“The rent is too damned high.” You hear it on the subway, you hear it on the news, and you hear it exclaimed even by mild-mannered conservationists while perambulating in the park. The rising cost of urban housing is on everyone’s mind, from Mayor Bill de Blasio to the chattering masses of the blogosphere. For most of my life, I figured nature had nothing to do with the price of my apartment. But now I’m not so sure. Let me explain by taking on the boogeyman of the moment: gentrification.
Gentrification is the process by which the wealthy, and the values of wealthy people, displace the persons and the values of others who are economically less well-off. On the one hand, one can see gentrification as a measure of a city’s success. Rising rents indicate the attractiveness of the city and, in particular, of certain neighborhoods, as places for people to live and work. Simply stated, more people want to live in the city than there is housing available, so rents rise. (This is exactly why the Mayor is so keen on building more affordable housing.) More expensive rents bring greater returns for property owners, raise the price of real estate, generate construction and secondary economic effects, and thus expand the municipal tax base. Compared with just a few decades ago, it is astonishing how New York has changed: safer, cleaner, more populous and more prosperous. Mayors of many cities in America and around the world would kill to have such problems.
On the other hand, what gets lost as rents rise is diversity and the vitality of urban spaces that follows directly from diverse, “authentic” experiences. Sharon Zukin, a renowned sociologist at Brooklyn College, opens her book on gentrification by saying: “In the early twenty-first century, New York City lost its soul.” What Zukin laments is the loss of gritty, heterogeneous, vibrant, ethnic, working class villages of small shops and businesses that used to comprise New York City, a city of villages. As Zukin writes, these were the kinds of neighborhoods celebrated by Jane Jacobs and are now the explicit goal of most urban planning practices. Yet, despite the best of intentions, in areas with access to the subway, these “authentic” places are being replaced by high-end versions of the Mall of America. The wealthy displace the less wealthy and bring with them what might be called homogenization by capital. Mom and pop stores just can’t compete with multi-nationals (read: Starbucks) when rents double every 18 months. The coffee might be stronger, the food might be fancier, the clothing might be finer, but only the better off might afford it for long. And truth be told, the wealthy are a bit boring.
Displacement is the nub of the issue. This group of people comes in and that group of people goes out. One can’t help but note that this has been happening in New York City for a very long time. Quoting Zukin quoting Burrows and Wallace quoting periodicals of the middle nineteenth century: “Manhattan is a ‘modern city of ruins,’ the New-York Mirror wrote in 1853. ‘No sooner is a fine building put up than it is torn down.’ Harper’s Monthly declared ‘A man born in New York forty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew.’”
Of course all of this is ripe with analogies to nature. Gentrification is not unlike the invasive weed that takes over the empty lot, squeezing out less competitive flowers of various kinds. Sure, one could argue that the biomass is higher and that some ecosystem services, like carbon sequestration or water retention, are better served by the dense, monotypic cover, but anyone who knows anything about biodiversity can’t help but feel the loss. More is not always better, and everyone—down to the smallest and most fragile—deserves some place to live.
Another analogy: gentrification has, indeed, been proceeding from the very beginning. If early twenty-first century New Yorkers mourn the loss of the gritty streets of New York in the 1970s, if mid-nineteenth century New Yorkers lamented the loss of farmland and springs, then they are only echoing the much more profound loss of nature initiated when the city began. Earlier generations of Native Americans knew forests and wetlands and a diversity of creatures completely unlike the city of steel and asphalt we know today.
In fact, my dear “The Nature of Cities” readers, what was the original displacement? Who has the greatest claim to vitality and authenticity in New York City? Well, it ain’t you and it ain’t me. It is the plants and animals (including some people) that lived here before the idea of New York City ever emerged. It is to these creatures, and their sense of the city, that “The Nature of Cities” blog is committed. We seek the true authentic experience of place—the experience of nature.
As you may know, the place that became New York City—what I call Welikia, which meant “my good home” to the Lenape inhabitants of 400 years ago—had an extraordinary nature. Our latest count puts it at over 100 distinct ecological communities that once inhabited the landscape that became New York, filled with at least 1,000 distinct species of plants and animals. Differences in class and ethnicity among the human species represent one kind of vibrant heterogeneity, but the heterogeneity across species—biodiversity—represents a much more profound level of difference. Consider for a moment the life histories of a red oak, a broad-winged hawk, and a humpback whale, all of which made Welikia home. Those are the authentic experiences of New York City.
Why were these vital, authentic, heterogeneous populations almost entirely displaced? Where were the policies that should have maintained their lives in the city? Such policies did not exist because plants and animals (including the Lenape that inhabited Welikia) had no political power and were economically undercapitalized. Not a single tree, bird, whale or American person at the time New Amsterdam was founded had a single penny to his or her name.
Zukin is absolutely correct to say that gentrification is not a “natural” process, especially if we take “natural” to mean outside the human arena of social relationships. Gentrification, as we know it in New York City today, is almost entirely the product of the rules we have set up to govern the relationships among our fellow citizens. (“Almost” because the amount of land, one must remember, is determined by geological forces that long preceded us. Yes, we might make some landfill, but our contributions are still modest compared to the glaciers.) Today, those rules are driven by the exigencies of who has the most money, in the context of the laws of the city, state, and country. Therefore if we seek remedies for gentrification or for the destruction of nature, we must seek to change the rules.
I don’t know what to do about gentrification, but wrestling with gentrification has clarified in my mind what we need to do for nature in the city. There are four main approaches. One is the usual one we take in this forum: exhort our cities and each other to do better. We describe how lovely nature in the city can be, we provide interesting case studies or poorly known facts about urban nature, and we link arms in a shared, global endeavor. It’s nice, even wonderful in the best of cases, but sad to say, less effectual than many of us might like. Over the long run beautiful words and ideas make a difference. In the meantime, they hardly pay the rent.
The second approach is public demonstration and protest. Here fights over specific uses on specific pieces of land (for example, community gardens, beach fronts, parklands) can bring attention, motivate larger groups, and actually change the minds of politicians, especially if the clamor grows loud enough and the press gets involved. Sometimes nature even pitches in, with unpredictable and dramatic acts, such as Hurricane Sandy in New York City in 2012. Retrospectively, and with all due respect to the losses of life and property that followed the hurricane, Sandy is probably the best thing to happen for nature in New York City in a long time: it reminded us all that nature actually does exist, despite the tall buildings.
The third approach is the regulatory one: actually changing the rules to change the behavior. This approach is more dependent on local situations, with each government (and level of government) in each locality having its own ways of doing things. In the United States, we saw a wave of important environmental regulation in the early 1970s that made large, important changes for the New York City environment (e.g. Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, National Environmental Policy Act, etc.). Forty-five years later, those laws still govern our environment, with their focus on human health and safety, but one could imagine a new set of rules that addressed the species long since displaced. I harbor not so secret desires to have all of the Welikia community back, minus perhaps the dangerous ones and the climate refugees, to whom the city might make commitments to save elsewhere
The fourth approach is the most potent one and the one least tried: to directly tie nature to the economic system by valuing it. In other words, we need to agree to give nature value in a monetary sense. The problem from the very beginning was that Europeans ignored the value of nature. They conceived of the bountiful land and its many services as a free gift, to be used and abused at will. In other words, they never thought to pay rent to the first landlord: nature.
What does it mean “to pay rent to nature”? In a literal sense it is not possible, because nature doesn’t care for your money; nature’s lack of greed is its downfall. Rather than pay nature directly, we need the public to act as the guarantor of nature, both for our sake and for the nature of cities. The rationale lies in rights and responsibilities. Any development project represents an appropriation of ecological value from nature and the body politic as part of nature. The apartment building that creates more stormwater runoff and displaces the trees that would have cooled the city has taken something from me and you and everyone else. For the birds and the bees, it has taken everything. In compensation, the private owner has a responsibility to repay the public for its loss.
The most direct way to value nature is through taxes. Right now, property taxes are based on the economic value of the land, which is one reason why some city leaders applaud the process of gentrification. Higher real estate prices translate directly into more money in the city’s coffers. Valuing land in terms of its ecological value, instead, would decouple some of the economic incentives that lead to bleeding high rents while simultaneously returning value to nature. For New York, we could use information about the historical ecology of the city (via the Welikia Project) to set a price on the development of oak-hickory forest, or salt marsh, or the shallow estuary waters, for every parcel in the city. If the tax per area increased as a function of development for each type of natural community, incentives would be built in to develop and respect nature simultaneously.
The result would not only be better nature, but better cities, and, in short order, a better world, with less reliance on the free gifts of nature and more on the diverse talents and skills of human beings. If you want a preview, try chapter 9 in Terra Nova, or read this, or try this.
Eric Sanderson
New York City
Advertisements for real estate developments are a hotspot for the revalorization of urban nature. A quick look at the urban visual landscape of Bangalore—at the eye level of what used to be the treeline, dominated by majestic avenue trees—shows a vast expanse of real estate advertising, much of which is targeted at the wealthy, advertising the sale of apartments and homes that range anywhere from $US 200,000 to over a million dollars.
Living near a well-maintained lake is a luxury for any urban resident. The 
It took a few days of clothesline- and bird-watching to solve the mystery of the pellets in his pockets. Among the various wild creatures who shared Will’s yard was a Scrub Jay, a consummate city slicker of the not-so-wild American West. This bird, like so many of its Corvid cousins in cities all over the world, is a generalist and opportunist with a not too picky appetite for the veritable smorgasbord served up by us, both purposefully through bird feeders and wastefully when we throw out food and organic garbage. Dog and cat food make for delightful morsels for these omnivores, and it didn’t take long for my friend to notice that his Scrub Jay neighbor regularly pilfered the pellets out of his dog’s bowl on the porch.
So what is the ecological rhythm of life in the city, for species that share our urban spaces with us? Dr. Ajith Kumar, one of my professors at the Wildlife Institute of India, while teaching us the methods of documenting and measuring primate behavior in the wild, made the observation that the daily time-budget and diet of monkeys—Bonnet Macaques—in Chennai (and other South Indian cities) consist of hanging around people’s kitchens and eating idli (steamed rice-and-lentil cakes) for breakfast. Just like the human inhabitants of those cities. Nearby, House Crows watch people keenly and dart into kitchens through open windows in sudden snack attacks that startle the human inhabitants but seldom draw more than a frustrated yell or an expertly dodged broom thrown in retaliation. Like their Scrub Jay cousins in California, and other corvids around the world, these Chennai residents have figured out when and where to obtain food reliably in the urban maze.
House Sparrows in many a quaint European city start their mornings—and likely spend the rest of the day too—hanging around the outdoor tables of streetside cafes, waiting for crumbs of croissant or baguette (maybe bagel for their cousins who’ve settled across the Atlantic) dropped accidentally or on purpose by the patrons. Meanwhile in Tempe. Arizona, in the xeriscaped backyard of Dr. Dave Pearson, an entomologist at Arizona State University, large flocks of birds show up every dawn like clockwork. These mixed flocks include non-native city slickers like the House Sparrow and Inca Dove alongside Sonoran Desert natives like Abert’s Towhee, House Finch, White-Winged Dove, Cactus Wren, and Curve-billed Thrasher. And they all wait patiently (but not for long) every morning for Dave to bring out bags of birdseed to replenish the feeding stations at designated spots throughout his yard.
Examine the city from an ecological perspective, as an ecosystem built for humans, and a few features about the rhythm of city life stand out. We built cities to escape the vagaries of nature, its seasonal cycles and annual and decadal fluctuations which make life challenging. In the city, we shelter from extremes of climatic cycles, insulating ourselves in increasingly climate-controlled indoor environments. Outdoors, cities even create their own local climate bubbles, heat islands which mitigate the northern winters and herald a globally warmed up future. We have now altered the flow of food and water across the planet, funneling much of the products of plant/animal/human labor into cities that blanket the lands as busy hubs in an ever tightening web of highways and railways. Our network of cities in this globalized world is thus the culmination of our millenia-long quest to free ourselves from the contraints of nature’s cycles. So we can now eat mangos and cherries in the middle of a northern winter, and never seem to be too far away from an all-you-can-eat buffet of foods fast and slow. In harvesting so much of the Earth’s primary productivity for ourselves, we have succeeded in raising and flattening out the fluctuations in natural cycles of nutrient flows. Where our ancestors (and some increasingly small indigenous communities even now) flowed across the landscape keeping a close eye on the flushing of leaves, blooming of flowers, ripening of fruits, and the local or long-distance migrations of fish and bird and mammal, worrying about where the next meal was coming from, we now mostly worry about when the bakery around the corner opens in the morning so we can get in line before the fresh bagels are sold out. The ebbs and flows in our food supplies have been replaced by a more steady stream, and the rhythm of food availability now pulses to a new urban beat, set more by the convenience of our social arrangements rather than the rotations of the planet or its cycling around the sun.
Over the last twenty years Israel has undertaken a railway revolution, modernizing and expanding the system that was built originally as part of the vision of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, which established direct rail communication from Alexandria in Egypt to Damascus in Syria. The Turkish North-South grid always included Jerusalem in its itineraries. In the recent years of train revival the railway has become the main mode of transport for more than one and a half million Israelis, taking some of the strain off the main highways, and helping to reduce pollution in our cities.
While the steam train was running, it cut through the Jerusalem neighborhoods that had developed in the Southern part of the city after the original track had been laid.
The eight-kilometer promenade is used by people of all ages and cultures, practically round the clock. They enjoy the clean air, quiet, social interaction and beauty of the Railway Park. Wheelchairs, baby strollers, joggers and bikers all benefit from an enjoyable and accessible walk/run/skate/ride. The park is also playing an important role in protecting urban biodiversity, since it serves as an ecological corridor linking the chain of inner city parks and gardens to the southern section of the ring of metropolitan parks surrounding the built perimeter of Jerusalem.
The success of the park is proving to be an incentive for the urban development long needed in the poorer areas adjacent to it. A couple of the poorer neighborhoods have had densification and urban renewal planned for several decades. However, without a serious incentive no one was interested in moving into the area, and there is no doubt that the Railway Park has rebranded the whole area with its message of beauty, quiet, greenery and health.
After the train from Tel Aviv was stopped in 1993, the station, a classic nineteenth century structure, of historic and architectural value, fell into neglect. The place was burgled, vandalized, burnt and more. However, as the plan for the park developed and began to be implemented, Jerusalem businessmen realized the opportunity offered by what has come to be known as “The First Station”. The station houses a large variety of eateries and coffee shops, displays art exhibitions, boasts a small visitors’ center which tells the story of the place, and regularly hosts cultural events. It offers for hire all kinds of bikes and scooters, for use on the track of the railway park and beyond.
I am aware that Jerusalem is not the only city to have turned an inner city abandoned track into a vibrant corridor park. The New York 
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