the vine. She did not yell at the owner to stop, but stood on our balcony shocked. He was destroying the bird’s home. Then a flurry of questions: Where would they go? Can they live with us? Can we plant vines in our kitchen? She was confused because she thought the bird poo was good for the plants below (I told about the usefulness of bird poo (guano) as fertilizer and how people at one time had fought over it), so why did the landlord think it was bad? We spent the afternoon figuring out how best to explain concepts of private property, a desire for particular aesthetics, and nature as ‘out of place’ in cities.
Later that week, Chloe approached Antoine and asked him directly why he destroyed the bird’s home and didn’t he know that they need homes too. Indeed, she continued, bird poo is really good for plants. Antoine replied equally directly that birds can find another home in trees were they belong, not on human buildings. Anyway, he sneered, birds are girly. The exchange prompted even more questions, now around whether certain animals were for girls and others for boys. It also brought into this ‘event’ another co-inhabitant: Chippy (as named by Chloe), the squirrel who inhabits two trees, one in the front yard of the duplex and the other in the neighbour’s front yard. Chippy travels between his/her two homes via the telephone and electric cables. If birds were girly, Chloe wondered, what about squirrels?
Chloe’s questions and the conversation between her and Antoine illustrate the complex culture-nature questions at the heart of dwelling in the city. The story also points to the ways in which dwelling and assembling are gendered. Moreover, paying attention to their emotional reactions to the bird apartment and its destruction helps to make sense of Chloe and Antoine’s experiences of dwelling with birds, squirrels, and many other urban natures. Chloe’s feelings of anger and confusion generated a new set of questions about nature, gender, and dwelling. Her query as to whether nature really was gendered—is there really a boy nature and a girl nature— gives rise to further questions around why and how Antoine assumed birds and squirrels are for the girls?
Media landscapes, children, and nature
Children’s understanding and experiences of nature are shaped by a variety of influences. Media is one influence. As many media scholars have noted, the pervasiveness of media in children and youth’s everyday lives affords it power (Holtzman & Sharpe, 2014; Singer & Singer, 2012). Portrayals of human-nature relations in films, TV shows, and literature can be very powerful in shaping children’s understanding of nature. The influence of Disney and other media franchises on the socialization of children has been well studied since the 1960s. Cultural theorist Whitely (2012) explores the different ways that Disney portrays wild nature and humans in their films. He stresses that more than just representing nature, Disney films create feelings; their “stock in trade”, he suggests, “is emotion”. Whitely argues that sentimentality in such films needs to be better understood. The feelings and ideas we have about the nature, humans, etc. shape our relationship with the world; engagement with the world through sentiment needs to be given more importance. What we need to pay attention to, therefore, is the affective atmosphere that films and TV shows create.
I want to turn now to My Little Pony and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—shows that Chloe and Antoine watched that summer—to explore how nature is portrayed differently in animated TV shows aimed at girls and boys (separately), and the different emotions they elicit in viewers. I consider the environment and aesthetic modalities of the shows. The environment includes: whether the setting is urban or rural, day or night, and the presence of nature and how it is represented. Aesthetic modalities in this chapter refer to the visuals (such as colour), language, character interactions with the environment, and sound elements that create the world in the cartoons. Both of these work together to create affective atmospheres.
Environment and aesthetic modalities in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (MLP) is a show that is marketed directly towards young girls, from preschool to around age 10, although the fan base is much more diverse than this and includes men in their twenties (Delano Robertson, 2014). According to Creative Director Lauren Faust (2010) the aim of the show is to illustrate the diversity and complexity of being a girl. MLP itself epitomizes the urban/rural divide. It takes place in a small rural village called Ponyland, and the surrounding forests and farmlands, all of which are in the land of Equestria. However, there is one large city in Equestria—Manehatten— in which a few episodes are set. There are clear distinctions made between the metropolitan city of Manehatten (fashioned after the island of Manhattan) and the rural landscape of Ponyville (see the images below).
Manehatten is considered the centre of high society, where ponies go for culture (theatre) and consumption (clothes shopping—although the ponies hardly ever wear clothes). Depending on the pony’s traits and special talents, they either feel out of place or inspired and excited while in Manehatten. For example, Apple Blossom, a young pony from the apple orchard near Ponyville, visits her urban cousin and feels very much out of place with the rules of etiquette, pressures of being ‘in style’, and the closed-in landscape of the city (‘The Cutie Mark Chronicle’, season one); she longs for the peace, quiet and freedom of Ponyville. In contrast, Rarity—a pony whose special talent is fashion design—travels to Manehatten to participate in fashion week. Rarity is excited and energized by city life. However, during the episode, she transforms into a stereotypical, competition-driven, ‘every pony for herself’ urbanite. Eventually she realizes that life in Ponyville is better because it revolves around community and friendship.
Rural landscape of Ponyville (above) and urban landscape of Manehattan (below) in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Images: http://mlp.wikia.com
Nature figures prominently in the rural landscape of Ponyville, as the above image illustrates. Scenes always contain plants, trees, animals, and even flying insects. The soundscape often includes birds chirping. The pony’s houses are frequently populated by small animals, especially the Fluttershy’s home, where she lives with numerous animals that she cares for. In contrast to Ponyville, the setting of Manehattan leaves out street trees and the sounds of birds. The urban scenes are louder with more background noise, such as talking and cars. MLP takes nature out of the urban to make the contrast with the rural idyllic more drastic. The visuals of each landscape, however, are similar in terms of animation technique: bright colours, light, and soft images.
The ponies also interact differently with the urban and rural landscapes. In episodes set in Manehattan, ponies from Ponyville are often more tense, get frustrated easily, and long for the calm and quiet of the rural. The ponies also take on stereotypical urban characteristics, such as the example of Rarity above. When she participates in the fashion show, she becomes more competitive and treats her friends like workers. Back in Ponyville, the ponies’ main role is to make sure that nature is kept in balance—they each have a role to play in caring for and maintaining nature. Along with caring for friends, caring for nature is the key task in MLP.
Environment and aesthetics in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
TNMT Sewer Lair. Image: turtlepedia.wikia.com
The world in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) is radically different from MLP. TMNT takes place in an urban landscape, yet like MLP’s Manehattan, it is also a fictitious New York City. The four teenage turtles and their father figure and sensei, Master Splinter, live below the city in the storm sewers. They only emerge onto the surface at night, as they are trained to be shadows and to hide from humans. Because the show takes place below the city and at night, the visuals are very dark; the shades used in the animation are gloomy, with only splashes of colour (figures above and below). The sewer lair is lit from above by what seems to be the subway system, and by dim lights placed near the walls. In the aboveground landscape of New York City, there are no street trees or plants visible. Nor are there any bird sounds, even on the rare occasions when the Ninja Turtles leave the sewers during the day. While there is no ‘green’ nature displayed in the above ground cityscape, neither are there any natures that run through the storm sewers; that is, it never seems to rain while the turtles are in their lair, even though they live in storm sewers.
Typical nighttime urban landscape of New York City. Image: tmnt2012series.wikia.com
The visual and sound landscapes change dramatically when the Ninja Turtles and two friends need to leave New York City and drive to a farmhouse several hours away. Leaving the city in a VW van, the turtles go to recuperate and energise in the country. In the rural setting of the farm, the animation because much lighter and colourful (figure below). The setting here is, of course, full of nature; the farmhouse is surrounding by forest and the Ninja Turtles have to learn how to be in ‘Nature’, including interacting with animals such as chickens and deer. Indeed, Michelangelo becomes attached to the farm animals, tearing up when he has to say goodbye. In the rural landscape, the turtles fight different ‘bad guys,’ many if which draw on mythical tales. For example, Bigfoot appears in one episode.
The rural landscape of the O’Neill Farmhouse (TNMT season three). Image: tmnt2012series.wikia.com
Experiencing nature at the farmhouse becomes pivotal in the Ninja Turtles’ journey to becoming better masters of Ninjitsu, which involves deeper concentration and balance. In this way, the idealisation of a balanced nature is directly linked to inner peace and focus within the turtles. This connection is clearly portrayed in season three, episode eight, when the turtles leave the farmhouse to camp in the forest. Their task is to practice Ninjitsu, to meditate, and to be at one with nature. After having a vision of Master Splinter, the turtles embark on individual journeys, each of which is linked to a goal and to an element of nature. Raphael is represented by fire and needs to find focus; Leonardo follows the wind to become an exemplary leader; Donatello has to find more power in the mountains; and Michelangelo is too distracted and needs to find calm in the forest/woods. At the end of their journeys, the turtles emerge from the forest triumphant, each bearing a banner with their newfound nature element and ready to return to New York City to fight the colonizing alien species, the Kraang (figure below). There are little emotional affinities towards protecting nature in TNMT. Rather, nature serves as a source of power and strength. It is rejuvenating and energising.
TMNT emerging from the forest after their vision quests with their new banners symbolizing different elements in nature (from left to right: fire, wind, mountain and woods/forest). Image: turtlepedia.wikia.com
Affective atmospheres, media landscapes, children and nature
Both MLP and TNMT exemplify a dominant and romanticized understanding of nature: nature is outside cities and is ‘othered’. Moreover, nature is portrayed stereotypically as something important to protect and to dominate as well as an idealised escape from the urban, which is calming and energising. MLP—a show aimed at girls—very obviously generates feelings of care and protection for nature. It is a key element in the show. Indeed, nature in MLP is in a pastoral setting and is venerated. Nature is calming, healing, in balance, in need of protection, and outside of cities.
This is also the case in TNMT, but only in four episodes; the majority of episodes take place in a city devoid of nature. The feelings both shows produce about nature do nothing to challenge dominant understandings of nature for children. But the presence of nature in MLP makes it clear that girls should take care of nature while in TMNT, boys fight off imaginary bad guys in cities and go to the rural areas to rejuvenate in nature. Here we have the too-easy association of male-culture and female-nature; we might further map male-rational-urban, female-emotional-rural onto these stereotypes, It is difficult to extract the exact emotions these shows generate in children since each child interacts and interprets differently based on his or her experiences and geography (e.g. urban or rural). But these shows most certainly play a part in shaping understandings of nature (and spaces).
In the everyday lives of Chloe and Antoine, we can consider the TV shows they watch as affective atmospheres in their lives. The shows they watch affect their feelings, emotions, and understanding of nature. It is almost too simple to draw connections between the representations and feelings of nature (and the urban/rural divide) in both shows to the reactions of Chloe and Antoine to the “bird apartments.” However, pointing to the obvious similarities between the shows that Chloe and Antoine watched during this time and their respective reactions illustrates how media shapes our spatialised relations with nature. Chloe was very much attached to the figure of Fluttershy in MLP, and she loved Fluttershy’s house (figure below).
Fluttershy’s cottage in the woodland just outside Ponyville. Image: mlp.wikia.com
The bird apartment on Chloe’s house most likely reminded her of Fluttershy’s house, although Chloe did not express this verbally. For her, that her house was located in an urban setting did not matter; what was important was that the house was shared with animals. Just as Fluttershy’s home in MLP was always more-than-human (and not just because the main characters are ponies—they are, after all, anthropomorphized). Fluttershy’s home is inhabited by all sorts of creatures because it is in the rural forest and is part of creating balance. This is not, as I point out above, unproblematic. Chloe felt as though she need to take care of the birds and was curious how they could survive without someone (such as humans) to help them. Antoine, in contrast, felt little in common with the birds and other animals dwelling with him. For Antoine, the birds belonged in the country and not in the city. That his house was urban was an important element in whether the animals belonged because, in his favourite show, TNMT, urban New York does not have trees or animals.
It is difficult to imagine how these media landscapes—the affective atmospheres of children’s media—cannot influence how children feel about the material socio-natural spaces they inhabit. As Whitely notes, the feelings about nature that are created through animated films have very real material affects. Almost a century of Disney’s influence in shaping feelings and understandings of human-nature relations in N. America, Europe, and beyond cannot be underestimated. Analysing how media portrays nature and human-nature relations is necessary, but there also needs to be more focus on showing how ideas and emotions regarding nature in media transfer to everyday ways of interacting with nature.
Richard Louv’s ‘Children and Nature Movement’ and similar campaigns tend to eschew media as an evil technology; in many ways, they are justified given the ways in which nature is portrayed by the media. However, even for children who are exposed to few hours of media (such as my daughter, who is allowed to watch no more than 2 hours/week), media is powerful because these children interact with other children who are exposed to films and TV shows every day (and we cannot ignore the power of literature as well!). Yet while the ‘Children and Nature Movement’ and similar movements critique the ubiquity of media, they tend to recreate the same ideas that are generated by the media. Such movements seek to reconnect children to nature. The argument is that children are being distanced from their natural (innate) connection to nature, what Louv diagnoses as ‘nature deficit disorder’. While such movements have the potential to be very beneficial efforts for children, there is little critical reflection on how children’s relationship to nature is socially constructed as gendered, culturally specific, and spatially fixed (authentic nature is outside the city).
Scholars and others have pointed out the ways in which girls and boys interact with and play in nature differently, but few analyse such gendered play in nature as socially constructed. Movements to reconnect children seem not to be concerned with reproducing (problematic) gender stereotypes. They also tend to reinforce the spatial divide of urban-culture and rural-nature by privileging the natures outside of cities, such ‘wild’ natures, which are depicted as more therapeutic and authentic. By not recognizing gendered and spatial differences in children’s relation with nature, such movements implicitly naturalise gendered relations and fail to challenge the dominant and problematic understandings of nature. If we are to reshape children’s relations to and understandings of nature, then engaging with work in media on representations of nature and human-nature relations is critical—especially if we want to avoid reinforcing and perpetuating problematic, romantic, idealized human-nature relations.
What do we do to counteract media that reifies problematic human-nature relations? How do we create media and urban spaces that enable Chloe and Antoine to produce different notions about nature (or that emphasise nature’s diversity and dynamism) and open their minds to different notions about what it means to be a boy, a girl, or something else? My family has since relocated to Costa Rica, so Chloe and Antoine have not been able to revisit their dialogue about birds, squirrels, and gender. But Chloe has moved on from MLP to the Magic School Bus and Spongebob Squarepants, both of which are slightly less problematic. The Magic School Bus uses a scientific perspective to explore different natures (from the human body to insects to ocean ecosystems). And Spongebob Squarepants….well, I am still not sure how to anlayse this show. Perhaps, in some ways, Spongebob illustrates how a completely fantastical world that does not seek to imitate or teach reality opens up possibilities for thinking differently about nature-society relations.
This article is adapted and shortened from a forthcoming chapter entitled ‘Birds are for the girls: children’s media landscape and the emotional geographies of urban natures’ in Skelton, T., Dwyer, C., & Worth, N. (eds). Geographies of Children and Young People: Volume 4: Geographies of Identities and Subjectivities, Springer Reference.
The names in the Chloe and Antoine story have been changed.
Works cited
Aitken, S. (2001) The Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity. Routledge, New York and London.
Anderson, B. (2009) Affective Atmospheres, Emotion, Space and Society 2: 77–81.
Delano Robertson, V.L. (2014) Of ponies and men: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and the Brony fandom, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 17(1): 21-37.
Holtzman, L., & Sharpe, L. (2014). Media messages: What film, television, and popular music teach us about race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Second edition. New York: ME Sharpe.
James, A., C. Jenks, and A. Prout (1998) Theorizing Childhood. Polity Press, Cambridge.
Singer, G. & Singer, J.L. (2012). Handbook of children and the media. Second edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Taylor, A. (2013) Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. Routledge, New York.
Vossen, H., Piotrowski, J.T. & Valkenburg, P.M. (2014). Media use and effects in childhood. In Nussbaum, J.F. (Ed) The handbook of lifespan communication (pp. 93-112). New York: Peter Land Publishing.
Whitley, D. S. (2012). The idea of nature in Disney animation. Second edition. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing.
Thanks to a bunch of canny coyotes doing what coyotes do, we have recently been reminded of the increasing presence of nature in cities and the human interaction with nature, both in New York City and other cities. And these lessons are applicable not just to the many cities where humans and nature interact, but also to how people relate in a social way with nature.
New Yorkers are a funny group, at once impatient with any reminders that natural elements (such as the snow and cold of our recent winter) might impact their lives, but endlessly fascinated by nature in the form of wildlife and plants, appearing and surviving against all odds in one of the world’s mostly densely populated and built up cities.
For followers of nature in cities, few can forget the saga of Pale Male and Lola, two red tailed hawks whose nest on a tony Fifth Ave. co-op was evicted, later to be replaced following a high-level diplomatic negotiation (that I was part of along with officials from the Audubon Society). The story of Pale Male transcended the small world of birders and entered the popular culture mainstream through several books for adults and children (Red Tails in Love, Pale Male: Citizen Hawk of New York City, The Tale of Pale Male, etc.) and movies.
Pale Male and Lola. Photo: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Over the last few months, coyotes have been appearing on an almost daily basis in New York City—one on top of a bar in Queens, another wandering through Manhattan’s Riverside Park, a third (or was it the second) trapped outside a restaurant in Lower Manhattan. Each of those sightings, and the attendant police chases replete with tranquilizer-dart armed sharpshooters of the NYPD’s elite Emergency Services Unit, becomes fodder for the nightly news and daily newspapers (with the word “wily” used almost every time). In fact, coyotes have been in parts of NYC for decades, and now are common in cities across the country.
Hal the coyote being tracked by NYPD and Park Rangers. Photo: NY Times/ Paul Kreft.
But the fact that those stories are still prominent on the news reflects New Yorkers’ fascination with nature. Kind of like the song “New York, New York”—if they can make it here, they’ll make it anywhere—city residents seem to identify with the survivor instincts of hawks, falcons, herons, and now coyotes. They also tend to love stories of “survivor” trees, such as the non-native Ailanthus altissima—the tree made famous in the novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—which grows from almost any surface. (I have even seen one growing out of a subterranean pit and up through a steel grate.) Threaten to cut down a tree, even if it is old and decrepit and likely to fall, and the neighbors will get up in arms (except for those who don’t like trees and the messy leaves they drop.) It may be no accident that nature has taken an ascendant role in New York City, where the City has pursued a deliberate policy of protecting and enhancing natural areas for more than 30 years, from starting a special unit concerned with natural areas in 1984 to the recent creation of the Natural Areas Conservancy.
And while it might seem to people who have never visited New York, or only visited Manhattan, that New York is the last place for nature and humans to interact, in fact more than 50 percent of the parklands in NYC (City, State and Federal) are “natural,” according to the Trust for Public Land’s “2015 City Park Facts,” which also reports that among the 100 largest cities in the US, more than half have park systems that are more than 50% natural. More than 1/3 of the parks under the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation (NYCDPR) are natural areas, and they have been under the care and study of the NYCDPR Natural Resources Group (NRG) since it was established in 1984—more than 30 years ago.
So what do people actually think about nature in the form of parks, and what are the social interactions that people have with parks and nature? What do they look for when they go to a park, and how far are they willing to travel to get there? Are they looking for experience with nature that are active, as in fishing or birding, or passive, as in simply experiencing nature and finding a place of refuge there?
Those were some of the questions asked by researchers from the US Forest Service (USFS), working with the Natural Areas Conservancy (NAC), a recently founded non-profit partner to NYCDPR and NRG, and with NYCDPR/NRG staff. The study, led by USFS researchers Erika S. Svendsen, Lindsay K. Campbell , Nancy F. Sonti and Michelle L. Johnson, working with Bram Gunther, Sarah Charlop Powers, Helen Forgione and Clare Pregitzer of the NAC/NRG, was done through interviews with park visitors to NYC parks along Jamaica Bay in southern Queens and Brooklyn in 2013. “Reading the Landscape: A Social Assessment of Parks and Their Natural Areas in Jamaica Bay Communities” was issued in March of this year, and it contains fascinating documentation of how New Yorkers interact with their parks along Jamaica Bay, many of them natural, with tidal wetlands, coastal meadows and forests, and even freshwater wetlands. This “social assessment” was done in coordination with a city-wide ecological assessment of the 10,000 acres of NYCDPR natural areas conducted by the NAC/NRG.
Study survey team getting to work. Photo: USFS, Social Assessment project.
The primary questions guiding the study were these: “How do New Yorkers use, value and assign meaning to parks, and in particular, to less programmed or ‘wilder’ spaces in parks? How might we collect this data in a comprehensive yet efficient way so that it can be used by land managers and, ultimately, benefit the public?”
Interviewer team reviewing responses. Photo: USFS, Social Assessment project.
The study looked at 17 parks encompassing 2,140 acres along the edge of Jamaica Bay, whose adjacent neighborhoods have over 900,000 residents—more than many of the largest American cities. Those neighborhoods are also quite diverse racially, economically, and ethnically, including African-Americans, whites, Latinos and Asians. Field observations were made to document usage patterns, and the research teams conducted 681 in-person interviews with park users.
Site interview taking place at Jamaica Bay. Photo: USFS, Social Assessment project.
While there is much to be gleaned in the details of the assessment, here were the broad findings:
Parks provide for an important number and range of activities that are beneficial to human beings.
Parks serve as local resources, but are connected through their users to a wider network of outdoor sites.
Parks are a crucial form of ‘nearby nature’ that provides space for activities, recreation, socialization, and engagement with the environment and supports social ties and place attachment.
The majority of adult park users do not participate in formal environmental stewardship groups, but information about other forms of engagement and barriers to stewardship provides insight on potential for increasing stewardship.
Although relatively few park users commented independently on Hurricane Sandy, those that did discussed the way in which parks and neighborhood residents were affected by the event.
Of great interest to me was that city residents were willing to travel to get to these parks: though 37 percent of the people polled lived within ¼ mile of the park, 26 percent lived from ½ to I mile away, and 37 percent traveled more than I mile to get to the parks. In our work, the Trust for Public Land has found that most city residents are not willing to walk more than about ½ mile to get to a park. Mass transit options to get to most of the Jamaica Bay parks are extremely limited, which means that more than a third of visitors to these parks are traveling more than a mile to get there by driving, walking, or bicycling, primarily. So it’s possible that visitors are getting fit not just in the parks, but on their way to them.
Jamaica Bay on descent to JFK. Credit: Erlend Bjørtvedt.
As may be expected, almost 70 percent of visitors were there for active pursuits, including sports, walking, dog-walking, bicycling, and running. But almost 10 percent were engaged in a passive activity, and more than 4 percent were pursuing nature recreation. In interviews, a “prevalent theme for 14.7% of respondents was the ability to connect with material qualities of nature and the outdoors,” and “of the numerous sub-themes identified, the most commonly referenced attributes of nature were “fish”, “shade”, “views”, “water”, and “trees.” Also mentioned were qualities of the air, including “fresh air”, “breeze”, and “cool.” Other wildlife mentioned includes crabs, birds, and eels. Similarly, “13.7% of respondents identified the ways in which the park serves as a site of refuge. Interviewees sought out green space in order to get away from the crowds, sounds, and traffic of New York City. In particular, they sought out the sense of isolation (e.g. “to get away from crowds”) and peace and quiet that they could find in parks.”
Waterfront along Pelham Bay Park. Photo: USFS, Social Assessment project
The importance of the USFS/NAC/NYCDPR social assessment cannot be overstated. While many scientists are studying the life of nature in the city, and the roles of natural systems in providing ecosystems services, little is known about the social values of parks and nature and the way that people interact with them. Furthermore, many of the users are from economically underserved areas, who count on these parks for social connections to people and to the natural world.
This assessment is eye-opening, and it will be interesting to see the results of a second, city-wide assessment carried out in 2014. But as people increasingly move to and live in cities, scientific and social viewpoints on human and nature interactions will be important areas to study so our cities can use the data to make policy. While the cute stories of wily coyotes and people interacting describe one point of contact, the survival (and happiness) of humans and the other life forms with whom we share our cities will depend on mutually reinforcing, symbiotic contact. The 1933 movie “King Kong” ends with movie maker Carl Denham who, when asked about how the airplanes killed the giant ape, says “It was beauty killed the beast” (that is, Fay Wray, not the planes). Our coda can be “…and beauty and the beast lived happily ever after.”
King Kong and Fay Wray. Credit: RKO Radio Pictures
“…and thus we layered a continent with asphalt and linoleum.”—Eric Sanderson (Terra Nova)
In 2010, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park West was transformed with a protected bike lane and pedestrian refuges. Overnight, speeding traffic was replaced with lighter, calmer car flow and increasing throngs of families walking and cycling to the adjacent park. The project nonetheless met fierce opposition from residents upset about the loss of driving and parking space, and it was not long until these local opponents took to public protest. “Your Bike Lane? Not on my Speedway!” and “Don’t be Conned by Sadik-Khan” read a few of the more outrageous signs. Of course, we responded with our own counter-protest. My friend and fellow sustainable streets advocate, Aaron Naparstek, was there. He was clutching Transportation Alternatives’ battery-powered megaphone and he was not afraid to use it:
“This is not just a about a battle for a bike lane. This is about our addiction to oil. This is about our wars in the Middle East. This is about global warming. This is about generations of kids not being able to move around and get the exercise they need to be healthy. This is a battle for the new American Dream.”
“Right On!” I think I shouted. But to others within earshot, Aaron’s megaphone manifesto may have missed the mark. What the heck do bike lanes have to do with national security, anyway?
A lot, it turns out, but it’s a much longer story. In Terra Nova: The World After Cars, Oil and Suburbs, Eric W. Sanderson tries to tell it like nobody ever has, in 350 pages rife with detailed infographics and illustrations by Pentagram’sEddie Opara.
If you read Sanderson’s last book, the acclaimed and best-selling Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, you know that, like Manhattan itself, he really likes to pack it in. Terra Nova is also crowded, like the future utopia it describes. There are a thousand facts here, and sixty-five pages of notes, citations and “elaborations” just for good measure. But the thing about density, as any urban planner will tell you, is that it yields unparalleled benefits if you are sure to layer in swift transportation and attractive open spaces. Sanderson does density right, sweeping his reader quickly from place to place, from a primeval history of oil to the collapse of the suburban housing market in 2008, to a convincing outline of a smarter future tax structure. And the gifted Opara provides plenty of eye-candy accompaniment, with more than 70 captivating charts and diagrams. (My favorite: ‘Tranportation Space’, which clearly illustrates the space-saving magic of walking, cycling, and surface transit).
But Sanderson is trying to do more than just take us on an entertaining and educational journey. He clearly wants this book to spark a revolution in how we live, and to do this he has to touch and motivate our souls. For this he deploys a few mythological frames, invoking Homer and Native American lore. The promise of the car was one of three seductive Sirens, and the heroic striving for a better world harks to the epic task of Nanapush, hero of the Lenape creation myth. These work pretty well, but they seem a bit forced. I think Sanderson would have made these devices more relevant and powerful had he used more modern versions of these ancient archetypes, or simply made some new ones up himself. If George Lucas can do it, so can a brilliant storyteller like Sanderson.
An infographic from Terra Nova, by graphic artist Eddie Opara.
The pith of the book is Terra Nova itself, the blueprint outline for denser, greener cities coursed with alternative transportation and governed by smart taxes that discourage waste and reward thrift of our limited resources. But before he unveils this ideal future, Sanderson marshals history, physics, biology, chemistry, and economics to carefully explain why transitioning to Terra Nova is much more complicated than changing a light bulb, or swapping your SUV for a hydrogen fuel cell sedan. “The goal is to imagine a future without also having to appeal to some miraculous technological fix,” he says early on. Getting to a post-car utopia requires coming to grips with the systemic nature of our problem: decades of short-sighted decisions have warped our energy, economic, transportation, settlement and political systems into a grossly inefficient dependency on greenfield land and cheap oil.
Other authors have delved deeper into the history of the car in the city (Fighting Traffic by Peter Norton), the march of suburbia (Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth Jackson), and the century-long consolidation of our transportation system into a monoculture of driving (Asphalt Nation by Jane Holtz Kay). James Howard Kunstler has done pioneering work weaving this all together, but with a touch of conspiratorial crankiness that has kept his important ideas on the fringe. Sanderson connects the big dots, but does it with the authority of a world-class science explainer, and without letting his ego get in the way. Even when Sanderson does occasionally lapse into eco-sermoning, he does it consciously and convincingly. We’ll move our bodies more in Terra Nova, and more daily walking, “combats depression, bolsters the immune system, fights osteoporosis, helps prevent diabetes, and improves sex life.” Preach!
I wish Sanderson spent more time on “Ramifications”, by far the shortest of the book’s three sections. Most of this section is dedicated to extolling the many benefits of trading resource extraction for renewables, sprawl for density, and cars for transit and human power. It’s important to point out the enticements—that there is future money to be made in retrofitting our systems and in selling streetcars. But much more interesting is the shorter subsection in which Sanderson treats the obstacles—we will have to pay more for gas, and give up the habituated convenience of cars and suburban living. And the biggest obstacle of all, evinced in the above-mentioned battle for Prospect Park West, is figuring out how to evolve past our NIMBYism, aversion to change, and new people using our street or moving into our neighborhood. While we mostly-accepting New Yorkers have by definition overcome this obstacle, we can still relate to Sanderson when he writes:
“One challenge that will come with living closer together is that we will need to face up to a social and psychological fact clearly in evidence in our democracy: other people can be really annoying. In the best of circumstances, density is fun and profitable; in the worst of conditions, it foments antipathy for humanity and certain individuals in particular.”
To solve the downsides to density, Sanderson calls for more tolerance, better urban design to give us peace and seclusion when we need it, and people-friendly public spaces where we can rely on Jane Jacobs’ ‘eyes on the street’ to bring out the good neighbor in all of us. This discussion of the cultural evolution required to reach the density requirements of Terra Nova is worthy of much more than a few pages, but perhaps here we have the seed of Sanderson’s next pioneering project, or the next George Lucas-produced motion picture. I eagerly await the next installment.
“The more we know of other forms of life, the more we enjoy and respect ourselves…Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.”
— E.O. Wilson
A recent, satirical New Yorker piece by Andy Borowitz quoted a fictitious resident who blamed scientists “for failing to warn us of the true cost of climate change. They always said that polar bears would starve to death, but they never told us our lawns would look like crap.” Although this does not represent a real person’s exact feelings, the underlying sentiment sadly has more than a hint of truth. To many people, the impact of a changing environment seems distant and completely separate from our existence until we are directly confronted with the negative results.
Poorly conceived design visibly divided us in urban areas from our wilds and contributed to our recent ability to see nature as something isolated from us. Yet reinvigorating our bond with nature is a challenge architecture and urban design are well placed to address. Architects and designers have control over our built environment; by changing the way we design cities and buildings to connectto rather than disconnect from nature, we can change our proximity to nature and shift our physical relationship to the environment.
Photo: Schristia. Creative Commons.
The separation that we have crafted over the centuries through our isolating designs hasn’t come without costs. Obesity, ADHD, autism, a decline in creativity—these are all connected to a lack of environmental connection. Unfortunately, this estrangement from nature has not only directly impacted our health, it has impacted our ability to respond to crucial modern challenges, such as climate change, because these dire environmental topics feel removed from us. The environment appears distant because we designed it as such. Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan describe this impact in their seminal book, Ecological Design:
“What do we learn from this kind of ‘nowhere’ environment? When living and working in nowhere places becomes normal, it is no wonder that we literally lose some of our sensitivity toward nature. Through the daily experience of the designed environment, we learn detachment… As nature has receded from our daily lives, it has receded from our ethics.”
Yet despite putting up physical barriers between nature and us, we still cannot shake our deep tie to and need for other species. Humans have an ingrained desire to connect. E.O. Wilson describes this impulse in his ‘Biophilia Hypothesis’ in which he explains,
“…When human beings remove themselves from the natural environment, the biophilic learning rules are not replaced by modern versions equally well adapted to artifacts. Instead, they persist from generation to generation. For the indefinite future… urban dwellers will go on dreaming of snakes for reasons they cannot explain.”
We crave connection to the natural world, even if we, individually, have always been seemingly divided from it. By calling architects and urban designers to ‘Make Nature Visible,’ as Van der Ryn and Cowan request in Ecological Design, we can begin to design places grounded in their own unique environment. In this way, designers can revive an awareness of the natural systems that affect us and recover place-based knowledge.
The advantages of interacting with and seeing nature are numerous. Beyond technical benefits, feeling the presence of the living world around us elevates the spirit. Supporting this movement, many architects and urban designers are inventively finding ways to reconnect us with the touch and feel of our wider biological community.
Photo credit: Thorbjõrn Hansen
Schools
Children seem particularly moved by biophilia and quickly gain many advantages from access to the outdoors. Schools that get children outside into natural places find that their students perform better academically (this has proven especially true for low-income students) and are more engaged and motivated to learn. These benefits come in addition to decreasing the need for disciplinary action, reducing stress, and increasing student attention spans. But the gains are not just performance-based—it turns out that the outdoors even improves vision and increases Vitamin D levels, all advantages that make students healthier. There are some great schools that strive to put children outside and reflect this philosophy in their design.
Photo credit: Thorbjõrn Hansen
Daycare Center in Holbæk, Denmark
Sitting at the highest point in the neighborhood, the daycare center on the outskirts of Holbæk, Denmark provides a base for an outdoor-oriented school. Teaching children outside has long been a traditional education approach in Denmark, with ‘forest schools’ dating back to the 1950s. This daycare, designed by Henning Larsen, includes large south-facing windows, a green roof, and gardens to allow children to play outside throughout the entire year.
Fuji Kindergarten in Japan
Physically encircling a tree, the innovative Fuji Kindergarten, designed by Yui and Takaharu Tezuka, highlights nature as a teacher every day. The children can play on an outdoor structure that surrounds the tree, climb the tree itself, or just admire the tree from every room in the school. The school furthers its connection to nature with lots of glass and open air, which means the outdoors flow seamlessly into the indoors.
Photo by Katsuhisa Kida/FOTOTECA.
Bronx Zoo School Proposal in the Bronx, New York
In the New York City borough of the Bronx, few people have close interaction with their natural environment. This proposal, which I designed for a public school in the Bronx zoo, was aimed at rectifying this problem. Our connection to the ecological systems becomes apparent day-to-day through this school’s open architecture and outdoor classrooms and is bolstered by the whooping crane breeding program, which is integrated into the school and managed by the students.
Image courtesy of Whitney Hopkins.
Hospitals
Connecting patients to nature has been innately valued for centuries—the first health centers were at remote monasteries intended to foster the tie between healing and the environment. Now, a growing body of modern scientific evidence supports this notion; patient outcomes appear to be closely related to interacting with nature. Connection to the natural environment has been shown to improve overall healthcare quality in multiple ways by reducing staff stress and fatigue, increasing the effectiveness in delivering care, improving patient safety, and reducing patient stress. All this leads to improve health outcomes and patients who are happier and heal faster. Hospitals foster this by having views, natural light, and access to gardens or the outdoors. The few following hospitals do this exceedingly well.
Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in Monterey, California
Designed in the early 1960s on the California coast, the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula was ahead of its time in pulling the outdoors inside a healing environment. The patient rooms and public spaces have large panoramic views of the surrounding forest, gardens, and courtyards and a flow between all the indoor and outdoor spaces. It has been recently expanded and remodeled by HOK to be state of the art while maintaining the original natural tranquility.
Photo: Frank Keillor. Creative Commons.
Children’s Psychiatry Center (KPC) in Genk, Netherlands
In an artistically crafted, patient-centric building, the Children’s Psychiatry Center in the Dutch city of Genk innovatively marries a designed outdoor environment with the hospital. Children’s well being was at the core of OSAR’s design, so every space in the center captures views of internal courtyards, gardens, or the forest. In so doing, the hospital reduces the stress of the patients, their families, and the staff and creates a safe and warm atmosphere within the center.
Children Psychiatric Center, Genk, Belgium. Photo courtesy of OSAR. www.osar.be
Workplace
Because the evidence of diverse benefits is so strong, contact with nature in the workplace has become a central element in the design of healthy office spaces. Various studies have repeatedly shown that access to outdoor gardens or parks, indoor plants, and windows with views of natural places reduce worker stress levels. Beyond manipulating stress levels, it appears that employees are also happier and more productive with a connection to nature. And firms greatly benefit because sick leave and worker turnover is reduced. With all these advantages, it is no wonder that creating contact between nature and workers is happening in offices, manufacturing plants, and every type of work environment in between.
Photo by Greg Williams. Creative Commons.
Ford Rouge Factory in Dearborn, Michigan
A historic manufacturing facility that had been deemed a heavily polluted brownfield site, Ford transformed the facility into a vibrant, sustainable new factory. Nature takes center stage at the facilities, which boast the largest green roof in North America, various treatment ponds and gardens, natural vegetation, and ample day lighting. As a result, the productivity of the workers increased and sick days decreased. One complaint: the amplified bird poop from the population that has taken up residence on the factory premise.
selgascano offices in Madrid, Spain
Within the urban area of Madrid, the architectural firm of selgascano made waves with their design for their own office. Sunken into the ground, curved glass opens the office up to spectacular and unusual views of the surrounding woods. The space is filled with natural light that bounce of the bright interior colors. Reportedly, employees love working in the space.
selgascano office. Photo: Iwan Baan.
Cities
In urban areas, the expanse of human construction can particularly estrange people from the environment, so it becomes crucial to consciously give residents access to natural places. A recent Danish study by Stigsdotter and colleagues found that people who lived more than 1 kilometer away from green space were generally less healthy. They also showed worse vitality, were at higher risk for depression, and reported higher levels of stress and pain. These advantages must partly contribute to the increased values of real estate adjacent to urban green space. Some cities are working hard to bring nature into the urban core by creating or revitalizing parks and seeing green space as an essential element in their infrastructure.
Cheonggyecheon stream in Seoul, with a highway running over it.
Cheonggyecheon in Seoul, South Korea
A stream runs through the center of Seoul, but for decades, most people would never have known. After years of polluting the Cheonggyecheon river, the city covered it in 1968 with an elevated, 8-lane hightway, hiding the river from view. But in 2003, the mayor began an initiative to improve traffic and restore the river. The Cheonggyecheon park opened in 2005, bringing people into close contact with the water and newly established parks through a central urban corridor. This project revitalized the local busineesess, improved transportation, and made the citizens happy by providing them with a delightful green space and reconnecting them to their historic river.
Cheonggyecheon stream in Seoul. Photo: David Maddox
In partnership with nature
With nature providing such joy and many health benefits, it is time that architects and planners leverage designs that highlight the environment in our built spaces. We can hope that beyond making a healthier and happier world, we can also prompt a more ethical relationship to nature.
As Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan conclude:
“Design transforms awareness. Designs that grow out of and celebrate place ground us in place. Designs that work in partnership with nature articulate an implicit hope that we might do the same.”
Cities have long been known as hotspots for innovation. In the past, much of this could be attributed to cities being the centralised physical location of businesses, investors, consumers, markets, and places of learning, and as nodes for connecting with other people and cities around the world. Yet in the new era of global communication, including crowd-sourced funding, online learning, and virtual marketplaces, this dependence on physical proximity is decoupling. Even as our world’s human population becomes increasingly urbanised, our transport and communication infrastructure are simultaneously changing our physical dependence on a city location for an “urban” lifestyle. This leads to a shift in our understanding of what it means to be “urban”, with previous understandings of urban as a physically defined “urbanized” landscape becoming replaced with a much more nuanced “continuum of urbanity”.
If we are shifting our conceptual focus from urbanisation to urbanity, what does this mean for the way we design, plan, and manage our cities and other landscapes for people and biodiversity? We currently have a large and growing scientific and practical knowledge base regarding how to create sustainable, resilient, biophilic, and biodiverse cities. Are there opportunities to draw upon this knowledge to pre-empt the challenges of retrofitting solutions and reintroducing nature and wildlife (including plants) into landscapes dominated by people? Could we instead begin designing how people can be successfully integrated into landscapes that can remain dominated by nature and biodiversity?
In this essay, I will try to explore this question by bringing together two initially disparate, but fundamentally related, topics that I have been actively thinking about over the past few months. I’ll start by sharing my recent encounters with the “continuum of urbanity” , before moving on to the ecological adaptations of organisms to urban environments. I’ll finish by drawing these two ideas together and showing how they can be combined to improve outcomes for people and nature across the full spectrum of urbanity, both now and in the future.
The “Continuum of Urbanity”
I recently encountered this continuum of urbanity when I attended the 2014 URBIO conference in Incheon in the Republic of Korea. Incheon has a population of 2.8 million people, and can be considered a satellite city within the larger Seoul Capital Area of 25.6 million people. During my visit, I encountered many examples of the new “urbanity”, but I will share three of them here, as they have made the largest impression on me.
From the street, the Songdo area within Incheon looks like typical new urban development with the usual configuration of buildings, parks, streets, and amenities. However, what isn’t apparent is the level of sophistication connecting the roads, properties, and residents with each other and the larger world. The advanced technology behind the centralised garbage disposal systems and road traffic control system, and the degree of virtual connectivity provided to the residents, were only revealed to me when a friend shared a link to a BBC series on Connected Cities, which featured the Songdo development. While these may seem like trivial differences, they are likely to have a profound effect on the social-ecological system through subtle changes in the behaviour of residents, and the implications for the environmental conditions associated with this urban landscape. How will personalised in-home conference facilities change the transportation patterns of residents and their preferred modes and locations for physical exercise? What will this mean for their relationship with nature and the external environment? What impact will the significant reduction in access to anthropogenic food resources redirected through centralised waste disposal systems have on the local wildlife populations? Can traffic flows be engineered to benefit wildlife as well as optimising travel times for people?
2. Rural features in urban landscapes
In contrast to the hidden shift to urbanity, I also encountered several examples of the inter-digitization of urban and rural developments. On one occasion, I chanced upon an example where a rural village had been encased within a larger neighbourhood of high-density urban development; the activities occurring in that landscape reflected an “urban” lifestyle, and the connection with the “rural” past was largely confined to the architecture of the buildings and laneways. On another occasion, I went for a walk through an area surrounded by urban development, yet the residents were still actively farming the land and living a much more “rural” lifestyle, whilst encased within the larger landscape of the city.
These encounters with the interdigitized “urbanity” have also prompted me to look for examples where the reverse may have happened. I didn’t have to look much further than my own backyard. A few months ago, my family and I relocated from Melbourne, a city of 4 million people, to a nearby regional centre of 100,000 people. My commute time to work is still roughly just over 1 hour, yet we have essentially joined millions of other people around the world who have made a tree change or sea change and “escaped to the country”. The very same transport and communication technologies that are making our cities more sophisticated are also enabling people to live an “urban” lifestyle in areas that have previously been considered “non-urban”. While this may have some positive benefits for biodiversity, such as the large-scale, spontaneous regeneration of tree cover in central Victoria that has accompanied the shift from commercial farming to hobby farming practices, there are also likely to be many distinctly “urban” impacts. For example, what impact does this low-density development and the associated increases in artificial night lighting infrastructure have on local plant and animal communities? How do human activities in these landscapes change the soundscape? What happens when areas that were traditionally used as “weekend escapes” become permanent residences?
I would like to shift focus now to discuss the second topic which has also been occupying my thoughts over the past year. These topics are actually intricately interrelated, and both are fundamental to addressing the question that I have used to frame the title of this essay.
Over the past decade, thousands of urban ecology studies have been published that investigate how biodiversity has been affected by urbanisation. However, many of these studies have largely been focussing on questions related to patterns: the Who?, What?, Where? questions. These pattern questions can be considered as “low-hanging fruit”—they are often the focus in relatively young fields, as they act as important precursors to finding suitable scenarios where we can address more detailed questions related to processes: the Which?, How?, and Why? questions. However, with the explosion of energy and investment that is now going into urban ecology research around the world, it is time to move beyond the low-hanging fruit and really begin to understand why it is that some species of plant and animals persist in urban areas, whilst others disappear. Which features of urban landscapes tip the balance in favour of biodiversity losses or gains? Why do some organisms remain in urban areas and others disappear? How do species adapt to the new urban environmental conditions, and are there potential costs associated with their persistence?
Over the past year, I have been working with colleagues on a couple of different projects that are addressing these Which?, How?, and Why? questions. I would like to share a little bit of that experience now, as I think that both science and practice have much to gain from an increased understanding of these processes. Additionally, as a second emerging area of research interest and conceptual development, I think it is important to start making the links between process questions and urbanity very early on, so that they can grow and inform each other.
Which features of urban environments?
Understanding which features of urban landscapes are affecting urban biodiversity is one key building block for designing and creating urban areas that can support people and biodiversity. The active interplay between science and design has been critical for pushing urban ecology research in this direction over the past few years, and many useful insights are beginning to emerge. For example, there is now strong evidence supporting the importance of retaining large old trees in urban landscapes and recommendations for how we can create succession plans to retaining this resource into the future. There is also emerging evidence of the importance of the spatial configuration of greenspace, and the role of complex vertical and horizontal vegetation structure in providing habitat for a wider range of species. As there are already strong advancements being made in this area, I will keep this section relatively brief. These questions will continue to be important, although we may frameask them slightly differently when addressing them under the framework of urbanity. The outcomes from this reframed research will be critical when we begin looking at how to design “urbanitizing” landscapes to incorporate people without negatively impacting the existing biodiversity.
Why is it that some organisms persist and others disappear?
As we find with any system, if you tinker with one component, there are repercussions for another component. Understanding Which features of urban landscapes impact on biodiversity, depends upon Why individual organisms are affected by them. Consequently, there has been an increase in the number of studies that are looking for common characteristics of species that may help explain Why specific organisms experience urbanisation in a particular way. Guilds and functional traits have been one common approach to addressing this question. This approach groups species that share specific characteristics (such as insectivorous birds, predatory insects, short plants with small seeds, etc.), where a strong response within a guild or functional group may reveal an insight into Why that particular urban feature is so important. These types of research questions are also gaining prominence within urban ecology, and revealing important insights around how we can better design cities for biodiversity. The shift towards addressing the Why questions under a framework of urbanity will also enhance our understanding of how we can better design “urbanitizing” landscapes for people and biodiversity.
How do organisms adapt and evolve in response to urban environmental conditions?
We have now reached the question that has been most intriguing me over the past twelve months. The emerging information from the Which? And Why? questions can only be fully understood if we begin to investigate How organisms are able to persist in and respond to the altered environmental conditions that they find themselves in. Are there inherent advantages within certain guild or functional traits that mean a species is pre-adapted to life in urban environments? Or are there ways an organism can adjust their behaviour or physiology that allow them to adapt to the new environmental conditions? Are the adjustments made through some level of phenotypic plasticity, or are there associated changes in genetics that would indicate micro-evolution? Do the adjustments of one feature have consequences for another feature? Overall, are the adjustments advantageous and thus , or are they simply a consequence of random chance?
While many of these questions may seem to belong within the white walls of the ivory tower, I believe that they have just as much potential to shape and inform our actions around the creation and enhancement of landscapes for people and nature as the Which? and Why? questions. In fact, these How? questions may even be more critical as they will equip us with an understanding of how our ecological systems may change in the future under the pressures associated with global climate change and the shift towards urbanity. By understanding the behavioural and physiological responses that confer adaptation and persistence, we can also begin to identify where the limits to adaptation may occur, and therefore the thresholds where our systems may shift from one local state into another state entirely. Therefore, we cannot truly incorporate ecological resilience or evaluate the effectiveness of our actions until we have harvested these high-hanging fruit. The extent and interconnectivity of urbanity only adds to the importance of this task.
In the future, will we build cities for wildlife and design the countryside for people?
And so we return to my original question. It seems to me that much of the current discussion around biophilic and biodiverse cities is often focussed on the features that are lacking in urban environments, which help to explain why we are left with the species that currently persist. While this is a very general statement and there will obviously be exceptions, in most cases the actions we are taking to create and design biodiverse cities involve retrofitting and post-development innovations. This investment in creating cities where humans and biodiversity can co-habit remains critical for all of the reasons that have led to this movement beginning in the first place. However, with the reframing from urbanisation to urbanity, the physical location and spatial extent of the urban influence is going to change with subtle but significant cumulative impacts for biodiversity and ecosystems across the globe. By embracing the continuum of urbanity framework, we have a unique opportunity to begin identifying solutions for how urbanity can develop through a considered and deliberate effort to design people into these urbanitizing landscapes, while the biodiversity that already exists there retains the ability and opportunity to persist, adapt, and evolve.
We are only just beginning to understand how our urban biodiversity has successfully transitioned into urbanising landscapes; it is now our turn to explore how people might innovate and adapt to urbanitizing landscapes. I, for one, look forward to the challenge!
I like to simplify what constitutes urban nature in a given area. I therefore thought it might be interesting to provide an overview and to ask whether anything is missing, or erroneously included. This article expresses my view of the variety of forms that could be included under the “nature of cities” banner. On planning maps, nature is represented by polygons, lines, and points. Polygons are shapes, denoting area. Lines are linear features—though not necessarily straight ones. Points are individual features small enough not to require a shape to represent them.
Shapes
Cities fragment the landscape that they occupy. If that landscape was not already transformed by agriculture, the fragments may contain remnants of natural ecosystems. The sustainability of these relatively pristine ecosystems is dependent on their size, shape, and connectivity to one another, as well as the kind of pressures they experience from outside. In biodiversity hotspots such as the Cape Floristic Region in South Africa, every remnant is considered by conservationists to be a precious contribution to national and local targets to conserve representative samples as a percentage of original extent. Although these are the “purest” form of nature in cities, various studies, going back decades, suggest that they differ from their previous, un-fragmented state (see, for example, Andren 1994). Fragments may include wetlands, which are subject to the same pressures as other remnants as well as additional pollution and water extraction.
Natural vegetation. Photo: Brian Ralphs
Coastal cities can count the strip of the coastal zone—both beaches and the sea—as part of the urban nature assets. Though often heavily utilized and over-fished, these zones are connected to distant ecosystems and, around the world, have features and even species in common. Often city governments are also responsible for managing them, while residents and tourists rely on them heavily for recreation—from swims at the beach to whale-watching.
Camps Bay, Cape Town. Photo: sat.greatstock.co.za
Parks in cities can take a variety of forms but are typically mowed and manicured to some extent and, historically, little effort was made to naturalize them. Nowadays, many are breaking that mold. The Tiergarten in Berlin, for example, has sections that are allowed to grow wild, while others are manicured in the traditional way. Parks are for people and their nature will ultimately be determined by what the local populace prefers. With evolving ideas of the nature of cities we might see a future, therefore, in which the Tiergarten approach becomes more commonplace.
An urban park. Photo: Florent Lannoy.
In the average city, gardens probably far exceed parks in total area. They are, however, intensely compartmentalized, limiting the flow of genes between them except for flying animals and the plants dispersed by them and the wind. It is also likely that gardens contain a far greater variety of species than parks in a given city, though many or most may be exotic species that do not perform the same functions as original and larger ecosystems. They can be remarkably diverse, as demonstrated in the famous example of 2,673 species of plants and animals recorded in Leicester garden over the course of 30 years (Owen 2010).
Cottage garden. Photo: Garry Knight
Botanical gardens merit separate mention because of the educational experience they offer over parks and the more expansive (and more expensive) experience of nature they offer over private gardens. Often paired with greenhouses, educational exhibits, and restaurants, they concentrate the experience of nature into a thoroughly-managed space while often maximizing biodiversity. Some, like Cape Town’s breathtaking Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, transition into natural vegetation. As one moves further into Kirstenbosch and away from the restaurants, the garden gets wilder while the crowds become more sparse.
Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens, South Africa. Photo: sat.greatstock.co.za
Brownfield sites are the neglected cousins of the preceding categories. They have the added ignominy of an uncertain or terminal future, with many being earmarked for future development. Studies have shown, however, that they play a role in supporting biodiversity and even in providing a natural experience (Bonthoux et al. 2014). Importantly in the context of urban nature, a perceived value (often based on the presence of a single, iconic-enough species such as a breeding pair of birds) may be motivation enough for enhancing such sites or retaining a portion when they are developed, for the sake of nature.
Brownfield site. Photo: Russell James Smith
Lines
A variety of green infrastructure can fulfill the purpose of a natural green corridor. In systematic biodiversity planning, however, corridors are considered to be strips of natural vegetation and the ecosystems they support, which connect more substantial fragments of natural vegetation. Their effectiveness depends on their length and breadth, and the species that need to use them to traverse the urban matrix, and entire books have been written on the questions of how they should look in terms of width, length and quality (see for example Hilty J and Lidicker WZ. 2006).
Green corridors through a city. Photo: La Citta Vita
Avenuesof trees or shrubs along roads are, in some ways, the linear equivalents of parks. They are, however, typically less diverse and imaginative, despite offering an undeniable improvement on a treeless road. Singapore is a world leader in re-thinking the concept of an avenue. In this crowded city, where space is paramount, biodiversity authorities have responded accordingly by planting multi-species, multi-layer “avenues” that contribute to the biodiversity of the city as much as to its aesthetics.
A multi-species avenue in Singapore. Photo: Jeremy Woon
“Water lines” in cities range from relatively sterile concrete canals that carry only water, to rivers with a variety of plant and animal life and vegetated banks. The former is often a wasted opportunity to bring nature to the city, although it may be necessary where space is severely limited. The ecosystem services provided by naturalized water lines, such as flood attenuation, water purification and recreation may, however, surpass the benefits of a canal even in economic terms. Perhaps the most popular option is a compromise between these two ends of the spectrum. In Seoul, the Cheonggyecheon Stream—re-engineered after the demolition of a highway —attracts thousands of visitors but is expensive to maintain because water needs to be piped in from elsewhere. Retrofitting often tends to be expensive—a reminder of the importance of design in early-stage city planning.
Cheonggyecheon stream in Seoul. Photo: d’n’c
Points
Many members of the public don’t think of any of the shapes and lines discussed above when considering nature in cities—they think of wild animals. Many “cosmopolitan”, or widespread, species play a role in various parts of the world. Some are appreciated by the public (squirrels, ducks), others abhorred (rats, cockroaches), and still others produce mixed feelings (pigeons, seagulls). Many such species have little value in terms of biodiversity due to their ubiquity and uniformity; nevertheless, they are nature, and must be counted as residents of cities. One common phenomenon regarding urban wildlife is that the rarer the species is, the more it is valued. This is demonstrated, for example, by the excited reaction of tourists having their first experience of a species that may be common and problematic in a city they are visiting for the first time, such as foxes, raccoons or mallard ducks. Animals in the city are usually mapped (i.e. treated as points) only if they are relatively rare.
Falcon chick. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York
Plants constitute many of the features discussed under shapes and lines, but in the urban context, or the context of the planner, they can also be points. This is especially true for large and iconic trees (see also Trees as Starting Points for Journeys of Learning About Local History and Heritage Trees of Cape Town (Continued) by Russell Galt), which may be located in a concrete matrix, as well as individuals of rare species in parks or gardens. Individual trees may have great natural and cultural relevance. In the seaside town of Mossel Bay, in South Africa, for example, the “post office tree” is an ancient milkwood (Sideroxylon inerme) and a national monument that acted as a mail system for sailors in the 1500s, who hung their shoes with notes in them for safe delivery.
Photo: London Trees
Others
It’s not always so clear whether a feature should be regarded as point, line or polygon. For example, a cluster of points can constitute a shape. A population of sedentary organisms (i.e. mostly plants), especially a rare species, may therefore be represented by a polygon of the area in which they are distributed, rather than by individual points.
Cluster of points constituting a polygon.
Green roofs and, to a greater extent, green walls, are difficult to categorize in the spatial sense but are also important contributions to urban nature.
Flower growing in a sandwich space. Photo: Anderson Mancini
As we get further into more-difficult-to-define features, we should not forget the “sandwich spaces” discussed by Timon McPhearson and Victoria Marshall—the spaces between buildings, rooftops, walls, curbs, sidewalk cracks, and other small-scale urban spaces that exist in the fissures between linear infrastructure (e.g. roads, bridges, tunnels, rail lines) and our three dimensional gridded cities. These spaces can be reservoirs for species, assist with water infiltration and offer other benefits discussed in McPherson and Marshall’s piece.
Green wall. Photo: Swiss.piton
Lastly, in cities, representations of nature are to be found in the intensively managed and artificial confines of zoos, aquariums, and museums. If urban nature is to be defined as that which provides us with an approximation of a natural experience, and if it contributes to the conservation of biodiversity, these cannot be excluded. Especially if education and awareness are our goals, these features need to be considered a part of the nature of cities.
Penguins at Edinburgh Zoo. Photo: Glen Bowman
Concluding remarks
This was a brief blow-by-blow summary of urban nature in categories, as seen through the eyes of a conservation biologist. The tools that are used to map and appoint attributes to these features, to indicate their location and importance, is often a geographic information systems (GIS)—a digital mapping device. We all use the resulting maps to get around cities with which we are not familiar, while city administrations increasingly focus on a network of green spaces as a key component of conserving biodiversity in the urban environment. For these reasons a holistic, spatial view of the nature of cities will always be an important contribution to our understanding and conservation of the nature of cities.
Andren H. 1994. Effects of habitat fragmentation on birds and mammals in landscapes with different proportions of suitable habitat: a review. Oikos. 71:355-366.
Bonthoux S, Brun M, Di Pietro F, Greulich S, Bouché-Pillon S. 2014. How can wastelands promote biodiversity in cities? A review. Landscape and Urban Planning. 132: 79-88.
A striking example is that a third of the world’s largest cities obtain a significant proportion of their drinking water from forest protected areas, which serve not only as a supplier, but also provide filtration services that lead to clean water and substantial cost savings. For instance, over the last few decades, Beijing has been facing a progressively worsening water crisis. Much of the original broadleaf forest in the Miyun watershed had disappeared. The 
People living in cities—coastal and land locked—depend heavily on the sea as a food source and for transportation to sites of employment, recreation, and leisure. Unlike many urbanists who focus only on land boundaries of cities, Beatley takes one big step forward in this book: he extends the boundaries of cities not only to coastal areas, but to the deep blue sea, even to parts inaccessible to an ordinary person. Because coastal cities constantly use marine resources, it is only logical to include the vast marine ecosystems of the world in cities’ boundaries. Beatley gives us a new perspective in viewing water masses (rivers, lakes, seas and oceans) as an extension of our cities and, in the end, an extension of ourselves.
Disasters are terrible. I always use the image of “I hate you Sandy” painted on a wall somewhere on the Jersey beach, to stress that whatever happens and how bold and big government and private sector can come in, it is still all about the human scale. Bridging the gap between public and private also means bridging the gap between the institutional world and the people, the communities and the informal world. Because there is not only a disconnect between politics and people, there is also a disconnect between professionals and people.
Imagine this scenario; you live in a dense urban community along a vulnerable coastline, a catastrophic event occurs with only 6 hours warning, but since a web of communication exists to locate and reposition people, critical assets and provide alternative places to live and work short term. Issues have been worked out so that the time of recovery is minimized to 24 hours and there has been no loss of life and livelihood. In this community individuals and everyone around them are constantly reminded through notations on the physical surfaces of the city, their environmental history and through this the dynamic nature of where they are standing. Through these simple set of graphic interfaces, that are constantly kept current by real time data from scientists, people are able to learn as they go through their daily lives their risk level in a very subconscious yet concrete way. In the event of a climate related extreme events and conditions, these citizens, when they get critical warnings, via their devices or through media, understand in a visceral way where they are and therefore what they need to do. Because of the level of individual awareness, government and businesses alike have had to agree on a system and plan in the case of sudden and extreme climate related events. Although change is difficult, likely the increase in public and environmental knowledge has resulted in increases cultural and social capital spread across income levels.
Working this way the mechanisms of design and planning are the means to understand actual places, guiding policy and thus funding projects to reflect the way people behave both as individuals and in aggregate. Building soft and hard systems; from signage, to floating communities, new public transit and public spaces, to new places for habitat, wind turbines and water resource management, that help us adapt, model and test new ways of living and producing, are critical to a future of competing priorities and fluctuating risk levels.
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