Thinking about a Landscape Approach to Revitalize the American Landscape

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I normally write in The Nature of Cities about biocultural diversity, particularly related to the developing world, but in light of recent events, I would like to ask the reader’s indulgence in my writing about a slightly different topic, and maybe even getting on my soapbox a little.

In the U.S., landscapes where subsidies have promoted dependence on one industry are the same ones registering feelings of alienation and degradation. Why?
You see, in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election in the United States, we heard a lot about the decline of the American rural landscape and the challenges facing the people who live in it. And as we watched a once-unthinkable candidate go from joke to threat to candidate to president, we heard more and more about how this is the result of dissatisfaction—namely, a feeling that much of the country has been consistently ignored by establishment figures, the ones in urban areas who make the decisions. A look at a map of red and blue districts shows the degree to which rural America determined the election. Whatever you make of the result of the election, if these voters were trying to get more attention, they surely succeeded.

It is tempting to point out here, like so many have already, the glaring inconsistencies in claims that the new President understands and speaks for rural America when, to many, he looks more like an extremely privileged urban elite who has gotten rich playing with other people’s money. The irony is not lost on us that so much breath has been expelled—about a candidate who would stop the government from coddling self-identified underprivileged groups—by those exact groups, shouting about an establishment that they did not feel considered them to be its highest priority. These debates will go on, and on, and on. But for now, I would like to suggest that we can treat this feeling of dissatisfaction as real, whether we think it is justified or not. And if so, maybe we can take a moment to think about the American landscape as a place where people live and work and find their identity and produce things, and what can be done to make it a good place for all of this to happen.

One view of an American rural landscape. Photo: William Dunbar

I have already hinted at some of the problems felt in ex-urban, peri-urban, and rural areas in the United States. The perception is that decision-makers in the U.S., particularly those coastal urban elites, have been ignoring rural America for decades; this has resulted in a steady outflow of economic and social capital from the landscape, with jobs being outsourced to other countries, and factories and other places of business abandoned; big-box retailers owned by rich outsiders are empowered to move in and force small enterprises out of business, making the employment situation even worse; without jobs, people have little to give meaning and structure to their lives, and turn to medicating themselves with hours of mind-numbing TV or video games or, worse, drugs; communities cannot thrive with their members living like this, causing family and other social structures to fall apart; and so the landscape becomes a place of little hope, its people holding on as best they can, hoping things will somehow get better again, and looking for a different kind of decision-maker, someone who will make great things happen for them.

In the face of this perception, an overriding theme in 2016 was that this is not what America is supposed to be like. Americans, perhaps to a fault, think of their land as a “great” country, in many ways the most advanced nation in the world. This contrasts with the description I have just given of problems in the American landscape, which do not sound all that different from those facing the rest of the world, even in many developing countries. If the plight of the American landscape is really that bad, then, the time may have come to consider applying lessons more commonly found in the sustainable development field when we think about how to revitalize that landscape.

With all this talk of the American “landscape”, it is notable that a hot topic in fields including nature conservation and sustainable development over the past few years has been the idea of the “landscape approach”. This term is, at least in my experience, generally applied to work in developing countries, or else in places where some kind of historical or biocultural landscape has been found since time immemorial. Still, since it is used in many diverse parts of the world, it is important to keep in mind that it is not a single agreed-upon “the” landscape approach, but rather a general concept of making the basic unit for resource management, decision-making, conservation, and other goals a “landscape”, rather than, for example, an administrative unit such as a municipality or a county. One consequence of using the landscape as the basic unit is that it requires consideration of all factors affecting the landscape, both internal and external. The term “integrated landscape management” is often used in this regard—where “integrated” means accounting for and including as many different stakeholders, interests, ecosystem functions, levels of governance, and so on, as possible in management decision-making. In this sense, “integrated landscape management” is essentially synonymous with “landscape approach”, at least for the purposes of this essay.

A quick note may be helpful here about the term “landscape” itself. There is a bit of semantic slippage between the sense of “the landscape” and “a landscape”, the former being a broader and more abstract concept of the way the world looks from a certain perspective and all the elements that make up this view, while the latter tends to refer to a geographically distinct physical space. Since, as I suggest in this essay, landscape approaches have not typically been used in the U.S., the term tends to be used with the former meaning, as in “the political landscape”. Conversely, applying a landscape approach means working in individual physical landscapes, requiring exactly the kind of re-envisioning of the American landscape—to wit, as a landscape made up of landscapes—that I am arguing for here. In any case, suffice it to say that there may be some inadvertent or advertent mixing-up of the two senses of the word in this essay, but I hope it will help to show the richness of the concept rather than to confuse the reader.

Before tackling any landscape approach, there is the basic question of “what is a landscape?” A definitive answer is surprisingly difficult to find, as it depends greatly on the country and context. For the purposes of the project I work with—a research project based on the Satoyama Initiative, an effort to reconcile biodiversity conservation and human livelihood by promoting the “socio-ecological production landscape or seascape”—we use the somewhat inexact guideline that a landscape is defined by the community or communities that inhabit it, as the area they rely on for their livelihood and well-being. It could therefore be a watershed, an administrative boundary, an arbitrary area centered on an urban area, or almost any other division the communities consider meaningful. Getting community members to think in terms of landscape and to attempt to determine their own landscape is an important basic step. The distinction between “the landscape” and “a landscape” becomes important here, as “a landscape” is a distinct unit while, for example, “the American landscape” refers to essentially the whole country as a more abstract concept. Keeping this in mind, the remainder of this essay briefly asks readers to consider what a landscape approach can do for individual landscapes of the American landscape, providing a few examples from other parts of the world.

Consider the problems facing the American landscape as described earlier. At the heart of most of them—and directly related to our election results—is the feeling among many non-urban Americans that decision-makers create policies that ignore or even harm their well-being. While policymakers say that their intent is to help the economy and improve the livelihoods of all Americans, policies sometimes create perverse incentives that result in jobs fleeing the landscape. An example may be when policies favor cheap imports of foreign-produced goods that make American manufacturing uncompetitive, a problem the new President has said he will meet by opposing free trade.

The advantage of a landscape approach here is that perverse incentives are often caused by favoring one sector or industry at the expense of other priorities—for example, when subsidies lead to overproduction of one type of goods to the point that the supply chain becomes damaged, eventually degrading the ability to produce that good and subsequently causing the subsidized industry to crash. A landscape approach, by focusing on the landscape itself rather than any one industry, should not allow this kind of imbalance if it will harm the landscape. Any subsidies or similar incentives applied using an integrated landscape management perspective would have to be to the benefit of the landscape rather than any one element in it, and would ideally balance costs and benefits toward long-term sustainability.

A diverse landscape in Tuscany. Photo: William Dunbar

A promising example in this vein comes from Italy (not a developing country in this case, but one with a long history of people shaping their landscapes for sustainable existence in harmony with nature). In one part of Tuscany, an organization called the Ancient Grains Association is attempting to bring back heritage wheat species as part of a sustainable landscape management model for an area that has suffered from rural abandonment and environmental degradation, in part a result of the globalization of the wheat industry, which has encouraged modern and calorie-efficient, but less sustainable, strains of wheat and incentivized the cultivation of a small number of high-profit, high-efficiency crops. A traditional landscape in this area comprised a richer mosaic of grapes, olives, forest patches, animal husbandry, and others activities. One major factor that the Ancient Grains Association has identified as crucial to its success is local government action to support growing ancient strains of wheat. Cultivation of these strains has been proven to be possible without subsidies, but would be very difficult if less sustainable grains were subsidized. The local city council is already involved in asking local schools to buy the ancient grains, financing local events, and creating an agricultural reservation as a kind of common space to encourage this kind of project. These actions have led to the success of the project to date, and plans are ongoing to further upscale them in the future.

A wheat monoculture landscape in another part of southern Europe. Photo: William Dunbar

Feelings of alienation can result from this same trend toward globalization. When the people in the landscape feel that they are not in control of the policies and decisions that determine their well-being—that they are not active agents in a mutually-beneficial and harmonious relationship between people and nature in the landscape—they will naturally feel less responsibility to make sure that the landscape is managed in a sustainable manner that will be good for themselves, their communities and the natural environment for the long term. A landscape approach is intended to help with exactly this problem in that it is centered on the people in the landscape themselves, and by definition makes them the decision-makers and key stakeholders in management decisions, resulting in a sense of ownership and motivation to work for long-term sustainability.

Looking to the world of sustainable development, an example of a project strongly emphasizing stakeholder engagement and empowerment is the COMDEKS project, which is administered by UNDP and has been implemented in 20 developing countries around the world. This project works in targeted landscapes to create a “landscape strategy” for integrated landscape management and then promote work toward the strategy’s implementation. Key to the project’s success is that it has required communities in each landscape to examine their own priorities for improving their sustainability and resilience and to collectively agree on steps to take towards reaching those goals. An important principle here is that in many cases, the people in the communities themselves hold the knowledge of what is best for their own landscape, although they are sometimes denied the means to implement it or are otherwise incentivized not to. Since each landscape is unique, the knowledge of what results in sustainable landscape management is built up over people’s long-term interaction with the landscape. This is often called traditional, indigenous, or local knowledge, and in many cases this knowledge is updated, enhanced, or integrated with modern scientific knowledge, while new knowledge is always being developed.

Assessing a landscape in Namibia with the COMDEKS project. Photo: William Dunbar

The American landscape itself provides famous examples of hard lessons learned where there was a lack of an integrated landscape strategy. One of these is the so-called Dust Bowl era, when a number of factors—perverse incentives leading to overproduction of cotton in an almost complete monoculture in some areas, alienation of the local farmers from the very decision-making processes that led to this imbalance, lack of a long-term strategy for sustainability—resulted in a landscape that proved tragically lacking in resilience in the face of changing environmental and economic pressures. Unfortunately, although this experience seems to provide a clear lesson, one look at much of the landscape in, for example, the American Midwest, where I grew up, shows that large-scale, monocultural agriculture, particularly of corn, still dominates. Is it likely a coincidence that the very landscapes where subsidies have promoted similar dependence on a single industry are the same ones where we hear the most about alienation and degradation both of the environment and the communities that live there? Maybe an integrated landscape management strategy for long-term sustainability and resilience—integrating diverse productive activities, interests, levels of governance, and ecosystem services in harmony with nature—is what is needed for the revitalization of these communities and to make their people feel they are truly the decision-makers and stakeholders in their own well-being.

Like anywhere else in the world, conditions in landscapes around the United States vary widely, so, as I have mentioned, there is no one approach that would work everywhere in the country. Still, the factors that characterize landscape approaches in general apply here as well. For one, any approach should include landscape diversity as one of its key factors, as diversity is strongly correlated with sustainability and resilience in many projects—for example, the “Indicators of Resilience” used in the COMDEKS Project encompasses these facets.

Meaningfully including landscape diversity means not only ecological diversity (although it is, of course, important), but also socioeconomic diversity. Readers of The Nature of Cities will be very familiar with the danger of urban areas relying on one or a small number of industries, as in the famous case of Detroit. The same principles apply as in rural areas of Oklahoma in the Dust Bowl—Detroit’s automobile-based economy can be seen as a kind of industrial monoculture and an example of the lack of resilience that comes from reliance on this kind of monoculture. The American landscape overall might be a very different place if communities were incentivized to remake their landscapes as bioculturally diverse mosaics of different land-uses and production activities, taking advantage of the knowledge that has been gained in the past and feeling deeply engaged in the future direction of their own lands.

Ultimately, the point of this essay is that we need policies that will help, not hinder, this goal. We need a well-thought-out and comprehensive vision of the landscape at multiple scales—from the perspective of the individual land-holder all the way up to large-scale policies on infrastructure and economic incentives—that will result in sustainable, resilient, fulfilling, and healthy communities committed to improving their own well-being. The examples provided here are of a few efforts being made in this direction in other parts of the world, and are meant to point to lessons that the United States can learn from when addressing sustainable development. Those who want to improve the American landscape should not be averse to looking at how landscapes are approached elsewhere, even in the developing world, as a source of good ideas and knowledge. If I can climb back on my soapbox just a little at the end here, I propose that this may even be a way to help bring some sanity into our sometimes-crazy politics.

As one last note, I would like to invite readers to post any comments below, but particularly I am interested to hear about any examples of positive landscape approaches in the States, as I have not found many in my limited research. I hope this essay can be the beginning of a dialogue about this important topic.

William Dunbar
Tokyo

On The Nature of Cities

Thinking About the Concept of “Cultural Nature” while Walking the Gardens of Méréville

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Man is part of nature, and the conservation of natural and cultural heritage, including intangible heritage, can go hand in hand.
The first time I visited the Méréville Estate and its Anglo-Chinese garden, created south of Paris at the end of the 18th century, I was struck by the interlinking of nature and culture in this amazing place. This National Heritage Site is the work of the Marquis de Laborde, who acquired the estate in 1784 and involved the greatest artists of his time (the architect Bélanger and the painter of the rocks Hubert Robert). The landscape created evokes a sublimated nature, punctuated by follies, utilitarian and decorative garden buildings. The walker is invited to follow a path of sensations, along which succeed different “scenes” with varied characters. In this kind of initiatory journey, he explores, with all his senses, the links between man and landscape. He is an observer of the natural life, in the sense given by the natural philosophy of the Enlightenment (Baridon, 1998, p.835).

View of the castle and the Méréville Gardens. Photo: S.Becher, 2016

What is striking in Méréville is the conjunction between the cultural creation of a “natural” landscape and the way in which this landscape has evolved. Nature has, little by little, regained its rights, thanks to the gradual abandonment of the estate in the course of its history. To an undiscerning eye, the garden now appears as a natural valley in which the meanderings of the river, the groves, rocks, caves, and other waterfalls seem to have existed from time immemorial. This soothing landscape, pleasant for walking and meditation, seems just out of a painting by Hubert Robert! http://www.essonne.fr/no-cache/diaporama/diapo/domaine-de-mereville/

The Nathalie Island with, in the background, the Trajane column, one of the main follies of the 18th century. Photo: L.Bruno, 2017

Over several years of research and work on protected natural areas, especially in urban areas, I have observed how humans manage this “nature”, which is considered as wilderness. In the gardens of Méréville, I found myself faced with the same type of paradox created by human intervention on natural environments: Can a landscape that has undergone human intervention still be considered “natural”? If the resulting “cultural nature” is not less rich in native biodiversity, why would its conservation value be lessened as compared with other areas considered “wilderness”?

The (artificial) rockfall scene. Photo: L. Bruno, 2017

In the case of Méréville, man created an irregular garden in which he sought to reproduce the idea of nature, as conceived in the 18th century. This was a romantic nature, idealized and punctuated by the follies that make it so picturesque, while recalling the links of man with the natural world. Time has made the imagined landscape truer than nature itself.

Hiking in the historical garden is a bit like exploring a natural protected area. Its panoramic structure seeks to reach the great wild landscapes and create the effect of surprise and admiration on the visitor, as an explorer discovering “wild” nature. Here is a meander of river, an island, a lake; there are rocks and caves; and for the adventourous who dare advance to the bottom of the park, there is a great waterfall with rustling waters.

The vegetable garden. Photo: L.Bruno, 2017

In the case of urban protected areas, and protected areas in general, men intervene to protect, manage and preserve a space considered as natural, in a way that recalls the gardener caring for his garden. The very fact that there is human intervention, to manage and protect biodiversity, guides the evolution of the protected area and transforms it de facto from a natural place into a cultural place, or even an artefact, into the etymological meaning of the term, “made by the hand of man”. Nature thus meets culture, which does not prevent it from enriching itself by this “fertilization”.

The castle of Méréville (13th-18th century). Photo: L. Bruno, 2017

The conservationists will forgive me my audacity, but can we speak of a “natural area” in the case of a “domestic nature”, even in a national park with big cats? The evolution of the nature and the culture concepts opens our mind to that of “cultural nature”. It has been demonstrated in the Amazon Rainforest, which is a “garden” cultivated by the Amerindians for their needs for the centuries (Hladik, 1996); in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai, where tribals cultivate and find medical and food plants among the highest density of leopards in the world; or in the Tijuca National Park in Rio, a “cultural” forest replanted by men. The recognition of the “cultural nature” value could contribute to integration of traditional knowledge into the management actions of protected areas. The survival of the Nairobi National Park, Kenya, depends to a large extent on the traditional Maasai knowledge to maintain the seasonal wildlife migratory corridor, linking the south of the park with the Athi Kapiti Plains, the “Maasai Garden”.

The castle seen from the entrance meadow with the two-century-old plane trees. Photo: L.Bruno, 2017
The Ruined bridge, created per se. Photo: L.Bruno, 2017

The hand of the man who protects and manages a so-called “natural” area in order to conserve it does not, in any way, diminish the importance of conservation actions or the value of the landscapes and the biodiversity conserved. Rather, the growing awareness of the need for human intervention and the beneficial transformation that it can bring about should lead to fundamentally different conservation practices. For it means to recognize man as part of nature and his responsibility, both in its transformation and preservation.

In Méréville, human intervention is the basis of the landscape built. There, conservation issues of the natural and cultural heritages intertwine. Most of the large trees planted in the 18th century were replaced or simply cut out by former landowners, in particular a forestry tradesman. But in this place preserved from visitors for several years, the herbs have pushed everywhere, good and bad. The river, whose bed has been moved and traced to draw curls, to throw itself into large and small waterfalls and to cross lakes, has gradually faded and flows slowly, as if for it time had stopped. The rocks and caves, covered with vegetation and blackened by the centuries, have such a “natural” character that they would deceive the most knowledgeable climbers. Many follies of the 18th century garden were sold and exiled to Jeurre Estate, 20 km further north. The remaining follies, including the castle almost in ruins and the “Swiss farm”, accentuate the natural character of the landscape, now housing a fauna and flora so important that it is classified a “Natural Area of Ecological, Floristic and Faunistic Interest” (ZNIEFF: Zone naturelle d’intérêt écologique, floristique et faunistique; https://inpn.mnhn.fr/zone/znieff/110001587). The protection of this area was motivated by the presence of wetland habitats of patrimonial interest (wood of alders, willows and sweetgale).

The orchard. Photo: L.Bruno, 2017
The Rocks bridge: Photo: L.Bruno, 2017
The Rocks bridge and the small waterfall. Photo: L.Bruno, 2017

The parallelism between a natural area and a cultural site is not obvious, but it allows us an interesting reflection on the different levels of intervention and the power games played in the protected sites whether natural, such as a national park, or cultural, as a heritage site. The UNPEC research program (Urban National Parks in Emerging Countries & Cities, 2012-2016) analyzed the linkages and the relationships between the multiple stakeholders interacting with this type of protected area, managed at the national level, in a local (city) and regional (state, county, region) context and whose status, particularly symbolic, is strongly influenced by the international bodies.

In 2016, the Department of Essonne, owner of the Méréville Estate, decided to reopen the gardens to the public. The project involves a slew of stakeholders from many institutions. They come from the level of the French National State (Heritage Site, Archaeological Service, Environmental Department, etc.); the Ile-de-France Region, where it is located, the Department of Essonne itself and the Méréville Municipality, but also the Agglomeration of which it is a part. In 2017, the Department of Essonne has created the “Essonne Mécénat” Foundation, to look for financial support for the conservation, restoration and improvement of the Department’s natural and cultural heritage, including the Méréville Estate (http://www.essonne.fr/le-mecenat-au-service-de-lattractivite-de-lessonne/). This new public-private partnership initiative is still quite innovative in France. As part of this logic, a call for projects was launched with the aim of establishing a public-private partnership for the restoration of the castle, the main folly of the garden, which is now almost in ruins (https://fr.calameo.com/read/003221600d33fca1193d8).

The mill, in the entrance meadow, supplied running water to the castle. Photo: L.Bruno, 2017
The Golden Globes Bridge. Photo: L.Bruno, 2017
The Great Waterfall (currently out of the water). It has not flowed for more than 50 years. Photo: L.Bruno, 2017

The restoration of the garden and its hydro-ecological system reveals some contradictions of environmental and heritage law. From the environmental point of view, the ecological integrity of the river must be restored and the obstacles created by man destroyed. It means destroying the waterfalls and lakes created in the 18th century. A hypothesis unimaginable from the cultural heritage point of view. The rehabilitation project of the historic paths calls for the expertise of archaeological excavations (National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research). For every path traced, every grove site, every meander of the river, every rock, was thought to build this surprising landscape. Therefore, to meet the requirements of one law, technical choices require compromises with the other.

Chris Sandbrook speaks of plural conservation in the 21st century, and proposes a fairly wide definition which encompasses the diversity of conceptions of what nature conservation can be today: “actions that are intended to establish, improve or maintain good relations with nature” (Sandbrook, 2015, p.565). This plurality could also be applied to the conservation of cultural heritage.

The ruins of the dairy. Photo: L.Bruno, 2017

While conservation is now composed of multiple means and various actions for natural and cultural sites, each one, in its cultural, socioeconomic and political context must find where to position the cursor between a traditional form of conservation, and opening up to the territory as well as its actors and inhabitants.

The new pond, created in Méréville in the early 20th century, is hidden discreetly in the meadow. It has become a refuge for wildlife, especially for birds such as the grey heron, looking for a secure breeding site on their migratory route. This element in particular has inspired a proposal for sectorisation of how the Méréville Estate, itself inspired by the sectors of national parks such as Table Mountain, Cape Town, and Tijuca, Rio. This system makes it possible both to regulate and secure visitation, and to protect the biodiversity of the site, including preserving certain areas from anthropogenic disturbance. The internal rules complete the protection of the natural and cultural elements of the site and the visitors.

The Wetlands. Photo: L.Bruno, 2017

But the park today (58 ha) is only a fragment of the 18th century property (400 ha). Beyond the walls, urbanization has come to nibble fields and forests but left in the valley floor marshes, now classified as Sensitive Natural Areas (ENS: espace naturel sensible) property of the Department of Essonne.

These natural areas follow the river for more than 2 km until the small village of Boigny. There are the stone quarries named “Carrières des Cailles”. It is one of the thirteen protected sites of the Essonne Natural Geological Reserves (http://www.reserves-naturelles.org/sites-geologiques-de-l-essonne), which are the witnesses of the last marine transgression at the Paris basin (-33.7 and – 28 million years).

The four sectors of the Méréville Estate: free access; regulated tour; guided tour only; quiet zone for nature conservation. Credit: Conseil départemental de l’Essonne, 2017
The small pebbles (“cailles”), used in the Méréville Garden for the paving of the paths and the caves, came from the sands of the Stampien Age[1] found in this location. The loop is thus looped, linking the odd cultural heritage of the historic garden, the sensitive natural heritage of the wetlands, and the remarkable geological heritage of the Stampien Age. The complementarity of the exceptional heritage value of these three sites, belonging to the Department of Essonne, makes Méréville a unique place for the dialogue between nature and culture. There, the two meet, complement and value each other. An intelligent and integrated management of the three sites could contribute to the acceptance of the “cultural nature” concept.

This could lead to changes in the management of heritage areas, both natural and cultural, particularly in urban and peri-urban areas, and to definitively integrate the value of human intervention into a proactive conservation.

Louise-Lézy Bruno
Paris

On The Nature of Cities

[1] The Stampien is both an age of the geological timescale and a stage in the stratigraphic column. LOZOUET P., 2012

References
M., HLADIK A., PAGEZY H., LINARES O., KOPPERT G. et FROMENT A. dir., 1996, L’alimentation en forêt tropicale : Interactions et perspectives de développement. Paris, UNESCO, vol. I, 639 p. http://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/divers09-03/010009721.pdf

BARIDON M., 1998, Les Jardins, Paysagistes, jardiniers, poètes, Coll. Bouquins, Robert Lafon, Paris, 1260 p. http://www.bouquins.tm.fr/site/les_jardins_paysagistes_jardiniers_poetes_&100&9782221067079.html

SANDBROOK C. “What is conservation?”, Oryx, 2015, 49(4), 565-566© 2015 Fauna & Flora International. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/oryx/article/what-is-conservation/01CD7B55A1D009475B9A83ED15C78468

LOZOUET P., 2012, Stratotype Stampien, Editions Biotope, 460 p. https://www.abebooks.fr/Stratotype-Stampien-Lozouet-P/11487880954/bd

 

 

 

 

Thinking Like a Lake in Mexico City

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When faced with seemingly insurmountable problems, it’s a good idea to call upon the forces of nature. First you have to think about the nature of your city, how it works and how to work with it. Mexico City is built on a lake, so start there.

A satirical video circulated this past summer announcing Mexico City as the country’s newest and most exciting water park, featuring waterfalls in the metro and an airport runway turned waterway.[1]  I thought they might have included the geyser spouting out of a drain that I saw next to the sign for the Fuentes Brotantes (Gushing Fountains) Metrobús station.

Mexico City as a Waterpark. Photo: http://quinto-poder.mx/videos/video-nuevo-parque-acuatico-la-cdmx

Instead of draining away the rising water that was filling the major arterial road Avenida Insurgentes Sur, the sewage system was channeling rushing water from higher up the slope of the Valley of Mexico into the centre of Mexico City at the bottom. Similarly, roads running perpendicular to the avenue became fast-flowing streams with cascades forming as the water flowed over outcrops of urban infrastructure. The force of the water provided a new reason to take care when crossing intersections as the water level crept up our legs and hinted at the possibility of being swept away. But my real moment of fear came when edging along a ledge over several feet of murky water and thinking about the unlucky combination of my natural lack of balance and the number of electronic devices in my backpack.

From drain to gushing fountain. Photo: Janice Astbury
Intersection with waves. Photo: Janice Astbury
The view from the edge. Photo: Janice Astbury
The view from the Metrobús. Photo: Janice Astbury
Metrobús station as dry land. Photo: Janice Astbury

This watery urban adventure had begun when my boundlessly adventurous friend and colleague Jürgen Hoth decided that we should get off the Metrobús and continue our journey on foot along the flooded expressway. This seemed perhaps the only way to avoid spending the night in an articulated bus which had come to a complete stop with the thousands of other vehicles on the road.

We saw the reason for this paralysis after an hour or so of wading through water and clambering over railings and road dividers and across Metrobús platforms in search of higher ground over which to continue our journey. At the front of the sea of immobilised traffic we saw that a lake had started to form in the lower part of the expressway. Emergency workers were moving about with hooks presumably trying to unblock drains, which appeared to be a hopeless endeavour. People kept saying to me: “This city was built on a lake”. And although it looks like every last vestige of water has been drained away, “The lake keeps coming back”. This lake, with no natural outlet, was Lake Texcoco where the Aztecs turned an island into their capital city of Tenochtitlan.

To wait or to wade. Fording the Avenida Insurgentes. Photo: Janice Astbury

The flooding on the day of my watery adventure was by no means the worst of this past rainy season. It was only one of many days where people spent hours and hours moving small distances within the city-becoming-a-lake. Mexico City dwellers spend huge amounts of time sitting in traffic under all climatic conditions but the addition of water shifts the question from “what time will I get home tonight?” to “will I get home tonight?” As in many places, there is a sense that the climate is changing and that the flooding is getting worse. It is a big problem that requires a big solution. Some have decided that the solution is to build a giant sewer to carry more of the city’s unwanted water away. The Túnel Emisor Oriente (Eastern Discharge Tunnel) is scheduled for completion, after various delays and budget overruns, at the end of 2018. Despite the enormous investment, according to some critics, it will not be able to prevent flooding.[2] This massive engineering project raises questions about the effects of being on the receiving end of the wastewater of nine million people and their economic activities. It also seems unwise to channel water away from a thirsty city with a falling water table (and a serious subsidence problem), which must resort to piping water in from further and further away. The Sistema Cutzamala (one of the largest waterworks in the world, and possibly the most expensive to operate) brings water from about 150 km away and pumps it 1 km up to the elevation of Mexico City—and still only provides about 30 percent of the water required.

It’s an absurd situation for a city that was, and to some extent still is, a lake.

Fortunately, a growing number of people are thinking about what it means to be a city that was a lake, and are exploring ways to work with their ecosystem rather than against it. Many of them believe this is the only feasible solution given that conventional water management infrastructure has been tried unsuccessfully since the arrival of the Europeans. Academics, civil society organisations, and government officials are now talking about what are increasingly described as nature-based solutions. I have been fortunate to speak to some of them about this in my role as a researcher within the programme NATure-based URban innoVATION (NATURVATION).


Within the city boundaries: Milpa Alta. Photos: Janice Astbury

Fortunately, Mexico City has nature on a grand enough scale to play a significant role in providing solutions to its big problems. One of the most surprising things about this densely populated city is that more than half of the area within the city boundaries is a conservation zone, the Conservation Land (Suelo de Conservación). This large area of 85.5 hectares was designated for conservation some years ago (classified in 1976 and clearly defined in 1987).[3] This designation recognised the importance of the local ecosystem within the growing city. Unfortunately, there are many threats to the Conservation Land and the regulations governing its use are not always respected. However its very existence is testimony to the long-standing, prescient vision regarding the role of natural processes in the city, and an enduring legal framework that facilitated emergence of these nature-based solutions.

The Conservation Land is deemed to be of particular importance because of its role in recharging the aquifer, which still satisfies about 40 percent of the city’s water needs and has potential to do more. The slopes of the Valley of Mexico must retain their vegetation in order to absorb rainfall and recharge the aquifer. Vegetated slopes retain rainwater in the upper parts of the basin, slowing and absorbing the flow and lessening the likelihood of creating lake-like conditions and flooded roads and buildings at the bottom. Below much of the paved surface of the city lies an impermeable clay lakebed. There is nowhere for the water to go. It is therefore infinitely better for this runoff to be absorbed higher up and converted into good quality water for humans and non-humans, than becoming an agent of destruction, picking up contaminants, doing damage and ultimately requiring costly removal by a yet to be effectively implemented grey infrastructure.

It is also important to note the existence of the pedregal in the Valley of Mexico, an ecosystem of drought-resistant vegetation in a water collecting landscape of basalt (volcanic rock). It has the capacity to store water and to channel it into the deep aquifer below the lake bed so maintaining its functioning is crucial.[4] There are remnants of this landscape in the built-up portion of the southern part of Mexico City and there are opportunities to protect and restore it using approaches showcased around the campus of the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM).[5]


Pedregal landscapes at UNAM. Photos: Janice Astbury

But while there is growing awareness that the best solutions to Mexico City’s water problems must be nature-based solutions, the challenges of implementing these are greater than engineering a giant sewer. Multiple overlapping layers of grey infrastructure and the social infrastructure that facilitates its expansion limit the opportunities to benefit from the green infrastructure underneath.

People looking for housing can find cheaper options by moving to the edge of the city and up the slope. This land is thus sealed off beneath homes and roads and the other facilities that will eventually follow. Both real estate development and irregular settlements facilitate this sprawl, and are in turn encouraged by the social, economic, political, and legal context in which they unfold, with vulnerability and corruption playing big roles. Poorer people in this very unequal city often find themselves driven away from central areas and forced to settle far from their places of work and the amenities and communities that may be important to them. Sadly they become both victims and sources of the traffic problems, spending hours each day in buses that move even more slowly during flooding exacerbated by their dislocation.

Some areas are safeguarded by the presence of traditional practices of cultivation, now also combined with newer forms of sustainable production and land management. These are often in the care of indigenous communities or ejidos (campesino communities), which collectively own their lands. In the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Xochimilco (the last vestige of the Mexico City lake system) people still grow food using chinampas, the floating gardens that once fed the entire city and that are now also noted for their water filtering and flood mitigation capacity. But alongside these are a growing number of greenhouse operations and throughout the Conservation Land intensive cultivation both reduces and pollutes the water that makes it to the aquifer, while illegal cutting or clearing and land use change removes trees and displaces the native grasses that have a key role in maintaining the healthy functioning of the ecosystem.

All of this is made more complicated by the presence of criminal activity and accompanying impunity that can make it dangerous to confront people engaged in illegal activities. In parallel other forms of criminality direct attention and enforcement resources away from protecting a vital ecosystem and the communities maintaining sustainable livelihoods within it.

This complex dynamic plays out within an equally complex web of land tenures and jurisdictions including collectively owned lands, protected natural areas, cities and their boroughs, and several states. Fortunately various entities (states, municipalities, local communities, civil society organisations, academics) within what is now known as the megalopolis have come together to collaborate in an initiative called the Water Forest which covers an area of about 1000 square miles. They recognise that the ecosystem of the wider Basin of Mexico is essential to the survival of Mexico City and surrounding settlements with their 23 million people, and its protection and restoration is, therefore, a question of national security.[6]

The current investment of effort, creativity, and goodwill of many actors engaged in diverse activities is a source of hope, particularly as the work is taking place at multiple scales including within local areas like Xochimilco, the wider Conservation Land, and the umbrella initiative of the Water Forest. This is accompanied by the development of innovative approaches to financing that reflect the high value of the ecosystem services provided and it is facilitated by the expansion of perspectives that acknowledge and work with the complex overlapping systems that are the source of and solution to challenges, as is evidenced by the Mexico City Resilience Strategy[7].

Perhaps the biggest challenge, however, remains the socio-cultural shift required among all urban actors who need to move away from thinking like a builder of a machine and move toward thinking like a collaborator in an ecosystem. When faced with seemingly insurmountable problems, it’s a good idea to call upon the forces of nature. First you have to think about the nature of your city, how it works and how to work with it. Sometimes it’s not obvious on the surface, as in the case of Mexico City where water scarcity is emblematic but where the solution is to think like a lake.

Janice Astbury
London

On The Nature of Cities

NATure-based URban innoVATION (naturvation.eu) is a 4-year project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme involving 14 institutions across Europe in fields as diverse as urban development, innovation studies, geography, ecology, environmental assessment and economics. The partnership includes city governments, non-governmental organisations and business. The project will assess what nature-based solutions can achieve in cities, examine how innovation is taking place, and work with communities and stakeholders to develop the knowledge and tools required to realise the potential of nature-based solutions for meeting urban sustainability goals.

[1] Quinto Poder. (2017). El nuevo parque acuático de la CDMX at http://quinto-poder.mx/videos/video-nuevo-parque-acuatico-la-cdmx/

[2] López, J. (2017). ‘Túnel Emisor Oriente no acabará con inundaciones’ in Excelsior, 27 July 2017, at  http://www.excelsior.com.mx/comunidad/2017/07/27/1178183

[3] Connolly, P., & Wigle, J. (2017). (Re) constructing Informality and “Doing Regularization” in the Conservation Zone of Mexico City. Planning Theory & Practice, 18(2), 183-201.

[4] National Research Council. (1995). Mexico City’s Water Supply: Improving the Outlook for Sustainability. National Academies Press.

[5] Suárez, A., Camarena, P., Herrera, I., & Lot, A. (2011). Infraestructura verde y corredores ecológicos de los pedregales: ecología urbana del sur de la Ciudad de México. UNAM, at http://centro.paot.org.mx/documentos/unam/infraestructura_verde.pdf

[6] Hoth, J. (2014). ‘Urban Jungle: No Forest, No Water for Mexico City’, in humanature, 21 March 2014, at https://blog.conservation.org/2014/03/urban-jungle-no-forest-no-water-for-mexico-city/

[7] CDMX Resilience Office. (2016). CDMX Resilience Strategy, September 2016 at http://100resilientcities.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/CDMX-Resilience-Strategy-English_2.pdf

THIRD LANDSCAPE, Part 1: For the Design of an Amazon Forest City

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Urban development in the Amazon region could be reframed by associating two different systems of thought and practices: natural indigenous and technology capital production. Together—what I call a Third Landscape—they could meld “foreign” and “local” technologies within the relevance of local context.

1 Proposition

The logic of urban growth in the Brazilian Amazon could be changed if we succeeded in bringing together two different systems of thought and practices: that of the natural and indigenous, to that of technology and capital production. Together, they could guarantee the continued economic and environmental resilience of the region and pave the way to interesting hybrid solutions—what I have called a Third Landscape, where “foreign” and “local” technologies are employed within the relevance of local context. The Amazon could become a laboratory for design exploration, to establish a different logic for spatial (and maybe political) organization, where there is a productive encounter between natural and urban environments.

I have prepared a three-part article to expand on this idea. This one, where I lay out the proposition and try to justify it, a second one where through a series of images and short texts I interpret some of the ideas of what I have called a Circular Culture, that will serve as base for the understanding of an “indigenous imaginary”, and the last one where I make design propositions to exemplify what a Forest City could be.

2 Intro: extensive urbanization

In 1970, Henri Lefebvre posed the idea that the “total urbanization of society” was an inevitable process, which would demand new interpretive and perceptual approaches.[i] Indeed, not even fifty years later we are experiencing fast growing rates of urbanization, with more than half of the world’s population already living in urban centers. In many ways, it is not far different in the Brazilian Amazon. As consumption levels in our modern cities demand supplies from far-away sources, the Amazon region has been systematically integrated into the logic of urban growth with pressing global demand for its natural resources. Today, it is interconnected with Brazilian cities like São Paulo and Brasilia, as much as it is with other global cities like Tokyo, Montreal or Beijing. “Urbanization” has, in fact, arrived in the Amazon.

Within the logic of the extraction that regulates Amazonian economy, major deforestation factors such as farming, mining, largescale infrastructure, and logging are all supported by a network of towns and cities throughout the region. As Eduardo Brondizio points out in his  article (https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2016/02/02/the-elephant-in-the-room-amazonian-cities-deserve-more-attention-in-climate-change-and-sustainability-discussions/), the Amazon urban net has grown quickly. There are more than three hundred cities with populations over twenty-five thousand people and an equal number of smaller cities in the Brazilian Amazon, in addition to scores of indigenous and small riverine traditional settlements. Today, the resiliency of the Amazonian biomes is very much intertwined with this web. As Thomas Lovejoy, “the Godfather of Biodiversity”, says: “It’s not simply about what happens in the forests; it’s also about what happens in cities. The quality of life in Amazon cities is a very important part of reaching the ideal solution.”[ii] (https://oglobo.globo.com/sociedade/conte-algo-que-nao-sei/thomas-lovejoy-biologo-ambientalista-preciso-criar-cidades-sustentaveis-na-amazonia-21829192)

Urban web in the Brazilian Amazon. Source: IBGE 2010. Image: Axelle Dechelette and Anna Dietzsch

However, despite the rich cultural and natural environments and the predominance of a decentralized pattern of small urban nuclei, urban settlements in the Amazon follow models that are totally foreign to their contexts, mirroring urban centers of the Brazilian Southeast, the US and Europe. There is widespread disregard for the forest and the traditional knowledge that comes with it. As Bertha Becker pointed out in 2013, “In this regional economy commanded from outside, indigenous culture and knowledge have mostly been dissociated from great transformation movements.”[iii]

But does it have to be this way?

No. But if we want to work within the realm of an ecological urbanism, we will have to acknowledge the strong interdependency between natural and urban environments. We will need to transition from a perpetual response to emergency, to a long-term vision that nevertheless is not standardized, but specific, interdependent and aligned with new technologies that are relevant to local context 

The (asphalted) grid stamped into the forest. City of Souré. Source: Google Maps
Armed conflict between the Guarani-Caiowá and farmers in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Photo: Spensy Pimentel

3 Another Imaginary

One point of departure may be to look at the societies of the indigenous populations we have ignored in our rush to “progress”. If their paradigms are different from ours, maybe their solutions could enlighten us. But for that to happen we would have to acknowledge the possibility that modern society is not the only viable or credible social system and that economic progress and reliance on monetization are not “fundamental truths”.

Charles Taylor, in his book “Modern Social Imaginaries” coins the term “social imaginary” to explain the “intrinsic grasp” of our social environment and possibilities, pointing to the existence of a “moral order” that underlies our political and economic structures. In other words, our modern order is the one we may take for granted, or believe in, but it is not by any means the only possibility. Innumerous traditional communities, as well as disenfranchised ones, although imbedded in the reality of global economy, have found ways to live within different sets of values all over the world. Different imaginaries, or different “political imaginaries”, as Gibson-Graham have called them, are not fantasies or naïve discourse, but rather forms of alternative economic organizations that currently exist—“politics of possibilities” [iv] that locally define their own internal rules.

Castells pointed out in the 90s, that as the internet made the globalization of the production economy possible, it also created a platform for the connection of local voices.[v] Grounded in the reality of local possibilities and constraints, these voices can guide us in the conversation of what regional and global design could be. I have talked about this in another article at TNOC.

“The embrace of local power doesn’t have to mean parochialism, withdrawal, or intolerance, only a coherent foundation from which to navigate the larger world. From the wild coalitions of the global justice movement to the cowboys and environmentalists sitting down together there is an ease with difference that doesn’t need to be eliminated, a sense that . . . you can have an identity embedded in local circumstances and a role in the global dialogue. And that this dialogue exists in service of the local.” [vi]

As the deforestation of the Amazon poses a huge threat to our global environmental balance, indigenous populations have been able to sustain environmental preservation more efficiently than in other parts of the world. In Brazil, it is estimated that deforestation in indigenous areas can be substantially s smaller than in other non-indigenous lands, while in the world, indigenous land and communities are responsible for absorbing 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.  It is clear that indigenous cultural resilience and practices are tightly linked to the environmental resilience of their habitats.

In Brazilian Indigenous Territories, deforestation can be eleven times smaller than in other areas. Image by Anna Dietzsch and Mariana Gortan

My proposition is that we should examine traditional indigenous practices to inform our understanding of the urbanization occurring in the Amazon and explore the idea of a “hybrid urbanization” that is structured on alternative solutions arising from the encounter of two imaginaries—that of our modern world and that of the indigenous knowledge. I believe we could reframe the discussion of urban development in the Amazon region by associating two different systems of thought and practices: the natural and indigenous, to that of technology and capital production.

Together, they could guarantee the continued economic and environmental resilience of the region. This would pave the way to interesting hybrid solutions—what I have called a Third Landscape, where “foreign” and “local” technologies are employed within the relevance of local context.  The Amazon has the potential to become a laboratory for design exploration, to establish a different logic for spatial (and maybe political) organization, where there is a productive encounter between natural and urban environments.

The city of Altamira, Pará, Brazil. Photo: Marcelo Salazar (ISA)

4 The man-made forest

Three thousand years before Europeans arrived in Brazil, Brazilian Indians lived in a web of spread-out civilizations that covered the country’s surface. Opposing the view of “naïf civilizations”, or “pre-civilizations”, several studies show us today that they were organized in quite intricate and elaborate ways. Satellite imagery has revealed the occupation of the Amazonian Upper Xingu area by a system of gardens villages that could be compared to Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities[vii]. These “polities” were responsible for the domestication of the forest: vast areas that we today assume are “pristine natural forests” were really planted and managed landscapes, indicating a high degree of “manufacturing” and yet great balance in the coexistence of man and forest.[viii]

Map showing ADEs found locations and predicted sites. In: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2013.2475

Soil samples from the Amazon Basin tell the story of Pre-Columbian, anthropogenic activity through the analysis of the Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs). The samples that have been classified as such are rich in macro- and micro-nutrients, in stark contrast to most of the Amazon soil, that is naturally acidic and rich in minerals that are toxic to plants at high concentrations. Layered above the more acid soils, ADEs contain remnants of burnt biomass, are rich in essential minerals like nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, and zinc and maintain a higher pH that is more forgiving to cultivation. These samples have persisted for centuries because of “fire derived black carbon”, and they have been found in the savannas, rainforests, and various blends of the two across the Amazon Basin. Indigenous cultures have apparently shaped the entire landscape through millennia of coexistence with the environment.[ix]

ADE and acidic soil samples. Image by Carbon-terra.eu. In: https://permaculturenews.org/2014/10/22/black-magic-secrets-amazonian-fertility/

As a rule of thumb, the Amazonian forest stands on a thin layer of nutritious soil, regulated by a fragile balance of natural processes that allow the system to survive interdependently. By ignoring the complexity of its functioning as a sophisticated superimposition of specific elements and conditions, modern agriculture cannot reproduce the fertility of the original soil in the long term, as many collapsed attempts have shown us.

The occurrence of Mycorrhizal (roots and funghi link) speeds up the decomposition of the large amount of debris the forest produces, feeding the poor Amazonian soil with organic material. Image by Anna Dietzsch and Mariana Gortan.
The suspension of volatile organic compounds (“forest perfumes”) in the high pressure zone created by the forest’s perspiration, speed up the cycle of clouds and rain precipitation. Image by Anna Dietzsch and Mariana Gortan.

The discourse of pushing the “integration” of the Amazon into the economic logic of the country, and ultimately global capital, will be a failed experiment in the long run. Cities and rural settlements that were implemented in the region since the seventies, along a web of highways and throughways constructed by the military regime, are today the focus of the worst environmental disasters, pushing deforestation and fires to dangerous levels. The political inclination of the current federal government to further advance with this strategy adds a level of urgency to the Amazonian issue that we have not seen since the 60’s, when its indigenous population was considered “extinguished”.

In contrast, “By creating gradients of forests that mutually activated each other – the riparian buffer, the orchard, the managed forest and the gardens –these [indigenous] societies have avoided soil deterioration and could [can]therefore develop complex social relations and durable places of habitation.“[x]

Reconstruction of a section through a pre-Colombian Indian settlement. Information collected from authors: Heckenberger, Neves, Clement and Nevis. Image by Andrea Margit.

These spatial arrangements are imbedded in a social imaginary that is different than ours and that, in admittedly oversimplified ways, will be here described by the pinpoint of four characteristics: fluidity, kinship, cultural territory and subsistence. [xi] In this imaginary, patterns of flexibility, cohesion between man and nature and a non-hierarchical connection between socio-economic practices, natural cycles, and cultural traits form a cohesive system that I have called Circular Culture:

Fluidity: In Latin American indigenous mythology, nature and humans are bound by a “common spirit”. Our bodies and forms are transitional, pertaining to a world that is “all people”. The Brazilian anthropologist Viveiros de Castro borrowed from German philosophy to coin the term Amerindian Perspectivism[xii] to explain this way of seeing things. As he points out, in this world relations are formed between subjects with different perspectives, be it between humans, or between humans and non-humans. There is no “subdued object” and the separation between nature and human (Foster’s metabolic rift) diminishes.

Co-related notions extend to ideas of fluid time and fluid space, where boundaries are related to natural elements and events, rather than to abstract concepts of time or property. Acknowledging their importance in the structural organization of things, rivers acquire the status of deities, being the most important elements of continuity, both as means of transportation, as well as means of subsistence;

Rivers as the elements of symbolic and physical continuity. Image by Anna Dietzsch and Clara Morgenroth.

Kinship: Since the Enlightenment, when theories of natural rights[xiii] started to shape modern man as owner of his own, individual rights, we have valued individuality above community, disassociating both as opposing values. In Indigenous social organization, individuals are intertwined with the idealization of the group and its traditions. In some communities the symbiosis between the two is such, that political forces are horizontalized and apparently “non-hierarchical”, relying on an organic understanding of practices.[xiv]

As pointed out by Pierre Clasters in his book Society Against the State, Brazilian Indigenous societies rely on a political structure with no coercion, where the figure of the leader is important and respected but has no freedom to decide for the group. In periods of peace, leaders act as mediators, peacemakers and providers, and are constantly put in check by the group. “Greed and power are incompatible; to be a chief it is necessary to be generous.”[xv]

The Araweté people. Photo: Viveiros de Castro.

Cultural Territory: Without prescriptive boundaries (therefore fluid), the indigenous territory is defined by historical occupation, use and the capacity of those who occupy (and define) it to defend its natural resources. Boundaries are porous and with strong interdependence between man and land. In both the symbolic and physical worlds, culture and territory are interrelated in defining each other.

Subsistance: In a social logic that doesn’t aim for accumulation, concepts of modern capitalism are subverted, as individual supremacy, objectification of relationships and commodification of values don’t prevail. The construction and management of inhabited landscapes and “cities” will also obviously differ from ours.

In Circular Cultures, man, divine and nature coexist in a non-axial relationship. Image by Anna Dietzsch and Mariana Gortan

Turning to Indigenous communities to understand the forest and how we should relate to it as we deal with different degrees of urbanization and extraction patterns, will allow us to question the socio-political parameters that are now threatening the natural balance of the whole Amazonian system, as it could guide us to a more holistic approach where natural, cultural, and economic realities intersect as guides, much in tune to what Sir Patrick Geddes practiced more than a hundred years ago, and trends of “regionalism thinking” are currently practicing too.

Indigenous community protesting in Brasilia, Brazil. Photo: Valter Campanato, Agencia Brasil

It is relevant to notice that indigenous communities are very much imbedded and active in the Brazilian political life, with strong connections to a global web of institutions and governments. The 1988 Brazilian Constitution guaranteed the preservation of their livelihood and laid the framework for the demarcation of Indigenous Territories, which today occupy 13% of Brazil’s total area, if we only account for those already legally established. Ninety percent of these lands are in the Amazonian biomes and together are a real safeguard for the natural environment. Supporting them in deciding how their territories should be managed and how their “cities” could be shaped, will engender design propositions that could be applied beyond the indigenous territories and into the growing net of small and medium-sized cities that populate the different biomes of the Forest.

Anna Dietzsch
New York and São Paulo

On The Nature of Cities

Notes:

Pict 13 – Indigenous community protesting in Brasilia, Brazil. Photo by Valter Campanato, Agencia Brasil

[i] Lefebvre, H. (1970). La révolution urbaine (Vol. 216). Paris: Gallimard.

[ii] Thomas Lovejoy

[iii] Bertha

[iv] Gibson-Graham –Postcapitalist Politics, University of Minnesota Press, 2006

[v] Castells, Manuel – The Rise of the Network Society, Blackwell Publishers, 1996

[vi] Solnit, Rebecca – A Hope in the Dark, Nation Books, 2004

[vii] E. Howard Garden City

[viii] Michael Hekenberger

[ix] Arroyo-Kalin, M., E.G. Neves & W.I. Woods. 2008.

[x] Margit, Andrea – Amazon Inaginaries, Masters’ Thesis for the Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2017

[xi] Andrea Margit

[xii] Viveiros de Castro

[xiii] Thomas Aquina and Locke, etc.

[xiv] Viveiros de Castro – Araweté

[xv] Pierre Clasters

A scale made of leaves

This Changes Everything: New York’s Environmental Amendment

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Art, Science, Action: Cities Re-imagined

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As the clearly expressed will of the people vis-à-vis environmental rights, New York City’s Section 19 will both constrain and guide legislative action. The amendment provides a floor below which environmental protections cannot sink, and all laws will have to take account of that environmental floor.

In November 2021, New Yorkers overwhelmingly voted to add an environmental amendment to their state constitution. Section 19, which provides that “Each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment,” is now part of the New York Bill of Rights (the part of New York’s constitution that defines individual liberties and the limits of state power). This language is both sweeping and simple. It guarantees all New Yorkers the constitutional right to live, work, and play in communities that are safe, healthy, and free from harmful environmental conditions. As Steve Englebright, the amendment’s primary sponsor in the state assembly, explained:  “the right to clean air and clean water and a healthful environment is an elementary part of living in this great state.” Just to give some perspective on how momentous this moment is, the last time any state amended its constitution to recognize environmental rights was 1971 when Pennsylvania voters voted overwhelmingly to add Article I, Section 27 to their constitution.

The final vote adopting this amendment indicated wide political support for environmental rights—the proposal to add Section 19 to the New York constitution garnered just over 70% support from voters, a greater than 2:1 margin. And, before being added to the ballot, the proposed amendment first had to twice pass both houses of the state legislature—something it also did by an overwhelming margin. This amendment clearly and unambiguously reflects the will of the people of New York. In this, New York is part of a broader social consensus on environmental rights across the United States and around the world.

A chart showing how political parties view air quality importance
Figure from Struggling to Breathe: Asthma, Pollution, and the Fight for Environmental Justice

In the Fall of 2021, just before New York adopted its environmental amendment, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted overwhelmingly to recognize the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a universal human right. In the Spring of 2022, the UN General Assembly as a whole will consider a similar resolution recognizing the human right to a healthy environment. Appropriately, this vote will take place in the UN’s New York headquarters—bringing environmental rights full circle. The New York City Bar Association has long been a vocal supporter of this UN resolution.

What does it mean to amend the state constitution?

The United States has a federal system in which both states and the national government have constitutions. The federal Constitution’s Bill of Rights, which applies to the states through the 14th Amendment, defines the minimum constitutional rights that must be accorded to every person in the United States. While States cannot use their constitutions to deprive individuals of the minimum federally guaranteed rights, they may add additional protections. With this amendment, New York has expanded the fundamental rights of New Yorkers to include the right to a healthy environment.

When the “forever wild” provision was added to the New York constitution in 1894, New York became the first state in the Union to include environmental protection in its state constitution. By enacting Section 19, New York has once again placed itself as the vanguard of green constitutional amendments, but it is far from alone in its embrace of environmental rights. Montana, Pennsylvania, and, to a lesser extent, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Illinois recognize environmental rights, as do the national constitutions of well over 100 countries. The United Nations Human Rights Council recently recognized the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a universal human right.

How will this amendment promote environmental justice?

A quote from Jenny VelozSection 19 is a clear recognition that environmental rights belong to everyone—that no people and no neighborhoods can be sacrificed on the altar of economic growth.

By grounding environmental rights in the state constitution, New Yorkers have committed their state to a new path forward—one based on environmental justice. Environmental justice involves both fair treatment and meaningful involvement of communities in decisions by which environmental choices are made.

The constitutional rights enshrined in Section 19 give substantive heft to procedural rights that have long been a part of environmental decision-making under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA.) These existing laws are focused on creating a pathway for public participation in decision-making processes largely in order to prevent “uninformed rather than unwise”  decisions. By contrast, the substantive environmental rights enshrined in Section 19 put issues of fair treatment—how environmental burdens and benefits are actually distributed—squarely on the table.

With the adoption of Section 19, the right to clean air, pure water, and a healthy environment are now on equal constitutional footing with the right to property (Art. I, §7), to petition the government (Art I, §9), freedom of religion (Art, I, §3), and freedom of speech (Art. I, §8). Like these other constitutionally-protected fundamental rights, Section 19 delineates self-executing rights (meaning they can be claimed without additional implementing legislation) that the government can neither deny nor infringe. Every person holds these environmental rights by virtue of being in New York, and Section 19 applies whenever state action might impede those rights. It imposes constraints on what the government can do vis-à-vis environmental rights as well as on how the government must make decisions. All agencies and local governments will need to ensure their decisions take full account of environmental rights. In short, public officials of all stripes must embed protecting environmental rights into the fabric of all governmental workways.

Moreover, this amendment shifts the baseline for considering environmental (in)justice. For far too long, New York’s Black communities, communities of color, and low-income communities have borne far more than their fair share of the environmental burdens, with pollution disproportionately and systematically impacting their communities. They have had to fight tooth and nail for basic environmental rights. Poor communities, and communities of color, bear the brunt of polluted air, unsafe water, and the growing impacts of climate change.

Nearly a century ago, structural racism in the form of redlining intentionally cut Black and brown communities out of the New Deal and out of the economic prosperity it built. New York compounded this legacy of structural racism by steering most of its polluting infrastructure into these same communities, and then by failing to protect those communities with rigorous environmental enforcement. As a result, a Black child in New York is 42% more likely to have asthma than a white child, eight times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma-related ailments, two or three times as likely to miss days of school because of asthma. Across the state, Black New Yorkers are nearly four more likely to die from asthma-related complications.

A chart of asthma mortality rates in New York
Figure from the National Asthma Survey—New York State Summary Report

The same grim disparities hold true for cardiovascular and pulmonary disease, which are also closely related to pollution. Recent studies have shown how increased exposure to pollution heightens the risks posed by COVID-19.

Section 19 must be read in combination with the pre-existing guarantees of equal protection under law and the prohibition of discrimination (Art. I, §11). To fulfill their interrelated constitutional duties of equal protection and respecting environmental rights, all government actors, from courts to legislators and regulators, will have to prioritize protecting the most vulnerable from pollution, degradation, and climate change, and ensuring that environmental burdens are not heaped on already overburdened communities.

As such, this amendment is a momentous step forward for environmental justice. It provides a context and platform for raising disparate health and environmental outcomes associated with governmental decisions about polluting activities, and for challenging unequal protection under, or enforcement of existing law. It also requires a rethinking of public participation to ensure that those most affected by environmental decisions have a genuine opportunity for meaningful participation in a decision-making process that takes their environmental rights seriously.

What will this amendment mean in practice?

The challenge will be turning law on the books into change in the world and ensuring that this constitutional change marks the end of business as usual for polluters. If we are successful, Section 19 will mark the beginning of a new era in which human wellbeing and planetary health are the priorities. Nearly a century ago, in New Jersey v. City of New York, the United States Supreme Court explicitly found that issuance of a permit could not prevent a court from enjoining conduct that created an environmental nuisance. Much the same way that a permit is not a defense to a claim sounding in nuisance, a permit will similarly not insulate ongoing conduct from constitutional scrutiny. Article 19 thus opens a pathway for reconsidering past governmental decisions that unduly discounted environmental concerns or did not fully value environmental rights. New York now has both the authority and the duty to ensure that environmental rights are respected. For that to happen, behaviors must change in all branches of government.

Executive Branch

The New York Constitution tasks the Governor with the duty to “take care that the law be faithfully executed.” Article 1, Section 19, now provides a constitutional foundation for all New York’s laws affecting the environment. To faithfully execute the environmental amendments, the state must issue new environmental guidance for interpreting existing law and regulation and will need to enact new regulations designed to promote, protect, and defend environmental rights.

A poster saying: vote yes for Clean Air and WaterThe state has an unambiguous mandate to protect New Yorkers’ right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live and work in a healthy environment. Everyone exercising governmental authority, including agencies and local government, has an obligation to protect environmental rights, to promote actions designed to preserve and enhance these rights, and to take affirmative steps to provide a healthy environment to all New Yorkers, including intervening when these rights are jeopardized.  Protecting clean air and water must shape how all state law is interpreted and applied. State actors will have new grounds to justify more rigorous enforcement or to defend state environmental legislation from attack by polluting industry.

Section 19 also gives states more flexibility to act in response to emerging environmental threats that might not yet be subject to regulation. This will be particularly useful when responding to threats posed by new chemical compounds. For example, had this constitutional amendment been in place earlier, it would have given New York clear grounds to take actions in Hoosick Falls to remedy PFAS water contamination once it became clear that the pollution was negatively impacting environmental rights. New York would not have to wait for regulations specifically targeting a particular chemical before holding polluters responsible.

Perhaps the most sweeping changes will be in how governmental actors conduct environmental impact assessments and/or consider environmental costs and benefits in decision-making. State actors will need to ensure that their decisions (vis-à-vis e.g. siting, transportation, development, and permitting) fully respect environmental rights. Section 19 necessitates that agencies and local planning boards strike a new balance when environmental rights and property rights (or economic development proposals) conflict. Where DEC previously interpreted SEQRA to allow permit denials “if the adverse environmental impacts cannot be favorably balanced against social and economic considerations,” this amendment now puts a thumb on the scale for protecting the environment.

A scale made of leavesThe Judiciary must assess whether government action has violated these rights

Section 19 will greatly expand the range of people able to establish standing to bring challenges to government decisions about the environment. Because litigants can now allege that their fundamental constitutional rights have been violated, Section 19 will make it easier to challenge government actions with negative environmental impacts. In particular, the new amendment will facilitate new environmental justice challenges—allowing overburdened communities to allege that governmental action (or inaction in the case of failure to enforce permits) unduly infringes on environmental rights. Under Section 19, a court will have to satisfy itself that a challenged government action adequately protects and respects environmental rights. Where that is not the case, courts can impose the full panoply of equitable remedies that might be needed to ensure that environmental rights are honored.

Section 19 will also change the way that courts evaluate the adequacy of governmental decision-making processes by which environmental choices are made. As the United States Supreme Court explained in Cleveland Board of Ed v. Loudermill, the state definition of fundamental rights like property or liberty give rise to constitutional due process requirements. Once a state creates such an interest (and there is no better way to create than via constitutional amendment), no one can be deprived of their liberty/property interest without due process of law, nor can it be taken without just compensation. New York must treat environmental rights akin to property rights—deprivation of which can happen only after due process and with just compensation. This principle should serve as a guide to agencies in interpreting their duties under the myriad state laws and regulations.

The Legislature

As the clearly expressed will of the people vis-à-vis environmental rights, Section 19 will both constrain and guide legislative action. The amendment provides a floor below which environmental protections cannot sink, and all laws will have to take account of that environmental floor. This will be true for existing law, which may have to be amended to bring it into harmony with Section 19. Going forward, Section 19 offers important guidance to New York’s legislature as it debates a wide range of new legislation across a host of topics including eliminating structural racism, criminal justice reform, public education, transportation and energy needs, housing and development, and climate change. Environmental equity provisions like those built into the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act will become the standard for how to move forward with legislation that affects and concerns the environment.

Rebecca Bratspies
New York

On The Nature of Cities

Though There is Method, There is Madness In It: How Silos of Methods Impede Cross-Cutting Research

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Art, Science, Action: Cities Re-imagined

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I have three jobs—lecturer, facilitator of academic research, and mother of two nature-engaged kids. My three experiences lead me to think we have a core problem in urban social-ecology: that we let our fealty to discipline-specific methods get in the way of true multidisciplinary work that is key to real understudying in urban social-ecological systems. That is, our cross-cutting ideas are good and on the right track. Our methods, kept in silos, hold us back.

Job 1

One of the best parts of my lecturer job is that I get to teach a graduate course in urban ecology. I take a class of fourteen postgraduate students and we spend a semester exploring the theory and practice of urban ecology. The University of Cape Town’s Environmental and Geographical Science Department has various streams and points of entry for graduate students and students in my class have a diversity of backgrounds. Some have a strong disciplinary foundation in biology or social science, and others have more vocational training and are looking to add value to their qualification. This makes for an interesting teaching space, and we often end up in lively debate. The debate that goes on in my head is:

“What sort of urban ecologists do we want to train?”

“What should they be capable of?” And finally:

“Do we want good generalists or niche-specific specialists?”

Irrespective of their backgrounds, all my students relish the examination of the theory emerging in the field of urban ecology. For the first half of the semester we grapple with the call for new frameworks and theory, and scrutinize the old ecological theories to see if they fit the urban context. We delve into several thematic areas, and as the students lead these discussion sessions, selecting the themes at the start of the semester and the readings for each class, we shy away from nothing. This is a thrilling and greedy journey in which the students flex their muscles and put out critical and bold views.

Just as we are getting to that point when classmates start to anticipate each other’s points of view, we change gears. We start the second term of the semester with a daylong field trip, the purpose of which is to stimulate research ideas. Students return from this field trip and must present their research idea to the class—the question there are addressing, likely areas of literature, and the methods—following which we take a vote on which project the class should carry out. I am always delighted by the creative project ideas, and can see the culmination of theory and local context informing the ideas.

Skye McCool KRC

At this point I allow myself a brief moment of smug happiness. This year they elected to do one project, and are currently busy with the task of redesigning the City of Cape Town to the best ecological end. They have subcommittees representing different entities such as transport and biodiversity, and are steeped in the challenges of collective governance.

My smugness, however, is short lived. When it comes to the presentation of likely methods that would answer their questions, I start to squirm in my seat. Here students really flounder. While my students read a lot and are exposed to a variety of methods, it seems there is no compensation for a full and concentrated undergraduate degree in a single field in which one is systematically trained in discipline-specific methods.

This begs the question of what sort of training we need to make a contribution to urban ecology. It is comforting to fall back on an idea from ecology: that in life we need the generalists, who will thrive in a diversity of conditions, and the specialists who will fill specific roles and niches. Ecology also tells us we need this sort of diversity of function for health and persistence, so all is not lost. I like to look at the class as a whole, a representative group of young professionals heading out into the work force, and I see among them some specialists who have now added an urban angle to their undergraduate foundation, and then some well positioned knowledge brokers, who have been sensitized to another way of thinking that will inform their professional practice. I also know that by simply sitting in a class together they now also have each other as they move out into the world, one of the often under recognized benefits of being at university.

Luzaan Isaacs

Job 2

My job with the African Centre for Cities (ACC) sees me heading up an Urban Ecology CityLab. The CityLabs follow the notion of city as ‘Laboratory’ and a number of thematic CityLabs have been set up to foster the transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge between the academy, the various tiers of government running the City of Cape Town, and broader society. In each instance the work generated is meant to be put towards a publication.

Here, while still steeped in the theory and practice of urban ecology, my engagements take a different turn. My role is not instructive, but that of facilitator. I am conscious of being among a diverse working group of well-informed colleagues (again a miscellany of generalists and specialists) and guiding this group through the process of sharing and creating knowledge. After the first two years of the initiation of the CityLab programme, a group of us CityLab leaders got together to reflect on the CityLab process. This brought to light a number of interesting insights, where for example the spatial geography of the meetings significantly influenced attendance and outcomes, and debates around appropriate terminology had resulted in irreparable schisms. In the Urban Ecology CityLab we ran a series of seminars, on the basis of which we worked towards a special issue publication. I was not sure in the end if we managed to pierce any disciplinary boundaries. Generally we worked well across institutions. For example we had papers co-authored by staff at the City and staff of the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), and papers co-authored by staff at UCT and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

But we did not have papers that were co-authored between a social scientist and a botanist, or an anthropologist and a zoologist. I think it might come down once again to methods. We are married to our methods, guarding our own territory closely on the basis of some secret society bounded by method. It is our security blanket, and often the site of great mistrust. As scientists we believe we are only as good as our method. What we achieved was a collective output, rather than any true transdisciplinary engagement.

I believe, indeed fear, that until we are happy to really acknowledge the value of each other’s method, any real transdisciplinary engagement, so critical to urban ecology and more broadly global sustainability, will continue to elude us. Simon Lewis (quoted in Zoe Corbyn’s piece ‘Ecologists shun the urban jungle’), commenting on the failure of ecologists to engage in the social really, calls us on it when he attributes this to the fact that it helps make complex systems more analytically tractable.

In other words, when upacking a complicated multidisciplinary problem, we often have more fealty to the method that to understanding.

These musings around the need for, and frequent failure to achieve, integrated and more holistic research in the urban, are of course not new. The literature is full of reference to the need for complex methods to engage with the complexity of cities, and the call for transdisciplinary work. There are good stories, and I do stumble on the occasional inspiring and insightful collaborations in the literature. For example, Vesa Yli-Pelkonen and Jari Niemela (2005) give a very frank account of the rewards and challenges in work in Finland that aimed to integrate ecological and social systems.

However, the examples do not abound, and I think we still have a big leap to take in forging methods that really bring together the diversity of research needed to understand the workings of our cities. Certainly in my own world I think a conservative approach to research on the basis of discipline-specific methods, developed in our silos, is retarding our progress in forging the cities of the future.

Job 3

Moving to my third ‘job’, I ask the question: ‘how do you raise children to be decent human beings with sound ethics and an appreciation of the natural environment?’ And given my own particular fascination with urban ecology: ‘how do you raise urban children to be ecologically aware and thoughtful, and give them the necessary tools to see, and experience nature in our cities?

With children (mine anyway) I am increasingly aware there is limited teaching and instruction. In part we set up patterns and rhythms that they fall into step with, and in part allow them space to dance to their own beat. My children spend much of their time out of doors in and around the City of Cape Town. Our front yard often looks like the high water mark after a heavy storm, with sticks, seaweed, stones and all manner of flotsam and jetsam lying about.

butterfly

Like my graduate students, they are also not short of questions. At the moment they are exploring what happens to dead jelly fish when you freeze them. As for robust method, well, they are not there yet, but they have an unbounded and exploratory approach that is inspiring. Perhaps we lose our willingness to try new stuff, and become too rigid in our approach to problem solving. Perhaps if we embraced their open-minded approach, and accept a process of experiential learning throughout life, we might be less stubborn in our engagements with others and more open to ongoing learning.

Young people, my graduate students and my kids, pose interesting and unusual questions. They pose the kinds of difficult questions that integrate different areas of thought and reflect the complex world we live in.

They are, however, short on the methods.

My colleagues, on the other hand, may be too precious about their methods.

There is certainly space for experts; the specialists who will contribute the detailed and fine work and grow the disciplines. Much of the work required in understanding our cities will however require a more integrated approach. What I would like to see is the retention of some of the youthful no-categories approach to urban study, and the forging of a new and unified methodology that will facilitate real multidisciplinary work.

My sense is that there is a growing understanding of this need and that we are ripe for the revolution.

Pippin Anderson
Cape Town

For The Nature of Cities

All photos by Pippin Anderson

A concept drawing of a park

Threading the Needle: Advancing Equitable Green Infrastructure Investments in US Cities

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Art, Science, Action: Cities Re-imagined

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As we continue to make positive ecological, economic, and social impacts in each community, we have been asking ourselves how we can “thread the needle” and invest in vulnerable and disadvantaged communities while minimizing the negative impacts of gentrification and displacement.

Dr. Ian Mell from the University of Manchester recently published an article in Frontiers in Sustainable Cities on the role of green infrastructure in cities as a tool for economic and ecological “regeneration”. Dr. Mell’s article is one of a series of articles in both the peer-reviewed and popular literature that is critically analyzing whether urban greening projects are, not only providing measurable ecological benefits, but also providing “positive change” in communities.

Dr. Mell’s article identifies two United States examples where green infrastructure development has resulted in varying levels of gentrification and displacement — The New York City High Line and the Atlanta BeltLine. An earlier study by researchers at the University of Utah and the University of Colorado in Urban Studies found that long linear greenway parks like those in New York and Atlanta (plus Chicago’s 606 trail and Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park) cause the most gentrification due to the amount of real estate development and redevelopment that can take place in close proximity to the amenity. Although the study also found that parks near downtown caused relatively greater gentrification than other new parks in cities, the study finds that there is less gentrification on balance in cities with higher-quality park systems.

Based on these findings, Dr. Mell sums up urban greening initiatives well: “All investment in [green infrastructure] …needs to be cognizant of the benefits and disservices that may develop because of landscape change. These potential problems should not limit the discussion of [green infrastructure] intervention in regeneration activities but should be examined to assess who benefits and who loses from change, and how any negative aspects of [green infrastructure] can be mitigated against.” As new urban greening projects come online around the US, more attention is now being paid to ensure that the negative externalities and unintended consequences of well-intentioned investments are minimized and that any new “value capture” near these projects can benefit the current residents near these amenities.

For the past decade, The Conservation Fund has been involved in green infrastructure regeneration in US cities through its Parks with Purpose program, with pilot initiatives in places like Atlanta, Baltimore, Durham, and Raleigh. As we continue to make positive ecological, economic, and social impacts in each community, we have been asking ourselves how we can “thread the needle” and invest in vulnerable and disadvantaged communities while minimizing the negative impacts of gentrification and displacement.

While we do not have all the answers, The Conservation Fund has been intentional with approaches intended to support local communities and minimize unintended consequences. These include: (1) planning, development, and construction of parks by the community (residents near Mattie Freeland Park identified key amenities during the visioning process); and (2) identifying opportunities for local value (acquisition of commercial land adjacent to the Harbour-8 Park in Richmond, California to support local park maintenance).

Mattie Freeland Park concept drawing
Mattie Freeland Park concept drawing. Credit: Park Pride

The next frontier in this work, supported by the findings of the study referenced earlier, is a two-pronged approach. For linear and downtown green infrastructure, affordable housing provision and anti-displacement regulations, through tax increment financing and inclusionary housing tactics, can be implemented. For other areas of the city, making more green infrastructure investments in park-poor, lower-income communities, in combination with protecting nearby affordable housing, would make cities more equitable and livable. Alessandro Rigolon from the University of Utah Department of City & Metropolitan Planning and Jon Christensen from the UCLA Institute of Environment & Sustainability are demonstrating leadership in this space through their research into parks-related anti-displacement strategies (PRADS).

Coordinating green infrastructure investment and affordable housing will be an ongoing challenge given the institutional history and constraints of each industry, but it will be worth the effort to try and, as I like to say, would not be any fun if it was easy.

Will Allen
Chapel Hill

On The Nature of Cities

Three Case Studies in Re-wilding: Models and Methods for Other Cities to Consider

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Re-wilding beckons landscape architects to embrace a logical next step…to release artistic conceits altogether and replace them with the actual landscape type naturally intended, as much as is realistically possible.
Re-wilding is a new area of interest in landscape architecture concerned with making landscapes that are as close to the original ecology of a place as possible. Not limited to only planting installations, re-wilded landscapes can also exist to attract, reconstitute and/or re-introduce wildlife to heighten biodiversity.

Given the emergence of environmental issues at the scale of the planet, the interests, activities, and design works of landscape architects in the last few decades have evolved. Now, highly designed and artfully conceived landscapes include prosaic elements, such as constructed wetlands, areas for wildlife habitat, plants for pollinators, and features that perform as “living machines”. These new concerns have transformed ordinary elements such as drainage and detention features into performance-driven inventions such as biofilters and bioswales.

Re-wilded Trinity River. Rendering: Courtesy, Kevin Sloan Studio, Vincent Hunter, AIA

Since landscape architecture originates from a long and great history of gardens and artistic conceits made with living materials and natural systems, it’s understandable how the discipline continues to sustain the artful and intellectual dimension of landscape design as the new performance-driven landscapes culturally take hold. In fact, the very definition of a garden is any landscape that is charged with metaphorical meanings and abstractions.

Recent images of environmentally motivated works in landscape architecture that include native grasses, wetlands, and oyster beds to improve water quality, will arrange the elements into artful arrays, dramatic forms, and abstract relationships, as if, when all is taken together, the artistry and compositional relationships remain the priority over environmental performance.

In cases where it is appropriate and environmental performance is the priority, re-wilding compels landscape architecture to move beyond image-driven design for its own sake and embrace the full potential a performative landscape program offers. The three following case studies demonstrate that re-wilding does not present an “either/or” choice. Rather, they are extraordinarily compatible if handled with the right kind of attention.

Three Natures. Image: Curiositez de la Nature ed de L’Art, Pierre Le Lorrain de Vallemont (Creator)

Re-wilding beckons landscape architects to take the next logical next step in the evolution from highly designed landscapes to ecologically driven solutions. That leap, whether it is a small part of larger design work, or the entire work itself, involves letting go of the artistic conceits altogether and replacing them with the actual landscape that is intended, as much as is realistically possible.

This article examines three re-wilding case studies that all were recently built in metropolitan Dallas. Each case study offers a different approach taken to re-wilding, along with the political and economic methods used to achieve them. Dallas-Fort Worth is a compelling platform for re-wilding because the colossal geography, settled at an average human density of one person per acre, has enabled wildlife to take hold in the undersigned spaces between buildings and throughout the watershed network.

Bobcat City. Photo: Texas Parks and Wildlife Film Title, “Bobcat City”.

As evidence for wildlife in the city, a recent film by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, titled Bobcat City, is a documentary about a graduate research program studying urban wildcats in DFW. Red fox, coyotes, turkey flocks, beavers, alligators, and river otters are just a few of the wild species frequently seen in DFW. Cities have always had rats, mice and other parasites that thrive with human urbanism. Wildlife, and the attendant food chains are radical and new phenomena that are distinctly and uniquely the product of the twentieth century and its sprawling and sparse suburban patterns.

DFW is also relevant for the topic and for a broader world audience to consider, because the pattern which formed the metroplex is not unique—it is typical, if not identical, to the patterns that also constitute similar cities such as Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, as well as the perimeter regions that flourished around the historical centers of East Coast cities in North America and also in Europe. Coming to terms and contending with the problems in Dallas, offers us lessons and examples that could apply to the same generic patterns throughout the world.

The three case studies examined by this article, all in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, are:

  1. The John Bunker Sands Wetland.
  2. The Airfield Falls Conservation Park.
  3. The Trinity River Audubon Center in the Great Trinity Forest.

1. The John Bunker Sands Wetland Center

Replacement view across the John Bunker Sands Wetland. Photo: GFF Good Fulton & Farrell Architects

The development of environmental techniques to re-wild is also producing innovative methods to fund and drive their realization. Located just twenty miles from downtown Dallas, Texas, the 2,000-acre John Bunker Sands Wetland Center (JBS) is a model for taking a problem and combining it with a set of other possibilities that, when taken together, enlarge the outcome and cultural impact of all.

JBS Education Center. Photo: GFF Good Fulton & Farrell Architects

For visitors, the outward image of JBS is a nature project and a constructed wetland for public education and use. Situated within a unique, sinkhole-like basin of approximately 4,000 continuous acres, a single, special-use building receives visitors, offering a set of permanent exhibits, flexible galleries, administrative space and open, programmable rooms that are wrapped with glass and broad shaded verandas. Admission is free, and on days the center is open, visitors savor the exhibits and trails that extend throughout the wetlands over levee paths and walkable wooden trestles.

Without in any way misleading visitors from the enjoyment of their nature outing, the sense of “publicness” that JBS presents conceals the fact it is actually privately owned, as one part of the vast 28,000-acre Rosewood Ranch, a land trust for a significant Texas family. While the idea of shaping public spaces with private hands is not new, it is typically utilized to realize urban parks, cultural institutions, museums, and performance halls, versus as a model for an environmental reconstruction that is publicly accessible. However, there is more to the realization of JBS that makes it an exceptional example of environmental engineering and a model for other places to consider.

JBS Waterfowl. Photo: John Bunker Sands Wetland Center

For several years prior to the construction of the JBS wetland project, the flat and poorly drained 2,000 acres made the property too wet for agriculture and cattle ranching. Seasonal rains combined with the flat terrain made any kind of land planning and management, unpredictable. Itinerant ponds, potholes, and marshes could appear with seasonal rains to inundate crops. Conversely, in drier years, drought and evaporation turned the network of potholes into a muddy flat that was inaccessible for tractors, trucks, and all-terrain vehicles.

The key that unlocked the potential of JBS, and also solved all the associated land use problems, began with the idea to transform the area into a municipal water storage project for Dallas. By coincidence, the location of JBS is not only close to downtown Dallas, but it is also near a set of regional reservoirs that supply raw water to DFW. Since these reservoirs are also susceptible to drought and unpredictable water levels, JBS stores water that can be transferred to the reservoirs via pipeline to offset the effects of drought.

The environmental engineering that was needed to manage water for the JBS land produced an interconnected system of marshy pools defined by earthen levees. Installing a program of re-wilded wetland plants, a system of trails and trestles for public access, and an iconic visitor center turned what was an otherwise utilitarian water project into a thriving, multi-functional landscape for wildlife and cultural potential.

Educational outreach completes the JBS mission with programs that accommodate visits from elementary schools, wildfowl enthusiasts, birders, and individuals from the city who may simply want a day outing to walk the trail system and appreciate the abundant wildlife. Private groups can also rent JBS for use. During the fall, JBS sponsors a youth duck hunting day that also offers educational seminars in conservation and gun safety.

Mussel-Hunting at JBS. Photo: Wetland Link International

John Bunker Sands Wetland Center is a model of environmental accomplishment. The clever combination of re-imagining a water conservation strategy, educational outreach, tax abatements, environmental resilience, and making public places with private lands were made cohesive with a re-wilded landscape. Much more can be done with the strategy in other places.

2. The Airfield Falls Conservation Park – Fort Worth, Texas

The Airfield from the Pavilion. Photo: Courtesy Kevin Sloan Studio, Timothy Hursley

With any new design movement such as re-wilding, the concept and description have the potential to be misunderstood. Given the great history of landscape architecture as an art and design activity for cultural production, it is understandable that re-wilding could be misunderstood as a renunciation of design and artfulness.

The Airfield Falls Conservation Park in west Fort Worth Texas is one of the newest re-wilding examples which clarifies that architecture and a re-wilded nature can co-exist, not as an option but as a necessity. In this case, the combination and contrast of the two conditions heightens the appreciation and experience of each individually.

During the Cold War, Carswell Air Force Base (AFB) in West Fort Worth, Texas was one of the largest Air Force and military installations for long-range bombing and domestic defense in North America. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1988, the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990 relocated the 7th Bomb Wing from Carswell AFB to Dyess AFB near Abilene, Texas. This resulted in not only a massive downsizing in Carswell’s population but also a significant reduction in size to the airbase geography. Approximately one-fifth of the former area of the base was relinquished to private land speculation. The more modest military outpost that remained is known as the Fort Worth Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base.

Airfield Falls. Photo: Courtesy Kevin Sloan Studio, Timothy Hursley

In reducing the fenced and secured footprint of the airbase, two regional creeks that were formerly sequestered within the base are now available for public recreation. One of these, Farmers Branch Creek, features a natural set of cantilevering limestone ledges that are the tallest natural waterfall in the north Texas region. Inaccessibility to the waterfall during the Carswell years had made the waterfall somewhat mysterious and legendary in local lore. The project objective was to provide access to the waterfall with a park and trail system. The project purpose was extended by an additional client-driven request to make a state-of-the-art water-conserving landscape.

The Tarrant County Regional Water District (TRWD) under whose jurisdiction the creeks and the parkland are held, wanted the yet-to-be-realized, seventeen-acre “trailhead park” to become the next addition to their vast network of hike and bike trails that already traced other creeks and rivers of their system. The request for a water-conserving landscape would also offer the benefit of introducing park users to water-conserving practices and plant materials that could, by logical extension, eventually reduce demands on the raw water supply as the new lessons circulate throughout the city.

The five-acre area off of Pumphrey Drive in Fort Worth, where park users arrive, coincides with the historic location of the former base commander’s house. All that remains of the commander’s residence are a few foundation walls, the stone curbing of a circle driveway, and a D-shaped concrete terrace that provided a pleasant creek view which was frequently a meeting place to discuss military strategies amongst officers and politicians. The five-acre arrival area also required a program of architectural elements for visitors, set into a re-wilded, water-conserving landscape.

Airfield Car Park. Photo: Courtesy Kevin Sloan Studio, Timothy Hursley

A water-harvesting car park is the first element that visitors encounter. The car park demonstrates two tree and understory examples of how to make shade in paved areas; with tightly spaced live oaks on one side, and a low, non-irrigated gravel paver landscape on the other side. Grading precision directs stormwater into a horsetail reed planted bio-swale and also toward a flume that cascades some of the stormwater into a rain garden pond. Rows of tables that encourage picnics form a line and edge between the car park demo and the open lawn that is planted with Habiturf®, a native grass mix that is the trademark of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas.

Two wings and the tail section of a McDonnell Douglas C-9 Nightingale Transport Jet were donated to the park by the air base for display. Instead of treating the three aircraft pieces like disparate sculptural objects, the design team elected to reassemble them as a dramatic structural tri-pod that forms a gateway arch to the trail system. The 100-foot wide wingspan of the display was also re-wired to illuminate the navigation lights of the wingtips and tail section. Low energy LED lighting extends the conservation lessons of the park, as does a set of night lighting fixtures that are the same as those used by the US Air Force. Both considerations extend the conservation mission of the park and also the history of the site.

Hanging Out. Photo: Courtesy Kevin Sloan Studio, Timothy Hursley

Lastly, a shaded family picnic shelter made of powder-coated steel sections re-use the foundation walls of the base commanders house and repurpose the extended patio for park users. All of the architectural objects stand in abject contrast to a natural landscape that is either untouched or enhanced with additional eco-constructing plant species. The use of Habiturf® ties it all together.

The arrival area, containing the display of architectural objects, exits into the second park section; a quarter mile long path, re-wilded with 30,000 pollinator-attracting plants. Once across the existing creek bridge, the six-foot-wide concrete path parallels the creek ensconced by dense tree cover and shade of the creek edge. This “Butterfly Walk” concludes at another bridge over the creek, where the waterfall is reached in a short distance. Nothing at or around the waterfall was touched or modified by the design project.

After testing to confirm the water quality in the creek, the TRWD allows visitors to get into the plunge pools of the waterfall. Children splash and play along with pets that are restrained by a leash.

When experienced, the Airfield Falls Conservation Park offers three sequential landscapes that progress from a re-wilded field with architectural objects, to bio-filtering landscape surfaces, to an untouched and preserved natural waterfall. The image of the front area in particular, with its orange and white, airfield elements and the monumental scale of the historic jet display, is a landscape of mismatched wild and architectural elements.

Airfield Falls entrance. Photo: Courtesy Kevin Sloan Studio, Timothy Hursley

Bobcats, turkey flocks, foxes, coyote, river otters, and countless avian species have been sited at Airfield Falls Conservation Park. At sundown, when the airfield lights turn on, and the nearby air base broadcasts Taps, visitors note seeing the park mingling wildlife with a re-wilded landscape of nature and architecture. As a case study, the lessons it offers establish an alternative set of possibilities for re-wilding and landscape architecture.

Airfield Falls demonstrates how re-wilding can enlarge the impact of a project done with a modest budget. In lieu of the cost of reworking an entire site with design, the select and strategic introduction of architectural objects transforms the untouched landscape into a perceivable intention. It also demonstrates that re-wilding need not be thought of as a precinct that is two-dimensionally separate from or adjacent to a project context. Instead, Airfield Falls became a re-wilded field condition dotted by highly designed architectural objects. The added coincidence that the re-wilding was agreeable to the existing wildlife already present at the two site creeks confirmed the appropriateness of the idea and also served as a lesson for similar circumstances.

3. The Dallas Trinity River Audubon Center (TRAC)

TRAC Harvest Table. Photo: Trinity River Audubon Center, National Audubon Society

Dedicated in 2008, the Dallas Trinity River Audubon Center sits on 120-acres of reclaimed land and illegal dump-site that exist within the vast, 10,000-acre Trinity River Floodway corridor. Located safely above the inundation line of the Trinity River flood management corridor, the Center exists between a climax community of riparian trees and hardwoods known as The Trinity River Forest to the south and an eight-mile, levee-protected and grassed conveyance area to the north.

The location of TRAC near the threshold where the grassy conveyance transitions to the forest, anticipates a forty-year-long desire by patrons and stakeholders in Dallas to realize the entire 10,000-acre corridor as a publicly accessible urban park. Over four decades, nine distinct plans have been developed by acclaimed and internationally renowned landscape architects. While a recent plan by MVVA is proposed for the area between the two new highway bridges by Spanish architect, Santiago Calatrava, no federally approved plan, nor a means to fund another one, currently exists.

Walkway. Photo: Trinity River Audubon Center, National Audubon Society

The Trinity River Center epitomizes and embodies the national mission of The Audubon Society: what is good for birds is good for everyone. TRAC was specifically developed to fulfill two purposes: “the production of habitat for indigenous and migratory birds”, and to “serve as a place that will form a nature connection between visitors and the environment”. Education is the common product of both goals, since “people don’t tend to care about things they don’t understand”, notes Lucy Hale, the current director. The more people who understand how songbirds are the coal mine canaries of the environment, the more they can appreciate the critical role of nature, the environment, and their relationship to both.

While the architecture at TRAC is charged with abstractions, dramatic cantilevers, and poetic meanings, the re-wilded landscape around it is pure prose. Consisting of seven miles of publicly accessible paths, dotted with blackland prairie potholes, the re-wilded landscape has produced a compelling reason for its existence.

Audubon Center. Photo: Dallas Observer

The Dallas Trinity River Audubon Center is a textbook example of twentieth-century writer Sigfried Gideon’s notion of “the machine in the garden”. But where Gideon’s twentieth-century machine suggests a highly designed garden that is human-made, re-wilding offers a new kind of garden that is wild. Such a contrast, taken to a practical and poetic conclusion, heightens the potential and experience of both.

Summary

A re-wilded landscape can offer an experience of beautiful wildflowers, song birds, and fall color. But they can also include encounters with poisonous snakes, wildcats, undesirable plants, and other species who are unhesitant to defend themselves during face-to-face encounters with people. Even the seemingly bucolic and shaded environment of the Great Trinity River Forest has inadvertently drowned fishermen caught and overwhelmed by floodwaters from a deluge that occurred far upstream.

TRAC Trails. Photo: Trinity River Audubon Center, National Audubon Society

The realities of a re-wilded landscape demand that individuals set aside the distractions of cell phones and their ubiquitous internet access, which allow individuals the privilege of moving through environments while unaware of their surroundings.

In this respect, re-wilding begins to strike a philosophical chord. For humanity to sustain a beneficial relationship with the environment and planet, Nature and how people relate to it, cannot be ignored. Perhaps it is this attribute which best recommends re-wilding as a new and conscious objective for cities.

Kevin Sloan
Dallas-Fort Worth

On The Nature of Cities

Three Key Ideas for Making Sense of Climate Change Adaptation in Urban Ecosystem Management

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The sustainability of urban ecosystems depends on how we respond to future social, economic, and environmental challenges. From reducing the negative effects of highly engineered infrastructure on the ecological functioning of natural systems in cities, to achieving a more equal provision of ecosystem services in the urban social landscape, each challenge is unique.

Effectively adapting to climate change means addressing uncertainty while taking a dynamic view of urban natural systems.

However, no challenge has more potential to exacerbate problems and cut across social, environmental, and economic fields than climate change. This is partly because of the complexity of its manifestations, including: 1) increase of average temperatures, enhanced by the urban heat island effect; 2) change in hydrological regimes, which may result in more, less, or more variable rain; 3) increase in the frequency and severity of weather events, which may not be limited to “warm” events, such as tropical storms, but may also include prolonged dry spells, ice storms, or frosting events. Also, climate change requires a complex response, which necessitates putting together a wide range of ecological, social, economic, and political strategies that may be too difficult to conjure all at once in small-scale management landscapes, such as urban parks.

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Many urban rivers concentrate urban nature, particularly densely forested areas. With climate change, these may be more vulnerable to changing hydrological conditions, such as intense storms or prolonged droughts. This riparian forested area in the Santa Rita River, a subsidiary of the Cali river, in Cali, Colombia, is an example of that. Photo: Camilo Ordóñez

Although climate change is being considered more and more in urban ecosystem management, I sometimes see an over-excitement about hasty and narrowly-conceived climate strategies. My experience is in urban forestry, where, for example, people usually argue that just planting more trees is the best way to address climate change. This idea has gained so much popularity that many cities are doubling or tripling their tree-planting targets. Obviously, the motivation for this is to enhance the benefits of urban trees, such as reducing urban heat, among other climate-related benefits. However, although planting more trees is a welcomed activity in itself, planting trees without giving any thought to climate adaptation may actually result in a higher mortality of newly planted trees. Urban trees are already vulnerable to the harsh conditions they grow in, such as compacted soils—conditions that have nothing to do with climate change, yet tree decline may be further exacerbated with the effects of climate change. For example, a tree surrounded by concrete and already struggling to survive may be more severely affected by a tropical storm. Considering that urban-tree planting is a considerable expense (e.g. many North-American cities today spend $250-500USD/tree in new street-tree plantings), our concern should be to maximize their benefits in a changing climate, instead of just blindly planting a lot of trees.

I believe that maximizing the benefits of urban nature in a changing climate depends on a strong adoption of some of the often-overlooked ideas related to climate adaptation. Contributors to TNOC have argued that national climate change strategies fail to address regional and local microclimatic realities (Villagra, 2016), while others show how engineering solutions for climate-proofing actually exacerbate climate vulnerability and social inequity (Shi and Anguelovski, 2016), or how climate change is actually an opportunity for reinstating nature-based solutions in cities (Garvin, 2016). I want to contribute to these efforts by revisiting some of these often-overlooked ideas and making better sense of climate change adaptation, drawing from my experience in urban forestry. Some of these ideas may be old for seasoned TNOC participants, others new for those new to TNOC, and yet others may have been only implied in passing in other TNOC articles. If anything, my intention is to bring these ideas to the forefront of the discussion.

1. Let’s increase adaptive capacity, instead of just mitigating impacts

When we think of climate-change impacts we intuitively start thinking about how to mitigate them. If the day is going to get hot, we seek the shade of a tree. Mitigating the impacts of climate change on urban ecosystems is an important issue. We can plant more trees in parks so people can escape the heat. We can also build barrages to protect a naturalized riparian forest from flooding, or develop storm-response programs to take care of trees in the case of a storm. But increasing the resistance of urban nature to the external threats of climate change can only go so far. If the trees we plant in a park are all the same species, they may be more vulnerable to a pest or disease that attacks that particular species and that is being driven by warmer temperatures. If a larger flood event than the ones the barrage was meant to stop comes, then our riparian forest will still get flooded. As important as impact mitigation is, we also need to work towards increasing adaptive capacity.

In broad terms, adaptation is the adjustment of a system in response or in anticipation to changing conditions. The adaptive capacity, or the characteristics that make a system capable of adapting to change, of urban ecosystems is important given the existing climate vulnerability of cities. Although the vulnerability of cities to climate change depends on the magnitude and intensity of changing global patterns and their local manifestations, it also depends on the conditions that already exist. For instance, for historic, cultural, environmental, and economic reasons, the majority of world cities are located in coastal areas, while a significant number of cities are located in mountainous regions, as in Latin America. Coastal and mountainous regions will be severely affected by climate change given the intrinsic variability of climate in these regions, which includes a higher frequency of storms, a more variable precipitation regime, and dependence on glacial water sources. Add to this an intensification of urbanization patterns, inadequate land use regimes, unsustainable livelihoods, undemocratic political organization, and a deteriorating natural environment, and we have conditions of high climate vulnerability, a determining factor in the direction of change for urban ecosystems.

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In 2013, the city of Toronto was affected by a severe ice storm. The weight of the ice brought down a number of urban trees and broke numerous branches, causing evident damage to trees, infrastructure, and people. With climate change, ice storms may become more frequent and/or severe in certain urban regions. Photo: http://www.yourleaf.org

Increasing adaptive capacity may be a more important consideration in urban ecosystem management than mitigating impacts if a climate response is to be sustained in the long term, since mitigation responses may be downplayed by a mal-adapted system. When we only think of mitigating impacts, such as when we plant trees in a park without thinking if they are susceptible to a pest or a disease, the solution may actually become a part of the problem. Adaptation requires us to have a more dynamic view of urban natural systems, since these must thrive in a very different climate. The adaptive imperative is crucial from a climate adaptation perspective.

Our task, then, is to translate this adaptive vision into practical techniques. An adaptive response in the case of planting trees in a park, or protecting a riparian forest from flooding, may mean modifying the species and age mix of these urban forests in such a way that they can withstand pest and diseases, or flooding and storms, on their own. In the case of planting trees on a street, it may also mean improving soil conditions so the trees that are planted can grow to be robust and to withstand any attacks by pest and/or diseases, or by storms; or maybe planting trees at a younger age, since these can be more malleable to changing conditions. These techniques speak to a more general goal of creating dynamic natural areas in cities that emulate or enhance those natural patterns that are more favourable in shifting conditions and that optimize their functionality, without sacrificing their ecological integrity.

Undeniably, an adaptive response in urban areas will not be complete without the human element. So, climate adaptation in urban ecosystem management also means enhancing community participation programs to engage people in the management of newly-planted trees in parks, or riparian forest set aside for conservation. This doesn’t just mean raising the public’s awareness of the benefits of urban trees and natural areas, or asking residents for a helping hand in tending them, such as asking them to water them once in a while, or even gathering volunteers regularly for tree-planting events. A strong community program means actually allowing people to participate in the management of urban nature. This may mean establishing more public consultation processes in the development of management plans, or establishing community-based steering committees for an urban park or a residential area full of public street trees. If we have more people both interested in seeing urban natural areas thrive and engaged in their management, then climate change can be confronted effectively.

2. Let’s think about uncertainty and try to address it

Some people think of climate change as something that will happen far away in the future and they look at 50 to 100-year projections to inform their decisions. Others think that the changes are already starting to occur, and the drought, flooding, heatwaves, and ice storms they see right now will soon become the new norm. In reality, no matter how useful climate change projections are, or how indicative current weather is, we may never know the absolute magnitude of climate change and have no empirical basis to know how urban ecosystems may respond to it. We also do not know if our cities will live through cultural shifts that will reduce or increase the importance of urban nature. This “uncertainty”—known formally as the expression of the degree to which a value is unknown because of disagreements of what is known or even knowable—is a very important aspect of climate change.

Climate change uncertainty cannot be addressed with a static vision of the future determined to mitigate climate change impacts that may or may not manifest in the way they are projected. However, uncertainty does not make us powerless or our management strategies trivial. Uncertainty should not limit the development of climate-adaptation strategies. One of the things we can do right now is to assess the direction of change and what factors are contributing to this change, so we know if we can expect more, or less, or different, urban nature. This means increasing the amount of climate change vulnerability assessments (or CCVAs) of our urban natural resources, including doing CCVAs for urban forests, urban wetlands, and other natural features in cities. We also need to develop communication strategies so that we can build a language for communicating uncertainty openly and clearly to other stakeholders, allowing them to understand the degree of confidence we have at a particular moment in taking a decision regarding climate change. Finally, uncertainty requires us to diversify our portfolio of management strategies so we can increase the chances of reducing it. In the particular case of planting trees in cities, it may require us to diversity our planting techniques. Instead of just planting 5-yr old trees wide apart, we could combine this with planting trees closer together and/or planting them at a younger age, among many other techniques that diversify how we plant trees in cities and reduce uncertainty.

3. Let’s bring back adaptive management so we can learn before things get worse

The 1970s saw the emergence of a so-called “adaptive management” approach to ecosystem management (Holling, 1978). This theoretical construct was widely used to adjust management to the dynamic stability of natural systems. Although still widely used as a buzzword, many times the idea of adaptive management doesn’t materialize into anything substantial. Today, and with climate change, we have an opportunity to bring the principles embedded in the notion of adaptive management back to life.

The majority of us have an intuitive notion of adaptive management and see it simply as management that adapts to new circumstances. In fact, this conceptualization is widely used in ecosystem management plans. But such simplification is actually dangerous, since it may result in a reactive approach to management. To avoid this shallow interpretation, we need to be more proactive. In real terms, adaptive management refers to the integration of uncertainty and change into management by devising learning processes based on monitoring and experimentation activities that in turn feed back not just into management actions, but also into the basic assumptions and values of the management model.

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This newly planted tree struggles to survive in the harsh urban environment of Bogotá, Colombia. With climate change, newly planted trees may be more vulnerable to changing climatic conditions, unless changes in planting techniques are adopted, such as planting smaller trees and planting in tree clusters. Photo: Camilo Ordóñez

Adaptive management is the cornerstone for managing climate change in urban ecosystems because it promotes monitoring and experimentation, activities that help us to be more proactive on the basis of the results of our activities on the ground. Monitoring and experimentation embrace uncertainty and establish a mechanism to reduce it. This is even more relevant in urban ecosystems, where complex socio-ecological dynamics and rapid or sudden changes usually determine the pace of change.

So, any climate-inspired activity in urban ecosystem management, such as planting more urban trees, needs to be complemented with strong monitoring and experimentation programs. A monitoring program can be used to collect data on the survival rate of these newly planted trees, which is crucial to understanding how climate change is playing a role in tree survival. An experimentation program may involve setting up lab experiments, either in a tree nursery or in a control urban environment, where different planting treatments, such as planting smaller trees and planting tree in clusters, can be set up to understand how successful these can be for ensuring the survival of newly planted trees. If adopted boldly, the whole city can be viewed as a living laboratory for urban forests, where we experiment, in a controlled and systematic manner, with different planting and management techniques that educate us today, faster, about the future.

Nature-based solutions to climate change: an economic justification

Because of their political, economic, social, and environmental conditions, cities will differ in the way they approach nature-based solutions to climate change problems, and will also differ in the way they can bring adaptive capacity, uncertainty, and adaptive management to the core of what they do. Climate change is certainly not an easy challenge for cities. Economically, not everybody can allocate budgets for planting more urban trees. Politically, not everybody has a centralized system government, or even enough public land, to coordinate nature-based strategies at the city scale, such as planting a million trees. Socially, poverty and lack of education may be more pressing issues in some neighbourhoods than spending more money on planting trees.

However, nature-based solutions to climate change can also provide low-cost, decentralized, poverty-alleviating, and educational opportunities in urban areas (see Garvin, 2016). And in cases where nature-based solutions are the preferred option to respond to the climate challenge, adaptation is a better way to think about how to manage them. Climate-proofing a riparian forest zone through conservation and tree-planting strategies requires the ecological savvy to do so, but ultimately it takes less money than a flood-resistant barrage to protect such a zone. Engaging private stakeholders in tree-planting and engaging citizens in the management of urban natural areas may actually reduce centralized municipal efforts and budgets. A tree-monitoring program could be led by citizen scientists; citizen leaders could collect data on the survival rates of newly planted trees using free-to-download cellphone applications. Finally, experimenting with different planting techniques, such as planting smaller trees and planting in clusters, may be cheaper in the long-term than investing in highly engineered tree-supporting infrastructure. Eventually, an adaptive mindset will pay for itself in the changing urban world we live in.

Camilo Ordóñez
Toronto

On The Nature of Cities

A diagram of how nbs effect community interactions

Three Lessons for Co-creating Nature-based Solutions: How Can We Build Natural Networks to Deliver the Deal With Stakeholders?

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Art, Science, Action: Cities Re-imagined

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Quite often city-makers who want to implement nature-based solutions run into many hurdles standing in the way of realising their green ideals. But how do you tear down those walls? Effective co-creation is a path forward.

More than half of the world’s population lives and works in diverse, bustling cities. And perhaps, if you are reading this blog, you have a desire to make these places we call home greener—it can be done with nature-based solutions! Quite often city-makers who want to implement nature-based solutions run into many hurdles standing in the way of realising their green ideals. In this blog, DRIFT intern and Connecting Nature project member Shibeal McCann shares how adaptability and communication can help to overcome these hurdles collectively.

During an enlightening session (“Building natural networks and delivering the deal with stakeholders”) at the Glasgow Innovation Summit (23-25 March), I heard experiences from the cities of Glasgow, Genk, and A Coruña, as they endeavoured to explore how to deliver city-scale green networks using nature-based solutions.

We heard three contrasting examples, yet a coherent story on governance with unifying themes emerged—of adaptability and communication. Each city initiated networks to achieve a common vision that could not have been achieved alone. We heard firsthand the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of building networks to deliver the deal with stakeholders. Knowledge was shared that has relevance beyond the region and context it came from. We discussed insights into how to build networks in our own work. What stood out is that delivering parks is by no means a walk in the park. Here are the lessons I took away from this session.

A screenshot of five people in a Zoom call
Session: Building natural networks and delivering the deal with stakeholders – Glasgow Innovation Summit

Lesson #1: Strike the right tone

While building networks between people and places is encouraged, it is not easy, as explicit knowledge and textbooks on the topic are few and far between. As project manager, Max Hislop presented the hardships faced when he and his team set out to develop the Glasgow Clyde Valley (GCV) Green Network Blueprint, Scotland, UK.

Their journey from development to delivery began over fifteen years ago. The GCV Network blueprint is a strategic master plan which seeks to turn Glasgow City Region ‘green’ by developing green networks. The master plan includes installing walking and cycling routes to break up the conurbation (high density of buildings) of Glasgow while leaving room for wild spaces to return to for wild animals. Three cheers for Glasgow’s response to the biodiversity and climate emergency we are facing!

A simplified geometric map of the Green Network
Green Network – The Blueprint. https://www.gcvgreennetwork.gov.uk/

In all this, communication is key. You need to speak the language of your partners in the process and avoid complex data. The GCV team learned this the hard way when they presented a detailed, integrated habitat model mapping the networks of species to urban planners. It flew over the crowd’s head. The team had to accept that data is only effective if it can be communicated properly to the audience in question. This setback forced them to adapt, and, since then, they’ve started discussing this topic with urban planners in a shared language, linking the model to the project’s overarching strategic development plan.

Key take-home: Communicate with planners, if you have strong simple graphics, people will make use of them, avoid complex data – simpler is easier to absorb and digest.                                                 

Lesson #2: Find a banner to unite under

Nature-based solutions work better when people and organisations collaborate to achieve what they could not attain alone. Working in partnerships helps to ensure that different needs are considered and local opportunities are exploited.

This state of mind led the city of Genk, Belgium, to form partnerships to deliver their Stiemerdeals. Mien Quartier unveiled the innovative ways in which her city involved stakeholders, including citizens, groups, and local citizens – developing a network of people within their project.

A diagram of how nbs effect community interactions
Revolving around 8 fixed themes: nature, relaxation, meeting, happiness, growth, water, creativity and entrepreneurship.
https://www.genk.be/stiemerdeals

The Stiemer itself is a stream running through the city of Genk, physically connecting neighbourhoods, nature reserves, and strategic city sites. Since 2015, the city has started revitalising the neglected and polluted valley to realise its full potential. What initially began as a spatial and ecological transformation project, later evolved to include social and economic objectives, realising that these types of transformations could act in synergy.

So, what do these deals entail? The city of Genk collaborates with one or more local entrepreneurs and companies with a flexible approach to governance. Every Stiemerdeal is a tailor-made cooperation, a symbiotic relationship. Stiemer honey, beer, biscuits – you name it, together they’ve made it. In total, they made 37 deals within the first year, incorporating a huge diversity of entrepreneurs into the valley!

The Stiemerdeals offers partners both financial support and material support. At the start of the deal, the team co-creates a clear vision, for how one aspect of the valley can become a valuable asset for the city and deliver multiple benefits. It’s an innovative way to develop a flexible approach to engage people and organisations, give them a sense of ownership, and make them feel part of something bigger, creating a snowball effect.

For me, the key take-home message here is that complex objectives usually cannot be achieved by a city alone. We must increase the capacity to realise the full potential of nature-based solutions. By connecting and networking, and co-producing innovative business models we can accelerate the journey to reach the multiple goals of nature-based solutions together with local actors.

Lesson #3: Tear down those silos

Hands planting a plant in a garden bed
Urban gardens in A Coruña

For our final lesson, we took a trip to the North-West of Spain, to the city of A Coruña, where Antonio Prieto González shared their process for working with urban gardens in the region.

The various benefits of urban gardens were apparent in his city from the outset, specifically as powerful tools for fostering social cohesion, bonding between generations, and ownership of public spaces.

The team in A Coruña didn’t have much experience with nature-based solutions at the start of their adventure. And there were other ongoing initiatives in the city — school gardens, private urban gardens, and community gardens — however, they were all disconnected. The team wanted to create a network to unite these similar initiatives because siloed government departments are one of the main barriers to achieving multi-functional benefits. Many different departments in the municipality were connected indirectly and directly to these urban gardens, like the education, employment, and environment department.

But how do you tear down those walls??

Their solution was combining two societal levels: organisational and strategic. Antonio and the team took the time to work both levels when delivering the urban gardens and simultaneously making interdepartmental connections to show that there is common ground.

Firstly, they organised meetings with relevant councillors and heads of the departments to secure political support. This enabled them to connect to the operational level, working with technicians from different departments. They needed both.

Once again, the process wasn’t a breeze — some departments were not so easy to contact; it’s hard to find the right people (who have to have the time and energy and are not always the first people you think of) -but it’s crucial when working in this horizontal manner.

The key lesson for me was that working on fenced-off projects isn’t enough. You need to align the goals and benefits of the nature-based solutions with the wider city goals. In order to achieve this, making connections from one team to another, and one project to another, is vital to create and build local alliances.

Reflections

To me, these three contrasting examples form a coherent story on governance. Each city initiated networks to achieve a common vision that could not be achieved otherwise, employing communication, adaptability, and operational versus strategic working.

I saw a testbed for what does and doesn’t work so well, revealing the dead ends encountered so that, for others, the journey will be shorter. In that way, this session was an excellent way to show the variety of governance innovations we work on in the Connecting Nature project, and beyond!

About connecting nature

Coordinated by Trinity College Dublin, Connecting Nature is a consortium of 30 partners within 16 European countries, and hubs in Brazil, China, Korea & The Caucasus (Georgia and Armenia). We are co-working with local authorities, communities, industry partners, NGOs, and academics who are investing in the large-scale implementation of nature-based projects in urban settings. We are measuring the impact of these initiatives on climate change adaptation, health and well-being, social cohesion, and sustainable economic development in these cities. We are also developing a diversity of innovative actions to nurture the start-up and growth of commercial and social enterprises active in producing nature-based solutions and products. Connecting Nature is funded under the Horizon 2020 program (call SCC-02-2016-2017; Grant Agreement 730222) and includes 29 partners and 5 self-funded partners.

DRIFT’s team is coordinating the co-production of a new planning cycle with the involved cities and academic partners based on state-of-the-art knowledge about co-production and reflexive monitoring. This planning cycle is for city planners and policymakers that will connect experimentation and lessons to ongoing policy and market needs. It includes operational mechanisms to accelerate the scaling of nature-based solutions as well as guiding principles for turning socio-economic and institutional barriers into opportunities. This is achieved by close interaction between the academic and city partners; to learn by doing and to iteratively reflect upon the steps that are being taken in ongoing nature-based solution projects.

https://drift.eur.nl/nl/publicaties/three-lessons-for-co-creating-nature-based-solutions/

Shibeal McCann, Marleen Lodder, Paula Vandergert, Kato Allaert
Dublin, Rotterdam, London, Rotterdam

On The Nature of Cities

Lodder Marleen

About the Writer:
Lodder Marleen

Marleen Lodder graduated MSc Architectural Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology with honours in 2010 and worked as a Ph.D. candidate (October 2011-2015) at DRIFT, Erasmus University. Her research focuses on how urban area development in the Netherlands can become beneficial, by generating economic, ecologic, and social cultural values.

Paula Vandergert

About the Writer:
Paula Vandergert

Dr Paula Vandergert is a Senior Research Fellow in the Sustainability Research Institute, University of East London. She works with local authorities, strategic development organisations and local community groups on adaptive governance methods for sustainable and resilient communities and places.

Kato Allaert

About the Writer:
Kato Allaert

Kato Allaert is a green urbanist, currently based in the Netherlands. In her work, sustainable cities with happy citizens are the focal point. To achieve this, Kato links the spatial perspective with the social, economic and ecological aspects of cities. Kato has around 10 years of work experience in different contexts - from academic research to urban design practice and the public sector - and in different countries - the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Belgium.

Three M’s for Empowering Volunteer Urban Foresters: Mobilizing, Mapping, and Monitoring

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Art, Science, Action: Cities Re-imagined

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Local governments planted millions of young trees on urban streets throughout the United States during the first decade of the 21st Century. From Los Angeles to New York, large cities made prodigious investments in urban reforestation and wrote off the expense as a relatively thrifty way of dealing with some deep-rooted and long-lasting environmental problems that any municipality would be hard pressed to fix on its own. That’s great. If Chicago can’t make every eighteen wheeler barreling down Kennedy Expressway run on ultra-clean biodiesel, it can plant more trees to filter the soot that inevitably burps out of tailpipes on older freight trucks. If Boston struggles to prevent raw sewage from seeping into the harbor every time a thunderstorm inundates the local treatment system, it can cut more tree beds into the sidewalk to sop up rainwater before it cascades into a curbside drain. You get the idea. On their own, trees don’t solve the underlying causes of pollution, but they ease the burden of so many different dilemmas that it’s hard to quibble with any concerted effort to plant more of them.

Scientists put a good deal of research toward cultivating and testing trees that can hack it in the city, but even the hardiest species need help during their first few years living on the streets. Young trees need water. They need fluffy, well-aerated soil. They need mulch. They need their broken branches pruned to promote rapid callusing against infection. In short, urban forests are not unlike rural forests in that they rely on human labor to successfully meet human needs. Yet few cities in the U.S. can pay for all that hard work.

Images captured using a D.I.Y. infrared camera developed by the Public Laboratory for Open Technology & Science. Source: PLOTS
Images captured using a D.I.Y. infrared camera developed by the Public Laboratory for Open Technology & Science. Source: PLOTS

While planting trees by the hundreds of thousands is a significant one-time capital investment, it’s nothing compared to the ongoing cost of staffing an army of public employees dedicated to keeping those trees alive.  While the expense of sustainably managing a rural forest often pays for itself in the form of timber, the indirect benefits of a thriving urban forest never transform into real dollars and cents deposited in municipal coffers. We can calculate the value of ecosystem services provided by a functioning urban forest—the tons of carbon emissions prevented, the gallons of rainwater absorbed—but those savings don’t reappear as a line item in the street tree budget.

Since street tree care doesn’t pay for itself, cities rely on volunteer labor to make ends meet. I dealt with the pros and cons of this arrangement in my previous contribution to The Nature of Cities, so I won’t go any further than to say this: if volunteers are at the front-lines of urban forestry, we need to stop treating them like auxiliaries for a non-existent army of municipal arborists. We also need to recognize that volunteers aren’t just unpaid employees of local government, subject to policies emanating from City Hall. Neighborhood by neighborhood, volunteers have different ways of dealing with their patch of urban forest—different ambitions, different strategies, different priorities. Some want more trees. Some want fewer. Some form tight-knit groups to systematically care for every tree. Some prefer a more relaxed, individualistic approach. We must find a way to empower every community to find its own unique and evolving style of doing urban forestry. Volunteers are in the trenches. The rest of us, working in government, academia, and NGO’s, have to figure out how to help from the rear.

Trees mapped by volunteers at the Gowanus Canal Conservancy in Brooklyn, working with TreeKIT. Source: TreeKIT
Trees mapped by volunteers at the Gowanus Canal Conservancy in Brooklyn, working with TreeKIT. Source: TreeKIT

OpenTreeMap may hold some answers. An open-source website that invites the public to interact with detailed maps of urban trees, OpenTreeMap is already set up in San Francisco, Philadelphia, San Diego, and throughout Great Britain. Earlier this year, the geospatial masterminds at Azavea launched a cloud-based version of the website that will be more affordable and accessible to small communities wanting to share their locally made tree maps with the wider world. This new version of OpenTreeMap allows volunteers to track the work they’ve done to maintain any individual street tree on any given day, from watering and pruning to enlarging a tree bed and installing a permanent guard around its perimeter. Volunteers click on a tree in the map, and up pops a little window where they can record their most recent activities. Later on, other volunteers can search for recent stewardship activity on the map, filtering out trees that have already been maintained in order to see where the most help is needed. The whole thing functions as a sort of self-organized volunteer mobilization system — except there’s no boss at the top giving orders, and volunteers are free to make their own decisions based on openly shared information about recent stewardship.

Looking at street trees in Philadelphia’s version of Open Tree Map. Source: Philly Tree Map
Looking at street trees in Philadelphia’s version of Open Tree Map. Source: Philly Tree Map

Some communities may not have a map-based inventory of trees to load into OpenTreeMap. No problem. The system itself allows users to drop new trees onto the map with the click of a mouse — or, these days, the flick a finger on a tablet. Alternately, for communities that want a more comprehensive approach, TreeKIT offers a low-cost and low-tech method for accurately mapping whole blocks of street trees out in the field (a quick explanation of how it all works is available here). The results are easily loaded into OpenTreeMap, and the hands-on nature of the process invites volunteers to go outside and discover a new affinity for their local urban forest. To date, volunteers working with TreeKIT have mapped more than 12,000 street trees on more than 600 blocks in New York City, and more work is planned for the summer of 2014.

Eventually, volunteers will want to know whether their stewardship efforts are actually having a tangible impact on tree health and longevity. Yet monitoring urban tree health can be tricky. Outward appearances can be deceiving. Sometimes there’s no way of knowing if a particular stewardship regimen is working until it’s too late and a tree is already dead. Sophisticated protocols and rigorous tools do exist for assessing urban tree health, but most are beyond the reach of the average volunteer. That’s where “open research” initiatives like the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science and Photosynq come in. Both initiatives are busily developing affordable, easy-to-make, and easy-to-use environmental sensing technologies that can take the place of other, less accessible gadgetry. Public Lab recently unveiled open-source designs for a D.I.Y. spectrometer and near-infrared camera, both of which are potentially relevant for assessing tree health through measures of photosynthesis. Photosynq is beta-testing a similar low-cost tool for measuring “fluorescence and absorbance of photosynthetic plants and algae in a non-destructive way.” As tools like these become available, they can help volunteers make more refined assessments of their urban forestry efforts, empowering them to gradually tweak and adapt their practices based on good data about what does — and doesn’t — work.

Mobilizing, mapping, and monitoring — “Three M’s” for empowering volunteer urban foresters to do more impactful and rigorous work together, in their own style and on their own terms.

Philip Silva
Ithaca, New York

On The Nature of Cities

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tim Ingold’s “Sustainability of Everything”

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A review of Tim Ingold‘s lecture event “The Sustainability of Everything” at the Centre for Human Ecology, Pearce Institute, Glasgow, Scotland

Sustainability is an overused word.

It is much diminished by its occurrence in too many documents purporting to suggest that transport, local government or this tea or those coffee beans are “sustainable”. Grant applications ask how the project will be “sustainable” after the funding period. But we know that sustainability matters: we need to understand how to live without compromising the lives of future generations. Whether we subscribe to “business as usual, but greener” or the more radical “accelerationism” or “degrowth”, there are alternative ways of thinking about sustainability.

Tim Ingold’s approach to sustainability opens up new ways of experiencing and knowing which are more process- than object-oriented.

The provocative phrase “sustainability of everything”, the title of Tim Ingold’s talk, came from being asked to address sustainability in relation to art and science, citizenship and democracy, love and friendship. Ingold used “everything”, including qualities and processes, as a way to open up a trenchant criticism of not merely the usage of sustainability, the word, but more widely, the focus on thinking of sustainability in terms of stocks rather than processes.

Tim Ingold is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He is known for his distinctive arts-and-humanities inflected approach to anthropology, and is currently leading “Knowing from the Inside”, a major European Research Council funded project involving anthropologists, archaeologists, architects and artists. For Ingold the question of sustainability is not “How can we carry on doing what we are doing but with a bit less waste and impact?” but rather “What kind of world has a place for us and future generations?” “What does “carrying on” mean?” and, more practically speaking, “How do we make it happen?”

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“Redwings in the Little Asby Hawthorn near Orton, Cumbria” This lone tree is one of seven trees from “The Long View”, a two-year photography and writing project involving repeated meetings with these trees and an exploration of the landscape and stories that surround them. Credit: Rob Fraser / somewhere-nowhere.com

“Everything”, in Ingold’s sense, is not the collection of all the individual bits, but something different. He contends that the problem with current science and current constructions of sustainability is their reliance on isolating something to analyse it. Ingold comes at things looking for movement and entanglement rather than boundary. To make this point he regularly uses examples where either one doesn’t know where one thing ends and another starts, or examples of things in motion. He asks, for instance, whether the bird’s nest is part of the tree? Or whether the wind that has made the tree grow bent over is part of the tree? He asks if you can tell which part of the eddy in the stream is the “inside” and which is the “outside”? Of course, for artists, relationships between elements are at the heart of the process of composition. Artists’ process of composition explores exactly this sense of “what needs to be included” for something to “make sense”.

The importance of this approach, which highlights entanglements, is that it opens up new ways both of experiencing and knowing which are more process-oriented rather than object-oriented. Artists, in particular, respond enthusiastically to this way of knowing.

In his talk, Ingold developed this thread further, using Lucretius’ idea that everything is in motion, and when things bump into each other, they form knots—clouds are knots of water and temperature and wind. Trees are complex knots. Ingold evolves the idea of knots by pointing out that rope stays together through a combination of twist and friction. He notes that harmony (e.g. in polyphonic music) is a human creation making use of the principle—a combination of elements that in themselves might initially appear to be in conflict, but in relationship with each other are beautiful. Here again, he’s nodding to artists’ ways of knowing. In his terms, everything is a “correspondence of parts”—not a totality, but rather a carrying on.

In essence, Ingold is offering an indigenous ecological philosophy (based on his field work with the Sami)—his anthropology has moved beyond documenting and understanding indigenous world views to embracing them as a way of knowing and being in the world. To fully understand the implications of his process-oriented view of entanglement, it’s worth reading Barry Lopez’s “The Invitation”. Lopez articulates the immersion of indigenous people he has travelled with, beautifully describing encounters with bears and how his companions experience the unfolding of events; the bear is not an object to be viewed, but rather almost a field of influence which extends temporally and spatially.

After setting up this alternative way of understanding, Ingold highlighted how current formulations of sustainability are underpinned by an assumption that the “entire Earth is a standing reserve” and that we need to protect the Earth in the way that a company protects its profits. He drew attention to the underlying corporate or management language implicit in these descriptions of sustainability and how this is true of conservation organisations as much as corporations and governments. Furthermore, of course, Paulo Friere provided a deep critique of the “banking” model of education, which is closely aligned with this accounting version of sustainability.

Having established what he meant by “everything”, Ingold went on to construct an idea of “carrying on”. To do this, he referred to traditional ways of forestry in Japan, where there is a dynamic relationship between the forester, the forest, and the building of a house articulated in a 30 year cycle—trees take 30 years to grow, and a house needs to be renewed every 30 years. Trees are planted, foresters learn to build houses, trees are cut to build houses, trees are planted. It is very different from the forms of plantation forestry and clear-felling we experience across much of Scotland.

As he concluded, Ingold came back to the themes of art and science, citizenship and democracy, peace and friendship. He suggested that science has reneged on its commitment to understanding the world in ways that are useful for life, and that in his view environmental arts do this more effectively now. He talked about the need for a politics of difference and the importance of embracing tension and agonism (which emphasizes accepting that struggle and conflict are inherent to politics).

There are a few key points that are worth teasing out of Ingold’s valuable line of argument for reflection.

Firstly, the construction of sustainability currently offered in “sustainable development” and “ecosystems services” is fundamentally human-centric and has lost any connection with the “existence value” of the non-human, as constructed by the likes of Arne Naess, Gregory Bateson, and many others who were early inspirations of the environmental movement (and remain very influential on environmental arts).* Ingold’s focus on entanglement and movement is a useful counter to “banking” approaches. Understanding the world in terms of process rather than focusing on the objects is also characteristic of the arts and, in particular, of environmental arts. So many artists working with the environment make work that is both temporal and temporary, seeking to bring audiences and participants into new relationships with ecologies.

Secondly, we need to recognise that our current construction of sustainability is only one possible construction, built in terms of conventional ethics that are essentially a form of Utilitarianism—seeking to provide the greatest good for the greatest number. In this respect, our current construction suffers from all the criticisms of Utilitarianism in being fundamentally subjective and, in environmental terms, challenging—for example, a simplistic line of thought often promoted by architects and urban planners holds that, if more than half the world’s population lives in cities, then what is good for cities must be good for humans.

The point is that Ingold is providing an underpinning articulation of “being” that asks for a different ethics—one which accepts conflicts, but accords value to the connectedness of everything and its motion. In his talk, he positively argued against the conservation of trees and in favour of the carrying on of planting and growing, felling and building, as a cycle. Perhaps Ingold doesn’t go far enough in focusing on the cyclical relationship—Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, eminent ecological artists known as “the Harrisons”, argue that we need to “put more back into ecological systems than we take out” in our carrying on. By this, they mean that we need to positively contribute to ecological cycles, reduce the generation of entropy and work to produce greater biodiversity, strengthening ecological cycles.

Ingold’s construction, particularly of “knots” is useful if we recognise that we humans are arch constructors of knots. Everything we make is some sort of knot, whether it’s food or paths or roads or houses or nuclear power stations or mustard gas or satellites. And if we can imagine a knot, then we will make it. If it’s been imagined, then someone, somewhere, is trying to make it. That’s an interesting ethical dilemma. It’s prompted discussions around what “responsible innovation” might be. How can we create knots that make for healthier places for all living things?

Chris Fremantle
Ayrshire, Scotland

On The Nature of Cities

Video of Tim Ingold’s talk held at the Centre for Human Ecology on 10 September 2016.

 

Footnotes:

*I’m indebted to Dave Pritchard for elucidating this evolution through the sequence of major environmental summits starting in Stockholm in 1972 and progressing in 10 yearly intervals through to Rio+20 in 2012. He correlated this process with the shift from an environmentalism of “existence value” through to “ecosystem services” and “sustainable development”. Each Summit sought to achieve greater policy impact and, as a result, Pritchard suggests each Summit can be understood as a step away from intrinsic values towards utilitarian and anthropocentric policy.

Time of the Poppies

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“Do you seek the highest, the greatest? The plant can teach you to do so. What it is without will of its own, that you should be with intent – that’s the point!”
—Friedrich Schiller

Some days ago, after giving a lecture in a west German city, I arrived back at my Berlin neighbourhood subway station and walked home. I dragged my baggage trolley after me, tired from the journey, with a certain numbness of having seen and thought and being told too much. Too much dispersion, too many other lives entwined with my own, and a creeping loss of clear perspective on what I truly needed. Slowly walking back, I tried to exclude the sounds of passing traffic and the faces of passing humans from my perception.

It was not at all about city vs. nature, or human vs. technology. It was about the struggle between control, and obedience—and being, and needing.

I was torn out of my numbness by a glowing red haze that hovered above a traffic island overgrown with herbs. At first, I only felt this: a sensation of something glowing, emanating warmth, literally palpable on my skin. I stopped and focused my gaze. There was a patch of vivid redness spreading in the middle of the streetscape with its hushed silhouettes of cars, passers-by, and cyclists. The colour seized my senses like a distant blaze.

Poppies in a Berlin traffic isalnd. Photo: Andreas Weber

I stood for some seconds and then I nodded. It was a tiny field of poppies. The blossoms of the common European field poppy (Papaver rhoeas) emerging from the small wasteland on top of the traffic island. As I stared at them, I could vaguely discern the single petals, shivering under the oblique sun. In a slight gust of wind the stems bowed, sending a wave that rippled through the glow. Some of the petals gently swirled to the ground. The blossoms seemed to burn away silently, flanked by the makeshift ecosystem of slender blades of grass, of mallow (Malva sylvestris) and broad-leafed sorrel (Rumex acetosa).

What is the essence of a city? What is the kernel of urban civilisation, which, as we know, is engulfing the planet? Urban life is spreading from a minority’s lifestyle to be the predominant fate of human and increasingly nonhuman beings. As I thought in a first glimpse, being stopped at that glowing traffic island, the essence of a city is a constant immersion of everything and everybody in human affairs.

And human affairs are affairs of control. They secure that we do not trespass norms, behave accordingly, function, are on time, cope with what is desired and what one increasingly is desiring—status, a beautiful face which does not show the traces of age and of any vulnerability. Traffic noise, anonymity, peak-hour hurry, traffic lights, cars rushing by with deadly speed are not “inhuman forces” destroying human naturalness. They are forces in service of control.

Urbaneness is a big experiment against the vulnerability that goes with life. At the same time, it generates more of it. More wounds. More fertile soil. Cities are not only the loci of efficiency, but also the places of failure. They gather poverty, breakdown, despair, crime—and unexpected solutions. They are meant to be run as machines, and they partly come out as alive. This is what always fascinates me, and what makes me cling to my home city, Berlin. Blossoms are drawn to a city, as there are always crevasses in the functional façade.

When I stood in the light of the poppies, halted in my tracks, the trolley handle-up on the street, and let my eyes sink into the flickering red rising into the air, I felt in the flowers’ precarious exuberance, the power of vulnerability unfold. In this vulnerability, the streetscape revealed itself as wild. It was not because a small piece of “nature“ was preserved, but because the poppies so adamantly insisted on displaying their vulnerability on this bit of casually neglected dirt. Glowing in the evening sun, they dwelled on their ramshackle settlement. It was a pledge for being whole even while under assault. It was a pledge of being whole not in spite of, but because of being vulnerable.

I was reluctant to carry on walking. The traffic rushed past me. My bag sat there, on the curb, as if it had been forgotten by someone anonymous. The evening sun warmed my hair and my body from behind. The poppies’ embraced me from in front. I was immersed in sweetness, and melancholy, and did not immediately understand why. I could not walk away.

Last summer, the poppies had been our company, when I was falling in love with a friend I had known for some time, but distantly. I looked for her at her place, which was in a tiny village in the Southern Alps, in Italy. We walked the fields among the vineyards, the evening air vibrating between us, with the glow of a light still hidden. It was the time of the poppies. Grasses and flowers freckled the side of the small road, but the poppies were in the middle. They stood there, glowing, and untouched, formed of slender, hairy stalks, and fluttering petals opened to the light. Their beauty called to us.

Photo: Andreas Weber

We walked there, feeling gifted by the flowers’ naturalness. Not by the fact, that they were “nature”, as we commonly say, but by their gesture of being totally, naturally, what they were. They completely believed in themselves. They surrendered to their fragility without reserve. “I don’t have that”, my friend said. “I do not have this softness.”

In this moment, I felt the desire to stroke her skin in the same manner as the blossoms stroked my gaze. I yearned to see her walk into some of that warm glow that emanates from beings who are openly needing what is truly needed. I wanted to kiss her, because the poppy had kissed me, had embraced me with its warmth that was total surrender, and I wanted my friend inside that embrace, too.

For a short time, the time of the poppies of last year, I forgot that we cannot grant this to another person. Only poppies can do it, as any other living being who does not know, but simply is, can. They love, because they totally surrender to their own fragility.

In Berlin, that evening, I could not resume walking home from the traffic island. My thoughts returned to the poppies of the year before. Each time, when I returned to Italy to see my lover, I was greeted by the poppies. They grew along the railway embankments, and between the tracks, welcoming my approach with their radiance and fragility. The blossoms risked themselves totally in their gesture to unfold, to be fertilized, to connect, to multiply. They knew dying was included in this.

I found the poppies everywhere in Italy; between the tangled steel lines of Milano Stazione Centrale, along ripening wheat fields, under greyish olive trees, beneath the umbrellas of maritime pines on the way to Rome, where we once met. I saw them in the crevasses of the streets in Roman living quarters. I spotted poppies emerging from the ruins along the antique Via Appia, where one endless afternoon we lay in a freshly harvested field.

Their blossoms watched us, and they allowed us to be fragile, as long as they watched us. They watched us by being fragile. They granted us space by basing their radiance on the fact that every petal only lasted for a few hours. When I tried to gather a bouquet for my friend once at her village, I came back with the stalks only. The fire could not be conserved.

The poppies were summer, but a summer as a pledge, still not totally and reliably there, a gesture of summer sweetness rather than its installation. It was like Natalie Babbitt writes in Tuck Everlasting of the early days of the hot season hanging at “the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn…”. Our love was in the poppies, and when I think back, its sweetness is part of what the poppies did, rather than the other way round. When our love blossomed, a slight breath could extinguish it.

Journal page and drawing, by Andreas Weber.

At some point, in Berlin, I walked on, dragging my trolley after me. It seemed to me that its wheels circled with smoother revolutions, in a more effortless way as when traveling to Italy in the previous year. I slowly walked towards my home, not numb anymore, but vulnerable, feeling all sorts of feelings, sweetness, and soreness, birth, and death. “Blender”, my lover had called the states of her unseparated, undiscernible emotions, when she was in them, that numbness I also had felt stepping out of the subway. But that was gone now, substituted by something clean, and melancholic. The poppy’s blossoms are a sort of centripetal agent. They help solidify feeling, as the slender flowers show what they need. There is no error possible in what makes them live, or die.

With the anesthesia gone, I gazed around on my short way back home. I returned the gaze of all the blossoms I encountered, growing from slits in the curb, from untended spots between the green stretches in front of the tenements, in the neglected yard around the building of the high school my son graduated from last year. I felt seen, and I felt allowed to feel. I could be, because all these others trusted their needs. I could trust mine. And in the slight afterglow of the poppy’s blossom everything settled into clarity. I started to blossom myself.

The poppies I encountered, now and last year, are not a feature of rural areas (rural like the sweet southern alpine landscape where my lover lived). They are not a feature of “nature”, which could awaken me and console me by the way it had found its path between the “human-made” landscape of the inner city of Berlin. It was not at all about city vs. nature, or human vs. technology. It was about the struggle between control, and obedience –– and being, and needing.

It was about what family psychologist Virgina Satir calls the “Five Truths”, which are about being genuine about what we need, and perceive, and want to do. The poppy grants itself the right to be real. By its nature, it has no choice. We can see this absence of choice as determinism, like mainstream science is inclined to do. The blossom as genetic machine, totally dead from the inside. But we can also see it as a fantastic intuition about the right thing to do. As self-confidence. As a statement, announced by a red glow, and hairy stalks, and total wastefulness, about a real individuality.

“I am what I am”, reads a famous line in the old testament. I never really appreciated this enigmatic phrase, beyond it being a bit tautological. But what the poppy tells me, and other city dwellers, is just that. I am what I am. And what my lover for those days of the poppies, last year, until all the petals had been blown off by our reluctant breath, was telling me again and again, was the opposite of this: “I am not what I am, and that makes me suffer.”

So, what we call nature, is not about being self-made (organic) against human-made (technological). It is about being oneself, making oneself from the powers of the flesh that yearns for unfolding, against not being oneself, enclosed by powers who tell me what to do, how to behave, what to feel, until I have completely forgotten what my powers are—forgotten the fact that I also long for blossoming. That, indeed, blossoming is what all beings not only want, but need: to become a manifestation of blossoming, as my friend and colleague Hildegart Kurt puts it.

One of the places to blossom is the city. We all know this. It’s the reason we constantly travel to cities, although we are yearning for “unspoiled nature” at the same time. Wild flowers in the city are not a contradiction, but one way a city blossoms, and hence also allow me to blossom. I am lucky that Berlin is full of flowers in summer, full of small wild spaces, sought by rare plants, and peopled by rare beasts.

Plastic and poppies. Photo: Andreas Weber

Berlin is not the world’s poppy capital, though. That is Rome. Not the official beautiful Rome, but the dirty backdoor, hidden Rome, which you cross when approaching or leaving. It’s the Rome where I had stayed with my lover last year, for one short week, under an uncompromisingly blue sky. And when it was over, something was lost. It’s the Rome of the memories which grow not from idealizations, but from wildness, which has been watching us with tenderness and irony, and hence granted us to be wild for a couple of moments. Wild, here, does not mean unchained. It means self.

Self is a call. To see others blossom is a call. This explains the strange mixture of joy and longing I experience when I see other beings blossom. It shows me that I need to blossom, and it highlights for me the degree to which I already do. Or do not. Or can’t yet. The joy of the blossoms is a yearning.

There came a time, at the end of the season of the poppies, when my lover started to be wary of her vulnerability. She felt she had already shown too much of it to me. “It’s holes all over”, she said, feeling ashamed of herself. Of her individuality, which was beauty, in one individual making, from vulnerability, in one specific cast. Holes, like we all have, in her brilliant arrangement. Poppiness, ready to shed all the petals at one shy breath.

“Loving is touching souls” writes Joni Mitchell in her song “A Case of You”. This includes being allowed to be vulnerable, finally. That is why we are all searching for it, in the haze of the cities, among other single humans, hasty, lonely, very much in control. But love not only allows vulnerability, it also needs it. Loving is a call for vulnerability. A call like the poppies were uttering on the neglected island in the rushing Berlin traffic, which made me stop in my tracks, and let the wounds of the last year re-open, sweet and sore.

Love is a call for vulnerability. To let yourself be loved is to show all your vulnerability, because one who truly loves you wants you to be true. To be who you are. That’s the essence of it. And this is why the poppy is leading the way. It is encouraging us to be all we already are. It is a fundamental way of loving. The time of the poppies was over when my lover started to close herself, feeling too fractured, and I let the petals fall. We had lost our pact with the blossoms.

Andreas Weber
Berlin

On The Nature of Cities

References
Quoted according to Lorenzo Ravagli, “Live and Let Live”, Erziehungskunst (Waldorf Education Today), http://www.erziehungskunst.de/en/article/love/live-and-let-live/

Hildegard Kurt, Die neue Muse. Versuch über Zukunftsfähigkeit. Klein Jasedow: thinkOYA, 2017. See also https://cultures-of-enlivenment.org/en

Andreas has a new book coming in August 2017, called Matter & Desire.

 

Timely Tales of Urban Nature

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A review of City Wilds: Essays and Stories about Urban Nature by Terrell F. Dixon. 2002. The University of Georgia Press. ISBN: 978-0820323398. 336 pages. Buy the book.

Writing this review came with a built-in challenge: Is an anthology, now almost 15 years old, worth a reader’s time and money? I assume that visitors to The Nature of Cities website have an interest—likely a deep professional one—in urban nature. So, we can clarify the question: What mix of qualities makes an older urban nature anthology worthwhile?

City Wilds is a retrospective and an inspiration for aspiring urban nature writers, disclosing the diverse ways the story of a city can be told.

First on our list of criteria should be the quality of the writing. City Wilds is certainly brimming with that. There is Michael Aaron Rockland’s “Big City Waters,” a tale about the author and his friend circumnavigating Manhattan by canoe, reminding readers that despite its monumental buildings, New York City “is a liquid place” of islands. There is Chet Raymo’s “The Silence,” which opens with a time-stopping near-death collision that unfolds into a series of ethereal reflections on the vacuum of space, the explosion of stars, and the transporting impacts of silence found in nearby nature. Two essays caused me to audibly exhale a wow after finishing the last sentence—Rebecca Johnson’s “New Moon over Roxbury,” a meditation on Black people’s relationships to land and the city as well as her own practice of astrological gardening (“If I worship at all, it is at the compost pile. It receives my most consistent offerings.”); and Helena Maria Viramontes’s “The Moths,” a beautifully disturbing story about a young girl’s final moments with her dying grandmother and the intercessory role of moths.

city wilds coverOn the lighter side, Emily Hiestand’s “Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah” is another stand out, full of wry observations about the goings-on of nesting blue jays—“the bird of the postmodern, of invention and recycling, of found art.” Among these and the many other excellent essays in the collection, Stephen Harrigan’s “The Soul of Treaty Oak” is masterful, a story that is equal parts murder mystery, mystical circus sideshow, and compassionate commentary about the human search for connection—in this case, with the venerable but beleaguered Treaty Oak in Austin, Texas, a being “older than almost any other living thing in Texas, and far older than the idea of Texas itself” that becomes a magnet for clashing values after the tree is intentionally poisoned.

Another signifier for a strong collection of urban nature essays would be the breadth of its geographical and cultural scope. Are diverse perspectives included that shed light on the many ways of being human in particular places? Again, City Wilds hits the mark—or many marks. Essays in the book are “clustered” by geography, as editor Terrell F. Dixon notes, beginning with major cities in the Northeast and then taking us on a circuitous road trip around and through the country before arriving on the Pacific coast. Reading across these diverse regions, one gains a sense of how distinctive places inform the experience of urban nature. The multiculturalism of the book is also impressive, with familial customs and dynamics intersecting with neighborhood landmarks and comforting aromas emanating from kitchens.

The essays do not shy from delving into the shadow side of difference. “Thank God It Snowed” by Ronald L. Fair packs an emotional wallop, as the author recalls the healing rains and snows of his childhood winters, weather that washed away “the gray grit-cloud that tried to remind us of our place in society,” providing relief and temporarily leveling the sins of neglect in a segregated Chicago. Many essays, in fact, return to vivid impressions of childhood, a time when local nature serves as the anchor of memory and transformation, from “the vacant lot that was the shortcut between worlds” (Denise Chávez, “Willow Game”) to large bodies of water “alternately tranquil and wild, changing colors like a mood ring” (Susan Power, “Chicago Waters”) to those secret spaces between buildings that are sites of comfort and life-changing points of reference “far away from where our mothers could find us” (Sandra Cisneros, “The Monkey Garden”).

A final strength of this collection, one I wasn’t expecting, is the wide mix of genres—a reminder that a good nature story comes in many packages, from straightforward travel narrative to magical realism. The inclusion of fictional short stories adds a surprising layer of depth, pushing against the boundaries of conventional nature writing. One of the more delightful of these is Richard Brautigan’s “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard”, in which the narrator visits a salvage shop for a piece of a “used” trout stream, sold by the foot and stacked in various lengths (waterfalls sold separately)—an effective satire of the commodification of nature and an affirmation of the unquantifiable value of a living river and its myriad ecological relationships.

Taken as a whole, City Wilds is simultaneously a retrospective and an inspiration for aspiring urban nature writers, disclosing the diverse ways the story of a city can be told. Dixon deserves recognition for his prescience in assembling one of the first, if not the first, multi-author collections of such writings. With the exception of a few outliers in the volume (Dubkin, 1947; Brantigan, 1968; Fair, 1972), most of the essays were written in the 1990s, a period of time still characterized, Dixon observes, by the idea “that real nature stops at the city limits sign.” City Wilds, without necessarily aiming for it, is thus part history lesson, representing a moment when the fuzzy outlines of a new category of writing were emerging and the city began to be regarded as a worthy site of investigation.

Good writing is good writing, and good writers are adept at transforming landscapes into breathing presences alongside their human characters. Yet Dixon points out some features that may distinguish urban nature writing from other types of nature-based stories. Urban nature writing tends to focus on accessible areas (“nearby nature”), nature at smaller scales (a single butterfly instead of the Grand Canyon), the humorous or comical rather than the death-defying (everyday experience), and themes of interdependent community rather than heroic self-reliance (how we relate rather than what we conquer or endure). Perhaps all nature writing reckons with being human among other creatures, but urban nature writing lingers on the small-scale dramas of inhabiting place.

Now let’s circle back to the question of age. Should you invest in a book that is a decade and half old? I would answer by saying that good writing, of any genre, tends to age well. City Wilds has aged well, in part because the essays are already a “best of” from various writers. With increasing numbers of people living in cities, it could be that City Wilds has become more relevant as time has passed. Robert Michael Pyle, in his contribution to the volume—a now-classic essay entitled “The Extinction of Experience”—provides City Wilds with what could be its thesis: “Many people take deep satisfaction in wilderness and wildlife they will never see. But direct, personal contact with other living things affects us in vital ways that vicarious experience can never replace.”

The essays underscore this point, showing just how formative those everyday experiences are to our sense of personal identity, community, and care for the more-than-human world. Plucked like pigeon feathers from city alleys, slugs from garden leaves, and caddis-fly nymphs from the shallows of recovering urban rivers, the stories in City Wilds reveal again and again the small revelations that await us in the spaces we may consider the most ordinary and homey.

Is this anthology worth your time? Yes. Emphatically. If you have any interest in urban nature writing whatsoever—in reading about cities, in writing about cities, in understanding the human capacity to interact and engage with other species—this book should be on your shelf, dog-eared and underlined. Take it on the subway. Bring it onto the balcony of your high-rise apartment. Cozy into a weathered bench in a pocket park, allowing the chatter of birds and squirrels to envelop you, and look up every once in a while, between essays, to see for yourself if the city doesn’t seem to sparkle more because of the book in your hands.

Gavin Van Horn
Chicago

On The Nature of Cities

TNOC Encore: Exploring the Nature Pyramid

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(This encore publication originally appeared at TNOC on 7 August 2012.)

I have long been a believer in E.O. Wilson's idea of biophilia; that we are hard-wired from evolution to need and want contact with nature. To have a healthy life, emotionally and physically, requires this contact. The empirical evidence of this is overwhelming: exposure to nature lowers our blood pressure, lowers stress and alters mood in positive ways, enhances cognitive functioning, and in many ways makes us happy. Exposure to nature is one of the key foundations of a meaningful life.

How much exposure to nature and outdoor natural environments is necessary, though, to ensure healthy child development and a healthy adult life? We don't know for sure but it might be that we need to start examining what is necessary. Are there such things as minimum daily requirements of nature? And what do we make of the different ways we experience nature and the different types of nature that we experience? Is there a good way to begin to think about this?

A powerful idea

Here at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA USA), my colleague Tanya Denckla-Cobb has had a marvelous and indeed brilliant idea. Why not employ a metaphor and tool similar to the nutrition pyramid that has for many years been touted by health professionals and nutritionists as a useful guide for the types and quantity of food we need to eat to be healthy. Call it, as Tanya does, the Nature Pyramid, and we have something at once novel and attention-getting, but potentially very useful in helping to shape discussion about biophilic design and planning. Towards the top end of that nutritional pyramid, as we know, are things that, while important to overall nutrition—meat, dairy sugar, salt—are less healthful in larger quantities and should be consumed in the smallest proportions. Moving down the pyramid are elements in the diet—fruits and vegetables—that should be consumed more frequently and in greater quantity, and then finally, grains that provide healthy nutrients and carbohydrates that are needed on a daily basis. The Nature Pyramid would work in a similar way. I have taken a stab at what the nature pyramid might look like, presented in the graphic below. It is a bit different than Tanya’s initial idea, but a version I am convinced will be highly useful as a way to begin to explore and discuss the amounts and types of natural experiences we need to live a healthy life.

A hypothetical depiction of The Nature Pyramid. Graphic by Tim Beatley.

The Nature Pyramid, then, challenges us to think about what the analogous quantities of nature are, and the types of nature exposures and experiences, needed to bring about a healthy life. Exposure to nature, direct personal contact with natural is not an optional thing, but rather is a necessary and important element of a healthy human life. So, like the nutritional pyramid, what specifically is required of us? What amounts of nature, different nature experiences, and exposure to different sorts of nature, together constitute a healthy existence? While we may lack the same degree of scientific certainly or confidence about the mix of requisite nature experiences necessary to ensure a healthy life (or healthy childhood), as exists with respect to dietary and nutrition (and of course there remains much disagreement even about this), the pyramid at least begins to ask the right questions. It starts an essential and important conversation that needs to occur given our modern earthly circumstances.

The Nature Pyramid helps us to begin to think about what will be necessary to counter what journalist Richard Louv calls “nature deficit disorder” in his important book Last Child in the Woods (Algonquin, 2005; and further explored in his more recent book The Nature Principle, Algonquin, 2012). It is helpful for several reasons. First and foremost perhaps is the important message that, like one's diet, it is possible to act in ways that lead to a healthy mix and exposure to nature. This is subject to agency and behavior and responsible choice in the same way that the food pyramid guides eating. And, like the nutritional pyramid, the Nature Pyramid provides guidance to planners, designers and public decision makers. We have important choices about community design: what we choose or choose not to subsidize, what nature opportunities we want our children and adults to have available to them, and what steps might make a healthier biophilic life more feasible or possible.

Casual interaction with nature—in this case street trees in Madrid—should be experienced in daily doses. Photo by Tim Beatley.

What should make up the bulk of our nature diet?

At the bottom of the pyramid are forms of nature and outside life that should form the bulk of our daily experiences. Here there are the many ways in which we might daily enjoy and experience nature, both suburban and urban. As adults, a healthy nature diet requires being outside at least part of each day, walking, strolling, sitting, though it need not be in a remote and untouched national park or otherwise more pristine natural environment. Brief experiences and brief episodes of respite and connection are valuable to be sure: watching birds, hearing the outside sounds of life, and feeling the sun or breeze on one's arms are important natural experiences, though perhaps brief and fleeting. Some of these experiences are visual and we know that even views of nature from office or home windows provides value. For school aged kids spending the day in a school drenched in full spectrum nature daylight is important and we know the evidence is compelling about the emotional and pedagogical value of this. Every day kids should spend some time outside, sometime playing and running outside, in direct contact with nature, weather, and the elements.

A park — this one in Oslo, Norway — makes for a slightly more immersive nature experience. Photo by Tim Beatley.

Moving from the bottom to the top of the pyramid also corresponds to an important temporal dimension. We need and should want to visit larger more remote parks and natural areas, but for most of us the majority of these larger parks will not be within distance of a daily trip. At the top of the pyramid are places and nature experiences that are profoundly important and enriching, yet are more likely to happen less frequently, perhaps only several times a year. They are places of nature where immersion is possible, and where the intensity and duration of the nature experience are likely to be greater. And in between these temporal poles (from daily to yearly) lie many of the nature opportunities and experiences that happen often on weekends or holidays or every few weeks, and perhaps without the degree of regularity that daily neighborhood nature experiences provide.

Areas such as this park connector in Singapore provide more intense experience with nature higher on the pyramid. Photo by Tim Beatley.

Like the food items higher on the food pyramid, the sites of nature highest on the Nature Pyramid might best be thought of occasional treats in our nature diet—good for us in small and measured servings, but actually unhealthy if consumed too often or in too great a quantity. For many urbanites from the industrialized North, large amounts of money and effort are expended visiting remote eco-spots, from Patagonia, to the cloud forests of Costa Rica, to the Himalayas. It seems we relish and celebrate the ecologically remote and exotic. While they are deeply enjoyable nature experiences, to be sure, they come at a high planetary cost, as the energy and carbon footprint associated with jetting to these places is large indeed. No longer are such trips appreciated as unique and special “trips of a lifetime,” but fairly common and increasingly pedestrian jaunts to the affluent citizenry of the North. The Nature Pyramid sends a useful signal that travel to faraway nature may as glutinous and unhealthy as eating at the top of the food pyramid. 

Torres del Paine National Park in southern Chile: an experience, at least for people from outside South America, that would be high on the Nature Pyramid. Photo by David Maddox.

Another message is that a diversity of nature experiences will yield a healthy life, in the same way that a diversity of foods and food groups leads to a healthy diet. The middle of the pyramid suggests the need for larger local and regional green spaces that provide more respite and deeper engagement than street trees or green rooftops might. They can be visited less frequently, but perhaps with greater duration and intensity, say on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. The Nature Pyramid allows us to imagine lives lived mostly in urban (albeit green urban) environments but with some substantial amount of time spent in more classically natural environments around and outside cities. The pyramid lets us begin to imagine—as we imagine the combinations of food and types of food that go into our daily and weekly diets—the combination of different nature experiences essential to a healthy human life.

Overcoming the nature-urban dichotomy

The Nature Pyramid encourages us to overcome the paralysis of the modern urban-nature split that many of us perceive. For example, the United States is an urban population, for the most part: more than 80% of Americans live in metropolitan areas. Cities and urbanized areas typically provide less direct contact with the kind of pristine nature we often think we need. There are good and important reasons we live in cities, and from the perspective of sustainability and sustainable living, cities are an essential aspect of effectively addressing global environmental problems. Yet, the types of nature found in cities are more fragmented, smaller and generally allow less and shorter kinds of immersion than, say, camping in a remote wilderness area or spending several days in a national park. But as the planet continues to become more urban the challenge of providing the essential minimum dosage of nature becomes an increasingly important challenge everywhere.

Many of the techniques currently used to green urban environments provide value—"nature nutrients" if you will—in the lower rungs of the pyramid. Green design features such as eco-rooftops, bioswales and rain gardens, community gardens, trees and tree-lined streets, and vegetation strips and urban landscaping, provide valuable ecological services (from retaining stormwater, to moderating the urban heat island problem, to sequestering carbon), but they also provide urban residents with exposure to nature, albeit in a human-altered context. The pyramid helps us see how the daily consumption of and exposure to the myriad green features of cities provide, like a balanced food diet, a healthy mix of nature experiences. I know in my own case I notice and enjoy the circling turkey vulture, the ant life and invertebrate antics below foot, the sounds and sights of the not insignificant green strips and edges that I walk by on my way to work and on walks through my neighborhood. I might be happier (and healthier?) if my nature experiences were deeper in time or quality, but these fleeting and fragmentary episodes of a green urban life are valuable and indeed make up the bulk of my daily nature experiences. The Pyramid helps us appreciate the valuable exposure to many smaller green features and nature episodes in the course of a day, and importantly, the need to include these features in urban design.

Portland, Oregon, USA. Photo by Mike Houck.

Thinking About “Servings” and “Nutrients”

There are many unknowns in this conceptual framework, of course, and many open questions. But the Nature Pyramid is valuable in identifying and framing these important questions. One interesting question is how we measure the “servings,” if you will, of nature exposure in this nature diet. What is the unit of measurement that we ought to speak of in terms of a nature experience; say a walk or other time outside that takes twenty minutes or a half an hour, or something qualitatively different, say a momentary sighting of a bird, or tree, or distinctive mushroom. Is a ten-second glance out the window at work onto a verdant courtyard adequate to compose a “serving”? Is the momentary wonder at the interaction of two birds, at the joyous sight of a circling hawk, the scolding chatter of a squirrel as you pass by that corner lot with the large trees a useful serving? And how, over the course of an hour, an afternoon, a day, do these servings add-up to or accumulate to form the nature nutrition we need?

Often our nature “servings” don’t nicely fit into any description of an event or episode, and are more continuous, less discrete: for instance the aural background of natural sounds, the katydids, tree frogs, crickets that compose the night soundscape that many of us find so replenishing and soothing. One’s day is, in fact, made up of unique and complex combinations of these nature experiences (or they should be), some fleeting and momentary, others of longer duration and intensity. The Nature Pyramid helps us, at least calls upon us, to develop some form of metric for understanding this richness and complexity and to understand how (or not) these different experiences add up over the course of a day, week, month or year to a healthy life in close and nurturing contact with the natural world.

And there are other important open questions highlighted by the Nature Pyramid. Is it possible to imagine more intensive, immersive nature experiences even in normal everyday urban environments; urban places and smaller urban environments that may deliver the restorative power of experiences higher on the pyramid? And can we design them in ways that intensify these experiences? A brief visit to a forested urban park, or botanic garden, could in theory permit an immersive experience equal to more distant forms of nature. Again, these are important questions that the framework of the Nature Pyramid helps us to identify and focus on. 

The Nature Pyramid encourages us to look around at the actual communities and places where we live to see if they are delivering the nature nutrients and diet we need. Yale professor Stephen Kellert argues that we need to overcome the sense that nature is “out there, somewhere else,” probably a national park, and what we need today more than ever is “everyday nature,” the nature all around us in cities and suburbs. Much is there, of course, if we look, but we must also work to enhance, repair and creatively insert new elements of nature wherever we can, from sidewalks to courtyards, from alleyways to rooftops, from balconies to skygardens. Less frequent perhaps are the deeper and longer episodes—the visit to a regional park, the longer hike along a nature trail or through a regional trail or greenway system beyond one's immediate neighborhood. These experiences might for some happen daily, but likely don't. They are more infrequent, tending to occur more on a weekly than daily basis. There are several nature trails my family visits and hikes on weekends, and they form a part of our healthy nature diet.

We can quibble, certainly, about what the appropriate mix of nature experiences is or ought to be, to ensure health and well-being—how much of our day should be about experiencing nature through an outdoor walk on a trail or in a park, versus contemplating a beautiful view of a river or forest from an indoor room or balcony? But the pyramid most importantly helps us to see that for most individuals, living a healthy urban life in touch with nature is a function of the daily, weekly, and monthly (and even less frequent) nature experiences we have. Ensuring that we provide the minimum dosage or serving of nature should be a priority for all planners and designers.

A rich research agenda

While the Nature Pyramid already provides us with important policy and planning insights and guidance, there are clearly many important open questions and a significant (and exciting) research agenda that flows directly from it. Addressing these questions will require the good work of researchers in a number of disciplines, including medicine and public health, psychology, and of course the design disciplines of landscape architecture and city planning, among many others. The research questions are not easy ones, as this essay has shown, but are in fact rather complex. There is a need to focus at once on the natural elements and processes of neighborhood urban nature (trees, birds, gardens), the different ways in which these elements are experienced or enjoyed (listening, seeing, digging in soil), and the many factors that may influence their emotional import and “nutritional value” (are they experienced alone or enjoyed with others, with friends and family, for example). And there is a need to better understand and describe more precisely the outcomes or benefits delivered, i.e. the ways in which exposure to nature makes us happier and healthier. 

And there are complex behavioral cascades that will need to be better understood. If we feel happier when we see trees and vegetation in our neighborhoods, for instance, we are more inclined to spend time outside and engaged in walking, strolling, hiking and other physical activity, in turn delivering important physical health benefits. Some studies already confirm this. Equally true, trees and nature create context for socializing, thus in turn delivering important emotional benefits (and we already have considerable evidence about the many health benefits of friendships). So the research task becomes one of better understanding how and in what ways the nature in cities can set in motion other positive health outcomes (and again, which natural elements, experiences, features, or processes, and in which combinations, will trigger these valuable cascades). 

One view of Singapore. Photo by Tim Beatley.

Some of this research is already underway through our Biophilic Cities Project, here at the University of Virginia, with funding from the Summit Foundation and the George Mitchell Foundation. Much of our work has focused on learning from emerging biophilic cities around the world, and the tools, techniques and ideas these exemplary cities are employing to deliver nature to their citizens, and to foster connections and contact with the nature. We have partnered with some exemplars of urban nature, including Singapore, Portland, San Francisco, and Oslo, among others. But soon we will also be attempting to tackle the question of the minimum daily dose of the natural world. We are planning to consult leading researchers in medicine, public health, and other fields about the question of minimum levels of nature, through the use of a Delphi process, and to explore whether there might emerge some areas of early consensus about what kinds and amounts of nature urbanites need.

We are also beginning to work with our colleagues in psychology to better understand the comparative emotional and restorative value of different combinations of urban nature. But this work is just a beginning, and we will need many colleagues, in many allied disciplines, to join with us in this important work. While we know much, there is so much more to do, and so much exciting research to at least begin in the next few years. The Nature Pyramid, rather than being an answer or a complete and fully-developed model, is but the beginning point, a provocation to explore and innovate and better understand the important ways in which everyday, neighborhood nature can help deliver the essentials of a happy, healthy and meaningful urban life.  

Tim Beatley
Charlottesville

On The Nature of Cities

Experiencing nature. Photo by Tim Beatley

 

TNOC Encore: Vacant Land in Cities Could Provide Important Social and Ecological Benefits

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(This encore publication originally appeared at TNOC on 21 August 2012.)

Walk through any major city and you’ll see vacant land. These are the weed lots, garbage strewn undeveloped spaces, and high crime areas that most urban residents consider blights on the neighborhood. In some cases, neighbors have organized to transform these spaces into community amenities such as shared garden spaces, but all too often these lots persist as unrecognized opportunities for urban improvement. In densely populated cities with sometimes few opportunities for new park or green space development, small vacant lots could provide green relief, especially in low-income areas with reduced access to urban parkland. (You can read the academic paper on this research here.)

And yet, few cities are taking advantage of these underutilized spaces to improve urban biodiversity and provide additional ecosystem services. What’s even more surprising is the vast amount of urban land that is categorized as vacant. Take New York City for example: in this urban metropolis there are 29,782 parcels designated by the city tax code as vacant within the city boundaries, not counting vacant land in the surrounding suburbs and exurbs. This totals more than 7,300 acres of land that could be providing important social and ecological benefits for urban residents.

There are 29,782 publicly owned (red) and privately owned (orange) vacant lots in New York City. When combined they represent a sizable opportunity for urban improvement. NYC Parks are shown in green for reference. Image credit: Peleg Kremer (all rights reserved).
Urban garden in Manhattan, New York City. Photo by David Maddox.

Here is what we know:  Local and regional urban ecosystems provide important services that urban residents rely on for daily living. For example, ecosystems can supply clean water, produce food, absorb air pollution, mitigate urban heat, provide opportunity for recreation, decrease crime, and more. A recent publication from TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) details the list of ecosystem services that can be provided by urban ecosystems.

And yet, all cities do not have the same level of food production, clean water supply, or air pollution removal. Different levels of ecosystem services among cities are due to a myriad of reasons. However, research is beginning to make clear that to improve urban sustainability and resilience city planners and policymakers need to strategically develop and manage the ecological resources within the city to meet the needs of expanding urban populations.

Green infrastructure is being improved and expanded in New York City to improve the capacity of the city to absorb stormwater run-off, an important ecosystem service of green space in cities. Photo by New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

To improve the quality and quantity of ecosystem services that cities can reliably depend on, and given the financial difficulties most cities are facing, we need to find the low cost investment/high rate of return urban spaces where urban biodiversity and ecosystem services can be improved. These have to be spaces where people can interact with people (a component of ecosystems) and where people can interact with other components of ecosystems (air, soil, water, plants, animals). It’s also important for us to better understand urban people-nature dynamics (also termed social-ecological dynamics), which are about how interacting social and ecological components of ecosystems change over space and time and, for me anyway, understanding what these changes mean for future urban sustainability and resilience.

Lots of vacant land

One of the results of rapid population shifts in cities is the abandonment of previously occupied land. You can see the effects of this in older cities just by walking around. It is nearly impossible not to find land that is vacant in a city, regardless of whether you are in New York, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, or Jerusalem. Vacant land typically results from human migration, deindustrialization, environmental disaster, decreased birth rates or contamination, and occurs at various concentrations in cities across the world. Though all cities have vacant land, some have more than others. In some cities the amount of vacancy is tremendous, such as in Detroit, Michigan (USA) where nearly one third of the city is vacant land.

So, why am I so captivated with these overlooked, unmanaged, vacant spaces in cities, especially considering that they are not the most pleasant places in which to conduct research? For one simple reason: vacant, underutilized land has the potential to provide cities with opportunity to create and develop new ecosystems that support biodiversity and increase the provisioning of vital ecosystem services for urban residents. Vacant land is ripe for transformation into more sustainable, resilient urban forms. I’m not the only one who is thinking along these lines. Urban ecologists have long recognized that the ecology in the city is not relegated to parks and protected natural areas, but exists everywhere: on rooftops, in sidewalk cracks, in backyards, in soils, rivers, and streams, in narrow green islands between streets, and also in vacant land areas.

[Interesting side note: Urban ecology as a discipline basically started with the study of plant communities on vacant land in European cities.  Urban botanists in Berlin and other European cities studied the response of urban plants on “ruderal” bombed sites following World War II. These vacant sites, often consisting of rubble from destroyed buildings, provided warm, dry conditions for locally adapted plants to occupy.]

Researchers have noticed that vacant land in cities is created by a variety of urban processes, including deindustrialization, demographic and preference-based residential shifts, suburban expansion, and relocation of the work force. When my lab at The New School in New York City reviewed the literature, we noticed that the proportion of vacant lot area to total land area in large U.S. cities is relatively persistent, especially along the East Coast and Midwest of American cities, and remarkably, does not appear to be related to population growth.

Vacant lands constitute a large fraction of urban land area. In fact, vacant land in U.S. cities of more than 100,000 people varies between 19 and 25% of total land area — our research papers are in review in journals now — while for cities with populations greater than 250,000, vacant land makes up between 12.5 and 15% of total land area. The fact that the proportion of urban vacant land is fairly persistent in spite of population growth implies that vacant land may be a lasting phenomenon in urban areas, at least in the United States, and suggests that we need to be doing a lot more to manage these spaces to meet the current and future needs of urban nature and urban residents.

Vacant lots as opportunities

Another persistence is the way people tend to think about vacant lots: as areas associated with crime, abandonment, depressed real estate values, trash, overgrown weeds, pests, and general economic and/or social failure. Most people consider vacant lots to be negatively impacting community vitality.

I want to offer a challenging perspective, which is that we begin viewing vacant lots as opportunities for land use transformations that can contribute to community development. Vacant land in cities could provide important social and ecological benefits, including habitat for biodiversity, provisioning of ecosystem services, and new green space for residents in underserved neighborhoods of the city.

Given global urbanization trends compounded by the effects of climate change and other environmental pressures that are fast approaching or even exceeding planetary boundaries, one could argue that the primary dynamic that must be understood for increasing urban sustainability and resilience is the social-ecological relationships between humans and urban ecosystems.

Most humans are urban residents now. Which means, if you grow up in a city, your understanding of, and connection to, nature comes through interaction with urban nature. So, what is the state of our urban nature? Is it up to the task? Future decisions about how we steward our planet will likely be made by urbanites. What will their view of nature be? We don’t have answers to these questions yet, though the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity has recently launched a series of comprehensive publications to try to get a handle on the state of urban nature. However, many of us in the field of urban ecology and related disciplines would probably argue, first, that there is already amazing nature in cities, and second, that this nature is often overlooked, under-managed, misunderstood, abused, neglected, or wiped out for development. In any case, if we can agree that the current state of urban nature is not necessarily the ideal state for increasing the connectedness between people and ecosystems and for providing high quality urban living environments for human well-being, then where are the opportunities for making improvements?

Clearly, vacant land is an opportunity, and it’s time to seize it.

The benefits of vacant lot transformation

Here is a short list of the potential benefits that small investments to transform vacant land into more useful spaces could provide to cities:

  • Stormwater absorption
  • Air temperature regulation
  • Wind speed mitigation
  • Air purification (pollution absorption)
  • Carbon absorption
  • Flood control
  • Habitat for biodiversity (e.g. plants and pollinators)
  • Green corridors between urban natural areas
  • Recreation space
  • Community garden space
  • Social gathering space
  • Temporary art installation space
  • Crime reduction
  • Noise reduction
  • Neighborhood beautification
  • Increased adjacent property value
  • Sense of place
  • Environmental education opportunity
  • Sense of well-being
  • Green spaces for low-income neighborhoods
  • Residential and commercial building energy savings

However, the full ecological potential of the urban environment, especially in vacant land areas, is just beginning to be understood.

Some U.S. cities are beginning to get the idea. In Baltimore, Maryland, a city leading the way in urban ecological research by way of the long-term Baltimore Ecosystem Study, vacant land has been considered from the perspective of pockets for urban plant diversity. In Brooklyn, New York a non-profit group, 596acres.org, has mapped all the vacant lots in Brooklyn and is working with local neighborhood communities to turn these spaces into gardens; places not only for growing food, but also as social spaces for neighborhood residents. In Detroit, citizens, farmers, and entrepreneurs are turning vast amounts of vacant land into urban farms. And in Philadelphia, when researchers cleaned up and greened vacant lots, the crime rate fell.

At The New School in New York City, post-doctoral fellow Peleg Kremer and PhD candidate Zoé Hamstead have been working with me to map vacant lots to understand the social and ecological value of these spaces. Our goal has been to understand the combined value of urban vacant land in order to illuminate overlooked spaces in the city where policy and planning could simultaneously meet goals for biodiversity habitat, ecosystem services provisioning, and social justice. This work (currently in review for publication) shows that, at least for New York City, vacant lots are already providing a host of cultural, provisioning, and regulating ecosystem services.

For example, we were a bit surprised to find that most vacant lots are already relatively green. Trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants dominate the vacant lots we sampled. On the other hand, there were many vacant lots located in lower income areas where people lived with fewer parks and other green spaces, neighborhoods where existing vacant lots could be actively managed to provide new green infrastructure to meet community needs.

“Develop Differently”: If you have lemons, make lemonade

It’s interesting to look at just how many vacant lots cities have. Perhaps you should take a look at the tax code in your city to see how many spaces tax assessors identify as vacant?

In New York City, there are nearly 30,000 sites identified as vacant lots. Numbers like these demonstrate the vast potential for providing ecosystem services and new urban biodiversity habitats. But a significant requirement in making these services possible over the long term is to assure they are planning and management priorities, both at the city and neighborhood level.

Currently, there is very little management of urban vacant land. Since most vacant lots in New York are small (<500m2), they may not be easily developed into more traditional built infrastructure such as housing, retail, or other typical uses. Lots that are small in size or otherwise make development challenging present ideal opportunities to develop differently, by enhancing or preserving urban green infrastructure. Land that is topographically-challenging, for example, may be well suited as nature preserves, or oddly shaped lots may serve as greenways or small pocket parks with public access. Land near existing rail or other transportation corridors where other types of development are unlikely may serve as portions of greenways with pedestrian and bike access.

Google Earth Images of vacant lots in New York City shown here represent a range of contexts, from a high social need area (e.g. low-income, high population density) near a high ecological quality (highly green) vacant lot on the left (H-H) to a low social need area (e.g. high-income, low population density) near a low ecological quality (completely paved) vacant lot in L-L. Image Credit: Peleg Kremer.

It is common to find vacant lots in both low and high-density residential areas. Some may be small lots, located in the middle of rows of low-rise and low-density residential streets. Others, as in the example of a New York City community garden in the photo below, are part of higher density residential area. The lot on the far left in the image above representing tree cover within a residential context serves as an example of the importance of the location context and spatial distribution of vacant lots. In this case, the relatively high ecological quality (e.g. green) vacant lot is immediately adjacent to a low-income, high population density neighborhood. This lot is also next to a large public open space (not shown) and provides a connection between open space to the southeast and street trees to the northwest. Such connections are crucial in the maintenance and provisioning of ecosystem services, as well as the maintenance of biodiversity that supports ecosystem services in cities. Vacant lots could serve as corridors and connectors between fragmented urban green spaces, improving the ability for species to migrate between the built infrastructures of the city.

Vacant land can be transformed into community gardens, which provide multiple benefits for urban nature and urban residents. Photo by David Maddox.

The temporal perspective is also important to consider in addition to the spatial. For example, even if there is planned development for a particular vacant parcel, we should be considering the option of utilizing vacant lots — in the short, medium and long terms — as urban nature sites that provide and support ecosystem services. In a 2002 Planners Advisory Report of the American Planning Association (506/507 Old Cities/Green Cities: Communities Transform Unmanaged Land. J. Blaine Bonham, JR., Gerri Spilka, and Darl Rastorfer. March 2002. 123pp), the authors suggest that vacant land slated for eventual redevelopment should serve interim beneficial uses such as community gardens, wildlife gardens, public plantings and recreational areas so as to avoid the common blighting influence on the surrounding community. Community gardens, open spaces and other urban greening sites provide important cultural value in addition to ecological amenities such as food, air quality improvement and stormwater mitigation.

To develop differently, we need to plan and design urban spaces where ecological and cultural value can be intertwined. Importantly, as communities transform low quality landscapes into community gardens or other sites of community engagement, more resilient communities may emerge; communities that are better equipped to deal with future urban stresses. Community engagement that involves ecological resources may, in turn, perpetuate the development of ecosystem services and enhancement of community cultural amenities that continuously build both social and ecological resilience through a virtuous cycle. In this way, transformation of vacant land may provide an opportunity for enhancing the resilience of coupled social-ecological systems in urban areas.

There is still work to do to understand in detail how to best to use the cache of vacant land that cities have. Ecologists and social scientists could be very useful to planners, designers, and policymakers who are interested in transforming blighted urban spaces into social and ecological amenities. For example, differentiating vacant lot types according to how they are actually used, even if their use is temporary, can help planners identify target areas for improvement, as well as indicate possibilities for land transformation. Similarly, by assessing the size, location and shape characteristics of vacant lots, planners may be able to identify suitable spaces for various community purposes.

For instance, small, oddly-shaped lots along roadways with foot traffic may be best developed as pocket parks, while larger lots adjacent to residential buildings may be better suited for urban agriculture or neighborhood parks. Because most vacant lots are in residential areas, they can serve as spaces for community activities where people live, thus creating the potential to support neighborhood improvement and community engagement. Essentially, vacant lots could provide opportunity for developing social capacity at the same time that they provide new urban ecological infrastructure.

Frankly, vacant land has been overlooked for far too long. If cities were to invest in the social-ecological transformation of vacant land into more useful forms, they would be creating the potential to increase the overall sustainability and resilience of the city.  Depending on the kinds of land transformations urban planners and designers dream up, vacant land could provide increased green space for urban gardening and recreation, habitat for biodiversity, opportunities for increasing water and air pollution absorption and many other regulating, provisioning, and cultural ecosystem services.

Community gardeners across the world have capitalized on the opportunities of urban vacant land for decades, and the rest of us should too.

Timon McPhearson
New York City
USA

On The Nature of Cities

For more information see:

McPhearson, Timon, Peleg Kremer, and Zoé Hamstead. “Mapping Ecosystem Services in New York City: Applying a Social-Ecological Approach in Urban Vacant Land.” Ecosystem Services (2013):11-26  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2013.06.005

Kremer, Peleg, Zoé Hamstead, and Timon McPhearson. “A Social-Ecological Assessment of Vacant Lots in New York City.” Landscape and Urban Planning (2013): 218-233  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2013.05.003

 

TNOC Summit Dialogue: Demanding access to green space as a right for everyone

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Art, Science, Action: Cities Re-imagined

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Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Isabelle Anguelovski, Barcelona Urban greening and green spaces are vital to ecological and human health. However, achieving equity in urban health and reducing health inequalities requires a more complex approach than simply claiming that urban greening contributes to better health or livability.
Adrian Benepe, New York As we demand and proclaim the right to parks and open space, we can ground the abstract in the tangible by introducing a metric for park access: everyone within a 10-minute walk to a park.
Samarth Das, Mumbai A “nullah” watercourse weaves through various neighbourhoods. What better way to connect and integrate our various disparate communities within cities than to develop a string of linear parks and shared spaces along such watercourses —which provides easy access from every neighbourhood adjacent to them?
David Maddox

About the Writer:
David Maddox

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.

Introduction

What are the fault lines of making sure everyone has access to the benefits green space? How do we ensure such access is provided?
Do we truly believe in the benefits and value of urban nature and greening infrastructure? If we do, then we must ask ourselves: who should have access to and enjoy these benefits?

Everyone, no?

But not everyone has access to the myriad benefits of green. The world over, north, south, east, and west, green and its benefits for resilience, sustainability, and livability tend to concentrate in wealthier areas. How might we start to face up to and act upon the idea that access to urban green in a right made available to all? This was one of eight TNOC Summit Dialogues in Paris in 2019.

This is an output of The Nature of Cities Summit in Paris.

At TNOC Summit, we largely avoided long presentations in plenary—i.e. “Keynotes”. Rather, we gathered for eight “Dialogues”, similar to the Roundtable format at TNOC. For each dialogue there was a core question or prompt, such as the one in this Roundtable. We invited three people to participate, striving for a multi-disciplinary group, with diverse points of view, perspectives, and approaches. Each of the three delivered a short intervention (6-8 minutes), and then sat together for a longer conversation.

In this Roundtable, with Isabelle Anguelovski (Barcelona), Adrian Benepe (New York), and Samarth Das (Mumbai), we present both their written texts and a video of their presentations. Also below you can find a transcription and video of the conversation below.

A transcription of the conversation

David Maddox (Moderator): Does everyone in this room believe in the benefits of green space?

Raise your hand if you believe in the benefits of green space. Very good, then who gets to enjoy those benefits? Does everyone get to enjoy those benefits? No, they do not. So, the two big threads in this conversation. One is about the developed World. Lots of parks. And the other is places like places like Mumbai and many other places not only in the global South, but often the global South, which have very few or no green spaces at all. So I think there are two threads that we want to talk a little bit. The first one is to riff a little bit on what Adrian and Isabelle were talking about, how if we believe in the benefits of green space and we are trying to create a brilliant program like 10 minute walk to a park, which is very consistent with the what they’re doing in India as well, how do we break a cycle between the benefits of the creation of green space and gentrification and displacement. How do we break this pattern?

Adrian Benepe (Senior Vice President, The Trust for Public Land, New York): It’s a question that we’re actually wrestling with now, we got some money to do some studies. There’s very little actual good data on this. There’s a lot of data about it that lacks any direct conclusion about causation. There’s a lot of correlation, but it’s as we dig into it the causation becomes a lot thinner, because you also have to look at other things like the development of mass transit lines and all the other things that lead to gentrification.

Soho and Tribeca in the West Village of New York gentrified well before parks were added there. These were these are communities absolutely without parks, so the forces behind gentrification and particularly the impact of gentrification which is displacement are varied and complex. However, that said, what we have learned is that it is not an either/or but a but/and. If you’re particularly going to be doing large-scale park development, you have to look at the potential impacts and look at how can we ally this with affordable housing development or making sure that you keep permanently affordable housing there. There are homeowners who love the idea of gentrification because the value of the property goes up, the renter’s not so much. So again, you have both sides.

So, what we have learned finally in the park creation business is it’s not just a park. It’s going to have a ripple effect and, exactly as you say Isabelle, you have to look at how do we combine this park with mobility, with affordable housing, and all the other things that make a holistically healthy community a park  by itself won’t do that and it could have, as you point out, unintended consequences.

Isabelle Anguelovski (social scientist, justice advocate, Barcelona): I couldn’t agree more and the causation really requires spatial analysis methods that are very complex, and that are really important because otherwise, as you say, you cannot really parse out the role that green space plays in in gentrification. That said, I think that we also seeing is really some progressive mayors, like I would say our mayor in Barcelona, the mayor in Nantes, really embedding considerations of gentrification in every possible policy that they think about, that is related to land use, so they have special working groups, they have committees, they have almost like a gentrification impact assessment, if you will, which I think is a really smart way to think proactively about it. Cities like Washington DC also have Innovative models. For instance Community Land trust’s are quite popular in the United States, but very difficult to fund. I think regulations also very important like the inclusionary zoning aspect is key. The amount of affordable housing is key.

But you often have mayors who are elected having real estate developers in their pockets, and now real estate development is what drives growth in cities, both economic growth and spatial growth. So, if you don’t have a decoupling between urban agendas and who funds cities and at the same time growth in the city, I think you are going to keep having these gentrification effects, which as I was trying to highlight, really does not only concern lower income and minority residents, but also increasingly concerns the middle class. And it’s shifting. It’s like Boston gentrifying Washington DC because most people can’t afford to live in Boston, now DC becoming so expensive people go to Philadelphia, and now Philly…you know, there’s kind of this rotation around the country. It’s really in the end is kind of a national crisis

David: And Mumbai has a fraction of the green and open space that even New York. New York is a very dense City, but Mumbai has a tiny fraction of what New York has how do you respond to these kind of conversations?

Samarth Das (architect, Das & Associates, Mumbai): To give you the exact figure, the open spaces ratio to number of people in London is 31.68m2 of open space per person. It’s about 26.4m2 per person in New York. In Mumbai, it’s 1.1m2. So, we really don’t have any parks or open spaces when you look at our population density. That’s based on the data in the year 2000, and it’s probably even worse right now. (Source: Vision Juhu – Expanding Public Spaces, 2009, http://pkdas.com/published/juhu-book-final.pdf)

So yes, we are dealing with very different contexts. But the important thing for me is in the process of developing the park and then considering its ripple effects of gentrification, it’s important who’s developing the park. In Mumbai, what we have managed to do is really integrate even the small pocket parks, really integrate and build the process from ground up. I give you the example of some of the parks that I showed in my talk, those parks when undeveloped had illegal activities, drug peddling, but during the daytime you had kids from the slums coming there and playing. It depends who owns the park. Once we developed the parks we’ve ensured that it still be accessible to the kids from the slums. Still have access to those parks. Sonow they have started learning how to use these spaces, because they’re not used to have such spaces. So, initially we are faced with issues of vandalism, of theft. These are some things that communities push back against and then push for exclusion of certain groups of people, but we’ve managed to build that sense, a ground up network. Governance is very important.

And then in Mumbai—I don’t know the situation the other cities—but we have privately owned parks and publicly owned parks. And some of the parks that we’ve developed. In fact, the citizens fought against land-grabbing developers who had snatched land for real estate profits. You had the community mobilizing; you had almost 15,000 people at the gates to the park standing to oppose. We fought in the Supreme Court. So, the people get invested in the process. And then once the Park comes to life, there’s a sense of ownership, of belonging and, of course, maintenance that comes with it.

So, in Mumbai people are yearning for open space, we’re all crying out for some sense of open space. So, unfortunately—or fortunately—we’ve not reached the situation where we have to worry about gentrification that comes with parks, but for now, we want to make more parks.

David: If you applied the 10-minute walk to a park metric that Adrian described in Mumbai, we know what the answer would be it. Could you imagine though that if you applied such a metric in Mumbai, it could be a political tool, as Adrian described, that you could use it as a motivator for leaders and mayors, because they start to look bad? Could you imagine doing that?

 Samarth: Well, absolutely. And in fact, that’s precisely what we use to leverage getting some support. We work actively with elected representatives from the government. There are politicians who sometimes very insensitive to the ideas of greening and improving public space and more importantly ensuring access to public space. But we’ve been blessed over the last five or seven years with very active members of the legislative assemblies, along with the officers and the bureaucracy who see the benefits and then support this process.

It is why we focused on the nullah project, because of the importance of scalability. We have 250 kilometers of waterways within Mumbai. In fact, we took this project to the City of Mumbai  and the commissioner gave us permission: “All right, here you go, 1.2 kilometers. This is your pilot you have to find funding for it because we don’t have it. Let’s see if it’s successful and then we can Implement that across the city” … and of course everyone jumped onto that opportunity. So now the members of legislative assembly who supported the project already recognition in the city for doing something that has not been done anywhere in the country. Now there are people who piggyback on a process, and then it’s really how we stitch together those collaboratives to make something successful. It’s highly localized, even across the several projects that we worked on. The approaches have been very different, based on the different communities that we’ve been interacting with.

David: Isabelle, do you find the metrics like this to be positive political tools to promote the idea, not only of more parks and access to green space and their benefits, but also as a forum to discuss some of the negative things that you talked about: gentrification and displacement?

Isabelle: Yes, and I think certainly so especially as some cities are focusing on universal access to green space rather than addressing equity. And I think the example of Nantes is very good in that sense. Unlike for instance what Los Angeles has been doing, which is more to map where communities have least access to green space and then to motivate private developers to contribute to a fund, and that then will be used to create new green space around the city … except that this fund is actually going to other communities. So, at the end of the day you have new real estate development in low-income communities that don’t have green space, and the the communities that already have green space have it more. So, I really like the tool of universal access. It’s important.

Adrian: I was really interested in what you said, Isabelle, about the issue of gentrification impacts not just on poor people, but also middleclass people. We had a project in Bozeman, Montana. Bozeman is a small city of 30,000 people, but it’s doubled in population over the last 10 years. It’s going to double again, and we are creating the Central Park of Bozeman. It’s a 60 acre park, which is a big park for Bozeman, right downtown. We were able to carve off eight acres to be set aside for affordable housing. By Bozeman standards affordable didn’t mean for poor people, it meant for teachers, firefighters and others so they didn’t have to live 30 miles outside of town and have a big commute in. And it was also guided by local zoning, which turned out to be really difficult because the local zoning was for single family homes, affordable single-family homes. There isn’t a developer of affordable single-family homes in the United States, and certainly not in Montana. So, the constraints that were placed by zoning made it almost impossible. Luckily, we came up with a solution so that eight Acres of a site are now going to be devoted to affordable, that is for middle-income sort of city workers. So those kinds of trade-offs are important.

I should also add that this issue of green gentrification: there’s a concept of make it “just green enough”. That is make a just green enough that the wealthy people won’t want it, but it’s okay for the poor people. I defy that concept because in all of my work and central Brooklyn, in the South Bronx, and Harlem, I never had a community member say to me “make it just green enough don’t make it as nice as Central Park”. I heard just the opposite: make it as nice as the parks in the rich neighborhoods. And that’s the debate. That’s the problem. T he poor people who live there don’t want a second-class park. They want a first-class park. But if you build the first-class Park, will the poor people be displaced? That’s the big problem. So it’s it is a dilemma.

David: Let’s take a couple of questions from the audience.

Audience member: Hi. I’m wondering if the green gentrification is like a bubble that might just burst in the similar way. We talk about housing in Australia. Is it just a matter of time until the bubble bursts and we have it everywhere. And in the meantime, do we just have to bear the pain?

Isabelle: The problem with housing bubbles is that they burst and then we grow again because we don’t learn and we don’t question our models of growth and development. So hopefully it will burst but I think—and it’s tragic at the same time to think about it this way—as the middle class becomes increasingly impacted by having to leave and then cities lose a variety of their workforce, then they will really starting start questioning what type of housing they need to provide and how to fund it better. So, in the end of the day. it will also become much bigger housing agenda. There are a lot of housing platforms growing in many countries because housing has become an emergency.

Audience member: It’s not really a question; it is more comment or a proposal. I’m thinking about this concept of resilience that we are all are very familiar with. We can have an ecosystem that is resilient but not necessarily just. So we can use a social-ecological approach or social ecological systems approach. Okay, that’s good. I can bring local knowledge. I can network social capital of the people there. and I can use their knowledge to better manage the ecosystem. But still, the definition comes up short when it comes to environmental justice. So, I don’t know if we should keep on relying on this concept. I don’t know if it is an outcome from this conference. Why not create a new definition of resilience, in support of those ecosystems that can support and maintain ecological processes, but also are based on on justice for everyone?

Adrian: I spent some time this morning with the local Parisian parks officials, and they have some really sophisticated metrics now. They’re built into how they design new parks. And, of course, space is at a premium in Paris, and they are trying to put a whole lot into small spaces. What they said to me was that the smallest spaces are the more difficult, because they have to address all of these different demands—the equity demands, the resilience demands—and it was remarkable to see how much you’re squeezing into a six hectare park, roughly 14 acres, where they’re putting in humid zones and native plantings and play areas and all these things,

They created a program, a computer program, that the community could tap into called Design Your Own Park. You can put in all the elements you want, and then the program reports the price, and you have to figure out which you can’t afford to do. It shows an increasing sophistication, with resilience being at the top of what they were looking for and also social aspects being done for this park. I worry that we’re expecting a park to play too many roles, expecting that this park is going to solve all our problems, make us resilient, do all these things. At the end of the day, i’s got to be a great park that brings people together.

As I’ve traveled around Paris, seeing these tiny little parks with a lot of different things in them, and really being used … this is the greatest value of parks. It is not the health benefit or the environmental benefits. It’s people interacting with people which makes a great City and when you leave and you go to the suburbs in your in your private home and you don’t have parks and you have a backyard, it’s not people interacting with people. That’s the greatest virtue of parks. In my four decades of working in parks, it is the connection between people which defines what makes cities not just great, but also viable .

Samarth: So just to talk about the issue of ecology and open spaces. The movement of public space in Mumbai is very intensely interlinked with the movement to reclaim our natural assets and our ecological corridors, because in Mumbai we are faced with another problem. It’s interesting that all three presentations started off with mapping as an exercise—mapping as a means to empower a certain pocket of land, a park, a certain group of people. So, mapping is a tool to the to enable the Right to the City in Mumbai.

What’s interesting is that the mapping we did wasn’t just limited to the open spaces, but it also mapped the mangroves, the forests, the creeks, the salt pan lands, the wetlands. These areas had never existed on the map of Mumbai. In fact, after we did this mapping the city has recognized these resources for the first time in the last 60 years. The new development plan of the city actually has areas marked with edges with buffer zones for mangroves to wetlands to salt pan lands. Now there is a legitimate means to fight for them. So, for communities like us, activists who are looking to fight legal battles, these maps become legal tools.

We had a Seed Session yesterday about the Right to the City, which was very exciting. I believe access to open spaces, and at the same time access to natural spaces, which ensure vigilance and ensure their protection equally, stake a claim in the Right to the City,

 David: Please thank our panel

Isabelle Michele Sophie Anguelovski

About the Writer:
Isabelle Anguelovski

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

Adrian Benepe

About the Writer:
Adrian Benepe

Adrian Benepe has worked for more than 30 years protecting and enhancing parks, gardens and historic resources, most recently as the Commissioner of Parks & Recreation in New York City, and now on a national level as Senior Vice President for City Park Development for the Trust for Public Land.

Samarth Das

About the Writer:
Samarth Das

Samarth Das is an Urban Designer and Architect based in Mumbai. Having practiced professionally in Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and subsequently in New York City, his work focuses on engaging actively in both public as well as private sectors—to design articulate shared spaces within cities that promote participation and interaction amongst people.

Isabelle Michele Sophie Anguelovski

About the Writer:
Isabelle Anguelovski

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

Isabelle Anguelovski

Urban greening and green spaces are vital to ecological and human health. However, achieving equity in urban health and reducing health inequalities requires a more complex approach than simply claiming that urban greening contributes to better health or livability.
Asking how we demand access to green space as a right for everyone can be rephrased into how we build green, healthy, and equitable cities for all rather than creating green cities as enclaves of privilege.

This question is particularly important because traditionally, lower-income and minority residents suffer to a greater extent from environmental toxics, climate risks, and poor access to green space/infrastructure in comparison with white and higher-income residents.

These inequalities are illustrated by earlier highway construction projects replacing valuable green space for people of color, such as the I-10 construction on Clairborne Avenue in New Orleans in the 1960s, and by more recent unequal access to green space for Latino and Black residents in places like Los Angeles County. Such inequities have a particularly strong health ramification since high exposure to green space is associated with lower risk of all-cause mortality. Put differently, unequal access to green space by race, ethnicity, or class also shapes health inequalities and disparities.

Unequal access to green amenities more generally have been produced by urban development trends, including what is now increasingly known as green gentrification. In the context of cities advancing green agendas, visions, and urbanism, our research on green gentrification trens shows that green amenities can create conditions for the social and spatial exclusion of the most socially and racially vulnerable residents, their livelihoods, and practices. Parks, greenways, or climate-proofing infrastructure can become GREENLULUS in racially mixed and low-income neighborhoods.

In our Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ), our research has shown city-wide green gentrification trends in places like Barcelona, where approximately half of the new green spaces created between 1990 and 2005 contributed to strong green gentrification. We have seen similar trends in our recent study of Washington DC, where green space creation predicted losses in African-American residents. In addition, in DC, we were able to pinpoint that the green spaces most associated with green gentrification seem to be community gardens, which have historically been spaces of refuge for people of color. Finally, our latest study, in Boston, confirms the association between community gardens and gentrification, while also adding greenways to the picture of green gentrification. Greenways are particularly important because of the emphasis of local climate plans, such as the 2018 Boston Harbor Plan, on linear resilient parks to address stormwater and flooding.

Bringing it back to health, our work also tries to understand whether everyone’s health benefits from green space and other livability initiatives or, alternatively, whether the process of green gentrification cause worse health outcomes for some and better health outcomes for others. In a recent study of NYC, being exposed as a resident to a higher percentage of neighborhood active green space was associated with lower odds of fair or poor health. We also found that only the health of privileged groups (i.e., those with high incomes and those with high levels of education) who live in gentrifying neighborhoods benefited from active green space. In contrast, residents living in other neighborhoods, and less socially privileged residents in gentrifying neighborhoods, did not experience health benefits from active green space.

Counter-examples

Knowing this reality, what are counter-examples of green, inclusive, equitable planning? One example that comes to mind is the Superblock program in Barcelona. Embedded in the 2012 urban mobility plan, this program combines climate mitigation (emission reduction) and adaptation (heat island) goals. By altering mobility and enhancing access to public/open spaces, it proposes new a urban development path and city vision questioning spatial growth. Additionally, by planning to build more than 500 superblocks in the city, the plan emphasizes an equality-driven vision where all neighborhoods in the city would benefit from superblocks. In our views, this approach may avoid a “flagship” effect, whereby some projects draw specific attention, investment, and possibly green speculation. The HighLine example in New York is a prime example of this process.

Superblocks in Barcelona

Another socially-inclusive greening approach was adopted by Nantes in France at the beginning of the 1990s. At that time, Nantes decided to operate a transition from an industrial shipyard city to a high-tech industry and cultural center, oriented towards sustainable development, health, social cohesion, and livability. From 1984 to 2015, it added 200% green space (1,000ha), and achieved its stated goal of allowing all inhabitants to live within 300m of a green area. During this greening process, Nantes also created ecology- and health-centered ”active” eco-districts in working-class neighborhoods. Last, it added different affordable housing schemes and projects in redeveloped green neighborhoods. One of the most strongest regulations here is the obligation for developers to include 30% of affordable units for every new development. Last, this greening trajectory has been operated in an inclusive manner: In Nantes, green space is co-created and managed with residents, with large resources and times allocated to the Green Space Department to developing new uses, programming, and activities in green spaces.

Nantes

 

In sum, urban greening and green spaces are vital to ecological and human health. However, we in our BCNUEJ lab, we argue that achieving equity in urban health and reducing health inequalities requires a more complex approach than simply claiming that urban greening contributes to better health or livability.

In closure, I would like to propose a few directions for planning green and equitable cities: In our views, cities should integrate the concerns and local uses of social groups that might be less vocal or visible is core to the process of designing equitably beneficial public/green space. They should direct public action in ways that places the well-being and health of existing residents at the center of public policy and planning, and that controls real estate development, housing rights, and mass tourism. Policy-makers should also consider how supra-local constraints and politics undermine sustainability planning and decisions and build lasting wider socio-ecological political coalitions. Finally, there should be greater genuine cooperation between public entities and institutions at different territorial levels so that equitable greening is not envisioned and achieved at the municipal scale only, but takes metropolitan and regional realities into consideration as well.

Adrian Benepe

About the Writer:
Adrian Benepe

Adrian Benepe has worked for more than 30 years protecting and enhancing parks, gardens and historic resources, most recently as the Commissioner of Parks & Recreation in New York City, and now on a national level as Senior Vice President for City Park Development for the Trust for Public Land.

Adrian Benepe

As we demand and proclaim the right to parks and open space, we can ground the abstract in the tangible by introducing a metric for park access: everyone within a 10-minute walk to a park.
Our relationship to parks and open space is beginning to fundamentally change. Many of my colleagues at The Nature of Cities’ Summit in Paris this past June made the case that the perception of what makes a city livable, and worthwhile, is shifting. More and more, people are demanding green space as a right, not as a luxury.

The right to green space is a new idea, necessitated by the swelling populations of high-density urban areas, and the need to provide respite, relief, and leisure for those communities who are often on the frontlines of the worsening impacts of climate change. Excessive heat, flooding from storm water runoff and rising seas, deteriorating air quality, and the ensuing health challenges exacerbated by these factors, all require a reimagining of the physical and social infrastructure that compose our cities. Part of that is a new way of thinking about green space, and proclaiming it as a right as opposed to an amenity.

As we demand and proclaim the right to parks and open space, we can ground the abstract in the tangible by introducing a metric for park access: the 10-minute walk. The Trust for Public Land (TPL) has adopted a 10-minute walk (half a mile—or roughly 800 meters) to a park as our principle metric in assessing park access in cities across the United States, and we have launched a campaign—The 10 Minute Walk Mayors Campaign—to sign up mayors (300 and counting) willing to make a commitment to 100 percent 10-minute walk park access in their cities by 2050: the “100% Promise”.

NYC schoolyard before and after a TPL-led transformation.

TPL has also helped create or transform more than 500 parks that give 8 million people access to a high quality park within a short walk. One of our programs, NYC Playgrounds, has transformed over 200 asphalt schoolyards in New York City into thriving, green community playgrounds. The model created by this program has been adopted by cities across the US, and we have added more green schoolyard programs in cities like Philadelphia, Camden, Dallas, Atlanta, and Oakland. Paris, our host city for The Nature of Cities’ Summit, has very successfully incorporated the green schoolyard model into their sustainability plans, and have already transformed a number of sites through their Urban Oasis project, thanks to the “importing” of the TPL model by Bloomberg Associates. It’s a model that offers perhaps the best way for creating park access at scale, since most neighborhoods have schools, and by recreating their adjacent schoolyards into public playgrounds, we can create new green space without having to actually acquire new land—a difficult and very expensive prospect. It of course has its own complexities, like the need for a joint-use agreement between municipal agencies, but it nonetheless has the potential to deliver 10-minute walk park access to tens of millions of people.

A Paris Schoolyard, part of the city’s Urban Oasis Project.

As we ask mayors to make specific commitments, we are also equipping the public and city officials with the data necessary for spurring action and guiding implementation. Two TPL resources, ParkServe and ParkScore, do just this. In creating ParkServe, we mapped 14,000 communities in the United States to locate 131,000 parks and identify gaps in park access, and to find out how many residents did not have a park within a 10-minute walk. We also built in a tool where park planners locate optimal points for new parks that would provide the most people the most benefits, and layered these maps with information about the demographics of communities, using census data. We then fed all this information into ParkScore, which ranks the 100 top park systems in the countries according to access, amenities, funding, and a host of other criteria. This year, Washington D.C. came out on top, beating out the prior champion St. Paul, Minnesota, by a narrow margin. ParkScore is a potent tool, as mayors are naturally competitive. By ranking cities, we’ve found that mayors have been incentivized to improve their park systems, creating a race to the top. As a validation of our efforts to elevate the role of parks in the public discourse, the most recent US Conference of Mayors survey listed parks and open space as the number one sub-issue for mayors in 2019.

With many mayors now on board, and the right to green space gaining traction, we are now working with cities to help them meet their commitments and reach the goals they have set for themselves. All of us—community groups, constituents, and non-profits—must continue to celebrate visionary leaders and help them succeed, so that the right to green space is asserted and made a fundamental human right for city dwellers in perpetuity.

With additional writing and research by Thomas Newman, National Programs Coordinator, The Trust for Public Land

Samarth Das

About the Writer:
Samarth Das

Samarth Das is an Urban Designer and Architect based in Mumbai. Having practiced professionally in Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and subsequently in New York City, his work focuses on engaging actively in both public as well as private sectors—to design articulate shared spaces within cities that promote participation and interaction amongst people.

Samarth Das

This “nullah” weaves through various neighbourhoods. What better way to connect and integrate our various disparate communities within cities than to develop a string of linear parks and shared spaces along such watercourses—which provides easy access from every neighbourhood adjacent to them?
Defining relationships

We are currently seeing a rising trend of ‘gated communities’ crop up all throughout the city of Mumbai. These gated communities further the fragmentation and segregation of the city’s fabric; as well as re-inforce and re-assert the several social and economic divides between various classes of people that call the city their home. By the sheer nature of their planning and construction, they promote an ‘exclusiveness’ and thereby a certain apathy towards the surroundings they are located in. Romantic ideas of a utopic lifestyle complete with private parks and amenities are sold to buyers in the market – boldly acknowledging that one needs to ‘get away’ from the disrepair and hopelessness of the city itself in order to find comfort and feel ‘at home’.

The isolation that these types of developments promote stands equally true to the built as well as un-built environments. The concept of ‘nature’ is becoming increasingly manicured – almost manufactured –  with little or very less importance given to natural eco-systems and environments.

Fragmented city fabric with apathy towards natural assets.
Photo: Johnny Miller, Unequal Scenes, Mumbai

It is important, in this scenario, to build and define relationships collectively between people as well as with nature especially on questions of integration, cohesiveness, co-habitation and sustainability. Over the last 40 years, our architectural endeavours and our design practice PK Das & Associates, have stood by the belief that organising movements and creating grassroots networks would certainly help in defining these relationships.

Wider public dialogue and popularisation of ideas are necessary means towards the achievement of political recognition and thereby influencing structural legislative changes. The practice has been fairly successful in achieving these goals through city-wide public exhibitions for example, which have seen participation from key government officials and politicians; as well as organising and participating in public marches and protests with communities around issues of protecting their neighbourhood parks, gardens and open spaces.

Open Mumbai Exhibition. Mumbai, 2012. Photos: PK Das & Associates

Need for collective intervention

In 2007, we launched the Juhu Vision Plan—which propagated the idea of neighbourhood based planning for cities, instead of ‘city wide’ master plans—which are often alienating to many. Juhu is a western suburb of Mumbai, and this project envisions a public realm integrated into the neighbourhood through networking the public spaces and natural assets in the area. Providing access to these areas also ensures vigilance and protection. We evolved campaign posters in order to sensitise the community about the project as well as achieve the larger goal of popularising planning. The press and media become an indispensable part of this process by helping increase awareness amongst citizens, and ensuring accountability on behalf of governments.

Campaign Poster, Juhu Vision Plan. Credit: PK Das & Associates and KRVIA Design Cell

Integrating the backyards

Focussing on eliminating the expanding backyards of filth, abuse, discrimination and exclusion of places as well as people is a priority as it is undermining urbanisation and the very idea of cities. We argue that ‘urban’ is a larger concept that lends to a certain quality of life and spaces that respect our built as well as natural environments. Therefore, not all cities are ‘urban’; rather in this context rural areas and villages can be far more progressive than cities and thereby are more ‘urban’ in nature.

‘Nullahs’ were originally planned as open water channels – following natural low lying areas and drain channels in order to take storm water from the land to the sea. Unfortunately the apathy with which natural assets are dealt with have turned these potentially incredible waterways into open sewers and dumping grounds carrying the filth of untreated sewage to the sea. It is indeed a challenge to engage with the invisible yet perceived barriers across city landscapes while ensuring their unification.

Irla Nullah – before the Juhu Vision plan. Photo: Samarth Das.

Through urban planning and design endeavours

Urban planning and design are effective democratic tools of social and environmental change and such change must be demonstrative through participatory means and wider collective action, as has been in the cases of several neighbourhoods of Mumbai.

Irla Nullah

The movement to reclaim our neglected backyards has since moved on to several other projects. One of the most significant of these is the restoration of the Irla Nullah. In the process of re-appropriating these spaces, the project has been successful in creating walking and cycling tracks complete with landscaping and lighting and performance spaces which ensure that these spaces are multi-functional yet open to be appropriated in any way as deemed fit by the community.

Owing to its physical footprint, this “nullah” weaves through various neighbourhoods. What better way to connect and integrate our various disparate communities within cities than to develop a string of linear parks and shared spaces along such watercourses —which provides easy access from every neighbourhood adjacent to them? The idea is to advocate smaller, pocket and linear parks that are within walking distance instead of major, city level central parks which we all have to travel to using some means of transport. This project is also the first of its kind in the country where there is an attempt to clean the waters flowing in these nullahs. With over 150kms of ‘nullahs’ running across the city of Mumbai, the potential of this project’s scalability is enormous.

The Irla Nullah Re-invigoration Project. Photos: PK Das & Associates

Bring about citywide transformative change

Bottom up processes and their scalability to city-wide transformative change must be a necessary mission in the re-envisioning of cities and their sustainability. The movement to reclaim public spaces in Mumbai started almost 23 years ago. Through all our public work and engagements we have engaged with communities in each neighbourhood. With every project our understanding of the city grows, and with it, the potential for scalability of ideas across these various projects increases.

Movement to reclaim public spaces in Mumbai – 23 years and continuing
Image credit: PK Das & Associates

 Open Mumbai

In 2012, we held an elaborate city-wide exhibition called ‘Open Mumbai: Re-envisioning the city and its open spaces’ . A mapping of open and natural spaces in the city revealed some incredible facts. A brief list of the incredible natural assets that we fail to realise within our city can be seen in the image below. Sadly, we have failed to recognise in our city’s development plans. This ignited the idea for the Open Mumbai Plan. vThe Open Mumbai plan proposes the re-invigoration and re-integration of over 300 kms of the natural watercourses within our city’s landscape; and thereby develop a network of linear parks and shared spaces across neighbourhoods and the city.

A plan that aims to create non-barricaded, non-exclusive, non-elitist spaces that provide access to all our citizens. A plan that ensures that open space is not just available, but is geographically and culturally integral to neighbourhoods and a participatory community life. A plan that we hope will be the beginning of a dialogue to create a truly representative “People’s Plan’ for the city of Mumbai”.

TNOC Summit Dialogue: How can professors help mobilize knowledge?

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Art, Science, Action: Cities Re-imagined

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Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Thomas Elmqvist, Stockholm What is still lacking so far is mechanisms for co-implementation where we, jointly with stakeholders, work on implementation processes. Academic professionals may have a very important role in implementation, both in evaluation and monitoring, but I think this has been overlooked so far.
Nina-Marie Lister, Toronto Our work in the Ecological Design Lab is founded on community research-practice partnerships. For example, we train 35 professional planners every year who will plan, design and build cities all over the world. We can and do influence new models of design and planning practice—indeed new communities of practice—from studio classes to field trips and internships.
François Mancebo, Paris I think that it is about building trust. It is not just a professor going out the “street”. It’s also about the “street” getting involved all along in the research. It is promoting more inclusive action research. Today, I have the feeling that the more we speak about going out and doing action research, the more we paradoxically stick to our own kind and our way of thinking.
David Maddox

About the Writer:
David Maddox

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.

Introduction

How can professors better mobilize academic knowledge? How can professors get more engaged in practice knowledge? Or, in the prompt’s most provocative version: how can professors get out of the ivory box and into the streets? This was the theme of one of the Dialogues at The Nature of Cities Summit in Paris, with scientists and planners Thomas Elmqvist (Stockholm), Nina-Marie Lister (Toronto), and François Mancebo (Paris), and moderated by David Maddox (New York).

Scientists produce lots of knowledge, certainly. Is it connected to the practical needs of cities? Are scientists connected to practitioners in ways that produce useful co-productions? Well, yes and no. Most of the people at TNOC Summit would be deeply sympathetic to the idea of transdisciplinary co-production that includes academics. But it is not the norm. How might we make it the norm? What prevents us from doing so?

There were two common themes. One is the key idea of trust between scientists and practitioners. Trust is largely build over time, and with the shared understanding that ideas, credit, and benefits will be shared.

A second theme is the fact that academia is not good at incentivizing collaboration outside the academy. Reward structures are not build to credit work outride traditional scholarly venues. Long publication times are not conducive to the rapid needs to decision makers. Non-academics are rarely invited into the decision making of university leaders.

But there are ways forward, and the three speakers included here are experienced at created new venues for collaboration.

This is an output of The Nature of Cities Summit in Paris.

At TNOC Summit, we largely avoided long presentations in plenary—i.e. “Keynotes”. Rather, even when we gathered in our largest group, we met for “Dialogues”, similar to the Roundtable format at TNOC. For each dialogue there was a core question or prompt, such as the one in this Roundtable. We invited three people to participate, striving for a multi-disciplinary group, with diverse points of view, perspectives, and approaches. Each of the three delivered a short intervention (about 8 minutes), and then sat together for a longer conversation. We are publishing all of the Summit dialogues in oder to make  the ideas widely available and keep the conversations going beyond the Summit itself.

In this Roundtable, we present both their written texts (essentially a transcription of their presentations) and video of their presentations. Also you can find a transcription and video of the conversation below.

A transcription of the conversation

David Maddox, moderator: Fantastic. Fantastic. The somewhat provocative title that we have was about getting professors out into the streets. Another version of the title is how do we mobilize knowledge, or even how we might democratize knowledge? So, if you can imagine one thing you would change—whether it’s a reward structure or whether it’s some sort of engagement patterns or … —what is one thing you would suggest we could do to change the current state of lack of engagement between these different sectors. Absolutely many people and many people in this room do this, and you guys are great examples of people who do this kind of co-production. But it is not the norm. So, how do we make it the norm? What is the one thing we could do to make it the norm Thomas?

Thomas Elmqvist: Well, I think this conference should be one thing. You have to make it a fun event. It must be very enjoyable to be engaged. We really need to think carefully how we design this to get people to talk to each other and engaged in a way that feels enjoyable and productive and gives hope for the future.

Nina-Marie Lister: Give university tenure to young people who are employed part-time in municipalities federal government, provincial government, and the university. Why? Because it fosters long-term research. And, by the way, Thomas you inspired me to answer it this way because we have no reward structure for the incoming generation of professors who do this kind of work at all. At least not in North American universities. You have to be something else before you are everything. And we don’t have time. And it’s not to say that I don’t value the enormous depth of research that science does. I’m still a recovering ecologist. I still respect the data. We use it all the time in our work, but we cannot spend time being duly certified in two or even three professions before the university system rewards us to communicate our knowledge in meaningful ways with our publics and our cities simply. When they do cross appointments with university… that’s just called having two jobs, people. That’s not good enough.

David Maddox: And why would we get the universities to accept that sort of change in the reward structure?

Nina-Marie Lister: Maybe they need to start counting the money that a lot of us are bringing in with our NGO Partnerships and work that we do with The Nature of Cities, which frankly doesn’t count in the academy. 

David Maddox: Although I am gratified that some people I know, I think Timon [McPhearson] might have been the first one to actually use The Nature of Cities publications as part of his tenure review. [Laughing] I think he was denied tenure, wasn’t he? No. No, he wasn’t of course. He got tenure. Francois?

François Mancebo: Yes, to carry on with the metaphor: let the giant into the room. Basically, as an ecologist as well as an urban planner, and I have the feeling that when try to address an issue it is important, to involve from the start everyone concerned in the answer that will be given to his issue: all the stakeholders, residents, inhabitants. We have to get them into it and accept their common knowledge is significant and makes a lot of sense. I remember a colleague of mine working in Bangladesh. They were developing a program about how to protect areas from floods, using people’s common knowledge. Traditionally, when people saw sand-worms get out of the sand, it meant that flood was coming in within a few days, so they moved. So simple. But it was very difficult to make local scientists accept this common knowledge was more adequate than their expert knowledge about flood in this specific situation. More so to include the people who had this knowledge within their research.

I think that it is about building trust. It is not just a professor going out the “street”. It’s also about the “street” getting involved all along in the research. It is promoting more inclusive action research. Today, I have the feeling that the more we speak about going out and doing action research, the more we paradoxically stick to our own kind and our way of thinking.

David Maddox: Many people on this stage have talked about the idea that building trust in collaborations is a key factor, maybe the most important factor, and so from your side of the equation, as professors who are trying to build collaborations beyond academia and be useful in policy and planning from your side, what builds trust for you? And maybe on the flip side of that is what do you do to demonstrate that that you are trustworthy as a partner?

François Mancebo: Basically, people are very pragmatic. Inhabitants and NGOs want more decision-making power on their lives, scientists need some ideas and topics that they can develop in their own field and increase their recognition. Thus, any stakeholder that is not considered to have the provide what they expect and can be useful for them in real life, lose legitimacy even if he has great expertise. Then action research doesn’t work. How do you say: you are f****d, pardon my English. Thus, legitimacy has a lot to do with trust, and you build trust through common interests. Making sure that if people trust you then they can have something in return that would better their life. A research is not just a report that will end in a drawer, or in a publication. It has to have consequences in their life, and positive ones.

Nina-Marie Lister: We use Rules of Engagement that are fair for everyone. We don’t take more than we give. We reference and give acknowledgement to our community partners all the time. We make sure that if we’re working with vulnerable communities, they tell us what they need, not us telling them what we will give. So, some of it is what I would say is courteous. The other is what would be contractually, ethically required. We make sure that we are available for information to be asked of us. We share everything we make. We don’t keep it and we never publish or photograph without permission. So some of those are really basic rules.

The other thing we do is something that Thomas has already mentioned. We try to have fun. We try to host dinners. We try to go out into the community and have our students and our researchers working together with community members in a personal way, much as I think The Nature of Cities does to build trust. I don’t think I’ve ever received funding for a dance party though. So if anyone’s got a line on that, let me know.

Thomas Elmqvist: Well, just a few words to compliment. I think on building trust, one important part is to really show that you have a long-term engagement and that there’s something that is a joint goal you want to achieve in the long term. And also that there is some sensitivity of any asymmetry, whatever it could be in power resources and to address that asymmetry in a sort of in a trustful way.

David Maddox: And, I guess this could go for any kind of collaboration that you might build, what else, beyond the question of loss of trust, are the most common things that go wrong? What can go sideways in collaborations when they don’t work. I know there’s a long list of things that can go wrong, but what if…maybe the question should be: what are the things that could go wrong that that wouldn’t have to go wrong as much if we planned better these collaborations. 

Nina-Marie Lister: Where to start?

David Maddox: Nina-Marie’s mind explodes.

Nina-Marie Lister: Okay, just one thing would be the ill fit between community-based research partnerships and co-design / co-creation with traditional universities bureaucracies and their own siloed way of thinking, based very much on a kind of linear reductionist accounting that makes it very difficult for us to do things that are kind or nice for our partners. I mean, I used the example of a dance party, which is not really a line item on my grants right at the moment, but even for us to do things like pay honoraria to indigenous Elders with whom we work is a difficult thing to do and it takes so much time and energy from us, away from the good work of collaboration. So that you end up feeling simply clobbered by the work and it can be very draining. These are [individually] very simple things, one by one, but they stack up and they consume an enormous amount of oxygen, energy, and time.

David Maddox: So, the rules are stacked against you, against anything that’s unconventional.

Nina-Marie Lister: Absolutuely.

David Maddox: Even if you want to do it that way and everybody else wants to, the rules are stacked against you?

Thomas Elmqvist: Yes, one other thing we know is that a lot of projects fail and I think one way of handling that is important is that maybe you already from the start have the attitude: Well, we’re doing this together as an experiment and, whatever comes out, it will be a learning experiment rather than the feeling of sort of a joint failure, which I think could be a legacy that it’s hard to get over.

François Mancebo: Yes, and it is a matter of adaptation to structural perturbations. More than often, as researchers, we are on our track and anticipate from the beginning what what we are searching, how we are going to search it and what we are going to find. But in real life there is political struggle, personal interests, it is completely different. Besides people change constantly. Things are not the way they were supposed to be. And sometimes, we don’t adapt fast enough. It is about our incapacity to adapt to chaotic situations. And it is really weird because at the same time we expect that the people in the street adjust to us and our methods, but we don’t adapt to them and their needs.  It is very difficult, and a lot of research fails on that basis. We listen, but don’t really hear what is going on.

Nina-Marie Lister: I’d like to follow up on the idea about failure. We have written a lot about the idea of “safe to fail” experiments and design so that when they do fail, they’re not catastrophic and nobody gets hurt. But I’m not a bridge engineer. So, I’m allowed to talk like that. But I have to say, nobody rewards me for failure and there’s a lot of them [failures]. I mean some of you in the academic world might know about the CV of failures. It’d be a nice idea, rather than showing us your impressive CV, show all the things you tried and didn’t get. I would like to develop a casebook of failures for community-based partnerships because, boy would it be a great learning tool! But there is so little incentive to talk about your failure publicly. So that’s another thing we could do.

David Maddox: It feels like an another element that is stacked against these kind of collaborations is the length of time it takes to publish the work. If the work is very alive and on its feet, and you’re going to be writing about it but it’s not going to appear for a year, year and a half. For the practitioners it is really frustrating. Can that be changed?

Nina-Marie Lister: That’s why I would advocate for different models of tenure that allow for our community-based practice and co-design to have evaluative formulas. We certainly say that we value, in my university at least, experiential learning. We value scholarly research and creative activity. And those of us that are in the creative design disciplines and in the arts have [different]models for tenure as well. But they’re an ill fit. One of the ways to do that is to begin to change those formulas, and that means we have to sit on tenure committees. But sometimes we may be the lone voice that’s advocating for work that’s being done as valuable in tandem, with different kinds of peer adjudication.

Thomas Elmqvist: One other mechanism to address this could be: some journals have already started a sort of pre-publication process. You can put out your preliminary paper with the authors being fully transparent and that is open for comments from a wide community. And then the preliminary results can be used in some sort of process. Then that open review process and maybe some other more formal review process will eventually result in [a decision on] whether this paper will be accepted or not. But you still have some process where it’s out there discussed and scrutinized and the results could be used [immediately].

François Mancebo: One big problem is that officially there are incentives for interdisciplinary research—at least in France but I guess it is about the same everywhere else— more multi-disciplinarity … blah blah blah. But in fact, everybody keeps working inside his disciplinary field. Not that much when you are a city planner scholar, who is constantly involved in action research, but go meet a biologist, a chemist, or lawyer and ask him: “Hey come and work with me on this matter, it’s quite interesting”. What does he usually answer? “Well, they’ll never publish what we will do together. We won’t have any incentive for that. I’m not going to be recognized.” This is a big problem: sectorization. I would like the emergence of a synthetic, multi-disciplinary field, but it looks like it is not going to happen soon.

Nina-Marie Lister: Well, some of us just make a concerted effort to publish in applied sectors, or we publish our work in policy.

David Maddox: Questions?

Question from the audience: Thank you very much really stimulating session. My name is Polly Mosley. I went as a mature student to start PhD two years ago after having worked with the community one mile away from the University for 10 years. My question is about ethics. I think for me in a Natural Sciences Department, I found ethics a massive hurdle to get out and actually start the research. I think we need a new land ethic and I think the university’s role in our city is massive. It’s a massive land owner. Its Estates Department puts plastic trees in our foyer. We have enormous impact on city life. It calls itself and modern civic university, yet it feels like it is designed to break down trust with communities, to stop adaptive behaviors that can build on trust that’s already there, and the local feels a lot less easy to talk about for the natural scientists than the global, far away issues. So, I just wonder how can ethics be used in a much more positive, bridging way. I feel it’s really key to research.

Nina-Marie Lister: I would just like to ask a clarification question when you say ethics. Do you mean an ethical imperative for the University to bridge those gaps or do you mean research in ethics as a tool? Okay. Can you sit on the committee? But that really is of course the solution, in a serious way, that more people who are doing interdisciplinary, practice-based research have to be on those committees and that does take time and you’ve heard me say certainly and others echo in different ways, that we don’t have a lot of time. So we have to find some way of being creative to use existing rigorous methods that take a long time, that take turn around time, and journals combined with those universities that have an imperative for either community-based practice research. You often find it in the health disciplines. You’ll find it in the artistic disciplines sometimes, so there are strategic connections one can make with those departments.

This is not advice that I would necessarily give to untenured faculty. It’s much harder for you and for them sometimes. I think that’s our responsibility, for those of us who have tenure and are already on those committees. We need to take that up and make it very clear. And besides we can be as irritating as we like.

François Mancebo: I agree completely with what you are saying. Unfortunately, I think it’s not only about being in the committees. I am vice-rector of my university, with a special focus on sustainability. This is what I am supposed to do, but every time you try to achieve something in this direction… good luck. So, it is something that has to come in the long term.

Question from the audience: My late mother was an urban Anthropologist and Professor but also very much an advocate. If you wouldn’t mind, talk a bit about the role of professors as advocates going beyond the Ivory Tower out into the community and maybe taking a stand on something that could be political, could be about the subject manager research where you go out on a limb. Have you done that? And what do you think about that?

Question from the audience: I’m glad that you changed the title from getting me out of a box. I was feeling a little bit coffin-like. I was in my Ivory box earlier. I just wanted to suggest that perhaps there are some University environments and indeed national research cultures where this work is actually now pretty much institutionalized. For better or worse, actually. If you speak to any UK academic about the RED—the Research Excellence Framework—you’ll find that at least part of our research evaluation, which is done periodically about every five or six years, is on how much societal impact we are having as a university. We are evaluated on that. It’s part of our promotion criteria, progression, tenure appointments, everything now means that you as an academic have to be doing this kind of work, to one degree or another.

But the problem is that nothing else has gone away. So you also have to do all the other things as well. I also have the pleasure of convening a Horizon 2020 project and it’s absolutely essential that this is the kind of work that’s done within Horizon 2020 or you don’t get the research funding so, all across European universities this is embedded in what they’re doing. The Australian research grants Council funding and the Australian academic culture is the same; increasingly so in The Netherlands. And so there is a lot of institutionalization of this at the moment for good reasons, but part of the challenge is how that then becomes institutionalized, how it’s evaluated, what kind of things get to count, and how it’s basically done on the on the basis of the Ivory Tower rather than on what the Giants or the communities might suggest would be ways of evaluating what was actually effective in terms of impact.

So, in some senses institutionalizing this … yes, but it’s maybe a little bit of a cautionary tale to be careful for what you wish for, because it doesn’t always actually mean that you get better research or engagement or practice out of it.

Nina-Marie Lister: I was just going to clarify that I don’t think I know of a North American University—I can’t speak so much for the U.S.—but aross the Canadian landscape, this is totally institutionalized by requirement. What I should say is it is disincentivized in terms of promotion for the very reasons you suggest, and when we look at—frankly, I have to say it—the gender breakdown on service that’s related to Community Partnerships, it is overwhelmingly women who do it and, we are on average ten years later to apply for promotion to full Professor. So there are enormous built-in disincentives. I agree completely.

David Maddox: Can you be an advocate in addition to your role as a scientist?

François Mancebo: Of course, a scientist is not an ethereal and neutral person, without sex or opinions. A professor is a human being, completely, including his own opinions. What you have to do ethically, is to declare clearly what your biases are and where you are speaking from. If you do that explicitly in the prologue of what you are writing, your readers can discuss with you, fight with you. And it is normal. What’s your position from the beginning? Just distinguish your belief and your motivation, and how it impacts your scientific work. You cannot be neutral.

Thomas Elmqvist: I just want to reinforce that I think yes, absolutely, you could take moral and important stands, but declare transparency in where you’re coming from. I think that’s that’s a very important part.

David Maddox: Last word to Nina-Marie.

Nina-Marie Lister: Urban advocacy is what I think a lot of planners are trained to do but do it in a way that makes clear what both my colleagues have already said. I’d also say that there is a moral imperative. We are facing a biodiversity and climate crisis combined. We have an obligation as public servants in anchor institutions in our cities that shape and form our cities. I think it is in our code of conduct in Canada as planners. We are morally required to do public good. So, for me, I will say all the time: my role when I wake up every day is to think about making an urban agenda for biodiversity conservation. So, anyone who’s here from CBD in Montreal, please come and talk to me.

David Maddox: Thank you to François, Maria-Marie, and Thomas.

Thomas Elmqvist

About the Writer:
Thomas Elmqvist

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.

Nina-Marie Lister

About the Writer:
Nina-Marie Lister

Nina-Marie Lister is Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor in the School of Urban + Regional Planning at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Francois Mancebo

About the Writer:
Francois Mancebo

François Mancebo, PhD, Director of the IRCS and IATEUR, is professor of urban planning and sustainability at Reims University. He lives in Paris.

Thomas Elmqvist

About the Writer:
Thomas Elmqvist

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

What I think is still lacking so far is mechanisms for co-implementation where we, jointly with stakeholders, work on implementation processes. Academic professionals may have a very important role in implementation, both in evaluation and monitoring, but I think this has been overlooked so far.
One important thing I think The Nature of Cities have been doing for many years now and many other people also are engaged in, is trying to break down silos and bringing people together to talk to each other not only among professors and other academics, which could be very difficult per se, but also outside the universities. In society, we have many examples of silos and breaking them down has to be based on creating arenas where people start to speak to each other. I think this whole meeting for the last three days represent a fantastic example of such an arena.

If we succeed to get a diverse set of people speaking to each other, coming from different silos, we will greatly enrich the picture of how we perceive the outside world. This illustration (FIG), which we call the spaghetti model, depicts how this may be done and how building a multiple evidence base could further strengthen knowledge exchange and knowledge generation.

There is valuable knowledge within as well as outside universities, among practitioners, among policymakers, among public servants, among local citizens. Knowledge is everywhere and constantly evolving and we need to find models how we may harness and use all that knowledge.

One important aspect in this process is the value of respecting each other and building trust and I think that’s the key for this to happen. It probably makes the process a bit slow. However, even though it will take some time to build trust, I think it’s absolutely essential for a successful process of co-creation of knowledge.

But even if we succeed, how do we turn this into action? How do we get the urban professor out in the street, doing something that is really valuable? An important starting process is co-design where stakeholders from different walks of life come together to design the challenge or prioritize among the problems they want to address. Then, the next step would be using a multiple evidence-base approach to come up with new knowledge that actually address and provide an answer. This step we may call co-production of knowledge. I’m quite optimistic and I think we’ve come quite a bit of on the way of doing this in practice.

For example, we may look at how the incentive structure and the reward system in the Academia has changed during the last five or 10 years, it is very much in this direction, partly driven by funding agencies. Now, you are often requested in grant proposals to include a diversity of stakeholders and you are evaluated on basis of the extent you involve them in a deep and real sense.What I think is still lacking so far is mechanisms for co-implementation where you jointly with stakeholders work in implementation processes. Academic professionals may have a very important role in implementation, both in evaluation and monitoring, but I think this has been overlooked so far, for which there are obvious reasons.  Currently there are no strong incentives for academics to engage in very long-term implementation processes. However, there are interesting examples, some municipalities are creating shared positions with the university researchers, with 50 percent position with the university and 50 percent with the municipality. This would better enable engagement in the whole process of co-design, co-production and co-implementation.

I think the question of how do we get professors out in the street, could be answered by that we are partly there and there are encouraging developments on the horizon. Of course there are challenges and barriers we need to overcome but I have quite an optimistic view.

Francois Mancebo

About the Writer:
Francois Mancebo

François Mancebo, PhD, Director of the IRCS and IATEUR, is professor of urban planning and sustainability at Reims University. He lives in Paris.

François Mancebo

I think that it is about building trust. It is not just a professor going out the “street”. It’s also about the “street” getting involved all along in the research. It is promoting more inclusive action research. Today, I have the feeling that the more we speak about going out and doing action research, the more we paradoxically stick to our own kind and our way of thinking.
Professor Jack and the Beanstalk

This is a tale about why professors are reluctant to go into the streets. From my own observations

Once upon a time, there was a professor named Jack who lived in a poor research center. His only means of income was a cow named “research funding”. When this cow stopped giving milk one morning due to budget cuts, he went into the street to sell his expertise. There, he met an old man who offered “magic” beans in exchange for this expertise. Jack took the beans but when he arrived at the research center without money, his colleagues became furious, threw the beans out of the window and send Jack to bed without supper…

What exactly is it about here? Legitimacy.

His colleagues considered that going into the street and exchanging expertise for the beans of common knowledge, was not good deal: these beans could not possibly end in good science, and they sure could not provide solid funding. Thus, poor Jack lost all is credibility.

But wait: as Jack was sleeping in despair, the beans began to flourish into a gigantic beanstalk. In the morning all the research center started looking in disbelief at this huge and cumbersome production. This was not supposed to happen, they said. It doesn’t fit into our theoretical frameworks at all. Better look away and let Jack deal with this “monster”.

So, Jack climbed the beanstalk and, with great efforts, arrived in a land high up in the sky, where he followed a road to a house. A house which was the home of a giant. A giant who had many names, such as “local communities”, “groups of interest”, or “people in real life”. Jack entered the house and proposed to organize co-construction and knowledge-building with the giant. But the giant answered:

“Fee-fi-fo-fum!

I smell the blood of a Professor of no help to us.

Be he live, or be he dead,
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”

Lack of legitimacy again, but of a different kind: Why the hell would the giant (local communities, people, etc.) accept to work with him, or introduce him to local knowledge? He would do so only if he perceived that Jack had legitimacy enough to represent Giant’s interests and help him have a seat at the decision-making table.

Yes, action research into the streets entails trust. When there is not such trust, professor Jack may very well get side-tracked by biased or incomplete information, or worse be eaten alive.

However, let’s continue the tale: Jack escaped down the beanstalk, with some results plus a bag of gold coins he stole. What do you think happened? Do you think his colleagues recognized his efforts, applauded and joined him to further explore this new field? Nope! They denied any interest in what he had found. Why? Legitimacy, again.

Let me give you an example: Once upon a time, again, in a province of the Netherlands was a research-action study on sustainable planning which results were never published by the authorities who sponsored it. Why? Because (I quote): the researchers who worked on it “had no political mandate for defining sustainable development”. Wow… results were OK, but they were not going to take them into account because they had no right to write what they wrote.

Anyway, back to Jack. Jack was a resilient guy. He didn’t give up. He repeated his journey up the beanstalk and finally found something that convinced his colleagues: A goose which laid golden eggs and a magical harp that played by itself.

This time, at least, his colleagues celebrated him. His research became renowned. But they did so under one condition: That Jack chopped the beanstalk down and kill the giant who gave him the goose and the harp. What he did. They were frightened at the idea of the giant breaking into the hushed and consensual atmosphere of their academic club.

Well professors getting out of the ivory box and into the streets … why not? Finally, they thought. But never let “the street” get into our ivory box!

Nina-Marie Lister

About the Writer:
Nina-Marie Lister

Nina-Marie Lister is Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor in the School of Urban + Regional Planning at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Nina-Marie Lister

Our work in the Ecological Design Lab is founded on community research-practice partnerships. For example, we train 35 professional planners every year who will plan, design and build cities all over the world. We can and do influence new models of design and planning practice—indeed new communities of practice—from studio classes to field trips and internships.
Leading with Landscape: Designing our Cities with Green Infrastructure

I started my training and career as an ecologist, and later, as an environmental planner. I work today at the intersection of culture and nature in our cities, where landscape, ecology and urbanism mix and mingle. I think of myself as a “pracademic”, with one foot in the academy and another in the practice of making and shaping cities. I have made a career of cultivating the spaces in between disciplines, of jumping fences and building bridges, and of collaboration and transdisciplinary learning. At Ryerson University in Toronto, I founded the Ecological Design Lab as a collaborative community partnership grounded in experiential learning, making and doing. We work to reconnect living landscapes and to build green infrastructure for a more resilient future. In all our work, my students and I lead with landscape.

Why landscape? At the edge of the Anthropocene, at a time when cities are growing faster than ever before in planetary history, landscape is a concept most people understand intuitively rather than technically. Landscapes are real places, grounding us in who we are, where we live. Landscapes are both cultural and natural; they are ecological, social, cultural and spiritual places that brings us together. If we can plan and design our urban landscapes with best available ecological, cultural and economic information, we can invest in a more resilient and sustainable future. If we lead with landscape, we can have hope for nature. As cities are fast becoming the dominant landscapes on the planet, urban nature may soon be the only nature our children will ever know.

As we face unprecedented loss of biological diversity loss coupled and compounded by climate crises, we have an urgent need – and opportunity – to do things differently. Now more than ever, we have a moral imperative and an ethical obligation to plan and design how and where to live differently. This doesn’t mean we don’t need research, or theory and models, but rather it means we ought to use this knowledge differently, in a more direct and applied context, to experiment quickly, rapidly prototype, at scales that are necessarily small, safe-to-fail, in which we co-create with and in our communities.

One way we can re-invest our knowledge and our capital is in nature-based solutions, or in a combination of both natural and designed green infrastructure. We have an abundance of good reliable ecological and engineering data that show clear benefits of ecosystem services of green infrastructure that range of stormwater filtration to biodiversity, to human health and wellbeing. There are ample opportunities to pilot test, implement and study as well as to co-create green infrastructure, especially in tandem with community partners.

Our work in the Ecological Design Lab is founded on community research-practice partnerships. In our graduate program for example, we train 35 professional planners every year who will plan, design and build cities all over the world. We can and do influence new models of design and planning practice—indeed new communities of practice—from studio classes to field trips and internships. These forums provide hands-on experiential learning as the backbone of co-creation and co-design within communities. This type of “practice-in-place” with our community partners offer context-specific in-situ opportunities for rapid prototyping and deployment of green infrastructure, as well as evaluation and assessment of landscape performance. All this means we can build a growing case for investment in green infrastructure more broadly.

In this context, landscape-based learning is at once possible and critical; landscapes that are designed as social places yet have clear, legible ecological performance are more likely to be valued by those who use them – from parks to trails to wetlands and green roofs. Widespread public adoption of green infrastructure means that people need to appreciate, understand and value—and therefore, care for—these landscapes as more than just recreational or amenity spaces. So it is essential that we make our landscapes and purpose-designed green infrastructure legible, accessible and beautiful! Green infrastructure is multi-functional with many value-added benefits: it ought to be ecologically performative and biodiverse, yet also provide multiple opportunities for recreation, relaxation, and rejuvenation for people. We know that working landscapes, from green roofs to living walls and wildlife crossings can be as beautiful and engaging as they are functional and performative.

In designing the next generation of green infrastructure, our Lab works with community members and professionals alike, engaging them directly in informed best-and next-practices, and together we co-design solutions that work. We use a collaborative hands-on method of working that is familiar to the design disciplines, modelled on a design charrette for the general public and for the allied professionals who work with us. Our ‘CoLabs’ are design and planning workshops—collaboration in practice—through which we develop and co-create site and context specific design solutions in the city. Our students use CoLabs to work on real policies in the city with partners who are our city building agencies. We also partner with not-for-profit groups who can influence decision-makers with examples from other cities, or pilot-test projects and trial demonstrations.

We’ve worked on nature-based solutions for urban flooding, where we focus on re-imagining cities that are structured by their rivers, rather than the conventional strategy of using rivers as urban drains and sewers. In Toronto, the largest post-industrial waterfront in North America is being restructured around a new river mouth for the Don River, and Canada’s largest urbanized watershed. Three levels of government have invested more than $1.5B (Cdn) to develop a new island, a new community for more than 50,000 people with 6 new parks all structured by a new river mouth. For the government, this is a flood protection strategy, but for most citizens, it’s just good place-making and green city building.

The performance values for green infrastructure should be revealed, highlighted and celebrated. Advancing nature-based solutions means communicating the values, services and benefits of landscape-based infrastructure legible and clear. For example, stormwater infiltration is a process of holding, slowing and cleaning storm water to manage quantity and to improve quality. But it must also be about making this process beautiful and accessible to citizens. We can turn gray infrastructure into green infrastructure through projects that celebrate these co-benefits. For example, we can use landscape-based green infrastructure to adaptively reuse and repurpose underused spaces beneath an urban expressway, transforming them into active public places for recreation, water infiltration and biodiversity. Ecological design strategies can be engaged to turn roadside waste places into pollinator pathways, bioswales and green streets. The technical term may be “infiltration basin”, but for most citizens, these are richly planted roadside rain gardens that are accessible, beautiful and legible. If people can understand how these green infrastructures work and the benefits they bring, they are more likely to value the investment and to care for or steward these solutions—nature-based solutions that we know work, and work well.

Green streets do more than just filter and improve storm water. Carefully planted with trees of many species and varied canopies along a gradient of available water and infiltration zones, green streets offer shade while they filter stormwater and sequester carbon. Green streets offer safe bikeways and footpaths, as beautiful places to ride, roll, walk, rest and commune. Although a growing part of the urban public realm, green streets and bioswales do work for more than humans, offering refugia and/or habitat for urban wildlife. For example, urban hydro corridors are being repurposed as combined public spaces, parks, and trail systems for people and wildlife, using different models of vegetation management, including less frequent mowing and stratified planting. In Toronto, the city’s primary hydro corridor is now known as The Meadoway: a 16 kilometer linear park initiated and managed as a public-private collaborative.

The Meadoway and other corridor projects can also include wildlife passages as part of urban natural heritage systems and greenway networks. Increasingly, as our cities stretch into the countryside, our roadways inevitably fragment habitat for wildlife—wildlife that need space to roam, and connected habitats to breed and feed. But roads are also a hazard, as everyone, people and wildlife need safe passage. Green infrastructure also includes adaptively reusing, repurposing or purpose-building passages, tunnels and bridges for wildlife to move safely through our urbanizing landscapes. [

But what about the birds? Green roofs are a nature-based solution in cities that do more than provide public space, improve storm water infiltration and insultation. It turns out they also provide biodiverse pollinator habitat and refuge for migratory birds, acting as “stepping stones” through the city. Toronto was the first city in North America to enact a green roof bylaw requiring a green roof for all new institutional commercial buildings, which has now become a precedent for many cities, including New York and Chicago. With more than 650 green roofs on over 5 million square feet of buildings, Toronto’s green roof bylaw has resulted in a large repository of data on water infiltration, thermal cooling, biodiversity, pollination and heat island effect reduction. Today’s next-generation of green roof infrastructure goes beyond these benefits: we are now building urban farms and prototyping new strategies for urban agriculture. Ryerson University’s rooftop urban farm produces more than 8,000 pounds of fresh produce in only 155 heat degree growing days in Toronto.

These and other nature-based solutions are technical, ecological and engineered infrastructure, yes, but they are also living landscapes that becomes places for people. As social-cultural designs, green infrastructure leverages more benefits and therefore more investment when  connected with artists. The Nature of Cities blog and the summit conference is ripe with wonderful examples of artist collaborations that help tell stories about nature in our cities and the infrastructures that sustain them. When artists are involved in these projects, they help make technology legible through story-telling and design. For example, the hydrology of a watershed comes to life as a story of rain to river in this beautiful living “map” at Evergreen Canada, in Toronto.

In these projects, we lead with landscape because we know at these small projects add up to big change: they are green links in a living chain, across scales from the site to the city to the region. At scale, they represent a new and urgent shift in investment from grey to green infrastructure. Our urbanizing world needs cities based on nature-based solutions, rooted in the living landscape. Leading with landscape is timely way of rethinking, reaffirming, and redesigning our relationship with nature in the city, and of co-creating and co-producing next-generation practices integrating culture and nature for a resilient future.

TNOC Summit Dialogue: How can we provide living space for people?

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Art, Science, Action: Cities Re-imagined

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Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Elisa Silva, Caracas Despite some successful public space interventions in Caracas, we realized there was a larger challenge of overcoming prejudices and recognizing the barrio as part of the city. We began an initiative that would address changes in the urban culture, addressing the language used to talk about informal settlements and urban symbolic gestures in the city. It was a point of departure to educate people about the city and the political and social cost of such lingering prejudices.
David Simon, London The nature of cities can be interpreted in different ways, and “living space” has two complementary meanings. One is space for living, rethinking land use, density, and sustainability. Another is space that is living, nature and nature-based solutions that are part of the cityscape. Both concepts are essential to address challenges in pubic and shared space in cities.
Fish Yu, Shenzhen On the opening day of our rooftop community space, we invited politicians, media, designers and experts from different sectors to bear witness. We found this place has become more than just a Living Space of Nature, but a real living space to we try to talk about the ideas of today—a cultural hotspot.
Samarth Das

About the Writer:
Samarth Das

Samarth Das is an Urban Designer and Architect based in Mumbai. Having practiced professionally in Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and subsequently in New York City, his work focuses on engaging actively in both public as well as private sectors—to design articulate shared spaces within cities that promote participation and interaction amongst people.

Introduction

How can we create living space in cities? This was the theme of one of the Dialogues at The Nature of Cities Summit in Paris, with architect Elisa Silva (Caracas), social scientist David Simon (London), and urbanist and non-profit campaigner Xin (aka Fish) Yu (Shenzhen), and moderated by architect Samarth Das (Mumbai). Public spaces within cities commonly take on various forms: squares, parks, sidewalks, and even rooftops in dense conditions. How can we build space in the public realm that creates accessible areas that are both alive and for living? What makes them “work”? How are they negotiated among stakeholders?

There were two common themes among the three diverse responses. One is the key idea of shared space, both in terms of use, but also creation. When we build cities, we need to consider not just not public space, narrowly conceived, but shared space that may take many forms and emerge from various sources. Shared spaces must facilitate uses by and interactions among all types of users. We might seek out new uses for familiar spaces—a parking lot to a playground, for example, a shared rooftop to a garden.

A second theme is the idea that engagement among stakeholders—residents, government, business, civil society—is a critical part of every successful shared space. This process of engagement builds on shared experience. It contributes to overall improvement of the project itself, and most importantly ensures that it thrives on people’s emotional connection to the space upon completion. Engagement cultivates broader acceptance of modified land uses, but also curate new ideas about how land could and should be used.

This is an output of The Nature of Cities Summit in Paris.

At TNOC Summit, we largely avoided long presentations in plenary—i.e. “Keynotes”. Rather, even when we gathered in our largest group, we met for “Dialogues”, similar to the Roundtable format at TNOC. For each dialogue there was a core question or prompt, such as the one in this Roundtable. We invited three people to participate, striving for a multi-disciplinary group, with diverse points of view, perspectives, and approaches. Each of the three delivered a short intervention (about 8 minutes), and then sat together for a longer conversation. We are publishing all of the Summit dialogues in oder to make  the ideas widely available and keep the conversations going beyond the Summit itself.

In this Roundtable, we present both their written texts (essentially a transcription of their presentations) and video of their presentations. Also you can find a transcription and video of the conversation below.

A transcription of the conversation

Samarth Das (moderator): Thank you all for very exciting set of presentations and thoughts. Before we jump into the first question, I want to string through all three of your dialogues. The one common theme that definitely comes out is the idea of shared space. I think it builds on the earlier discussion we had this morning about shared urban squares—it’s not public it’s shared. And the idea that engagement is a key asset is a key part of each of those discussions, so building on the shared experience. David (Simon), I’d like to take you up on the idea of the living and the livable, you know something that we had discussed. So how do we develop Living Spaces that are at the same time accessible to make them livable? Spaces in that sense. There’s always a tension between experts and locals and their thoughts about this. So, what are your thoughts?

David Simon: Well that comes back to my point about bringing together the different stakeholders living in a particular existing urban area or who are the intended residents of a new area in the process of being developed. The crucial thing about livability is both the physical environment meeting the needs both in a material sense, but also, as I said in my introductory comments in terms of social and cultural values. One can highlight this for example, in terms of the difference: If you look at indigenous cultures in different parts of the world, the way in which space is used socially is often very different. In some cultures and societies traditionally there were spaces for men and women to use together. There are spaces reserved for women and for men both domestically within the domestic sphere but even in public space and these are kind of superimposed layers.

In the conventional modern—as in driven by town planning since the late 19th century in a very sort of Western technocratic sense—the division between public and private is seem as a simple binary division. There’s something called public which belongs to one or other of the public governmental bodies and there’s something called private which belongs to individual people, individual households, individual firms, or other entities. So, in many societies, it’s much more complex and, without necessarily passing a value judgment about whether this is good or bad, the point is simply that if you going to have livable space it has to be culturally appropriate for the people and the values who are going to inhabit them. Otherwise, it becomes part of the challenge of alienation, of dysfunctional space, of anomie, and then we find that all sorts of other social problems relating to unemployment, individual alienation, substance abuse, violence of different sorts become much more prominent and that’s why some of the initiatives that Elisa Illustrated working with children, with youth, with other groups, and getting them to understand and to use and to make the spaces that already exist more expressive of themselves is a crucial part of all of those livability strategies.

Samarth Das: So Elisa, building on what David just said, you did demonstrate how children have been included in the process, the young adults. Tell us a little bit about how that promotes the building of a better Community.

Elisa Silva: These communities where I work and the country in general is very polarized politically. Very much so, and that’s something that is a challenge to work with. Children end up being an amazing tool to overcome that and by engaging them in these conversations and in the end somehow, it’s been a first sort of way to enter. They are as a community very aware that children don’t have safe spaces for play, places for them to really claim as their own, so because of all the obstacles and the difficulties and resources etcetera, we found that that was a way that made it easier to enter into this conversation with the communities and their enthusiasm of children. Because what we quickly picked up on is that we needed to make this fun, as Fish was saying, so every activity we’re doing with them was already somehow occupying and using that public space or that future public space that hadn’t yet been intervened by them or through the design process with them, but that they could already envision it as being something different. And then because they of their low resistance and willingness to play, it created a buy-in from the rest of the community, the adults who might have been more skeptical and those who don’t speak to each other because they’re on different sides of the political fence.

Samarth Das: So essentially it’s about building trust in within communities. So Fish, through your very specific example, how did that project really help build that trust that really opens up many avenues?

Fish Yu: Yeah. That was difficult. In the most of the preparing time we were kind of worrying about if this can be done in that special area, because that’s where Governments try not to really put lots of research resources in there. And so we try to do something but without any available regulation and so the people come to ask for permission, if you are allowed to do such project there, we didn’t know, we didn’t have that, and nobody has that. There is no current procedure of applying for such a permit. So, we were spending lots of time working on that and we try to involve the local residents to talk about the project and to talk about their needs and what do they want in the future for the space?

But there is particularly difficult to conduct in China since we have a very limited sense of community. So you’re you’re not really able to find those people, where those people are in the community. It’s really challenging. So eventually we talked some of those representatives from the Iresidents, from one building alone, but we failed to find so many from the buildings around them. So, I think the trust building is a gradual growing process. You might not be able to do, at the very first place, for the entire whole process, but we found happiness that we keep learning. We still keep this experience getting more and more for the future development. So, we would like to share those local groups in the city and we try to engage more civil organizations to join us to build this part of trust-building process

Samarth Dad 1: You mentioned these processes take time. And then you also showed us a slide where in a matter of years landscape is completely transformed into something absolutely unrecognizable. And you know Elisa, we have time as a factor of scale that we talk about. You have different processes that have their own timelines and yet they all need to come together to somehow contribute towards that larger process. That must be challenging to deal with if not the most challenging aspect but one of the most challenging aspects about this. What are your thoughts about dealing with time and managing timelines for these kinds of processes?

Elisa Silva: Well difficult and indeed challenging what we’re doing and in both of the examples that I showed in the case of Venezuela I think it’s a situation where it’s pretty much impossible to get all of the different actors that you would need involved, especially government and local government. So, there’s a little bit of faith that somehow we might be leading the time in this process and also as a way of resistance against or resistance towards survival. Resistance of a desire to continue to create livable situations, even though we’re very much going against the current. So in that sense, I think it’s a sort of an obstinate way of resistance. The one that has to do with so many other systems and landscapes. It is a challenge. I think most important is to map it, and show it, and make it visible, which has not really been done very clearly, neither for the stakeholders nor for the community itself.

Samarth Das: All right before we just move on to a few questions from the crowd, David that aspect of time relates very directly to some of the challenges that you face in co-production and co-creation. I like that you use those words. It’s recurring again with a theme of shared spaces. So how are those tackled?

David Simon: Well, I think it’s exactly as Fish just said, a case of building trust and confidence which is slow, it’s step by step, and it’s also very easy to break or to lose trust and confidence very quickly. So it’s an asymmetrical process and that’s why one has to be so careful that you don’t have a cross cutting or a contradictory intervention from one other stakeholder that undermines the whole process. But I also, just in the broader context of what we’re discussing, want to draw attention to the fact that there is also a challenge between the permanence, at least in terms of a number of decades, of the urban fabric as we design and build it out of these permanent materials of steel concrete glass metal wood, whatever, and the rapidity and the speed of technological change of demographic and social change, which means that today’s reality is often trying to figure out how to live in inflexible spaces, but where the needs have become very different.

So one example is how in the space of a few decades in many societies—and that number is fewer in the rapidly urbanizing parts of the world–we’ve moved from a situation where extended families are the social norm. However, they are constructed in different cultural contexts to a situation where the nuclear family of two parents and two children or whatever was regarded as the norm to a situation today where in most of the major cities in western Europe and North America between 1/4 and 1/3 of households comprise one adult often living alone, single person households. So, if one thinks about the challenges and those of course are at different stages of the life stage could be separation divorce never partnered—but increasingly it’s the elderly who have lost their life partner in one sense or another—so there is a huge challenge of making today’s urban fabric in the temperate zones, if you like of the world appropriate to the needs of single-person households of different demographic ages and stages.

Samarth Das: Localized approaches, right? That’s basically what it is. All right. Do we have any questions?

Audience member: I’m used to Mediterranean hilltop towns and I figure they probably grew up like the barios. So I’m wondering you know, is there a chance that today’s barrios will become the desirable places to live of the future?

Audience member: Hi, very very interesting session. And I’m glad that David Simon asked or mentioned about different demographics and different kind of households. I just wanted to go through give me a couple of minutes a couple of thoughts where you spoke about private and public spaces and then move say compound idea of private semi-private and public which is what courtyards or corridors outside of houses are considered and then moving into the modern society where you actually can have pockets of private in public spaces and pockets of public on your phone in very very private spaces. So what I just wanted to highlight is that in each of these contexts I think safety is one aspect which was spoken about by the group, but then also maybe legitimacy of doing what we can can do in different kinds of spaces and transparency as well as viewership. So how much of what you do in a private space is actually visible to the outside and how much that you can do in a public space is actually not visible to the public around you and especially because I have lived in three cities in the global South Delhic Cape Town and Bangalore. My one question is often our solutions are for the communities which seem to not have public space to call their own and nature is called upon to bring people together, especially the youth. There is also in a city such as Cape Town where apartheid is well not rife, but there are consequences of it that are still there in the urban fabric and you have families which are and households which actually are completely isolated from each other. Sorry. I’m going on too long, but I just wanted to know if there are examples of people here working with non-vulnerable social groups to bring them in a more public open space. Thanks.

Elisa Silva: Regarding the first question, I’ve thought about that a lot. Yes, I think barrios are a medieval village basically just built in the 20th century. And even though our approach has been very much thinking that public space can be a way to integrate them, I’m very keen right now actually on resignifying existing spaces as their as they are in their public dimension, or their common dimension, or their shared dimension, to recognize the values of those kinds of spaces, which organically were constructed by the people and represented them somehow to the rest of the city in a different light, so that they might find them as valuable as they in fact are. And another kind of really interesting thing that I would like to be able to learn from comparing medieval towns and how they grew for example, the gothic Barrio Barcelona and its expansion is just exactly in that moment where you go from a transition of a planned, gridded area and a medieval fabric—in Barcelona there different, but you just reverse them without ever feeling like you’re going through some gigantic threshold, which is not the case. In Barrios such as Caracas people have in their mind that they’re going into some other world and that’s really where I think there’s an opportunity there to be more specific, to be more mindful of what that can mean. I was in Amalfi on the coast and just in this amazing setting with Gucci stores and Chanel and I realized this boulevard is a creek. I’m certain that it’s a creek and as I walked up to the very end, of course, it had been covered and now it’s clean water that comes out into the ocean. But that’s essentially how barrios have emerged in the fabric of Caracas. They often occupied creeks. And so to be able to imagine that that same transformation would happen seems very logical.

David Simon: Let me pick up the question about different categories of public space and semi-private and private and how you identify them. This was a profound challenge that we faced during the campaign to create the urban sustainable development goal, which is now goalie 11. Where as you probably know there is a target and there are indicators about the extent of public space and the challenge was very simply that it was almost impossible to find an indicator that would work in all countries and all urban contexts because—precisely the point you made—that how open space, and that’s why it’s eventually defined as open space, is controlled very so much between local authorities different categories of private entity, regional, states institutions, and the national state as well as all the other planning issues… so it became impossible to find a sort of single indicator of public open space.

So, the definition shifted towards the open, and even there we’ve had to rely increasingly on remote sensing and other techniques that need ground-truthing to test the accessibility because there are different gatekeeping rules regulations fences boundaries financial disincentives and all the rest.

Samarth Das: Any last thoughts from you Fish before we close?

Fish Yu: I’ll probably just share a little story how we managed to communicate about this specific project. And once we found people having trouble with understanding this idea, then we actually put stuff over the window to stop try to stop the construction. We found a way, we actually put up of plants to show them what’s going on there, that they see the color change. They see there’s something else going on with the nature of the environment. So, they stop doing that. They start smiling with us. So that’s just the real change we sensed that then we can do practically to change people’s idea. I think that’s something to think about. Maybe we can find different ways of communication, different manners to make people understand what’s going on with urban environment

Samarth Das: So, lots of takeaways for what makes public spaces and shared spaces work. Thank you all for joining us here this morning, and thank you to the audience. Thank you.

Elisa Silva

About the Writer:
Elisa Silva

Elisa Silva is director and founder of Enlace Arquitectura 2007 and Enlace Foundation 2017, established in Caracas, Venezuela. Projects focus on raising awareness of spatial inequality and the urban environment through public space, the integration of informal settlements and community engagement in rural landscapes.

David Simon

About the Writer:
David Simon

David Simon is Professor of Development Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and until December 2019 was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, an international research centre on sustainable cities based at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Xin Yu

About the Writer:
Xin Yu

Xin Yu (aka Fish) is Shenzhen Conservation Director and Youth Engagement Director of The Nature Conservancy China Program. Since 2017, he has overseen TNC’s first City project in Shenzhen, China, focusing on Sponge City

Elisa Silva

About the Writer:
Elisa Silva

Elisa Silva is director and founder of Enlace Arquitectura 2007 and Enlace Foundation 2017, established in Caracas, Venezuela. Projects focus on raising awareness of spatial inequality and the urban environment through public space, the integration of informal settlements and community engagement in rural landscapes.

Elisa Silva

In spite of some successful public space interventions in Caracas, we realized there was a larger challenge of overcoming prejudices and recognizing the barrio as part of the city. We began an initiative that would address changes in the urban culture, addressing the language used to talk about informal settlements and urban symbolic gestures in the city. It was a point of departure to educate people about the city and the political and social cost of such lingering prejudices.
Thank you, David, for this fantastic invitation and to the organizing committee. We are going to talk about how spaces are made for people. I will start by introducing where I work which is Caracas, Venezuela, a city of three million, except when you include its surrounding satellite cities it comes to about 4 million. I’ve lived and worked there for 13 years now.

In 2012, we began a mapping exercise of the informal settlements and how they grew in a 60-year period. Informal settlements are the home of half of the population. That is, half of the city’s population lives in informal settlements. This was a key finding from this study.

Within the discipline of architecture, the discourse focused on social housing, which isn´t a bad thing, except that several open questions remain. For example, what about the people living in existing settlements? And what about those who are still migrating from rural areas?

In 2012, I had the opportunity to do research and visit many informal settlements throughout Latin America. Time and time again, what I witnessed proved that public space had a unique ability to increase social cohesion and integrate these territories into the rest of the urban fabric. At the time of my research, neither Venezuelan local governments nor the State were investing in informal settlement projects. The opportunity to test the effects of public space interventions eventually presented itself through civil society initiatives. One example of work we did is an open-air waste dump sites such as one in La Paloma, where we were able to work with the community and change the space into a small public plaza together with a local NGO and the financial support of Citibank.

Part of the project also focused on engaging neighborhood children, through playful activities to think about and reflect on these spaces and their surroundings. For example, through a theater production, the children acted out the roles of various public space elements such as the sun, trees, cars and shade.

We were subsequently invited, because of this work, to be parts of an initiative with the Swiss Embassy and another NGO. We had the opportunity to help the community of barrio Chapellin recover a deteriorated public square. A curious anecdote is that they were resistant to include green areas within their public space and we were able to overcome this by creating an alliance with local schools, where the children were directly responsible for the upkeep of plants in the plaza’s planters.

A use changed from parking lot to playground.

We were also able to create public space in an informal settlement used to park cars, by talking with the community of Las Brisas in La Palomera about transforming it into a public space. After negotiations with the car owners, a very modest children’s playground was built.

In spite of these public space interventions, we realized there was a larger challenge of overcoming prejudices and recognizing the barrio as part of the city. For example, streets signs indicate were formal neighborhoods are located. But, even if a barrio is right next to a street sign, it will not include the name of the informal settlement. Another example is that the quality of waste management services is very different for formal and informal city sectors. And so we decided to begin an initiative that would address changes in the urban culture. Addressing the language used to talk about informal settlements and urban symbolic gestures in the city, could be a point of departure to educate people about the city and the political and social cost of such lingering prejudices.

The program we started is called Integration Process Caracas. It began with a Manifesto to the Complete City, somewhat like the Dada Manifesto. It was read in public squares and published on online journals. It has inspired the lyrics of traditional music called decimas, which are rhymes, describing a city that includes all of its parts that we hope will sound on radio stations and become jingles people remember. We have printed fragments of it on T-shirts we use at our events. One form of recognition has been to acknowledge, for instance, the presence of bocce (or la pétanque in France) courts in the barrio. To celebrate them, have organized bocce games there, creating a setting were people play and share a space together, regardless of its location.

The initiative has amalgamated a constellation of artists and people from the community that allow us to spread the message further. One important event occurred May 25th, 2019. We celebrated the Cross of May, which is a festival or a traditional celebration. We combined it with a Mobile Museum, a procession through the settlement from the formal sector into the informal settlement, and an ambitious program of events and elements, including a large-scale model that allowed inhabitants of La Palomera to recognize themselves within their territory. There were performances by dancers and artists who worked with children from the barrio. And there were exhibitions such as a mapping and photographs of the barrio’s green spaces. Other artists led the celebration of the May Cross, and the San Juan procession with children from nearby schools. Celebrations that include music and dance, are an important way of creating cohesion among people. The community’s participation in the event was massive, as well as that of outside visitors. The celebrations and a long series of events with the community planned over the course of the previous seven months, have created a process that invites people to question perceived city boundaries between formal and informal sectors, and to expand their mental map of the city into one that is complete.

The stages of mescal production.

I would also like to introduce another question. What about the people that live in villages that still believe moving to a city is a way to improve their livelihood, or a way to send remittances home for their family’s benefit? For the past three years we have been working on a project in the southern part of Mexico in the State of Oaxaca. It is a region with a very important migrant population: 30% of its inhabitants live and work in larger cities or the United States.Mescal is today a spirit sold worldwide. I won’t go into details of how it is produced, which is fascinating, but what we know is that due to rising demand, production will have to increase tenfold over the next 10 years. In order to better understand how the resources used to make mezcal, (water, agave and wood) can be supplied without depleting natural resources, and how to mitigate the effects of waste byproducts, we have been working with three communities in the area of Ejutla, south of Oaxaca city. Deforestation and water shortage are already serious problems in areas where mezcal is made.

Félix González-Torres’ “Perfect Lovers”. In synch.

They also have an interesting land use structure where much of the land in these municipalities is communal, due to agreements made after Spanish presence dissipated and as a result of an agrarian reform in the early 20th century. In the fall 2018 I led a design studio at Harvard University with students mostly in the landscape department. Findings led to understanding that the communal areas, which are underutilized (mainly for grazing and wood supply), but could become a very valuable asset for reforestation, wood and agave production, as well as water harvesting opportunities. Instead of thinking of these fields the way tequila production has, as extensive monocultures of blue agave, proposals pointed to a mixture or species in the form of forests, wood harvesting, agave and crops. As complex and simultaneous systems, the landscape becomes a has happened simultaneously and their complex and in and showing how people land and all of the systems that are productive within them need to somehow enter into synchronicity.

I end with an image of a piece by Félix González-Torres titled “Perfect Lovers”, two wall clocks perfectly in sync with one another. Synchronicity is what makes them perfect. Synchronicity can happen between the land and the people, between city fragments in the city, as well as between people.

David Simon

About the Writer:
David Simon

David Simon is Professor of Development Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and until December 2019 was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, an international research centre on sustainable cities based at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.

David Simon

The nature of cities can be interpreted in different ways, and “living space” has two complementary meanings. One is space for living, rethinking land use, density, and sustainability. Another is space that is living, nature and nature-based solutions that are part of the cityscape. Both concepts are essential to address challenges in pubic and shared space in cities.
It is indeed both a pleasure and a privilege to be part of this wonderful urban experiment and so my answer to the question of how to produce living space for people in cities has many parts. Being here right here right now is the first part of that answer, precisely because this is an experimental transdisciplinary event in the sense of bringing together people from different communities of practice, different parts of the world and different lived experiences to share and to learn. It is a metaphor for the answer to the question of this dialogue. But so too is the way in which the international research center that I head, namely Mistra Urban Futures, works through transdisciplinary practice in several formal city-based partnerships of different stakeholders and institutions.

There we work together to bring together people who are often on opposite sides—and there can be many opposing sides of urban conflicts—to work through the entire process of producing new knowledge and research and thereby to understand that basically wherever you are within the urban fabric, whatever role you play, whatever livelihood activities you undertake, what unites us is greater and more important than that which divides and separates us. That is the basic idea of co-design, co-creation or co-production. These processes are called different things in different contexts, but we use them interchangeably. They are all about building that shared experience—which we find really important. It is innovative. It is experimental and in some of the independent evaluation studies that have been done of our work, those terms keep coming up.

Moreover, participants in the individual research projects and in the governance of the process as a whole often articulate the idea of the Centre’s offices being a safe and experimental space, since the Centre is a boundary crossing organization, if you like, where people are able to step outside their normal work environments and speak and think and study and reflect more freely. So that’s another part of the answer. We have many different examples of this from our different city platforms and, similarly, at each stage of this conference, about how people are using and reinventing their existing urban space to make it more habitable and more livable.

However, I should also flag that over the next 30 or 40 years more urban areas in terms of number of inhabitants and number of hectares that will be built up, will be constructed through the ongoing processes of urbanization worldwide, particularly in parts of the world outside North America and Europe, than have been built in the history of urbanism to date. That is absolutely crucial in terms of the global sustainability equations. The underscores the points that the Peter Head was making in the first dialogue this morning about rethinking use of resources and thinking about Integrated systems approaches and the use of new technologies.

It’s also important in terms of how we imagine new urban spaces and places and build them to reflect our cultures, our environments and so on in a way that most existing spaces at least in the 20th and early 21st centuries have not done. That too is part of sustainability and livability. And in that sense, I should also draw attention to the title of “living space”.

That’s because—rather as was pointed out earlier on—the nature of cities can be interpreted in different ways. To me, “living space” has two complementary meanings. The one is space for living in terms of rethinking densities, rethinking land use mix and ultimately sustainability, requiring that we redesign cities in more compact neighborhoods where we require less personal mobility and travel.

Even the discussions about new technologies, electric cars and all the rest, seem implicitly very often to operate from the assumption that more mobility is both necessary and good but actually, in terms of a more radical approach to urban resilience and sustainability, one could argue in certain contexts, at least, that less mobility is both necessary and good—so we need to have multifunctional neighborhoods in which we can walk or cycle. By other non-technologically intensive means of mobility, more of the facilities and income earning opportunities and neighborhoods and social networks and other resources that we rely on and we utilize within the urban fabric should be reachable.

But the second meaning of the term “living space” is again back to nature and nature-based solutions, not as an alternative to steel, glass, concrete, tarmac, wood, plastic and all the other conventional and unconventional building materials, but very much as part of it. In other words, it is space that is living, and a number of the slides that Eliza just shown and that we’ve had in other sessions and will do for the rest of the conference illustrate that very well.

Hence we need constantly not only to think about the design of new spaces, but how we can retrofit, how we can redesign and repurpose elements of the existing urban fabric that have either outlived their usefulness—through technological redundancy, for example—or are not socially and culturally appropriate to the needs and the priorities of different categories of often quite heterogeneous communities inhabiting not just individual cities, but the numerous neighborhoods or areas that make up the cities.

I’m sure we can pick up some of these points in the discussion. Thanks very much.

Xin Yu

About the Writer:
Xin Yu

Xin Yu (aka Fish) is Shenzhen Conservation Director and Youth Engagement Director of The Nature Conservancy China Program. Since 2017, he has overseen TNC’s first City project in Shenzhen, China, focusing on Sponge City

Fish Yu

On the opening day of our rooftop community space, we invited politicians, media, designers and experts from different sectors to bear witness. We found this place has become more than just a Living Space of Nature, but a real living space to we try to talk about the ideas of today—a cultural hotspot.
Hi everyone. My name is Fish. I work for The Nature Conservancy in China. This is really my honor today to present a story from Shenzhen with the title of Living Sponge or Space for the people in the local area. So how many of you have heard of the name of Shenzhen raise your hand please, and how many of you have heard about Sponge City?

Wow, that’s big crowd. Thank you. Well, I’m not surprised if you have ever heard of name of Shenzhen since the city’s so young.  This is a photo taken 40 years ago from the New Territory of Hong Kong to those who know. You can see in just 35  years there is a big change took place in that area. Now we have this city with a population around 20 million.

You might be surprised that I’m telling you half of the city’s population now living in the area we call Urban Village. Take a close look. You can sense the density and the distance between those buildings. This is a main street in this urban village of Gangxia. You can tell the living condition there looks convenient. Residents can find pretty much everything from stores, restaurants to mini Banks…

But when you look up, the sky becomes narrow and you can feel the pressure from this built environment and people from Village. People can gather in very little options of space in those urban village areas to have fun and even find a job. This is where we start  our project where is on a kind of unique building roof in this area.

It is one of the oldest buildings in the village and it is smaller than the normal size in the area. We try to use the simplest structure and to make it capable to hold as much water as possible. A 65% of run-off control rate is in this case. The green color on the screen is representing the plants. We also have a name for this project called Green Cloud for people to understand what’s going on in the future days possibly starting from this little building.

With this steel structure and rain bucket, we made this place become looking like this, from different angles, and with those local species you choose. This was taken in its three months’ time. It really became a very green and functional place.

But there are also stories about people. In the very first two weeks, people living around this building gave lots of complaints because they thought that we were trying to build another floor of the building and local executors came to stop us. We did a lot of communication with the local authorities to let them understand what’s going on. Finally they gave us a green light. And then we try to engage as many participants as possible from universities and also from it residents. Young people come together to help some of the construction work.

On the opening day, we invited politicians, media, designers and experts from different sectors of the city to bear the witness. And later on we found this place has become more than just a Living Space of Nature, but a real living space to we try to talk about today. It becomes a cultural hotspot for people to do different types of activities over there. We invited student volunteers to come to have a classical music concert for people living there who rarely have a chance to go to the Music Hall and more importantly we find this distance between those buildings become an advantage for people to be able to stand in front of the window to listen to the music and eventually this area turns out to be now a nature education classroom for the kids in the village to come and learn some science and nature.

This is the story from Shenzhen about a living Sponge Space. It is fun and beautiful. We will continue to work towards building healthy cities through the integration of green infrastructure and people’s engagement. Thank you very much!

 

To Create a Movement to Repair & Unify our Fragmented & Disfunctional Urban Landscapes

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Art, Science, Action: Cities Re-imagined

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Our struggle for unification of the broken pieces of urban ecology is a political battle that has to be pursued through democratic struggles. Public action will deeply influence decisions that governments take.
Broken and disparate urban landscapes are common experience. The multitude of issues and concerns that are causing such conditions are not new; neither are responses of those who are committed to ideas of sustainability. Yet, discussions of the causes and responses have to be repeated many times over, in order to strengthen our forces or build new ones where there are none. What is interesting and worthy is that every time we repeat them, we find new learnings, thus enriching our engagement and struggle for the achievement of sustainable urbanization.

What we require for the achievement of sustainable cities is a citizen-based and knowledge-driven movement for repairing and re-unifying the fragmented and dysfunctional urban landscapes. But under the prevailing trend of urbanization that is pursued by government with its thrust on privatization of common assets and development works, the agents of change relentlessly devise new ways of damaging and breaking down the landscape into disparate and often conflicting fragments to achieve business turnover and profit. My view is that our counter struggles to repair & unify our fragmented and disfunctional urban landscapes will succeed only when they are turned into significant political movements.

Citizen activism and public action is influencing decisions government take.

Our mission to re-connect the broken urban landscape must not be given up, in spite of the many despair and frustration that we face. Our undeterred commitment towards building sustainable cities compels us to keep raising these concerns, in opposition to the mighty forces that are causing enormous damage to natural assets under the guise of enabling developmental work for prosperity. But prosperity, as we know, privileges fewer and fewer people while marginalizing the vast majority. In this process, more and more people are alienated from participating in decisions that impact the nature of their cities and its future, thereby weakening the alternate political movements and popularization of sustainability politics.

Blogs such as those on The Nature of Cities are contributing significantly towards this task through cross-fertilization of ideas and experiences, thereby bringing closer the forces that are challenging the trend of exclusivity in urban development plans and causing harm to natural assets and their commodification for profit; world over.

Natural Areas are regularly vandalized by private developers and land sharks.
Seventy km seafronts in Mumbai are turned into backyards of neglect and abuse. Photo: PK Das & Associates

Fragmented landscape

Fragmentation is evident in the current state of natural areas, in particular, across Indian cities. These areas are subject to continuous abuse and misuse, including indiscriminate dumping of waste and landfilling in order to promote various projects. Natural areas are split into disparate parcels and the symbiotic relationships that exist between them are severed with damaging and often irreversible consequences.

Similarly, in the process of building and expanding cities, urban spaces too are increasingly fragmented and segregated into exclusive gated and ghettoized colonies. As evident, urban spaces have achieved various overtones on the basis of race, gender, class, community, religion and other forms of discrimination.

Seafronts in Mumbai are turned into backyards of neglect and abuse. Photo: PK Das & Associates

The current trend of urbanization is producing more backyards of segregation, neglect and abuse of people and places. Urban landscapes stand increasingly divided. This dual situation of ravaged and disparate natural conditions and divided urban spaces have led to deep cuts and fissures across urban landscapes that now characterize urban ecology. In such a situation of fractured urban landscape, achievement of sustainable cities becomes our primary objective in the planning and design of cities.

Mapping and open data

It is with an idea of achieving unification and sustainability of urban landscapes that Open Mumbai plan was prepared, beginning with mapping Mumbai’s landscape. A sustained campaign around the data obtained from mapping and the Open Mumbai Plan has succeeded in many ways. The current draft Development Plan-2034 for Mumbai has, for the first time, recognized the natural areas covering a vast stretch of over 160 km2, which constitutes 30 percent of the area of the city, by reserving them as “NA”, —previously these areas were designated as  No Development Zones (NDZ) along with other developable land reserved for future growth demand.

Public spaces developed along Irla Nullah in Juhu, Mumbai. Photo: PK Das & Associates
Public spaces developed along Irla Nullah in Juhu, Mumbai. Seventy km seafronts in Mumbai are turned into backyards of neglect and abuse.

That these natural areas are now integrated into the overall idea of open spaces for the city, as proposed in the Plan, has been recognized too with a number of planning recommendations. For example, the plan includes boardwalks along the edges of mangroves and wetlands and open space reservations on both sides of over 300kms of watercourses (restored “nullahs” or drains of sewage and solid waste). Hopefully, this designation for the nullahs will stop the watercourses from being treated as dumping grounds and the water treated of the filth and stink. More importantly, placing the natural areas in the public spaces domain will, slowly but surely, lead to people realizing the significance of these assets in their daily life experiences in their own neighborhoods and the city. Such an outcome is already evident in the ongoing “Reclaiming Irla Nullah” project in the Juhu neighborhood of Mumbai. Local area citizens’ organizations have launched a significant project of cleaning the nullah water, developing landscaped walking and cycling tracks on both sides and connecting and developing adjoining gardens and open spaces into an expanding network of public spaces.

In order to intervene with an objective of achieving unification of the divided urban landscape, mapping would be a good start. The process of mapping is an effective means for mobilizing participation. Promoting open data and organizing public dialogue are key tenets of democracy. Mapping is a significant political act as it opens new doors to socio-political understanding and valuation of the various resources—natural and man-made—while exposing and challenging the deep nexus between the various adverse forces that has over the years severed the various links and relationships.

A collective mapping process is also necessary in order to challenge the information and data that is meted out regularly by governments and their various agencies, which as we know, in many instances is propagandist and not necessarily in the wider public interest. The illegally land-filled mangrove and wetland areas manipulated for construction of various infrastructure and amenity projects or the case of saltpan areas being reserved for affordable housing, are two such examples.

Governments too legitimized encroachment and destruction of natural areas.

Urban planning and design

For me, it is urban planning and design that provides incredible power for the achievement of the objective of unification of people, places and nature. It is for this reason I have been arguing that participation in urban planning and design need to be considered a right, and that popularization and democratization of the same is, itself, an important step. We can plan cities taking into account existing land occupation patterns, particularly slums and informal sectors, rather than cause displacements due to the imposition of land use plans that are based on skewed planning standards and vested political interests. We must re-envision our cities on the basis of unification of the disparate parts. Achieving contiguity through un-barricaded spaces will enable the building of self-supporting structures of harmony and resilience. Natural areas and assets must form an integral aspect of city planning and design programs in which people are considered as custodians.

Protracted struggles

Organization of movements concerning planning and design matters has not evolved adequately to influence change towards unification of the fragmented landscapes and the achievement of sustainable urban ecology. Planning and design knowledge is considered to be technical and the domain of qualified architects and planners. This exclusivity of knowledge coupled with the distance that the fraternity of architects and planners have maintained from people and their struggles, is making this task even more difficult. Such separation has also not let the fraternity think of new ideas in theory and practice for understanding the enormous potential that planning and design exercises have in mobilizing people to participate and through that, popularize knowledge. As a result, governments and politicians too have kept them at a distance, resulting in cities and towns in India, in particular, experiencing anarchic growth without planning. Politicians and bureaucrats frame policies with total indifference to their adverse impact on built form and environment.

It is hard to get professionals to step out to public space to discuss alternate planning and design possibilities. Politicians and community leaders then get on to promote their own options, but limited to short-term interest and solutions. Moreover, such proposals, even though prepared in many instances with best intentions, are conceived without any holistic or comprehensive vision. Developmental works are often undertaken with knee jerk reaction to crisis, floods being an example. Or they are reduced to beautification work—landscaping traffic islands etc. In most such situations neither elected representatives nor the community leaders involve professionals. Professionals too do not come forward to participate. As a result, planning and design of neighborhoods and the city are given a go. This is why professionals must intervene and volunteer to enrich citizens’ movements, while learning from them too.

Popularisation

Popularisation of ideas and knowledge is a big and complex process since they are rooted in social and political ideologies and objectives. As we experience, participation is based on race, gender, religion, faith, and class prejudice and relationships. Similarly, production of data too is rooted in these various forms of social division. Plans and proposals that are mooted by Governments reflect the preferences of the dominant group. Public dialogue is invariably a dialogue of such groups. Law courts too have, in many instances, considered the views of the dominant groups as public opinion and have gone to the extent of ruling in their favor, thereby strengthening the hands of divisive trends and forces that deter unification and sustainability. Such political and social conditions pose significant challenges to progressive and liberal movements. Evolving effective strategy and tactics in the building of urban movements and the democratization of urban ecology are significant challenges that we have to deal with constantly.

A popular poster Campaign for unifying the host of open spaces and natural areas in Juhu, Mumbai. Seventy km seafronts in Mumbai are turned into backyards of neglect and abuse. Credit: PK Das & Associates

Legislation

Achieving sustainability through legislation is yet another important consideration in the strategy for winning our battle for unification of urban ecology. This necessitates building close relationship with elected representatives and the government on all matters that affect our lives. This is not simple and straightforward. As we know, every elected representative has his or her preference rooted in the divided structure of social relations. After elections they do not necessarily continue to neither represent nor value the opinion of all, particularly that of the minority communities. Also, it is the call of the government in power and their political positions that influence legislation.

Therefore, success or failure in the unification and achievement of sustainable ecology rests on alternate political ideology and the sustained power of the movements.

Various law courts have contributed significantly to the protection of natural areas and open spaces, supporting citizen’s movements.

Legal course/public interest litigation

When popular movements demanding sustainability fail to convince governments and policy makers, then legal course for relief is an option. In Mumbai, significant public interest litigations have influenced decisions leading to many victories. Successes in law courts have been possible due to, research, mapping and documentation undertaken by citizens and activists, of natural areas and putting forward comprehensive alternatives to government schemes.

But, the legal process requires substantial patience, tenacity and endurance on the part of the petitioners. Also, a lot of money is required and the process is often not affordable for citizens and community organizations, making it difficult to seek justice through the courts.

A political battle indeed

Our struggle for unification of the broken pieces of urban ecology is indeed a political battle that has to be pursued through democratic struggles. Our ideas, research, data, studies, documentation towards this objective must be put to extensive public campaign for the achievement of a wider public participation and acceptance. It is public action that will deeply influence decisions that governments take.

PK Das
Mumbai

On The Nature of Cities