A review of Conservation for Cities How to Plan and Build Natural Infrastructure, by Robert I. McDonald. Island Press, Washington. 2015. ISBN: 9781610915236. 268 pages.Buy the book.
In Conservation for Cities, Robert I. McDonald seeks to “guide urban planners, landscape architects, and conservation practitioners trying to figure out how to use nature to make the lives of those living in cities better.” The book succeeds as an introduction to how a broad range of municipal services can be provided by ecological systems—both natural and man-made. It is a slim compendium, based on the Manual for Cities published by The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB 2011) program, and extends this manual by providing planning strategies, implementation guidelines and monitoring protocols.
Following an overview of the ecosystem service concept and a planning framework for Conservation for Cities, ten chapters each focus on one ecosystem service. Each ecosystem service chapter begins with a short and compelling narrative case study that highlights an environmental problem and how ecosystem services have contributed to a solution. Quito, the second largest city of Ecuador, illustrates drinking water protection through source watershed protection by restoring the paramo—high altitude grasslands. France, the country that suffered the most fatalities in the 2003 European heatwave, demonstrates benefits of tree-shade for heat mitigation. Paris, France, experienced 142 percent higher mortality rates in August 2003, with different neighbourhood microclimates acting as a predictor of death rates—more shaded suburbs had lower death rates. Los Angeles children that participated in a Southern California health study highlight the positive effect access to parks can have on the health and wellbeing of children. The common thread that these stories illustrate is the power of working with nature instead of against it. Consistent organisation of these chapters provides ready access to the topics: how to map important services; common threats and common solutions; valuation of the natural infrastructure; implementation; and monitoring.
Many will find in this book inspirational examples of the benefits a range of ecosystem services can provide for city living. Details on how to reproduce these examples might remain elusive.
The ecosystem services selected for this book are arguably the most vital for enhancing the livability of cities. They range from stormwater protection and flood damage mitigation to the utilisation of tree-shade for heat mitigation and green spaces for physical and mental welfare. Dr. McDonald draws on his experience to include introductory technical information regarding how to measure and assess ecosystem services. Especially useful are his synopses of available tools for mapping, evaluating and analysing extant natural infrastructure. Tables on various software programs provide an at-a-glance summary of models used to value air and drinking water quality, coastal protection status, floodwater risk and stormwater services. Key data inputs and outputs identify how usable or appropriate a software program might be given available data, and highlights limitations of existing models or data sets. Some of the other chapters—particularly on drinking water protection, shade and air purification—illuminate well how natural systems can achieve these goals using measures and analyses comfortable for city engineers and planners. By contrast, it is in the most qualitative and complex areas—mental health and biodiversity—that this book is weakest; little justice is done to the complexity of the latter, in particular. Further still, the ecosystem services of food production and fibre provisioning are omitted entirely, although these are distinctly challenging topics for peri-urban areas.
While Conservation for Cities dwells on how to value (in quantitative terms) and use nature, it is disturbingly silent on a second stated concern—“how conservation actions can maintain or create natural infrastructure, ensuring and perhaps enhancing ecosystem service provision.” At the heart of asset planning—be those assets buildings, pipes, roads, or money—is creation, maintenance and renewal. With a few exceptions (for example, trees), the natural asset protection or management component of natural infrastructure is largely absent or underdone—which is notable if only because these elements are at the core of the term conservation. Regrettably, this introductory book misses the opportunity to emphasise and explicate the multiple benefits (or co-benefits) a particular element of natural infrastructure can provide.
In his overview, Dr. McDonald points out that “many conservation actions provide multiple ecosystem service benefits” and proceeds to ask “if it is the sum total of all co-benefits that should be considered, why is this book structured with each chapter considering a separate ecosystem service?” His answer is “for the simple reason” that most planning processes or pieces of legislation focus on one service. All the more reason a book like this could challenge traditional thinking, drawing out the potential value of these multiple opportunities in a discrete chapter, case study or diagrams. Mention is made here and there about co-benefits, but we fear they are easily lost in the welter of words focusing on the topic at hand.
In his closing chapter, Parting Thoughts, Dr. McDonald notes that although he has used utilitarian language to discuss ecosystem services because “these are often the terms on which important planning decisions are made,” there is another way “to frame conservation in cities to preserve or enhance ecosystem services: as actions to promote the common good,” concluding that “the new science and tools of ecosystem services merely allow us a clearer, more precise vision of what steps must be taken to preserve the common good.”
This is admirable stuff, but we offer a cautionary note. Utilitarian language may be appropriate in this context, but the dangers of discussing the use of ecosystems without a conversation about their protection or enhancement may be a focus on ‘using’ nature, with too little attention paid to the potential negative environmental impacts of this use or the consequences of unsustainable use. If we turn the focus solely to the component parts of ecosystem services, like clean air or drinking water, the ecosystem itself—a vibrant, dynamic interconnected system unique to a geographic place with living entities at its heart—simply drops out of the picture. That is not likely with the readers of TNOC. Yet it is something to keep in mind for readers with no background in natural resource management.
This book has an ambitious goal: to guide urban planners, landscape architects, and conservation practitioners in utilising natural infrastructure. This goal is one which more experienced practitioners may feel is under-delivered. Achieving brevity and breadth with such complex subject matter requires sacrificing depth, and we missed the provision of comprehensive references to topical material in a number of places. Guidelines for implementation and monitoring are generally advisory, considerably brief, and very high level.
To conclude, students, local government authorities and urban planning organisations as well as interested members of the general public will find this book helpful as an overview of the benefits a range of ecosystem services can provide for city living. Many of the chapter case studies are inspiring, showing how elegantly simple solutions, many of them involving protecting natural assets, can have a powerful impact in mitigating environmental problems and improving city livability.
The sting in the tail is that exactly how we might reproduce such examples, or incisively examine them, remains elusive. Such detail is not the province of this book, but it will have served its purpose if it takes readers further down an exploratory path.
Where once it was the shaman who took flight, who inhabited the mind of the animal or plant and who transmuted this knowing to the tribe, it is now the artist, the poet, the musician, the mystic, or the first nations’ people who enliven or sensitise our imaginary capacity; who draw our attention back towards what we have left behind, towards the animacy of all things.
We are gardening. Feeding our trees. We decide to cut the deadwood off the Fejoa tree. Afterwards it’s considerably squat and oddly shaped, but we agree it looks better. Or it feels better. Or it seems to us that it, the tree, feels better. It has just been liberated of its dead ends. Does it feel lighter and renewed like I sometimes do when I have cut my hair? If trees can count days till the arrival of spring, pass warnings and share nutrient, can they also feel better or lighter? The question is loosely aimed at the invisible life of a tree, at what animates it. What is it to be a tree? This question draws me towards the tree.
It appears that not only our language, but our institutions and economic systems, have imposed on us, as we have reciprocally imposed on them, an ontology that relates less to being than it does to having. What was once exigent—what our survival asked of us and what the comforts of modernity has enabled to atrophy, i.e., an imagination and instinct that inextricably embedded us in the interdependent web of life, as it embedded in us, a reverence for its aliveness—has been largely lost to us. The art of being has been squandered by the taste for having. Rather than artefact, can we retrieve from our primitive ancestors an existential mode, given the civilising project of modernity has been to progress us away from our magical thinking, our instinct, intuition, dreams and gods, towards the rational, the scientific, the industrial and the technological. Flung so far forward on modernity’s path, we’ve created a juggernaut, whose momentum and exponential wake of destruction, is larger than our capacity to stop it. How do we re-member what once rooted us in our own being and in the mutual being of the world around us?
Where once it was the shaman who took flight, who inhabited the mind of the animal or plant, and who transmuted this knowing to the tribe, it is now the artist, the poet, the musician, the mystic, or the first nations’ people who enliven or sensitise our imaginary capacity and reach, who draw our attention back towards what we have left behind, towards the animacy of all things. Not only the tree, but the stone, the storm, the sea, the sound of the wind and even the force that it takes for a mushroom to push through the earth over night. I recently learned that a Native American language has a word not only for this, but words like “to be a hill,” “to be a bay,” “to be a sandy beach.”i Hills, trees, beaches, bays, were not things to them, but beings. Language inscribes in us and reveals to us the limits of our ways of knowing. Can we know a tree as long as we see it as a noun, as a thing and not a being? In Australia, indigenous knowledge shows us that the land is alive with stories. There are laws and knowledge, for example, in stones and a belief that all law breaking comes from the sin of putting yourself above the land or the other people. For Australian Indigenous people, stones hold knowledge that comes from deep time.ii
I have reached for language that has been given to us by the natural world. To take flight and to root, both of which a tree attests to in the upward reach and rootedness of its form. What if we could experience our own rootedness in place or in ground, in its nourishing, moral, communal, generative and/or ancestral aspect, through our relatedness to and experience of the tree and of the forest? Would we continue to be so instrumental in our conceptions if we felt ourselves formed and informed by the tree, the bird, the rock, the river? To imagine the dream of the Almond tree or feel the growth of the Olive tree is to enter the beingness of the tree, to rescue it from its assignation as resource. And if we can imagine the trees’ cries of anguish as fire takes it, or the yearning of its branches towards the light, can we also feel the anguish of the earth, as its forests are felled, its ocean and sky polluted, its depths cut open and mined, its mountains fracked, its soils poisoned and depleted, its rivers dammed. To embrace the mythopoetic as an other lost way of knowing, would it be better to say of the earth, her forests, her ocean, her sky? Could we have given flight to our dreams, imaginations, and ideas, if flight had not been imaged for us by birds? Would we know what it is to endure if we could not feel it in a tree’s standing, in its magnitude and sturdiness? Would we understand how to dance if we did not feel the rise and extenuation of branches, the lightness of leaves as they outpour from their own rootedness below? Could we wing our arms, twist around our own stems? Would we know stillness if it were not for the mountain? Would we have a sense of deep time if it were not for rocks, the movement of water on stone? Would we know mystery if it were not for the night? What should we learn from the small persistent, togetherness of moss? What if we were again to live in companionship with trees, plants, rivers, and mountains?
I am going to take an iconoclastic view on how to conserve urban biodiversity in the real world: we do not need more research on defining the problem or defining the benefits of conserving biodiversity. I think we have enough models and empirical data to know which path to go and potential benefits. What really is needed is implementation and action. What we need is a concentrated effort on reaching the unconverted—namely the majority of the public, developers, and city planning officials who currently don’t see the value of urban biodiversity.
Now, I am the first to admit I have been part of that academic cadre that has created numerous articles on defining the problem and/or the benefits to conserving urban biodiversity. We have a plethora of studies that show improvements in biodiversity, carbon footprint, water quality, etc. when green infrastructure is conserved in cities (think conserved open spaces and conservation/restoration of native plants). I do think these studies form the backbone on how to move forward…but, on-the-ground, have we moved forward significantly? Why are most developers and cities not reducing turfgrass, using more native plants in landscapes, and making an effort to create wildlife habitat?
How many of the unconverted have read or accepted concepts of any urban biodiversity research articles, or even the blogs on this website? I suspect very few. I am not sure if you feel the same way, but I often feel that I am preaching to the converted through my articles. Sure, we have made steps towards the right direction, but as many of you have experienced, one step forward often results in three steps backwards. For example, that important piece of legislation on conserving open space is defeated with the next election; the one homeowner that transforms his/her yard is met with hostility from local neighbors and even a homeowner association; and the one maverick developer does something truly remarkable but his/her designs and management initiatives do not spread to other developers in the area. Each of us can think of efforts that ultimately result in minimal “real world” impacts.
Don’t get me wrong, I truly feel that any local development example that utilizes a conservation design pushes the bar a bit higher and helps further promote efforts to conserve urban biodiversity. However, except for the few remarkable cases, most efforts do not spread throughout a city. Local efforts are often met with pushback from conventional inertia, politics, ignorance, and just pure (or perceived) economics. How can we (more effectively) spread good design and conservation efforts throughout a city?
Ok—I titled the blog that we need to follow the money, but I have said very little about finances. I do think significant barriers to change are stemming from conventional inertia and money. Below, I am going to concentrate my comments on how to reach built environment professionals, which include developers, environmental consultants, and general contractors. This group, with one stroke of a pen or through day-to-day decisions, can have significant impacts if they decide to adopt alternative practices and designs.
From my experiences, developers, contractors, and hired environmental consultants have had to jump through a number of financial and regulatory hoops to make a development viable. Often, they have banks breathing down their necks; they have to adhere a number of different regulations from various agencies; and they are constantly worried about timing in the real estate market. Conserving biodiversity is often the furthest thing from their mind when subdividing land, and it is very difficult to make headway because they are used to doing things like they always have done to make a development work.
What I propose is a more concerted effort to understand the market and regulatory side from the perspective of the developer, and to help developers to jump through these regulatory hoops and make a project financially viable for developers to conserve biodiversity and make a profit.
In all development projects, time is money. Developers have learned and are often comfortable with conventional development designs because they prioritize what is needed to get their project passed through various regulatory and financial hurdles. When new design concepts and management practices are proposed, these are not time tested and they introduce uncertainty into a project and also a perceived or real cost increase. The additional costs could be from pure infrastructure or delays in getting a development order (which means paying more interest on the bank loan). It may also be that they think the homes in a “green” community will not sell because they may be lacking such things as turfgrass and exotic, showy plants. Development decisions are primarily made because of the bottom line—that is, money.
Making a profit is not a bad thing and I argue that if developments, especially green ones, do not make a profit, the odds of replication are slim. Most developers will not adopt new practices without some certainty that new designs and practices will not negatively affect their bottom line. Now, there are some studies that demonstrate that homes in green developments that have open space sell faster and more per square foot. Many green developments conserve natural open space and cluster the built areas, usually with the intent of conserving local plant and animal species. Of course a developer could view that conserving open space means a reduction in buildable space (ergo—money), but most clustered designs allow for the same number of buildable units. Thus, we may be thinking that there will be no financial impact, but developers will often argue that smaller lots and mixed use housing will not sell in their markets. This may or may not be true as there are examples of clustered designs selling quite well. The trick is to get one or two maverick developers to take the plunge and be successful.
How to make conserving biodiversity enticing? Show them the money!
We need to increase awareness of the costs of conventional design concepts vs. green development designs and how much land/money developers could save by doing a green design. In many instances, a side-by-side cost analyses of a fragmented design versus a clustered design will save a developer a remarkable amount of money. For example, in a cost analyses looking at road infrastructure for a proposed subdivision in Florida, costs were assessed for a fragmented versus a compact design (4,000 units in both cases). The compact design saved over 145 million dollars in road construction, landscape maintenance costs significantly decreased, and reduced fuel costs by residents over $13,000,000!
Another route to bring people into the conversation is to offer time saving and cost incentive-based policies that directly impact their bottom line. Incentives can go along the lines of density bonuses (i.e., awarded additional units over current regulations), permit breaks, fast-tracking applications, and reduced impact fees. All of these policies improve the economic bottom line, but which incentives are ultimately the most attractive will be different in different localities. Thus, built environment professionals need to be surveyed and educated to help determine what they would prefer. Further, once a policy is in place, it needs to be marketed so local builders know about the opportunity and the benefits of adopting the policy. From an analysis that we did on incentive-based policies, we found that most incentive-based policies have little impact (building practices, landscaping practices, site development). From our review of incentive-based policies, failure to reach most builders stemmed from:
1. Local built environment professionals did not view the incentive as a “good enough” incentive.
2. Many incentives were not taken advantage of because local developers did not know about them.
3. In some cases, various governmental agencies were not on board when the policy was passed and the novel approaches proposed by the developer actually slowed down the approval process!
For example, in my hometown (Gainesville, FL), a local developer adopted an LID (Low Impact Development) stormwater treatment approach but local regulators did not want to pass this design, and the permitting process was delayed.
Honestly, getting developers who are not convinced in the concepts of conserving boidiversity requires some enabling conditions at the policy level. I have found that if policy is in place (that addresses biodiversity conservation in some fashion), it will help built environment professionals pay attention and seek out counsel and methods to address the concepts of conserving urban biodivesity. However, even decent legislation has loopholes and developers can find ways around them if they do not buy into the intent of the policy. Trust needs to be built between planners, conservationists, and developers, but this is sometimes difficult to do. From my experiences, it takes partnering with that one maverick developer to get the ball rolling. Once established, this model development will provide local, tangible results to help bring other along.
Is there a silver bullet here? No. It is going to take some forays (by ecologists, developers, planners, and conservationists alike) into the built environment world to see what financial incentives will and will not work. This can be trail and error but it also can be systematic social science research about finding the right financial message to reach more developers to adopt novel conservation practices. Giving my two cents, I am convinced that academics need to form interdisciplinary consulting teams and collaborate with local developers and planners to build model “green” communities. We have tried to do this at the University of Florida, forming a group called the Program for Resource Efficient Communities (PREC). We have had our ups and downs with this group, but in collaborating with local developers we have learned much about what goes on in the development world and possible ways to merge research with “real world” activities.
So, how to get started? Below are some steps to get the ball rolling.
1. Meet with local planners and see if there are current policies or opportunities to encourage local developers to adopt biodiversity conservation strategies for planned developments. This also can open the door to help shape future policies.
2. Find that one developer that is willing to adopt novel practices and designs. A local model example pays huge dividends for future development in the area.
4. Develop local recognition and certifications for those model developments. Be careful of “green washing” certification programs that do not offer much in terms of biodiversity conservation. The best one I have found for conserving biodiversity is in the North Carolina Wildlife Friendly Certification Program.
When the first European colonists arrived on the islands of New Zealand a little over 150 years ago they were met by an essentially forested landscape with very unfamiliar plants and animals. The dramatic and breath-taking scenery ranged from geysers, boiling mud pools and volcanoes in the north to magnificent, soaring mountains, primeval forests and glaciers in the south. Apart from a couple of bat species there were no terrestrial land mammals and a highly endemic avifauna, many of them flightless. In an attempt to make their new country “more like home” the colonists voraciously cleared the “wild and scary” forests and converted the land to pasture. The result was that, along with the introduction of familiar mammals, the landscape was dramatically changed. These changes were with a speed and thoroughness never seen before and on a scale that has never been repeated. Both have had dire social and biological consequences. Similar patterns of settlement and landscape change occurred in other Anglo ‘colonies of settlement’ in the USA, Canada, and Australia (but that is a story for another time).
Fortunately, in New Zealand not all of the forests were cleared. So today, 30,000km2 (12%) of the total land area (268,680 km2) is preserved in 14 National Parks. These parks preserve the natural heritage, forests, wildlife and landscapes, close to — and in some cases, exactly — as it was before man arrived. Of global significance is that New Zealand is a biodiversity “hotspot”, not so much for the total numbers of species but because of the high level of endemism. Over 85% of the plants, lizards, frogs and birds are to be found nowhere else on the globe. Including: the world’s only alpine parrot, frogs that bear live young with no tadpole stage, a duck that breeds in running water, a conifer that is only a few centimetres tall, the largest insect in the world (an insect so large that it thinks it is a mouse), the list goes on….
What I have just described in the first 2 paragraphs is exactly how New Zealanders perceive nature — wild and breath-taking landscapes overflowing with indigenous biodiversity! Over the short time that it has taken New Zealand to become a nation there has developed a dichotomy between cities and towns and “wild” landscapes. Nature is not in the city but “out there” in the mountains. We (humans) live in cities — nature resides in the mountains.
I was mulling on this dichotomy when I was driving back from the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand last weekend. I had spent 3 days living in ‘wild nature’ at a place called Punakaiki in the Paparoa National Park. It is famous for its treasured ‘pancake rocks’ and ‘blowholes’ that were formed 30 million years ago from compressed fragments of dead marine creatures and plants and gradually seismic action has lifted this limestone above the seabed. Mildly acidic rain, wind and seawater have sculpted the bizarre shapes.
The sub-tropical forests in the National Park are diverse with podocarp (conifer) and hardwood trees (rata, beech) towering above thickets of vines, treeferns, and nikau palms. At dawn and dusk the forests come to life with the birdsong of native tui, bellbird, robin, kākā and kererū. It is truly a wonderful experience that is not easily forgotten. If you want to experience it for yourself then come to NZ! Or failing that have a listen to the “dawn chorus” here.
By the time that I arrived back home in Christchurch I was wondering how different the ‘wild’ forests were from the city. Is the indigenous biodiversity in the National Parks that much different that that in the city? My assumption was yes, much higher diversity would be expected in natural forests. So I thought I might do some quick calculations and research to see how biodiverse nature was in the National Parks and compare that to biodiversity in the city! Would that show that indigenous nature was in the mountains and not in the city or would it tell me something different?
Here is what I found for plants. (See reference at the bottom and here.) The table below includes the minimum estimates for vascular plant diversity in selected New Zealand cities and National Parks.
CITY/REGION
Auckland
Rotorua
Manawatu
Christchurch
Dunedin
# indigenous vascular spp
559
540
500
350
470
# exotic vascular spp
615
545
525
c.500
211
Indigenous spp/1000 ha
2.1
2.8
8.9
8.8
12.5
Indigenous % of NZ flora
22.4
21.6
20.0
14.0
18.8
NATIONAL PARK
Egmont
Arthurs Pass
Westland
Mount Cook
Rakiura
# indigenous vascular spp
c.650
660
620
437
580
# exotic vascular spp
NA
154
114
137
185
Indigenous spp/1000 ha
19.4
7.0
4.1
6.2
3.4
Indigenous % of NZ flora
c.26
26.4
24.8
17.5
23.2
Wow!
The differences were not as big as I thought, in fact cities are almost as biodiverse as National Parks. Indigenous species per 1000 ha ranged from 2 to 12 in cities and from 3 to 19 in National Parks. And the percentage of the total New Zealand flora represented at each site (city or National Park) varied from 14-22 in cities and 17-26 in National Parks. Not large differences at all. In some of the cities indigenous biodiversity is high because of substantial lowland rain forest remnants. In others, such as Christchurch (which has only one lowland forest remnant), about one-third of the flora is dryland species not found in any of the other major cities.
There are numerous examples of other indigenous biota that frequent New Zealand cities. For example, 374 lichen species occur in the greater Auckland area and that is approximately 30% of the total New Zealand lichen flora. In addition, 130 bird species occur in greater Auckland, which represents 40% of the total avifauna for NZ. There are about 100 moss species in Christchurch and 200 on nearby Banks Peninsula. That represents 20-50% of the NZ moss flora. Two hundred and sixty moth species have been recorded in one 6 hectare forest remnant in Christchurch, or 16% of the national moth fauna. The Christchurch estuary supports 113 bird species with 13 bush birds on the surrounding hills — that is 38% of the NZ avifauna. The intertidal zone of the Christchurch coast is reputed to be one of the world’s richest for indigenous species diversity.
So you can see that New Zealand cities can be rich in indigenous biodiversity!
It is worth noting that most urban areas in New Zealand (and the world for that matter) are at ecosystem junctions — where marine, maritime, estuarine, hills, lowland freshwater swamps, dry arable areas and building sites meet. These junctions are extraordinarily diverse and many animal species depend on the presence of these elements. As a generality it does appear that many of the larger cities are actually some of the richest in habitats and biodiversity, and are those that have the greatest natural productivity and diversity of environments.
Based on these numbers above urban areas are as intrinsically interesting and diverse and worthy of conservation as the mountainous National Parks. So in a biodiversity sense New Zealand cities could be regarded as National Parks as well!!!!
Now we just need to let the city dwellers know so that they can appreciate Nature in the City, not just in the wild mountains!!!
Given, D.R. and Meurk, C.D. 2000. Biodiversity of the urban environment: the importance of indigenous species and the role urban environments can play in their preservation. IN: Stewart, G.H. and Ignatieva, M.E. (eds.). Urban Biodiversity and Ecology as a Basis for Holistic Planning. Proceedings of a workshop held at Lincoln University 28-29 October 2000. Centre for Nature Conservation No. 1 Christchurch, Wickliffe Press. Pp. 22-23
Planting trees to achieve an arbitrary Tree Canopy Cover obscures the real challenges before us. It is time to go beyond trees and green infrastructure to a decoupling from the hydrocarbon economy.
Urban trees and tree planting is like a contemporary urban planner’s holy grail—more trees means a better city, and better city assumedly means a better quality of life for city residents. But why is this the case? I’ve set out here to reflect on this. Why the focus on urban trees today and what are the historical origins of urban greening. Should plans to build better cities for residents rely on strategies that involve greening and tree planting?
I see a growing need to explore the ideological origins of this approach, including in the U.S., where the presiding idea that nature should provide services in cities to remediate modernist infrastructure, may actually skirt a more fundamental question: the need to reinvent urbanization.
With this, I also think the notion of planting trees carries with it a whiff of colonial ideology wherein “planting trees substitutes cosmetic physical changes that are morally satisfying, for the radical reorganization of society and culture that would address the underlying attitudes and actions that have led to widespread degradation of the natural and human world” (Cohen 2004: 21). Further, hegemonic agreement that tree planting should be done in all cities to achieve certain tree canopy cover overrides local ecologies, climates, history, traditions, and practices. It evacuates difference and possible autochthonous emergence of solutions that might be more structural and transformative. While I personally find city trees beautiful and attractive, not everyone, or all neighborhoods welcome trees, nor are they appropriate for all places. It is time to discuss what kinds of cities we want, and where trees or green infrastructure fit in.
The rise of the city
The rise of industrial cities, enabled by the harnessing of hydrocarbon fuels, has fundamentally changed relations between “the city and the countryside”, to use older vocabulary. As cities grew, the countryside and the connection that many village dwellers had to nature and its cycles, changed. Not only was human labor less involved with nature through agriculture, animal tending, and primary harvesting manufacturing with locally sourced materials, but cities themselves expanded at an unprecedented pace. These new cities, using the dense power of hydrocarbon fuels, pioneered multi-story buildings, skyscrapers, paved roads and surfaces, sanitary systems for water provision and treatment, industrial manufacturing and more. In short, the large scale, engineered sanitary city emerged in western nations riding on hydrocarbon-based economic development. This new approach was enormously successful in many ways, including the reduction of disease, the increase in efficiency and transportation access, democratic access to water and power, and waste management.
Industrial cities utilized engineered systems to provide infrastructures that supported urban activities, but at the same time, these systems, propelled by the ideology of modernization and deftness of engineering science, overshadowed, and often overpowered and destroyed, local ecologies, hydrologies, fauna and flora, and more. Engineered systems utilized hydrocarbons to heat and cool buildings, ignoring cooling breezes, the orientation of the sun, obliterating slopes and valleys. Engineered systems paved over the soil’s ability to infiltrate storm water, and bulldozed existing vegetation, casting much of the fauna out of the urbanized area.
The evacuation of nature and building of dense and insalubrious cities, in the late 19thcentury, in Western Europe and the U.S. was countered with an influential park movement whose mission was, in part, to provide healthy spaces of recreation and repose to residents in tenements, to immigrants in need of acculturation and disciplining into “citizenship”, and to foster greater beauty (Rozenzweig 1983). They were also about display, prestige, and growing cosmopolitanism (Lawrence 2006). These parks were predominantly well-landscaped, unstructured green spaces that provided access to a picturesque nature in the city. As this vision evolved an additional aspect included a means to pursue social reform, and therefore parks were an important aspect of rationalizing city planning.
Rationalizing city planning
Connections between the US, UK and other European countries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were strong. Park planning, and concepts originating from the City Beautiful movement including greenways and access to nature in the city were traded across the ocean. Such luminaries as Frederick Law Olmstead, his partner Henry Vaux, and others strongly advocated for urban parks and beautification, and spent time in England and France, learning of efforts there. The result was impressive. The Emerald Necklace plan in Boston, Central Park in New York, much later the Olmstead Plan prepared by Olmsted’s sons in Los Angeles are among the most prominent examples. Major cities followed suit and undertook to plan and build parks. The idea that tree planting in urban areas could cool the atmosphere and provide health benefits was advocated as early as 1889 by Arbor Day organizers (Cohen 2004). Planting trees was promoted as a selfless act of good citizenship, and later advocated by American Forests and supported by the U.S. Forest Service (Cohen 2004).
Ideas of urban parks and beautification necessarily reflected their places of origin: a climate and vegetation predominant in northern Europe, predominantly “green”. Green and greening became to be an antidote to the urban—green parks in dense urban settlements offered relief from the surrounding asphalt jungle (Doherty 2017). Thus, as humans have come to increasingly live in urbanized settings surrounded by hardscapes, there has been increased concern and interest in building parks and providing green open spaces for urban residents.
Urban greening, ecosystem services and tree planting
In the contemporary period, there has been wide acceptance that modernist city infrastructure is insufficient if cities are to become more sustainable. Introducing natural processes into the urban fabric, trees, permeability, green roofs, bioswales and more, are now common strategies, though often opportunistically implemented, poorly funded with little maintenance money. The concept of urban ecosystem services comes out of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), and has been translated into urban programs, often implemented by volunteers and non-profit organizations, to be maintained by residents. Such efforts translate into a kind of ground up implementation of urban ecosystem services to remediate lack of shade, the urban heat island, increase water infiltration into groundwater basins and more.
The common vocabulary is greening the city. But is this appropriate? Is greening going to bring about the kinds of urban morphology transformations that on the one hand create more equitable, generous and welcoming cities, and on the other, decrease the Earth systems change cities require and engender for maintenance and growth today? Indeed, beyond the issue that the template for the greening ideal emerges from a mesic northern Atlantic environment, and that anything else is seen as lacking, there is an additional paradox: these greening efforts often become environmental gentrification. They are a convergence of urban redevelopment, ecologically-minded initiatives and environmental justice activism in an era of advanced capitalism. Greening operates under a seemingly a-political rubric of sustainability and appropriates any successes to serve high-end redevelopment (Checker 2011). Urban greening does little to substantively mitigate urban environmental and social impacts. And the volunteer mode of governance shies away from politics; it is cast as a kind of (soft) science universal consensus about what is good for the city, good for the residents, and good for the planet.
However, in order for cities to reduce their environmental and climate impacts in a just and equitable manner that does not refer to a Euro—North American view of a green nature frosting over existing material and urban conditions, much more radical and transformative actions to change cities will need to occur that reflect local climates, ecosystems, hydrology, residents, culture, history and politics.
Radically rethinking cities
Good and wholesome neighborhoods that are green seem desirable and necessary to improve the quality of life of residents. The arguments rely on an emerging science termed “biophilia” and on belief that trees in cities perform the same functions as trees in forests, such as carbon sequestration and stormwater mitigation. Some even believe that trees mitigate air pollution. Such concepts may be true, in part, but assert a view of what cities ought to be that is rarely broadly consultative, usually based on insufficient scientific studies of those places, and more importantly import and generalize an approach that may be implementable in mesic landscapes, but not in other regions. Finally, as stated above, this approach avoids dealing with the systemic hydrocarbon dependence of cities that is generating GHG emissions, creating voracious patterns of urbanization and Earth systems change for needed resources, and deludes people into thinking that urban ecosystem services can substantially affect these aforementioned problems.
No contemporary city is close to being sustainable in our high-energy modernity. Some say that modern society will crumble without fossil fuels (Lang 2018). And yet,, as I explained above, modern cities arose due to the power of hydrocarbon energy, whose use is changing the global climate, poisons water resources, soils and living beings, and is fundamentally altering hydrology in many parts of the globe. Hydrocarbon fuels enable mining, processing and manufacturing. They are ubiquitous. And thus, any urban sustainability quest must address the fundamental drivers of unsustainability and how hydrocarbon energy structures urban form, urban infrastructure and, ultimately, social and economic relations of power and influence.
Urban greening, while a well-intentioned strategy, brings with it assumptions about appropriate vegetation, aesthetics, benefits, and public commitment. I suggest it might be time to go beyond urban greening to revisit how we build our cities, where, and for whom. U.S. style suburban living, replete with lawns, trees and single-family dwellings prolong climate change, and urban impacts, including inequality. Understanding that our cities today must decouple from hydrocarbon dependencies will entail vast changes in our ability to continue to despoil local and distant environments, and urban morphology. It is time to go beyond trees and green infrastructure to decoupling from the hydrocarbon economy. This will mean that cities will evolve differently according to climate, water availability, culture, history and place. Planting trees to achieve an arbitrary Tree Canopy Cover obscures the real challenges before us.
At this juncture, it would be useful to rethink many of the codes and regulations that prevent cities from addressing a number of issues such as the urban heat island, density, mixed uses, and greatly reducing the need for automobiles and the amount of heating and cooling necessary to make poorly constructed buildings habitable. Reducing street widths, eliminating on street parking, requiring all urban surfaces to reflect the sun in warm climates, zoning for common wall buildings that due to their common walls, reduce heating and cooling needs, making sure people’s housing and jobs are close to transit. While none of these are revolutionary, they are also rarely implemented. Many of the codes for transportation infrastructure drive wider and wider streets and intersections. The dominance of single family dwellings continues to generate urban expansion and dependence on the automobile and Earth system change: habitat fragmentation, hydrological modification, materials intensive construction.
Urban greening alone will not help our cities become more suited to the places they are built in, including building orientation, typologies, building materials, heating and cooling fuels. It is a piece of the city, but an artifact of urban morphology and the rules, codes and conventions that supports the current high energy intensity of daily life.
Banner image: Bernard Rudofsky, 1967, Photographies de Cacères.
References:
Checker M. 2011. Wiped out by the “Greenwave”: environmental gentrification and the paradoxical politics of urban sustainability. City and Society. 23: 210-229.
Cohen S., 2004. Planting Nature. Trees and the Manipulation of Environmental Stewardship in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Doherty G., 2017. Paradoxes of Green; Landscapes of a City-State. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Land G., Urban energy futures: a comparative analysis. European Journal of Futures Research https://doi.org/10.1186/s40309-018-0146-8
Lawrence H.W. 2006. City Trees. A Historical Geography from the Renaissance through the Nineteenth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Rosenzweig R. 1983. Eight Hours for What we Will, Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1970 –1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Amita Baviskar, DelhiThe city in the Global South is a hard place for nature and for poor people. For biodiversity and for human rights, we need more vigorous democratic politics.
Lindsay Campbell, New YorkWe need to cultivate place attachment and cohesion that emerges through community self-help while also supplying crucial municipal resources.
James Connolly, BarcelonaThe either/or options, “common pool” or “public good” will not take us where we need to go. More promising is the trend toward social-ecological coalitions.
Sheila Foster, New YorkQuestions of equity and distributional justice are key to the urban commons as a concept.
Phil Ginsburg, San FranciscoMaintaining a constant feedback loop with park users can allow us to create well-loved public spaces and a social contract we can all adhere to.
Jeff Hou, Seattle“Nature spaces” in cities are increasingly far from a public good, and are, instead, commodities for those who can afford them.
Marianne Krasny, IthacaIntentional communities in Baltimore are reconceiving private space as community space as a way to foster nature, community, and related public goods in the city.
Mary Mattingly, New YorkNot only do we need more people at the table, we also need more opportunities for people to build the table.
Oona Morrow, DublinUrban socio-natures are both common pool resources and public goods—recognizing this is a necessary first step in establishing the ground for the city as commons.
Harini Nagedra, BangaloreCities in many parts of the world are experiencing an alarming shift in the framing of nature in the city away from a commons, repositioning it exclusively as a public good.
Michael Sarbanes, BaltimoreIntentional communities in Baltimore are reconceiving private space as community space as a way to foster nature, community, and related public goods in the city.
Phil Silva, New YorkUrban gardens demonstrate the qualities of common pool resources, public goods, and private lands—these aren’t truly categories in the restrictive sense, but interchangeable interpretive lenses.
Maria Tengö, StockholmThe ultimate responsibility for governance of urban green and blue infrastructure must lie with city authorities, but there is great opportunity for partnership with civil society.
Diana Wiesner, BogotáCities can regulate resources without depleting them. But in many cities, Nature is reduced, contaminated, and its availability diminished. Nature poetry should be equitable for all. (También en español.)
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.
We believe that urban green spaces and natural resources have value. Much of the writing at TNOC describes urban open space, in its various forms, as one of the key drivers of cities that are more resilient, sustainable, and livable. But who manages urban open space and natural resources? Who “owns” them? Who gets to have access and use them? Who is “responsible” for them? Who decides how they are used? Is it the community that lives next to them, or the entire city (which usually means the city administration)? Answers to these question relate to a fourth key theme at TNOC: creating cities that are just.
These issues are embedded in distinctions between “public goods” and “common pool” resources. Central to the definition of a public good is that it is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. That is, everyone has access, and one person’s use does not prevent another person’s use. (The use of an item of food is exclusive—when I eat that apple, another person can’t. When I build my house on a wetland—lucky me—but the other public values of that wetland have now largely been consumed.) Examples of public goods include (ideally) the air we breathe, roads, parks, systems of stormwater management, the enjoyment of birdsong. Common pool resources are owned (and sometimes managed) collectively by a community or society rather than by individuals. Some classic examples are fisheries, forests, and community gardens. The benefits are open, but they can also be used up (potentially resulting in “the tragedy of the commons”). A third category is private resources, an idea of “property” that is common in modern economies (but not necessarily traditional or indigenous ones)—an idea that can easily be at odds with the benefits of both public goods and common resources.
In the real world, in the context of urban natural resources and green space, these can be broadly overlapping or even confusing distinctions. But the underlying ideas are important to how we create green cities. Conflicts between these very different conceptions of to whom the “goods” of urban nature belong and how they are managed are fundamental to many urban contestations: for example, the conversion of wooded streets to concrete highways or wetlands to commercial real estate; inequitable distributions of nature-based solutions to social challenges, such as resilience to storms; foraging in public parks; community gardens in vacant lots; or habitat destruction that leads to loss of biodiversity. They relate to how cities spend money in different neighborhoods. They relate to the emergence of public-private partnerships as a mechanism for public space management. In the Global South, there are cities in which green spaces are consumed by nominally public streets or buildings, or privatized into clubs behind members-only gates, leaving no green spaces for ordinary or poorer residents. In New York, there are are examples of developers given zoning variances in exchange for providing “public spaces”, but public access is subtly (or not so subtly) discouraged.
These are real and deep issues for green city building. To whom does the city, including its green spaces, belong? How is it used? And who decides?
Common Pool or Public Good—What Matters is Environmental Justice!
In Delhi, the city where I live, nature is an accident. The heart of India’s capital may have stately avenue trees and sprawling gardens, even an “urban forest”. But the rest of the metropolis is an arid expanse of concrete and asphalt. In the packed warrens where the poor and lower middle classes live, there’s little space for nature. At least, not nature as most city-dwellers know it—no parks and pastures, no lakes and streams. The green and the blue have been consumed or conscripted to serve the city. The streams carry away sewage. The pastures have been converted to plots with higgledy-piggledy housing. And no one cared to leave space for parks.
The city in the Global South is a hard place for nature and for poor people—they find the in-between spaces. For biodiversity and for human rights, we need more vigorous democratic politics.
So nature survives by chance. On derelict strips along railway tracks, on abandoned lots tied up in litigation, on swampy soils along the river where it’s unsafe to build. This is where a family of Grey Partridge scuttles into the protective cover of heens shrubs. Where the Small Indian Mongoose darts like a golden streak into a clump of wild grasses. Where Black-headed Gulls swoop in from Siberia to the river Yamuna’s sludgy waters.
This nature was not planned. Plants and animals simply occupied every ecological niche that they could cling to or claim. It’s human neglect, not human design, that allows them to go on living.
And it is in these in-between spaces that the very poorest of citizens, too, make their homes and their living. Take the stretch of land along the river Yamuna. Farmers grow melons and radishes on alluvial islands. Washer-people spread clothes out to dry on the banks. Goats fattened for sacrifice on Bakr-Id are rested and watered here, amidst thickets of white-plumed kaans grass, on the way to the Jama Masjid market. Upstream, Hindus pray and perform rituals to honour the dead. This is where people from the squatter shanties on higher ground descend to defecate, groups of veiled women walking down at dawn and dusk.
Some of these practices are long-established, others newly negotiated. But whether old or new, legal or unlawful, unspoken or boldly asserted, they constitute customs about the commons, carved out as much by encroachment as by the continuity of old usage (the farmers and washer-people have legal rights; the squatters, who are mostly migrant workers, don’t). And yet, these commons have only survived because governments and developers have so far found them valueless. Fugitive flora and fauna could flourish and hard-pressed migrant families could find homes only as long as this sandy stretch remained invisible in the eyes of developers. When the riverbed became real estate—as started to happen with India’s economic liberalization in the 1990s—and the commons became convertible into cash, the customary practices that they supported were cut off. In 2004, 400,000 squatters were evicted from their homes on the river’s embankment. Many farmers’ leases were terminated soon after.
But wait! Before you think this is the old familiar story of “the commons versus capitalism”, consider this: both these moves were ordered by the Delhi High Court acting in the public interest. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of India also invoked “the public interest”, but to retrospectively legalize a gigantic temple complex on the riverfront. A few years later, the same court allowed luxury apartments to be built on the floodplain, even though both these developments disrupt groundwater recharge and release effluents into the river. “Public interest” or private profit and privilege?
Double standards often prevail when environmental conflicts occur in a society as unequal as India. For our courts—guardians of the public good—“saving the river” meant kicking out the migrants who crowded its banks; never mind that the water is mainly polluted by untreated sewage coming from well-to-do neighbourhoods. But prestigious projects gleaming of high finance and sleek aesthetics are allowed to override environmental concerns.
It’s not just the courts that harbour such views. So do bourgeois environmentalists—well-connected citizens’ groups that profess to be nature-lovers but who do little to lighten their own ecological footprints. For them, nature isn’t a means of subsistence or shelter. It’s a lifestyle accessory, a place of pleasure and recreation. They desire an ordered, domesticated nature, preferring manicured gardens over wilderness, riverside promenades over fluid floodplains. The problem is that these vocal and well-organized groups dominate debates about defining the “public interest”. And their power means that poor people’s predicament is made illegitimate and their claim to environmental goods—safe shelter, water and sanitation—is ignored.
The city in the global South is a hard place for nature and for poor people. For biodiversity and for human rights, we need more vigorous democratic politics. Only that will enable the marginalised and the excluded (and their representatives) to drive decision-making towards environmental justice.
Lindsay K. Campbell is a research social scientist with the USDA Forest Service. Her current research explores the dynamics of urban politics, stewardship, and sustainability policymaking.
I’m going to sidestep the theoretically rich domain of defining what we mean by “nature” in the “city” and focus in on the narrower subset of urban nature that occurs on the land, including vegetation and green space. So, I’m not considering the atmosphere, water, or energy systems that further constitute our urban environment and that can variously be considered as public goods or privatized commodities.
We need to cultivate place attachment and cohesion that emerges through community self-help, while also supplying crucial municipal resources to support—but not stifle—that engagement.
There is a spectrum of governance arrangements on the land—from the quintessentially shared community garden to the sometimes-exclusionary private lands. But for the most part, every piece of urban land is some shade of gray, some mixing of the public and the private. Plazas, parks, sidewalks, subway platforms, stoops—whether privately owned or publicly managed—they are part of the public realms, spaces where people, at least visually, if not physically, mix. So, while our property jurisdiction may subdivide the land into discrete parcels, we as humans moving through space can experience it as a blurrier, more complex, and multilayered system. Claims on land are both overlapping and incomplete—authorities are never total.
Over the course of my research, I’ve investigated grassroots management of green space, from community-based natural resources management in rural, Global South contexts to community gardens in urban, Global North contexts. I’ve always been drawn to bottom-up, community-led environmental management and have sought to understand why and how people engage in stewardship of the land. This is because I believe in the power, creativity, and voice of communities to solve problems locally and manage landscapes in ways that meet their needs, including through acts of commoning. Along with my co-editor, Anne Wiesen, I explored some of these ideas in the edited volume Restorative Commons: Creating Health and Well-being for Urban Landscapes.
We often see the emergence of community-led solutions in the retreat of capital or the absence of government. In 2005’s City Bountiful, Laura Lawson wrote about the history of community gardening in America and its relationships to periodic crises: the Depression, World Wars, and financial declines. This pattern continues to the present, as we see shrinking cities and Rust Belt cities that are simultaneously wellsprings of community farming, homesteading, and arts practices. With disinvestment by public and private authorities, we see people making their own claims on the land, not only through gardening, but also through squatting and other forms of individual and collective empowerment and self-help.
Though we see innovation and bottom-up management during moments of crises, how can we foster community stewardship in the “good times”? In the current context of New York, where I live, and in many other cities around the globe, community land management practices can be enabled by public authorities and private resources. As such, my more recent research for the book City of Forests, City of Farms (Cornell University Press, September 2017) examines the networked governance of urban forestry and agriculture. I find that municipal parks departments and private NGOs play important roles in supplying access to land, basic material inputs, and labor to organize community residents. For example, the NYC Parks GreenThumb Program has existed since 1978, and provides support to approximately 20,000 community gardeners citywide. While gardeners are the primary land managers of their sites, they adhere to minimum rules of conduct, open hours, and membership policies and also have access to soil, plants, other materials, and trainings as part of the GreenThumb network. We also see examples of public-private partnerships (for example, the MillionTreesNYC campaign), land trusts (such as The Trust for Public Land), and community coalitions (New York City Community Gardening Coalition)—all as different forms of governance arrangements involved in the stewardship of urban environments.
Effective and equitable management requires a balance. We need to cultivate place attachment and cohesion that emerges through community self-help, while also supplying crucial municipal resources to support—but not stifle—that engagement. And further, given the intense competition for space, in the context of skyrocketing real estate markets in many cities, we must find space for individual expression and collective action. Can we leave a little space, something a little more “wild”, a little less “governed”, in order to see what emerges?
Work cited
Lawson, Laura. 2005. City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
There are conceptual problems with viewing nature in the city solely as a public good or solely as a common pool resource, but common pool resource is closer to our current reality. In understanding why, we can also understand the political challenge of creating just and green cities.
The either/or options, “common pool” or “public good” will not take us where we need to go. More promising is the trend toward social-ecological coalitions.
First, we need to specify the full set of benefits that flow from the stock of nature in the city. Ecological benefits of urban green space include air and water filtration, temperature regulation, and habitat provision. Human health benefits are derived from the association between access to green space and reduced cardiovascular disease, reduced mental disorders, and improved child development. Meanwhile, there are measurable economic benefits, such as increased property values and increased tax revenues. Social benefits include greater connection to community for neighborhood residents and an expanded civic arena, which generates a more functional democracy.
This list of benefits could be much longer, which explains why inner city residents fight for equitable access to nature as a matter of justice. However, one thing that complicates this fight and the effort to conceptually categorize nature in the city is the fact that all of these benefits flow at once and affect one another. How do we decide which benefits to prioritize?
If we focus on certain ecological benefits of nature in the city, then the standard criteria for public goods are easily met. If urban natural areas are a public good, then, generally speaking, no one is excluded from accessing the flow of benefits and one person’s use does not diminish the capacity of another person to benefit. Ecological benefits, such as reduced toxins and cooler temperatures, can be accessed by all and are not diminished when the benefit is received. However, access to some ecological benefits (such as water drainage) and too many health, economic, and social benefits are often curtailed by institutions that limit who can occupy certain areas of the city. Thus, those advocating for urban greening as a public good emphasize the universal ecological benefits.
If we focus on the economic benefits of urban natural areas, then the standard criteria for a common pool resource are likewise easily met. If the stock of nature in the city is a common pool resource, then (generally speaking) anyone can access the flow of benefits, but—differently than a public good—these benefits are finite, and one person’s use limits availability for others. In this circumstance, people are rivals, competing for a resource and struggling to negotiate governance arrangements that ensure it remains available across space and over time. When urban green space demarcates high-end neighborhoods, as is the case with New York’s High Line Park, Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway, and Austin’s west side preservation efforts, then the economic benefits are mostly captured by a few. Soon, other benefits of urban natural areas are also increasingly spatially segregated according to the logic of gentrification. Under these circumstances, certain people access the benefits of urban nature at the expense of others meaning green space is no longer defensible as a public good and instead needs to be viewed as a common pool resource with associated governance challenges.
Of course, some ecological benefits remain accessible to all residents despite gentrification processes. Thus, categorizing urban greening as a common pool resource is also a contestable proposition. While it is a tautology, it is necessary to remind ourselves that these theoretical models only partially accommodate messy reality.
In sum, if you focus on ecological flows, then nature in the city is a public good; if you focus on economic flows, then urban natural areas are a common pool resource. I suggest that this conflict means we should see the stock of urban natural areas as existing along a spatially and historically contingent spectrum between common pool resources and public goods. In 1970s America, post-industrial abandonment made nature in the city more of a public good. Now, with urban space treated as a luxury item, greening is experiencing steep privatization pressures and is closer to a common pool resource. The broad urban context matters and those seeking to green the city should adjust with the context.
What does this tell us about the political challenge of creating just and green cities?
Relying only on the public good argument delegitimates those who focus on the non-ecological benefits of greening. Meanwhile, ignoring the public good aspects of urban greening weakens the political position of those advocating for just and green cities. As environmental justice advocates have long understood, such either/or positions will not take us where we want to go. Rather, a more promising trend is toward the formation of social-ecological coalitions, perhaps focused on human health and civic engagement. Precisely because these benefits are hard to put in any one conceptual category, they provide fertile political ground.
Sheila R. Foster is a Professor of Law and Public Policy (joint appointment with McCourt School of Public Policy) at Georgetown University. Professor Foster is the author of numerous books, book chapters, and law journal articles on property, land use, environmental law, and antidiscrimination law.
Think of almost any city in post-industrial American in the 1980s—Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, New York. Failed urban renewal programs have left most of these places scattered with vacant lots, abandoned by their original owners and now owned by the city through tax foreclosures. Now consider that, in the midst of economically and socially fragile communities, neighborhood residents utilize these vacant lots to construct hundreds of community gardens. Residents sweep away trash and drug paraphernalia. They plant and cultivate trees, flowers, and vegetables. The gardens become places where residents of different ethnic backgrounds and ages interact, local food is produced, and crime is prevented (because the garden participants become the eyes and ears of the community). The gardens also provide the infrastructure for community interaction—sitting areas (benches and tables), playgrounds, water ponds and fountains, summerhouses—as well as for cultural and social events.
Questions of equity and distributional justice are key to the urban commons as a concept.
Fast forward to the 1990s. Urban revitalization is well under way; many suburbanites who left the city decades ago are now itching to return to the promise of safe, burgeoning city life. Private developers are interested in land once thought forgotten. City officials, too, are interested in previously abandoned lots, particularly in selling them to private developers for the construction of new housing and other developments. Towards this end, imagine that public officials in one of these cities announces plans to bulldoze hundreds of community gardens and sell off the lots to private developers. Officials argue that in the long run, the communities where the gardens sit would benefit from the new development and even promise to construct affordable housing on some of the sites. In response, neighborhood residents bring a lawsuit to stop the auctioning off of the gardens, but to no avail. They discover that they do not have legal claim or proprietary right to the lots. They are essentially short-term tenants of the city government with consent to use the land at the will of the city.
City officials characterize the lots as “vacant”, notwithstanding the community gardens operating on the land, and want simply to return the lots to their previous commercial or residential uses. The residents, on the other hand, contend that destroying the gardens would deprive their communities, especially the most vulnerable, of critical resources on which they depend. To highlight the resources provided by the gardens, and their loss should the gardens be taken away, residents engage in a rhetorical campaign to equate the gardens as akin to parks or “parkland”. Parkland receives revered protection under the “public trust doctrine”, an ancient legal principle adopted by American courts that preserves for public access and use certain kinds of natural, cultural, and urban resources and prevents them from being sold off or exploited for commercial profit or strictly private gain.
The idea that the community gardens are more than just a piece of undeveloped land, and more akin to a common pool resource, raises important questions for how we think about urban “nature” and the urban commons. In many ways, much of what we consider the urban commons shares characteristics of both a “common pool resource” and a “public good”. At first glance, nature in the city looks and sounds a lot like a common pool resource. Many natural commons, such as lakes and rivers, pre-existed many modern cities and are resources on which urban dwellers now depend for their water supply and other critical goods. However, there are equally as many (if not more) constructed “nature” commons in the city—such as manmade urban parks and lakes—which share more of the characteristics of many public goods. That is, they function much like other built infrastructure in the city; they accommodate multiple users without subtracting from their availability to others. In many instances, public parks and recreational rivers and lakes are even closer to other kinds of urban infrastructure—highways, mass transit systems, public swimming pools, schools, airports—than they are to the forests, underwater basins and irrigation systems that were the subject of Elinor Ostrom’s study of common pool resources.
Take Central Park in Manhattan, New York, which is an entirely manmade park whose construction was made possible only by the destruction of Seneca Village, which was settled by free black people and was a flourishing community of African Americans and Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century. The City government claimed the land using its eminent domain power and then evicted the residents, razed their homes, and built Central Park. A similar story unfolded in the mid-twentieth century, when the now infamous “Master Builder”, Robert Moses, whom Jane Jacobs famously took on, began a seven- year public works spree in New York. Over the course of this period, using public money, he built over a dozen bridges, over 400 miles of highways, over 600 playgrounds, and several iconic cultural buildings such as Lincoln Center and the United Nations. He often did so by using the power of eminent domain to evict working class and poor communities from these sites to accommodate these public goods.
Thus, much of what we might consider to be “urban nature” is some mix of a public good and a common pool resource. More importantly, the creation and destruction of these urban common resources are often contested and raise difficult choices about what kind of urban environment we want and value, and who benefits and pays the costs of these choices. What this means for the urban environment is that we need a version of the “urban commons” that accounts for these difficult choices. One often overlooked aspect of thinking about the urban commons, including constructed “nature” resources in cities, is the generative potential of shared urban resources. We should privilege and protect from destruction and over-development those urban resources, whether natural or constructed, that generate goods necessary for human flourishing in communities. In addition to being able to subtract or extract from shared urban resources, some of the most valuable resources in cities (both natural and constructed) are also a means to produce a variety of critical goods and services for its urban inhabitants.
The “commons” is thus an important conceptual framework for examining questions of resource access, stewardship, distribution, and governance. As with common pool resources—fisheries, forests, information, knowledge, and so on—the issue is often the scale of production and renewability of urban resources. Very few resources are infinite and, at some point, decisions must be made as to how and to whom to allocate urban resources and what kind of process that entails. The management and governance of urban commons should pay particular attention to, and account for, those less able to access and utilize urban assets to support human survival and flourishing. In this sense, questions of equity and distributional justice are also key to the urban commons as a concept, which can help to mediate the question of who should decide, and on what basis.
Phil Ginsburg is the general manager of the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, which oversees 4,100 acres of park land and more than 220 parks.
At its best, nature in an urban environment is a public good whose enjoyment by one neighbor does not impinge on the enjoyment of nature by another, but instead enhances it by providing a place for people to connect face-to-face and to take full advantage of the benefits of being outdoors.
Maintaining a constant feedback loop with park users can allow us to create well-loved public spaces and a social contract we can all adhere to.
San Francisco is blessed with 224 parks, occupying roughly 15 percent of the real estate in the city. One thousand acres of that land is pure nature: miles of hiking and walking trails, breathtaking vistas and rich habitat. Every day, I see heartening examples of coexistence and the sharing of space that enriches lives and our public space.
We are not, however, immune to the challenges of managing open space in a dense urban area, which can include user conflicts, trash and vandalism, and disagreements about when and how and why to renovate a park.
We are not arguing the importance of open space versus development. There is a high level of agreement in our city about many things; there is broad consensus that open space makes the city more livable, and we have an active and engaged citizenry that believes in fighting global warming, expanding recycling and composting efforts, and reducing the carbon footprint of our parks.
On our best days, the combination of good planning and design, positive activation, engaged stewards, education, and enforcement keeps our parks as places that we can enjoy without interfering with our neighbors. If one of those pillars falls, however, conflict arises and parks can shift from a public good to a tragedy of the commons, where our shared spaces are riddled with congestion, overuse, and inconsiderate behavior.
Ideally and in practice, we all decide how public space will function—government makes choices in partnership with its citizens, informed by the best thinking and innovative ideas we can find.
An essential component of our strategy has been to place a high priority on community outreach, volunteerism, and engagement, and to maintain a constant feedback loop with our diverse park users, who share with us their priorities and how we can better facilitate connecting them to nature.
A prime example of this model in action is the recent renovation of Kezar Triangle, a 2.8-acre spot of parkland on the outskirts of Golden Gate Park, adjacent to one of our more popular stadium sites. In years past, the triangle was little more than a pedestrian throughway for commuters and an unfettered area for dog owners to exercise their furry friends. A community effort to organize, fundraise, plan, and design a repurposed park space in partnership with our department has resulted in a lively, activated multiuse park with an eager volunteer stewardship base.
Sure, government is the ultimate decision-maker on staffing levels, infrastructure, amenities, policy, and enforcement priorities, and our neighbors are the ultimate decisionmakers on how they interact with their public spaces. But when we align and work together to create well-loved public spaces and a social contract we can all adhere to, everyone wins.
Jeffrey Hou is Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture and Adjunct Professor of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work focuses on design activism, community engagement, public space and democracy, and transcultural placemaking.
Nature spaces in the city—as with air, light, and water—can indeed be conceived as a public good or common pool resource whose management is to be determined by its citizens. In reality, however, things are obviously far more complicated. The rise of property ownership over the course of centuries has impinged on many preexisting practices of common resource management in traditional societies. In contemporary cities, the prevalent, neoliberal form of urban governance has further blurred the line between public good and private interests, and muddled the process of collective decision-making.
“Nature spaces” in cities are increasingly far from a public good, and are, instead, commodities for those who can afford them.
The development and maintenance of public parks and open spaces in which much of urban nature exists are funded increasingly through myriad private and public funding sources with diffuse decision-making processes and accountability. While the public does benefit through many philanthropic and even private efforts, they are not necessarily engaged in decision-making that influences the outcome of those projects and how they are programmed and maintained. In growing cities, development and improvement of parks and open spaces are inextricably tied to processes of gentrification and displacement of individuals and communities. These “nature spaces” tend to serve only those who are able to live close to them. As such, “nature” is increasingly far from a public good, and is instead a commodity for those who can afford it.
How can we overcome this conundrum? How can citizens and urban multitudes reclaim and reconstruct the “nature” commons within the current framework of urban governance? There are a few things in Seattle, my current home city, that can serve as a starting point for discussion. First, at the institutional level, the City of Seattle faces significant fiscal constraints, like most other North American cities. But unlike the public-private partnership model used to develop major public parks in other large cities, Seattle citizens went to the ballot to pass tax levies that provided hundreds of millions of public dollars for development of new parks and the refurbishment of existing ones in all corners of the city. The use of such money was overseen by a Citizen Oversight Committee. The result is a network of urban open spaces that are accessible to and enjoyed by communities of different economic circumstances.
At the community level, citizen engagement is key to develop agency, participation, and attachment in the active stewardship of nature spaces in the city. The P-Patch Community Gardening Program under the City’s Department of Neighborhoods provides one such opportunity. Through community gardening initiatives and advocacy, citizens, neighbors, and civic organization form networks that extend beyond those focusing on gardening to include efforts in promoting green infrastructure, urban agriculture, and environmental education.
Public space activism is another important vehicle for civic engagement and as a form of resistance against forces of private interests and neoliberal enclosure. As early as 1971, citizens in Stockholm gathered and succeeded in protecting a beloved grove of elm trees at the King’s Garden (Kungsträdgården) from being taken down to make way for a subway station. More recently, residents in Istanbul staged protests to protect Gezi Park against a proposed development on the site. Though the protests were violently suppressed by the authorities, they inspired broad-based organizing and discussion concerning issues of the environment, authoritarian control of the state, and rights to the city. The cases in Stockholm and Istanbul are two examples of many instances around the world in which activism and social actions have been instrumental in protecting nature spaces (whether they succeed or not) and in engaging discussion and debate concerning the role of nature in the city. It is through these actions and mobilization that nature as a public good can become a subject of public debates and advocacy—a social and political process through which urban nature as a public good can be articulated and clarified in our changing society. I argue that it is through processes like this that the meanings and significance of nature in the city can be not only reclaimed, but also reconstructed.
Marianne Krasny is professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Director of the Civic Ecology Lab at Cornell University, and leader of EPA’s national environmental education training program (“EECapacity”).
What happens when nature in the city runs counter to what we think we know about common pool resources and public goods? When we observe urban nature that challenges common creeds, such as:
When common pool resources are owned by governments or communally they become public goods, but when owned by private individuals they are private goods.
Restricting access and assigning individual rights to a resource stops people from destroying common pool resources.
Without specific government policies, public goods will be limited [1, 2].
Baltimore, Maryland is a far remove from Sweden. Yet, inspired by the Swedish tradition of farmers allowing anyone access to walking on their land, a Baltimore family bought a house with a wooded yard bordering a stream at the end of an urban block*. Jill Wrigley and Michael Sarbanes set out to make their yard a community resource in a low-income neighborhood with few green spaces. The woods and the stream are a natural attraction for people in the community, particularly children, and Jill and Michael opened up access to their yard to anyone who came down the street.
Intentional communities in Baltimore are reconceiving private space as community space as a way to foster nature, community, and related public goods in the city.
Over time, the space became a place where many children would spend time on a regular basis and that they would claim as a daily part of their lives. The yard became a shared space where neighborhood children, their parents, residents of the block, and Jill and Michael got to know each other. These relationships formed the basis for creating a culture and simple set of rules that govern how the space is used—treat each other with respect; pick up any trash you see; take care of the wildlife; when the streetlights come on, it’s time to go home. When I walked with Jill and Michael through their woods next to their home a few years back, we were followed by a curious child from the subsidized housing complex up the street. She was delighted to skip a rock across the stream wending its way through a space that technically was privately owned, but which she saw as a natural part of her daily life.
Jill and Michael were white-collar professionals and activists deeply committed to social justice and their church. They saw opening access to their “piece of nature” in West Baltimore as a way to build community and address social ills. In Sweden, public access can be viewed from multiple perspectives: as a shift from nature as something to be exploited to something beautiful and intimately linked to humans, as a site of environmental education where contact with nature supports human and community health, and as a means towards environmental justice and democracy [3]. Jill and Michael’s openly accessible property reflects all three of these perspectives, but especially their commitment to justice and democracy.
In Baltimore, justice and democracy mean not just the right to be present in nature, but the right to be influential. Reported low levels of public engagement among people of color in the U.S. result in part from limited access to factors that provide a gateway to engagement—factors such as white adults not thinking to ask adults of color to participate in a volunteer event, for example, and children attending schools where after-school and service learning opportunities are absent [4-6].
Jill and Michael don’t just provide the “right to be present”. This in itself is important—mothers from the subsidized housing project up the street have talked about how this slice of nature is a rare place where they get to think and relax. But Jill and Michael have also tried to address the importance of being influential. Children and families help to establish and enforce the simple guidelines for how to interact in the space. They participate in stewardship outings to clean and improve the land and stream. They engaged in the design and beautification process that converted a vacant, trash-strewn property on the same block into the Peace Park, a flexible community green space maintained by residents. Over the past several decades, Jill and Michael helped to establish a multi-faith, multi-racial, intentional community of families who have moved to the same block with a shared commitment to social and environmental justice, informally naming themselves the Collins Avenue Streamside Community. In these ways, the private common pool resource they own creates a public good that goes beyond access to nature to encompass the right of participation in fostering justice, building community, and more broadly, democracy.
At Collins Avenue Streamside, a privately-owned resource is not a private good. And solving the free-rider and tragedy of the commons problems associated with common pool resources does not rely on restricting access to private property. Yet solving these problems does assign individual rights and responsibilities to the resource—the right of access to nature, the responsibilities of respecting each other and the land, and the right and responsibility of participation in democratic processes in a neighborhood where those rights have been traditionally restricted.
But does Jill and Michael’s initiative counter the tenet that without government policies, undersupply of public goods will ensue? During the evolution of Collins Avenue Streamside Community, several government policies have supported the creation of the space. For example, city code enforcement tore down an abandoned house on the lot that became the Peace Park, and a regional effort to reline old sewer pipes significantly improved the quality of the water in the stream. But these efforts form a background, rather than a direct cause of the creation of the space. The space itself is largely a response to the very limited access to public green space in the neighborhood. So, in this context, the undersupply of public goods in the neighborhood set in motion private action to create those goods.
In Baltimore, families in the Collins Avenue Streamside Community don’t just support greening and social justice, they live greening and justice in their everyday lives. Jill and Michael have seen the rise of similar intentional communities in Baltimore, which are reconceiving private space as community space. They hope other private citizens will consider their streamside project and intentional community as a life choice to foster nature, community, and related public goods in the city.
* Jill Wrigley was a lawyer and university instructor who passed away prematurely in October 2016, leaving behind her husband, her three adopted children, and her Collins Avenue Streamside Community. We offer this short piece in commemoration of Jill’s extraordinary devotion and commitment in all facets of her life.
References
Ostrom, E., et al., Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges. Science, 1999. 284(5412): p. 278-282.
Harris, J.M., Environmental and natural resource economics: a contemporary approach. 2006, Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin. 503.
Sandell, K. and J. Öhman, Educational potentials of encounters with nature: reflections from a Swedish outdoor perspective. Environmental Education Research, 2010. 16(1): p. 113-132.
Flanagan, C. and P. Levine, Civic Engagement and the Transition to Adulthood. The Future of Children, 2010. 20(1): p. 159-179.
Musick, M.A., J. Wilson, and J.W.B. Bynum, Race and Formal Volunteering: The Differential Effects of Class and Religion. Social Forces, 2000. 78(4): p. 1539-1570.
Foster-Bey, J., Do Race, Ethnicity, Citizenship and Socio-economic Status Determine Civic-Engagement? 2008, CIRCLE: Boston, MA. p. 19.
Mary Mattingly creates sculptural ecosystems in urban spaces. Mary Mattingly’s work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, International Center of Photography, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana, Storm King, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Palais de Tokyo.
A floating food forest, Swale is an experiment in a commons in New York City. With roughly one hundred acres of community garden space compared to 30,000 acres of public parkland, picking food on New York’s public land has been illegal for almost a century.
Not only do we need more people at the table, we also need more opportunities for people to build the table.
In a city where liability often trumps trust (even when benefits outweigh the harms), New York City Department of Parks & Recreation’s §1-04 Prohibited Uses initially stemmed from the concern that a glut of foragers would destroy an ecosystem.
Swale is an edible landscape built on a hopper barge that utilizes marine common law in order to circumvent local public land laws. In this way, Swale is able to dock adjacent to public land and allow people to pick edible and medicinal perennial plants grown onboard for free.
Collaborative building
Building together is a process of physical, mental, and social transformation. Because we all have much to teach each other, Swale has been improved by insights from visitors, and also by learning more about the Parks Department’s current concerns over public access to edible plants. These include differing degrees of plant knowledge, alternative maintenance needs for edible landscaping, and a philosophy of conservation on parkland.
The alliances that steward Swale are small examples that stress the large importance of urging more people to be involved in caring for our common home, and therefore in stewarding water and lands so that they may continue to be safe spaces to utilize in multiple ways. One year after the launch of Swale, the Parks Department will pilot the first public “foodway” at Concrete Plant Park in the Bronx. This signifies a change and a realization that basic human needs for access to healthy food outweigh perceived liabilities. Not only do we need more people at the table, we also need more opportunities for people to build the table.
Social love as a commons
Urban food forests won’t feed a city like New York anytime soon. However, a multitude of different approaches that are closer to home are necessary if we are going to address the role of industrial farming in climate change, and also begin to heal from damage done to the environment, ourselves, and our neighbors through industrial forms of production that neglect human and environmental health.
As a country, the United States has sped towards privatization of everything. So it is no wonder that movements towards food sovereignty and rebuilding common spaces continue to grow stronger. The ability to bridge understandings, communities, and knowledge sets with social love and dignity are urgently needed in order to understand (and then part ways) with systemic social and environmental violence. Social love is itself a commons, and it is what moves us to devise larger strategies together to halt environmental degradation and to encourage care. It’s difficult to presume we can begin healing nature and the environment without, at the same time, being able to trust in our fundamental human relationships.
Oona Morrow is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Geography at Trinity College Dublin, where she is a member of the European Research Council funded SHARECITY project. She is conducting ethnographic research on the sustainability potential of urban food sharing in Berlin and New York.
Cities pose numerous challenges and opportunities for commons. As Amanda Huron observes, the sociospatial conditions of cities such as density, overlapping uses, cultural diversity, the coming together of strangers, and high levels of capital investment can make cities particularly challenging for creating commons in their traditional forms—that is, place-based communities taking care of the territorially bound resources they depend on.
Urban socio-natures are both common pool resources and public goods—recognizing this is a necessary first step in establishing the ground for the city as commons.
Yet, urban spaces have also proven to be fertile ground for unbounding the commons and moving beyond the logics of scarcity and economic rationality that are embedded in Hardin’s tragedy of the commons. In cities, we discover commons that are abundant and unbound, overlapping in time and space, cultural and digital, material and immaterial, public and private, generative, and in dynamic states of becoming.
I’d like to begin by reflecting on why public goods and common pool resources are placed at odds with one another in this question. Public goods such as parks, fresh air, health care, and infrastructure signify commons in their most open and inclusive form. They are open access, and they exist for the benefit of all urban inhabitants. Depending on their social and material qualities, they may also exhibit the common pool resource characteristics such as sub-tractability and difficulty of exclusion. However, these public goods are rarely recognized as commons—it is often not until they are threatened through privatization or enclosure that they are recognized as such. Sometimes these public goods don’t feel like commons at all. Their rules, regulations, and governance processes might feel exclusionary or too top-down. Rather than encountering urban infrastructures, natures, and spaces as commoners who have the capacity to alter, repair, steward, or care for these resources, we often encounter them as consumers of services provided by an (often underfunded and overburdened) administrative state. I argue that urban socio-natures are both common pool resources and public goods, and that recognizing them as such is a necessary first step in establishing the ground for the city as commons. This “both/and” conceptualization allows us to recognize the place based claims of local communities on the socio-natures they care for and benefit from, while also suggesting that such commons based governance strategies can usefully operate at larger administrative scales, and may at times need to “go public” in order to ensure the equitable distribution of environmental benefits.
What does this “both/and” conceptualization of urban socio-natures as common pool resources and public goods look like in practice?
My research on the diverse economies and nature-society relations of food provisioning in cities has led me to explore commons in Boston and, more recently, in Berlin. In greater Boston, I got to know many people who were experimenting with collective forms of food provisioning. They were reclaiming vacant lots for community gardens and urban farms; foraging for edible plants in parks and on the verges of sidewalks and private yards; and harvesting, sharing, and caring for backyard fruit trees. Their practices produced common pool resources—gardens, urban orchards, knowledge of edible plants. But, they also sought to steward these resources as public goods; requested that city arborists and the parks department plant more edible plants; advocated for zoning changes that would make it easier for people to grow food on vacant lands and share or sell that food; and showed up to resist when the public parks they used for foraging were threatened by development.
In Berlin, I got to know people who treated public goods as if they were always already common pool resources. The mapping platform mundraub allows members to share their local foraging knowledge, enabling a potentially infinite pool of harvesters to reclaim the edible trees and plants growing on public property as commons. The borough of Pankow has gone a step further to pass legislation for the concept of Edible Borough, which provides locals and mundraubers permission to plant, care for, and harvest from fruit trees in designated public parks. All over the city, Berliners have been reclaiming land for commoning through a vibrant and thriving community gardening movement. The landmark 100% Tempelhofer Feld referendum over the future of an abandoned airport in Neu Kölln demonstrated that not only do Berliners want public goods, such as parks and green spaces, they want those goods to be open for commoning—for community gardening, for wilderness and wildlife, for leisure and art. The capacity to create common pool resources out of public and private goods in Berlin is truly inspiring, and all the more necessary during a time when so many public goods—from vacant lots to social housing—continue to be privatized and sold off to pay interest on municipal debts. For public goods to remain public in Berlin and beyond, they need to be recognized as commons, and to be used, governed, and cared for as common pool resources.
Harini Nagendra is a Professor of Sustainability at Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India. She uses social and ecological approaches to examine the factors shaping the sustainability of forests and cities in the south Asian context. Her books include “Cities and Canopies: Trees of Indian Cities” and "Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India's Cities" (Penguin India, 2023) (with Seema Mundoli), and “The Bangalore Detectives Club” historical mystery series set in 1920s colonial India.
Nature in the city is a confusing, contested category. Some would like it to be a public good: an iconic park, large lake, or wetland that exists to serve the needs of the city and all its people, cleaning up its polluted air and recharging its water. Others consider nature to be a common pool resource, co-created with the local community that interacts with the resource by planting, restoring and harvesting, via fundamental acts of commoning that increase the binding between otherwise disparate and disconnected city dwellers. Some others prefer to sequester nature in the form of a club good, shared by a few (a members-only “club”) in an apartment complex or gated community, or a private good reserved exclusively for their homes: this is something one can see real estate developers capitalizing on as they offer ultra-rich luxury homes, advertised with private butterfly gardens and lakes in cities such as Bangalore.
Cities in many parts of the world are experiencing an alarming shift in the framing of nature in the city away from a commons, repositioning it exclusively as a public good.
An urban ecosystem can constitute a public, a commons, and a private good at the same time. Thus, the Kaikondrahalli lake in Bangalore constitutes a public good, because it increases ground water percolation, which is then pumped out and used to supply the city with water. It is a commons, for the fisher folk and grazers who use the lake for its abundant supply of fish and grass. It is also a private good, for those who own apartments with balconies with a view overlooking the lake, in which they sit with their morning cups of tea to enjoy a rare moment of urban peace, and de-stress in harmony with nature. The lake can, it seems, be all things to all people.
Why, then, should we care about this definition? The distinction between public, private, and common goods is not an esoteric categorization dreamt up by political scientists with no bearing on reality. It is clear from many previous discussions at The Nature of Cities, that the increasing privatization of nature is something we all ought to be worried about. However, cities in many parts of the world are also experiencing a silent, but widespread shift in the framing of nature in the city away from a commons, repositioning nature exlusively as a public good. This is alarming, as well.
In Bangalore, my colleagues Seema Mundoli, B. Manjunatha, and I recently looked at what happed to the commons in 18 peri-urban villages that are now engulfed by the city. Government records indicate that these villages had as many as 43 urban woodlots—locally called “gundathopes”—just a few decades ago. An average-sized grove typically contained upwards of 20 trees, majestic collections of jackfruit, mango, tamarind, banyan, and fig that provided shade and fodder, food, timber, and shelter. Many also contained sacred elements such as stones and anthills, and were worshipped as sacred groves, in addition to being used as commons.
Of these 43 groves, 20 are now gone—erased so effectively from the landscape that in many villages, people did not remember the physical locations where the groves once existed. Of the remaining 23, many had no trees left, and were in a pitiable condition of disrepair. What has replaced these groves? We expected that they would have been cannibalized by wealthy private interests and converted into large private homes or business. Instead, we found them converted to “public use”—sites of government offices, schools, and community centers; allotted to low-income housing schemes; or razed to make way for roads, markets, and community temples.
Why was this decimation of groves so widespread? Because the village lost control over its commons. For generations, the local village maintained its groves as common property regimes. Decisions to plant, extract, or fell were collectively taken by local residents. As the city expanded to engulf villages, their groves became properties of the city at large—they went from commons to public goods. In a city cramped for space, it is easy to see why administrators sitting in distant offices prioritise the need for a school or community center over a bunch of trees. It is only the local residents, after all, who valued these as much more than a bunch of trees. As a commons that was central to their identity, culture, and placemaking—a value they have now largely lost, and which only the elderly seem to be able to recall. Ironically, in rare instances where groves have been protected, the local village has actively made efforts to convert them into landscaped parks for recreation, trying to retain control over their grove instead of “losing” it to the city.
The reframing of urban commons as public goods is widespread in Indian cities. A recent article on the cleanup of Bangalore’s largest lake, Bellandur (so polluted that the foam on the lake regularly catches fire, bringing international news coverage with it) highlights that the cleanup will restore the lake as a public space, but will destroy the livelihoods of hundreds of commoners—fishers and grazers—who depend on the lake. It is interesting that it is a business paper that carries this analysis, which provides a good example of inclusive business coverage. The discussion, which carries quotes from a number of experts with influence, clearly shows us that when urban nature is reconceptualised as a public good, the rights and requirements of the local community as stewards and commoners are given short shrift.
The trajectory of de-commonisation of urban nature is not inevitable. There are hundreds of examples around the world where commoners work to restore and maintain pockets of urban nature which also service the city and its public. But to argue for the co-construction of nature in the city as a commons and a public good, we need to make a strong case for keeping the distinction alive. And explain why it matters.
Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Public Policy at CIDE in Mexico. Raul’s research is interdisciplinary by nature, lying at the intersection of space, public policy, environment, and society. He is primarily interested in understanding the factors that contribute to (or hinder) cooperation in natural resource governance.
I have a somewhat problematic notion with the idea of the “right to the city” and that of the “urban commons” when it comes down to who gets to dowhat,where, and when—the traditional questions that public policy analysis theories ask. As an anecdote, I walk through the streets of Aguascalientes, the city where I live, and I witness several small, yet painful-to-watch actions that some residents take. These happen on a regular basis. For example, a few weeks ago, I was walking on the street, and saw a driver drop the cellophane that covered the candy he was about to consume. I have also witnessed parents who not only enable but encourage their kids to throw garbage on the floor. This lack of basic respect for the rule of law, these small-yet-visible infractions, drive me bonkers. It’s almost as though these citizens were disrespectful because they didn’t feel like owners of the city. Or maybe they feel like The Owners? Who has a right to access public services? Who should be responsible for taking care of their urban environment? And when will individuals take responsibility for their actions, particularly when these have a negative impact on their shared environment?
There is a right to the city, but it should be accompanied by a duty to the city.
I am always concerned when thinking about shared access to a valuable resource, particularly when these include urban amenities such as lakes, parks, urban forests, and so forth. As someone trained in the Elinor Ostrom school of thinking, I am hopeful about self-organization to protect shared resources, but I’m also skeptical at times. That’s how I can let my personal and academic selves coexist: by believing in individuals’ ability to find ways to access resources but not deplete them, but also keeping a watchful eye on their behaviour and ensuring that they follow governance rules that we all have previously agreed on.
I think part of the discussion on the urban commons that gets overlooked and glossed over is the issue of WHO is responsible for the shared resources. Not only for their governance, but also for their conservation. Sharing urban commons is an activity whose implications go well beyond the RIGHT to access public spaces. While there is some value to the “right to the city” approach (particularly the “No One Is Illegal” model), whereby individuals have a right to be within a specific space, just by virtue of actually being physically there, it’s more complicated than that. The cityzenship approach espoused by Vrasti and Dayal is intriguing, because it argues that:
“citizenship […] is the right to the city, the urban commons, extended to all residents, regardless of origin, identity or legality, based on the principle of ‘rightful presence’ […] The urban commons include public infrastructures as well as public spaces, places of culture and education, cafes, the street and the street corner along with the capacity to make and unmake these spaces” (Vrasti and Dayal 2016, p. 994).
As lovely as the sentiment depicted by Vrasti and Dayal is, the question remains: WHO is responsible for maintaining those urban commons? Who shares in the responsibility (and therefore in the costs)? And when can access to the urban commons be denied or limited? Under what circumstances can we afford to limit the accessibility of shared urban spaces? Approaches such as cityzenship gloss over the need for public service delivery and the role and responsibility of local governments in providing those services. Moreover, it’s important to remember that these public services have costs that need to be borne out by municipal agencies. Such city-level organizations provide services, including cleaning up, watering gardens, treating wastewater from toilets and other locations, and collecting and disposing of refuse. Therefore, one can’t simply let individuals access urban commons without some sense of shared duty and responsibility towards those resources.
While it is clear that urban commons (and, in particular, “urban green commons”, as defined by Colding and Bartel) are useful resources for communities intent on building resilience and enhancing cultural, ecological, and biological diversity (Colding and Barthel 2013), we also ought to build specific norms that delineate who is responsible for what and when. This is where policy theory thinking can help us out. To manage urban commons, we need a diversity of policy tools and mechanisms to guarantee access, but also conservation and preservation. This is also an area where common pool resource theory (or commons theory), as espoused by Professor Elinor Ostrom, can help us build new strategies for urban commons’ governance. In particular, as Colding and Barthel indicate, institutional diversity (Ostrom 2005) can help create new models of governing the urban commons because citizens and service providers aren’t locked into one particular model of public service delivery and regulation.
“[B]roader participation in urban green commons is more likely to succeed when a diversity of institutional options exists for their arrangement in a city. Such diversity provides a better matching of different individuals’ preferences and motives for participating in collective green-area management. Hence, policy makers and planners should stimulate the self-emergence of different types of UGC […]” (Colding and Barthel 2013, p. 163)
Parks are particularly important urban commons that need to be properly managed and governed because they enable everyday participation, as well as building social capital, creating network ties, and enhancing cultural and social diversity. Moreover, “parks are a mark that somebody cares about the neighbourhood; they make a nice place” (Gilmore 2017, p. 39). Nevertheless, parks need to be cared for, tended to, and maintained. Therefore, it’s important to place a system of urban commons governance that assigns roles, duties, and cost-sharing to all members of the urban ecosystem within which the commons exists. At the same time, it will be important to enable members of this urban ecosystem to have free, if governed, access, and to enforce rules and norms aimed at sustaining the urban commons.
In closing, I do believe that there is a right to the city, but it should be accompanied by a duty to the city, as well. This is an area where coproduction thinking can be helpful. Coproduction is defined by the sharing of responsibilities in offering a public service. Citizens and governments both participate in the provision of this service (Ostrom 1996). But the answer to the question of “how can citizens and governments coproduce their public services” will be the topic of another TNOC discussion.
References
Colding, Johan and Stephan Barthel. 2013. “The Potential of ‘Urban Green Commons’ in the Resilience Building of Cities.” Ecological Economics 86:156–66. Retrieved (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2012.10.016).
Gilmore, Abigail. 2017. “The Park and the Commons: Vernacular Spaces for Everyday Participation and Cultural Value.” Cultural Trends 26(1):34–46. Retrieved (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09548963.2017.1274358).
Ostrom, Elinor. 1996. “Crossing the Great Divide: Coproduction, Synergy, and Development.” World Development 24(6):1073–87.
Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton, New Jersey and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press.
Vrasti, Wanda and Smaran Dayal. 2016. “Cityzenship: Rightful Presence and the Urban Commons.” Citizenship Studies 20(8):994–1011. Retrieved (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13621025.2016.1229196).
Philip's work focuses on informal adult learning and participatory action research in social-ecological systems. He is dedicated to exploring nature in all of its urban expressions.
“Garden is a verb and a noun,” my friend John used to say.
In the late 2000s, John and I were just two of more than a hundred members of the Prospect Heights Community Farm, a 3,500-square-foot garden slotted between an old four-story tenement and a stately brownstone in the heart of Brooklyn, NY.
Urban gardens demonstrate the qualities of common pool resources, public goods, and private lands—these aren’t truly categories in the restrictive sense, but interchangeable interpretive lenses.
The “farm” provides a sliver of verdant open space in a densely-populated and rapidly redeveloping neighborhood. Yet a tall steel fence limits public access to the site. Gardeners come and go as they please, though, swapping a few hours of volunteer time and a couple of bucks in annual dues to get a little brass key to the rusting padlock on the garden gate.
Most gardeners volunteer by keeping “open hours” on weekends and weekday evenings, throwing open the gate to welcome curious visitors. Others help with weeding and pruning, raking and watering, making occasional repairs to the shed or the compost bins or the rainwater cisterns. The constant work of maintaining the farm means that things are always changing. Trees damaged in windstorms are cut down and replaced with vegetable beds. Overgrown shrubs are pruned to create new habitat for pollinating birds and insects. Fences are painted and paths are rerouted and crops are transplanted.
Every chore is the result of a choice: to prune (or not), to plant (or not), to paint (or not). Individual gardeners make millions of little unilateral decisions as they go about their weekly work. Most decisions go unnoticed, while some become the source of contentious and prolonged debate at monthly meetings. One group of gardeners can’t bear to see anything change. Others are excited by opportunities to tinker with our little patch of the urban landscape. When these two worldviews inevitably clashed, John would calmly remind us of the grammatical dexterity of the very word that brought us all together: garden is a verb and a noun.
I’m not precisely sure if a site like Prospect Heights Community farm is a public good or a common pool resource. The two concepts often overlap, as James Quilligan points out. Maybe it’s both. Looking at the farm through the lens of public goods, we see a resource that is repeatedly renewed through active and intensive use—if you think of the act of gardening and all its associated tasks as a kind of “use”. And you can be sure there are freeloaders—gardeners that do the bare minimum to enjoy the space while others take on all the hard work. Then again, the site is just four-fifths of an acre and cannot grow beyond its property boundaries. Only so much of the space can be actively gardened by its members before things start to get tragic in the commons.
Maybe the farm is neither a common pool resource nor a public good. Access to the garden is excludable to the general public, after all. And unlike municipally-owned parkland, the deed to the farm is held by a private land trust chartered as a non-profit organization in New York State.
So, what’s my point? Just as garden is both a noun and a verb, it may be that gardening sites, such as Prospect Heights Community Farm, can, in practice, demonstrate the qualities of common pool resources, public goods, or private lands—depending on what one chooses to emphasize. These categories aren’t truly categories in the restrictive sense, but interchangeable interpretive lenses that shape the way we see, interpret, and understand any plot of land and its relationship to particular people.
Maria Tengö is a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, interested in how strong human-nature relationships can contribute to social-ecological resilience.
How can cities secure the sustainability of urban green spaces and their ecosystem services while, at the same time, accommodating a wide range of demands and pressures?
The ultimate responsibility for governance of urban green and blue infrastructure must lie with city authorities, but there is great opportunity for partnership with civil society.
I argue that a portfolio of approaches are needed, a portfolio that can build on and nurture people’s engagement in and care of particular places and activities, while also recognizing the need for citywide (and beyond) coordination of initiatives to sustain the sustainability of urban green spaces and its ecosystem services.
As found in numerous examples in The Nature of Cities, from the northern as well as the southern hemispheres, that engagement with civic organizations and local citizens can restore and protect urban green spaces. Such engagement can lead to a number of positive benefits: it generates opportunities for recreation and nature-related experiences in the city; contributes to well-being through meaningful community engagement; and builds capacity for civic engagement and local democracy, as is shown, for example, around community gardens in Berlin. Co-management of parks, wetlands, or similar site types can be a useful way to formalize civic engagement in green space management, and to connect the agency of actors who are strongly engaged and who care for the values generated in parks and other public spaces with the resources and technical know-how of formal authorities.
However, to secure the range of ecosystem services generated by urban green and blue spaces, paying attention to civic engagement and social aspects is not sufficient. Urban ecosystems are often fragmented and isolated, and their biodiversity and ecology are dependent on connectivity between areas within the city as well as with ecosystems outside the city. The connectivity matters for flow of water and movements of animals and seeds, for example. Different ecosystems in the city can offer complementary resources for bird or small mammals. Matching scales of governance with the scales of critical ecological processes is a key challenge for environmental governance in cities. Thus, preserving biodiversity and ecosystem services requires targeting and managing flows and interactions at a larger landscape scale, beyond the internal qualities of individual spaces that can successfully be stewarded by civic groups.
Furthermore, some areas may be critical as urban green infrastructure, but lack characteristics that appeal to and engage citizens in their protection or restoration. Continued stretches of street trees that improve air quality, or green stretches around highways that are critical for water infiltration, are not very likely to be cared for by local citizens (even if individual trees may be protected). In the words of a Stockholm manager: “I focus my energy on the green spaces that nobody cares about”. Citywide formal authorities are required to coordinate initiatives, to secure governance of large-scale ecological processes, and also to maintain a technical knowledge base unlikely to reside in volunteer organizations.
For these reasons, I argue that the ultimate responsibility for governance of green and blue infrastructure in the city must lie with city authorities, but there is great opportunity for partnership and network approaches that can open up space for civic groups to manage and to have a strong influence over form and function of particular areas. As such, awareness of and the ability to identify urban environmental stewardship is required among city managers. Local initiatives can take many different forms that may not fit immediately within conventional arrangements, and creating opportunities for stewardship initiatives to emerge and develop can be a key role for authorities. Experimentation and a portfolio of approaches can include direct management, as well as different forms of partnership with varying degrees of citizen engagement.
See also: Andersson, E., J. Enqvist and M. Tengö. 2017. Stewardship in urban landscapes. In: The Science and Practice of Landscape Stewardship, Bieling and Plieninger (eds.). Cambridge University Press.
Iniquity for all1: The Right to the Poetics of Nature and the Duty to Care for It
[Una versión en español sigue.]
After deciding to risk answering the roundtable discussion topic from my realm of ignorance and intuition, a multitude of other questions immediately came to mind: What does the word “nature” signify in city dwellers´ collective imagination?
Cities can regulate resources without depleting them. But in many cities, Nature is reduced, contaminated, and its availability diminished. Nature poetry should be equitable for all.
Here, I intend the term “collective imagination” to refer to the desires or interpretations held by the majority of people; in this case, I’m talking about “the common man or woman’s point-of-view” on “green” in the cityscape—that is, protected natural areas, urban tree planting, waterways, and other natural features, such as mountains and woodlands. However, the cityscape contains an infinite number of life forms in which nature is held manifest: dazzling sunlight, the ever-changing hues of the sky’s color, atmospheric moisture, the way the wind blows, the sound of rainfall and the land´s slope toward the horizon.
In addition, there are two matters that must be kept in mind when discussing public property: the idea of property itself, and citizens’ duties with respect to its care and conservation. In the case of Colombian cities, the debate is focused on whether the state should be the owner and administrator of natural and protected areas to ensure public access and, thereby, to eventually serve the majority’s need for recreation and services. On the other hand, there are those who maintain that these areas should be kept in private hands, but made available for public use under a public/private administrative plan to guarantee sustainability. A third view makes the case for the public’s inherent right to enjoy nature, with the corresponding duty to respond for services rendered. This is linked to the manifestation of life where nature makes itself seen and heard and felt in the city: it is part of urban poetry. It is the poetry of nature that provokes feelings that in turn produce a specific landscape, one brought about either by nature’s deficiencies and austerity, or by its abundance.
Are these manifestations inequitable for all? Life-giving expressions that give rise to individual narratives cannot be considered property. Interpreting nature in the city is an infinite process carried out by the multitude of observers who are roaming and experimenting in the urban landscape. Individuals encounter spirituality on their own terms: by breathing the air; by seeking well-being, comfort, an aesthetic pleasure; by living through earth tremors, or dry, hot days, or wet and rainy ones. Nature in the city should not be seen as a resource merely to be exploited.
Can a renewable commercial forest be compatible with urban needs? In recent years, the idea of fostering rural enterprises within the city has become more acceptable. A number of agricultural activities could be included to round out the idea of “rurality” in the city; these would focus on introducing rural occupations and the rural aesthetic into the metropolis, thereby enhancing urban poetics by impregnating neighborhoods with greater meaning and symbolism.
Biodiversity is the source of ecosystemic services, and the state must take on the responsibility for their equitable administration and regulation. Public goods belong to the community, and they cannot be consumed by having their availability limited to others. The so-called common pool resources concept does just that: reduces availability to others. But, there are ways in which the community can regulate these resources without depleting them. However, in many cities, what happens is that they are reduced, contaminated, and their availability is diminished.
In consonance with the voices of indigenous peoples, Nature belongs to itself and has a duty to itself and possesses its own right to exist. Such has been the case of the Whanganui River in New Zealand or of the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers in India, where the rights of water sources were recognized as being vitally important to their respective countries. That is to say, these rivers were granted the same legal rights as any individual before the law. Similarly, the indigenous communities in Ecuador claim that, “Nature, or Pacha Mama, possesses the right to be respected in Her existential integrity and that Her vital cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes must be maintained and regenerated”.
The response to all of these questions may be summed up in the profound answer given by an indigenous mamo from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia: “No, I have no rights, but the river has rights, the wind has rights, the mountains have rights. All we have is the duty to protect them2″.
Notes:
Title inspired by the 2003 documentary film directed by Jacob Kornbluth
El Espectador. The Nature Conservancy. María Paula Rubiano¿Rights for rivers? Not such a crazy idea.
Translated into English by Steven William Bayless, April, 2017
Inequidad para todos[1]: derecho a la poética de la naturaleza, deber de mantenerla.
Aparentemente la pregunta “Is nature in the city a common pool resource, or a public good?” puede iniciar una interesante discusión entre economistas, sin embargo, he decidido arriesgarme a contestarla desde mi ignorancia e intuición. Inmediatamente, surgen muchas mas preguntas, ¿cual es el imaginario del significado “Naturaleza” en la ciudad”? Imaginario, entendido como el deseo o interpretación de muchos, podría deducirse que esta asociado por el ciudadano de a pie, a la presencia del verde en la ciudad. Áreas protegidas, arborización urbana, rondas hídricas y componentes naturales como montañas, bosques entre otros. Sin embargo, el paisaje urbano, presenta infinitas formas de vida que son el manifiesto de la naturaleza: el brillo solar, el color del cielo, la humedad, el viento, el sonido de la lluvia, el suelo que se inclina en el horizonte.
Adicionalmente, hay dos temas a entender respecto a los bienes públicos: el concepto de propiedad, y los derechos y deberes de los ciudadanos sobre la misma. Respecto al primero, en el caso de las ciudades colombianas, la discusión se centra en si estado debe tener la propiedad y la administración de las áreas protegidas y naturales para que permitan el acceso público a la mayoría o bien su disfrute y servicios. Hay posiciones respecto a la posibilidad de que pueden ser privados pero con uso publico y administración mixta para garantizar su sostenibilidad. Por otra parte, se habla del derecho al disfrute de la naturaleza como bien común y un deber ciudadano de corresponder a sus servicios.
Los manifiestos de vida y de presencia de naturaleza en la ciudad, reflejan una poética. La poética de la naturaleza expresada en sentimientos que puede producir un determinado paisaje, por carencia y austeridad o por abundancia. ¿Son estos manifiestos inequitativos para todos?. Las expresiones de vida que despiertan emociones o narrativas en los individuos, no pueden tener propiedad. La interpretación de la naturaleza en la ciudad es infinita, por la cantidad de observadores que recorren y la experimentan. El individuo la aprovecha espiritualmente, la consume en aire, bienestar, confort, estética, pero también sufre la inundación, el sismo, el exceso de calor o de humedad.
La naturaleza en la ciudad no se visualiza como recurso para explotar. ¿Un bosque de aprovechamiento forestal podría ser compatible con los usos urbanos?. En los últimos años se ha dado gran relevancia a la promoción de practicas rurales como la agricultura en la ciudad, otras practicas podrían implementarse insertando el concepto de ruralidad en la ciudad, entendidas como practicas y estéticas rurales en medio de la urbe que permitan aumentar la poética urbana, impregnar de mayores significados y simbolismos en los barrios.
La biodiversidad brinda servicios eco sistémicos y es deber del estado administrar y regular equitativamente. Los bienes públicos, son para la comunidad y no deberían ser consumidos quitando disponibilidad a los demás. Los llamados “Common pool resources”, reducen la disponibilidad para los demás. Hay formas que la comunidad logra que se regulen para no agotarlos, pero en muchos de los casos que se observan en diversas ciudades, los recursos se reducen, se contaminan, se afectan reduciendo esta disponibilidad.
Pero en consonancia con las voces indígenas, la naturaleza se pertenece y se debe a si misma y tiene sus propios derechos de existencia. Tal fue el caso el rio Whanganui en Nueva Zelanda y los ríos Ganges y Yamuna en India donde les reconocieron derechos a fuentes hídricas de vital importancia para cada país. Es decir, que se reconocieran los mismos derechos que una persona jurídica. Así como las comunidades indígenas en Ecuador reconocieron que “la naturaleza o Pacha Mama, tiene derecho a que se respete integralmente su existencia y el mantenimiento y regeneración de sus ciclos vitales, estructura, funciones y procesos evolutivos”.
La respuesta a todas estas preguntas, podrían centrarse profundamente en la respuesta de un indígena mamo de la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta en Colombia, al preguntársele cuáles son sus derechos: “No, no tengo derechos, pero tienen derecho el río, el viento, la montaña. Nosotros solo tenemos los deberes de protegerlos a ellos”. [2]
Notas:
[1] Titulo inspirado en el documentary film directed by Jacob Kornbluth de 2003.
[2] El Espectador – The Nature Conservancy. María Paula Rubiano ¿Derechos para los ríos? Una idea no tan loca
The integration of habitat restoration components into traditional shoreline engineering designs is the biggest lesson learned from the Toronto and Region remedial action plan for other areas.
As Toronto grew into Canada’s largest city and a world leader in business, finance, technology, entertainment, and culture, there were unintended consequences such as water pollution and loss of habitat. Today, Toronto and Region are a leader in environmental cleanup and reconnecting people to their waterfront as a part of a city where humans can flourish as part of nature’s beauty and diversity.
It was an early spring day and we were standing on a human-made peninsula called the Leslie Street Spit that extends five kilometers into Lake Ontario. The air temperatures were still biting cold, reflecting the long time it takes Lake Ontario to warm up.
All of us participating in the Leslie Street Spit tour were thinking how nice it would be to cut the tour short and get out of the cold, with the exception of our tour guide. He was a large and striking figure who could have easily been mistaken for a professional American football player. But what was most memorable was his knowledge of the region and science, and his passion to restore habitats. His passion and enthusiasm were so contagious that by the end of our site visit, despite the biting cold temperatures, all of us were inspired that urban habitat restoration was possible if you had the proper knowledge and the right players involved who have a clear understanding of potential natural resource outcomes and benefits. The tour guide’s name was Gord MacPherson and he spent his early years camping, fishing, trapping, and hunting throughout Ontario. His love for the outdoors led to a 37-year career with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority where he has championed cleanup and restoration as part of an effort to create a new waterfront porch for both wildlife and people. MacPherson understands clearly that habitat restoration is about people management and that he and his partners are playing a critical role in city building.
Pollution
As Toronto and Region grew and became more urbanized, environmental pollution increased. There is probably no better example of historical water pollution in the Toronto region than the Don River. The Don River is a 38km river that stretches from its headwaters on the Oak Ridges Moraine to the Keating Channel where it empties into Lake Ontario. At one time the mouth of the river had one of the largest marshes in all of Lake Ontario. Over time the Don River was straightened for convenience, channelized, paved and built over, and befouled with all kinds of municipal and industrial waste and land runoff to the point that it twice caught on fire. Heavy oil pollution was the cause of a river fire in 1931 that destroyed a bridge crossing the Don River at Keating Street. In 1943, severe oil pollution was the cause of a river fire fronting the British American Oil Company’s property. To no one’s surprise, on July 30, 1958 the Toronto Globe and Mail editorialized that the Don has “waters heavily polluted and laden with scum, its banks littered with all varieties of filth, and the whole sending up foul odors.”
Little wonder that in the fall of 1969, Pollution Probe organized a funeral for the Don River, symbolizing its death. On that November day, a couple of hundred mourners paraded a casket from the University of Toronto campus to the banks of the banks of the river. The cortege included a hearse, a band playing a dirge, a weeping widow in black, and a top-hatted student portraying a greedy capitalist.
Clearly, for many decades environmental protection was not a priority. Commerce and industry were the priorities and pollution was just considered part of the cost of doing business. By 1985, Toronto was suffering from extensive impacts of several centuries of agricultural land use, industrialization, and extensive urbanization, including poor water quality, contaminated sediments, contaminants in fish, loss of wildlife habitat and populations, and beaches that were often closed due to high levels of bacteria.
Harbour cleanup
As citizens awoke to visible damage and invisible dangers of polluted water and toxic residues, stifling local economies and degrading quality of life for all living near these waters, they began to speak out. It was in 1985 that the International Joint Commission identified Toronto and Region as one of 42 pollution hot spots called “Areas of Concern” where water quality and other ecosystem functions were badly impaired and Environment Canada and the Ontario Ministry of the Environment committed to developing and implementing a remedial action plan to clean up the harbor and restore all impaired beneficial uses using an ecosystem approach. An ecosystem approach accounts for the interrelationships among land, air, water, and all living things, including humans, and involves all user groups in comprehensive management. Think of an ecosystem approach as a more holistic way of undertaking integrated planning, research, and management of specific places like Toronto. If there was an ecosystem approach to drivers’ training for four students, the driver training car would have four steering wheels to show how all need to work together.
Identifying Toronto and Region as a Great Lakes Area of Concern elevated the priority for cleanup within the federal and provincial governments and provided laser-like focus to stakeholders and partners to work together to restore health of their ecosystem and its beneficial uses. A unique partnership of federal, provincial, and local stakeholders first came together to develop the remedial action plan and create the framework and conditions for all stakeholder groups to help implement it.
Early efforts focused on preventing pollution through regulations and voluntary initiatives. Since 2003, the City of Toronto has spent $485 million to control stormwater pollution and reduce basement flooding risks, and projects to spend $2.8 billion in 2016-2025 on additional stormwater projects. The Don River and Central Waterfront Project is particularly noteworthy and will capture and treat stormwater discharges and address discharges from combined storm and sanitary sewer outfalls to the Lower Don River, Taylor-Massey Creek, and Toronto’s Inner Harbour—a $2 billion investment over the next 25 years.
More than $80 million has been spent on habitat rehabilitation since 1987. In the last 10 years alone, over 823 ha of habitat and 57 km of shoreline were created or restored in the AOC. At the helm, every step of the way, has been Gord MacPherson collecting data, performing assessments, designing projects with partners, overcoming obstacles, helping secure funding, overseeing construction, and measuring effectiveness. The federal government and Toronto are now creating Canada’s first national urban park: Rouge National Urban Park. Rouge Park is rich in natural, cultural, and agricultural features, including 1,700 species of plants and animals, and some of the rarest and best remaining wetlands, forests, and agricultural lands in the region. Once fully established, it will be 101 km2 in size—nearly 30 times the size of Central Park in New York. Federal investment in Rouge Park will be $100 million. In 2017, federal, provincial, and municipal governments announced $1.25 billion to construct a new naturalized Don River mouth through the Port Lands, creating a new urban island neighborhood called Villiers Island. Continuous and vigorous oversight is needed to maintain these ecosystem gains and ensure long-term sustainability.
Cleanup leads to reconnecting people to the waterfront that leads to waterfront revitalization
Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (now called Waterfront Toronto) was established in 2001 by the federal and provincial governments and the City of Toronto to redefine its waterfront as a public asset for everyone. Working with public and private partners, Waterfront Toronto creates complete neighborhoods anchored by parks and public spaces, and diverse, sustainable, mixed-use communities that offer a high quality-of-life for residents and visitors alike. Waterfront Toronto has worked with MacPherson and the remedial action plan team to restore over 26 ha of wetland and aquatic habitats and 6.4 km of shoreline habitat in prominent locations like Tommy Thompson Park, Toronto Island, Port Union, Mimico Waterfront Park, and others.
As part of an effort to measure economic effectiveness, Waterfront Toronto commissioned studies of the economic benefits stimulated by its waterfront investments. Between 2001 and March of 2017 a total of $1.6 billion was invested in waterfront redevelopment to establish unique gathering places that foster a sense of authentic human attachment.
Economists have estimated that this $1.6 billion investment, adjusted for inflation, will: generate approximately 14,100 full-time years of employment, of which approximately 88.5% were in the City of Toronto; stimulate $4.1 billion in total economic output to the Canadian economy (the majority in Toronto); and generate total government revenues of approximately $848 million. Although Toronto Waterfront’s expenditures are significant, they are relatively small compared to the recurring benefits, like permanent jobs, property taxes, income taxes, and tourism spending that occur with continued development of new office, residential, retail/service, cultural, and entertainment uses along the waterfront which would not occur without the initial Waterfront Toronto investments.
While these impacts relate to Waterfront Toronto’s direct spending on planning and infrastructure, economists have also quantified benefits accruing to private- and public-sector real estate projects both on lands controlled by Waterfront Toronto and other privately-owned land on the waterfront. For example, the combined development on East Bayfront and West Don lands, and the adjoining neighborhoods, will generate nearly 207,900 years of employment, add $13.8 billion to the Canadian economy, and provide $7.5 billion in tax revenues to the three levels of government.
The next challenge
MacPherson believes that the biggest challenge facing the Toronto and Region RAP is how to fight public apathy surrounding the environment. Public concern has now shifted to the climate change crisis, but the concern has not yet become a catalyst for local solutions. Torontonians need to think globally but act locally. MacPherson feels that people now need to channel their concern for climate change into concrete actions that both demonstrate adaptation to climate change and achieve huge conservation benefits, like restoring wetlands, building green infrastructure, naturalizing shorelines, planting trees, and more.
MacPherson’s advice for the next generation of people who care about Toronto Harbour and the Great Lakes is simple: Be Bold! He is adamant that right now the environmental movement, the Great Lakes, and the planet need bold leaders. Improving habitat is a simple and effective method of engaging the public and educating them on the economic, social, and environmental benefits of looking after our communities as our home. MacPherson has always been struck at how the need to improve our environment is universally accepted, how restoration can be easily explained, and how involvement in restoration can foster a stewardship ethic and lead to advocacy. “We need to be bold and aggressively show the significance, importance, and function of restoring our waterfront to a greater percentage of the population,” notes MacPherson.
MacPherson feels that the integration of habitat restoration components into traditional shoreline engineering designs is the biggest lesson learned from the Toronto and Region remedial action plan for other areas. These ecological concepts are universal and are the cornerstone of Toronto and Region Conservation Authority’s habitat restoration projects and have application and benefits throughout the Great lakes and beyond.
Clearly, Toronto has become a North American leader in harbor cleanup, revitalizing its waterfront and reaping economic benefits, and creating waterfront destination of choice that is accessible and welcoming to all. For more information on other Great Lakes case studies about how cleanup leads to reconnecting people to waterways that leads to community and economic revitalization, and how to sustain momentum for restoration over many decades, visit: http://iaglr.org/aocdocs/GreatLakesRevival-2019.pdf.
I am from a family with Indigenous Latin American and German ancestry. I have been to many different countries and lived in different places. I believe this is partly because the Indigenous tradition my family comes from is nomadic. They see the earth as a living entity, and if they stay in one place they believe the land gets sick. They travel to where their ancestors send them, and this and other important messages are conveyed through their dreams. I married into a Cree and Blackfoot family where ceremonies are performed with the Blackfoot in Alberta. My son also married into a Maori whanau (family) in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
This inter-weaving of bloodlines gives me a perspective of many different Indigenous communities. I am no expert in any of them, and I do not speak for any of them. I also find it difficult to pinpoint only one place where I “come from.” In part, this is because I believe that the earth is alive and upset about fences and divisions. It is also because the tradition of being always on the road, crossing many different types of borders means one has to feel the pathway itself as a place too: one that enables you to see different patterns, different connections, as well as many similarities, and that offers a different kind of contribution to the whole. From this place, I would like to offer a story that speaks to the crossroads and the in-betweens.
I was coming out of a meeting at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where I work, and I found on the floor a dead hummingbird; it looked like it had died recently. At first I did not know what to do as I did not want people to step on the tiny bird. I could not leave it there, so I decided to wrap the dead body of the hummingbird in my scarf. I sang it a couple of songs, and put it in my bag because I was going to a lunch meeting and could not go straight home. I went to the meeting, had lunch, and really forgot about the hummingbird.
If we cannot see the hummingbird, it is because we are sleeping. People who were oblivious to the hummingbird, seemed to be so much in their heads, in their minds, that they could not really notice him: they were in torpor. I spend part of my life in torpor too.
As I was leaving the restaurant, I remembered the hummingbird and decided to show it to a friend. I took my scarf out of the bag and exposed the body of the hummingbird. As we were looking at it, to my greatest surprise, the hummingbird started to flex one of its legs. At this point the hummingbird’s heart began to race, and I thought that if I did not do the right thing, I would end up killing it. I decided to go straight to my office.
The hummingbird was slowly awakening and started flexing his wings, but his feet seemed to be entangled in my scarf. I took him outside in the scarf, but he would not fly. I thought: I’d better take him back to the tree where I found him, and then maybe he will know what to do. I started walking on campus; to get to the tree, I had to go counter-current through a lane full of people. It was a busy time when students had just finished their afternoon classes. I was carrying a scarf with a hummingbird flexing his wings, as if he was hovering on top of it. I had a miracle in my hands, going through that crowd. What really broke my heart is that nobody looked at the hummingbird. Nobody saw it. As I approached the tree the hummingbird flew away. And that was the end of my encounter with the hummingbird.
I went back to my office, and I started to research where those UBC hummingbirds come from. They come from Mexico. I also found information about the state that the hummingbird was in when I found it. When hummingbirds find an external threat, they go into a state of sleep where just eight percent of the bird’s metabolism keeps it going. This state is called torpor. In this state, they look dead. They take about an hour to “wake up” when the threat has been overcome. Maybe being in my bag protected by the scarf just gave him the warmth to come back to life again.
As I told the story to my Cree partner, he asked me to pay attention to what the hummingbird came to teach me. Reflecting on the hummingbird’s teachings took me back to the people walking without the ability to notice the hummingbird flexing his wings on top of my scarf. I believe the hummingbird was trying to teach me about torpor — the state of torpor of the people, who could not see him, as well as my own torpor. If we cannot see the hummingbird, it is because we are sleeping. People who were oblivious to the hummingbird, seemed to be so much in their heads, in their minds, that they could not really notice him: they were in torpor. I spend part of my life in torpor too.
From that point on, I started to think about an education that can awaken us all from torpor. I also started to think about this state of torpor in relation to what we are protecting ourselves against: what has created the state of torpor. If there is a threat that is prompting us to fall asleep, if we do not understand or face this threat, it is going to be extremely difficult to wake up from that state. And if we do not see the implications of being asleep, we might not want to be awakened, because we may be afraid of being awake. I imagined all these people coming to me with huge sleepy heads and very little bodies—heads that scale up our sense of importance, our sense of entitlement, our sense of control of everything, our sense that we are in a bubble that separates us from each other and protects us from the world. It is this sense of separation that presents the world as a threat, as something we need to be protected against and this creates a form of existential poverty.
Existential poverty is a denial of relationship (Donald, 2012), a denial of entanglement, a denial that our lives (both human and non-human) are all inter-woven. This denial leads to torpor and to the fear of awakening. Existential poverty also leads to material poverty because by trying to protect ourselves from each other, we start to accumulate stuff as walls between ourselves. We think that “stuff” is going to give us the affirmation of individuality and security that we believe we are entitled to.
I started to think about what has been scaled down so that the head could be scaled up. What has been scaled down for me is our sense of visceral connection with each other. We have been told that thinking is everything; that “we are” because “we think”; that reality is only what fits our enlarged bubble thinking heads. We have been taught to think about ourselves as much smaller and more limited than we actually are. I started to wonder about an education that could scale up what has been scaled down, that could un-numb the sense of visceral connection, and the responsibility that this entails. But also, the idea that we can scale up and connect the unique healing medicines located in our (different) bodies so this combination of medicines can contain and heal our collective pain, all the pain we have inflicted on each other.
We tend to think about hearts as limited, and to be afraid of the pain that we are going to face in the world because we may feel that our hearts are not strong enough to take it in. But as I was thinking about the teachings of the elders that have been in my path—and I have had the privilege of having elders in different traditions—I realized a common pattern. They have taught me through different stories and by example that we can scale up and connect our hearts. The same way that we can scale our hearing, so we can focus our hearing on something that is near or something that is far in our sight, we can make our hearts smaller, or bigger, enormous. Our sense of identity can also be perceived in the same way. We can be just this body, this ego, a defined identity, or we can be unbound spirit, we can be part of everything. Our sense of land could be just our home, our reserve, our country, or it can be the whole earth, or the whole universe.
Part of the problem with the kind of education we receive at university and schools is that we forget how to scale up the important things. And we scale down things like generosity, compassion, humility, in order to be able to participate in a system that has given us a few gifts, but that depends on violence to be maintained. So here I draw on Cash Ahenakew’s (2014) work to talk about this paradox that we face as Indigenous people all over the world. This paradox has two sides. On the one hand, there is the necessity to survive in a modern capitalist context that is inherently violent and completely unsustainable, a system that makes life outside of it almost impossible, unless we are “off the grid.” We have to fight for our lands, our rights, our languages and our cultures using the language of the nation state, if we want to be successful.
On the other hand, and at the same time, if we know that system is unsustainable, we have a responsibility to give our children an alternative mode of existence that might not be defined by that system. So how do we do the two things together, knowing that the first system tends to define our existence very quickly? Do we as Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators, as people who are here to support young people, just support them to get through the system and then they become one of the people who came towards me and could not see the hummingbird? Or do we just socialize them in traditions where the hummingbird is one of the most important things to be seen? Can we train them to be successful in the existing system and to be awake, to be able to see the hummingbird? If they are awake and within the colonial system, will they be able to survive the pain without knowing how to connect and expand their medicines and hearts?
I believe these are discussions that we need to have. We have been thinking about an education for walking both worlds, but we have not yet really talked enough about the difficulties and the complexities of doing that, in the sense that young people feel torn, or sometimes fall through the cracks of both worlds (Battiste, 2000). Perhaps one way to think about it is through the concepts of material and existential poverty, and material and existential wealth. We need to think about the ways that material wealth, which has been associated with affluence, competition, and individualism, has caused a lot of existential poverty. So, how do we pass a notion of existential and material wealth to our children that upholds the dignity and wellbeing of every being, both human, more than human, and non-human, a notion of wealth that does not harm other people or the planet and that honors ancestors as people who have come before and of people who are yet to come?
This is the kind of education that I have been thinking about in terms of working at a university that, after this experience with the hummingbird, feels very much like an ivory slum, in terms of the existential poverty it promotes. Within this context, I also wonder about what reconciliation means and what it looks like. When I get really frustrated, part of me starts thinking about exiting: I just want to get out of institutions, return to community, forget about the university. Another part of me remembers that the process of reconciliation requires us to be where the problems are. I am not talking just about the reconciliation related to the effects of colonial violence, but about the (difficult) sense of wholeness and oneness that we have to have if we want to open the possibility for another form of existence in this planet. It is a reconciliation that starts in our guts and stretches out to recognize our inseparability. In many ways, being in the ivory slum is extremely important. And it is also really hard. And it is very difficult to face that existential poverty and not know what to do.
I find courage when I manage to de-center and to trust that there is an ancestral vision guiding where I go, a vision that knows why I was sent to this place, even if I do not know. That is what I try to say to myself in moments of extreme frustration. This helps me remember that the process of turning towards existential wealth involves dealing with the existential poverty that we see around us and within us. And that the “us and them” mentality works for certain things to a certain extent, but ultimately does not really speak to that yearning that we have inside of us, which is a yearning for wholeness, for wellbeing, for connection. This can only be achieved when we are together.
As an Indigenous scholar from Trinidad, Jacqui Alexander (2005) has pointed out that we confuse this yearning for wholeness with a yearning to belong, or a yearning for identity, for individuation, or for affirmation. And that, again, works in certain contexts and has saved many lives. I am not dismissing that. But maybe that yearning will only be addressed in the long term, not necessarily through more thinking or more dialogue, but through a renewal of our relationships, and our awakening to this visceral sense that we are individually insufficient and collectively indispensable. Regardless of what has happened in the past, if we use the same frames of being that create violence to resist violence, we will reproduce more violence. If focusing on thinking alone, on “making sense,” is not the answer, what else can we scale up so that we can remember to listen and relate to every being, not necessarily through conceptual language, but through our bodies and our spirits? How can we remember how to “sense sense,” to access other forms of reasoning, without dismissing the gifts of the rationality that we are over-socialized into?
I believe this is what the hummingbird came to teach me that day. I am glad that I did not kill it accidentally by forgetting it in my bag. I am really glad that we both came back alive. The ideas of torpor and of the university as an ivory slum have been very helpful, both in terms of understanding what my role is in that space, and in understanding how my own frustration reflects the same existential poverty that I am trying to address.
Seeing the frustration itself as a trickster teacher, showing me that my ego also reproduces and has been trained in that same kind of thinking, has been very useful. Being able to let go and allow this other vision to come in is very difficult, especially when you have to keep your webpage updated saying how great you are at competing with others: how much research you do, how much knowledge you have, how many articles you have written, how much money and how many awards you have received. I look at it and feel my stomach turn. But I trust there is something beyond myself that moves us where we need to be. It points to the life force within every single one of us, even when we do not want to listen. I believe it sings us a song that speaks of being awake, of breathing, of knowledge coming in dreams, of being undone, of healing and dancing precisely because of the scars we carry. It invites us to a natural state of vulnerability where obsessions with the meaning of an individual lifetime loses centrality as we see the same matter (or flesh), animated by a life-force that precedes it, as constantly morphing into different forms and different learning experiments. In this sense, awakening requires an interruption of our satisfaction with torpor and the false security we have with the illusions of individuality and of control that come with it. Once we let go of that arrogance, we can un-numb our senses and renew our relationships, by noticing that we are, simultaneously, one, many and the creative potential of ‘nothing’, as we inhabit bodies/flesh/form in linear time/reified space—and not—all at the same time.
On the other hand, I do recognize that I cannot be in that state all the time, and that there is anger, trauma and childishness within me. And these forms that I take, take me to enclosures of thinking and to a sense of entitlement absolutely grounded in the “us and them” separation, which depends on a denial of my entanglement with everything else. Maybe these entities are also part of entanglement. In this case, the question is how can I encounter these forms of my self productively without being overcome by their narcissistic tendencies? How can I identify and name the colonizers who appear as external to me (obviously I have to do that sometimes) without allowing that definition to determine my relationship with those people, and without seeing myself in them? When should we play the political game, in the pre-defined political context, and when should we breach those definitions and insist on other forms of relationality? Can we do both at the same time? When should we center ourselves for the benefit of our specific communities and when do we de- center to allow the land to imagine through us, for the benefit of all life forms (Longboat & Sheridan, 2006)? If this is not a matter of ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and more’, as my brother Hemi says, how can we mobilize both strategies without having the one least practiced subsumed by the other, which currently colonizes both our hopes and our imagination, giving us safety in a state of torpor?
I must acknowledge the elders who have taught me the most about this. These elders are Keith and Karen Chief Moon and Leroy English who are Blood elders from the Kainai reserve where I sundance. Above all, they show me that humility, generosity and compassion are not intellectual choices, not attitudes you decide to have, but waves that are radiated through you, when you tune to a different wavelength of being. Keith’s story is a beautiful story. For the past six years I have witnessed the process of him sustaining a Sun Dance created from a vision he had forty years ago: of people from the four directions dancing together to reconcile on the land’s terms. According to the vision he received, people would arrive at his Sun Dance, and he would not be able to send them away because it is not the bodies that would arrive—it would be people’s spirits asking to dance. I have witnessed people from other Sun Dances coming and telling him that what he is doing is wrong, because people in the dominant culture are used to appropriating Indigenous knowledge and using it in bad ways. I have heard people saying, “White people will come here, and in five minutes they are going to be bossing Indigenous people around thinking they already understand everything.” And it is true; they are trained to do that.
However, Keith’s response has been really interesting and has taught me something that I did not expect. His response is always that he agrees, on political grounds with the criticisms, but that the land is a sacred place, that his vision is also sacred and that this vision does not require consensus. What he has taught me is that spirituality trumps politics. Seeing him respond with generosity and with compassion to people who act arrogantly or stubbornly due to their torpor or training has helped me to identify and not be afraid to learn from my own arrogance. Keith has established a distinction between necessary political relations that require political agreements and frontiers, and existential relations grounded on visceral connections and wholeness that create a wavelength where frontiers do not exist, a wavelength where all our 99 senses point to the fact that we are each other.
At that Sun Dance I learned there are two groups of elders (who come in many ages): those who insist they know (which is a sign that they don’t), and those who insist they don’t know (who could be on to something). Both are important. Elders in the first group see education as the distribution of answers to be consumed or wrestled with. Elders in the second group see education as a recalibration of a search beyond meaning and the individuated self – a search driven by doubt that often gets stuck in distractions when certainties creep in. The first education gives us languages, concepts and ideas to play and experiment with. The second education demands that we loosen the grip when these things get confused for the path itself, when they become the cement of our ontological securities, getting us entrapped and immobilized precisely by giving us the impression that we are moving somewhere. Combining both types of education requires patience, humor, self-compassion, vulnerability, discernment, and, above all, a healthy skepticism towards one’s own and other knowledges and desires.
Perhaps torpor could be considered as a consequence of the overdoing of the first type of education. When knowledge becomes an instrument of existential arrest we get stuck in distractions. Awakening from torpor does not mean dismissing or banishing knowledge, rationality or identity, but recognizing unhealthy attachments and investments in these things that foreclose on our capacities for a multitude of other possibilities for sensing, reasoning, relating and being. In times of exhaustion or scarcity, hummingbirds shut down their metabolic system. Under conditions of perceived existential scarcity, we may likewise shutdown our capacities, and forget that they exist as we embrace the illusions of safety in our sleep. Perhaps the second education can help us to learn to let go of the strong faith we have on detractions. This may, in turn, loosen the grip that they exert over us, allowing the search to unfold otherwise, awakening our capacities to fly again.
senses
of resonance
of awe
of fusion
of possibility
of form
of being
-in-breathing
-in-beauty
-in-flux
-in-vulnerability
-in-time/space
of embracing
the miracle,
the privilege
the responsibility
of being alive:
both one, many
and nothing,
entangled
unfinished
and free
This text is an adapted transcript of a keynote presented at the Indigenous Scholars Conference: Indigenous Epistemologies: Re-Visioning Reconciliation on 26 March 2015, at the University of Alberta. It has been accepted for publication in the Canadian Journal of Native Studies. The article originally appeared in this form on ArtsEverywhere.
References
Ahenakew, C., Andreotti, V., Cooper, G., & Hireme, H. “Beyond Epistemic Provincialism: De-provincializing Indigenous resistance.” Alter-Natives: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 10, no. 3 (2014): 216-31.
Alexander, J. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
Battiste, M. Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2000.
Donald, D. Forts, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Aboriginal-Canadian Relations: Imagining Decolonizing Educational Philosophies in Canadian Contexts. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012.
Longboat, D., & Sheridan, J. (2006). The Haudenosaunee imagination and the ecology of the sacred. Space and Culture, 9, no. 4 (2006): 365-81.
In Chile, over recent years, there has been increasing attention to the concept of community resilience, especially in facing natural disasters. Community resilience is the capacity of a community to adapt to changes that occur after natural disasters. Such adaptation capacity is vital for satisfying survival needs (e.g. food and water), as well as for maintaining local identity (e.g. fishermen community) and economic roles for the development of the territory (e.g. tourism). Several studies have been carried out in areas affected by the 2010 earthquake and tsunami on how to measure community resilience and how to increase it (MINVU, 2010; Franco & Siembieda, 2010; Platt, 2011; Rahman & Kausel, 2013; Cartes Siade, 2013).
But little of this research on resilience has been incorporated in the development of cities. This is most probably because this information came too late after the reconstruction process. Besides, resilience involves a variety of detailed quantitative and qualitative indicators which may be quite difficult to measure, evaluate and include in the local planning instruments. These demand extra funding and human capital, increasing the cost of reconstruction considerably. After a disaster, funds are allocated to those needs which are considered most urgent, such as refuge and food. What’s more, these indicators usually come in numbers and textual data instead of maps and specific cartography, which can facilitate the complementation of urban plans.
In facing this problem and following the discussion of the round table on resilience months ago, an interesting question came about in our research group (Laboratorio de Paisaje y Resiliencia Urbana: PRULAB): To what extent does the application of planning tools in cities increase community resilience? This question seems more important than measuring resilience in the context of Chile, which is prone to different natural disturbances, and in which, as in many other developing countries, it is very difficult to measure resilience due to the lack of information required in well-known resiliency checklists (e.g. Cutter et al., 2014). For example, in Chile, most social and economic databases are developed at the regional scale, hence no data is available at the community level. Therefore, it seems interesting to explore whether planning decisions are developed to support resilience enhancement, or otherwise.
This task becomes even more motivating in the local planning environment of the coastal town of Mehuin, in the south of Chile, in which the concept of resilience is not well known and is not directly mentioned in urban planning tools, even though the government of Chile committed to investing in building communities’ resilience to natural disasters and integrating this approach into urban planning tools after signing the Hyogo Framework of Action in 2005.
Planning tools include, for example, the Regional Development Plans, Regulatory Plans, and Emergency and Action Plans, which define land use, urban density, balance between un-built and built areas, amount of green open spaces, urban sprawl patterns, the distribution of socio-economic groups, and economic development, which, among other aspects, are addressed in urban resilience measures. Our idea of measuring the contribution of the current planning tools to building community resilience instead of measuring the community resilience itself is derived from the availability of the tools listed above.
One study, undertaken by a master’s student, focused on developing a ‘resilient study framework’ of urban planning tools. It was developed based on a variety of resilience attributes and variables derived from different hazard management and urban planning literature ((Walker & Salt, 2006, Cutter et al., 2008; Ahern, 2011; Allan & Bryant, 2011; Cutter et al., 2014).). Community resilience is a broad concept and has several dimensions, attributes, and variables. Accordingly, even if the term resilience is not found in the current Chilean urban planning tools, we expected that there might be some aspects of community resilience addressed in these tools. For this reason, the study aimed to reveal attributes (such as diversity, redundancy, multi-functionality, modularity, and adaptability) and variables (such as organizational structure and coordination, local disaster training, evacuation potentials, transportation network and medical care capacity) of resilience embedded in urban planning tools. The framework we developed focused on the “institutional” and “housing and infrastructure” dimensions of resilience (which highly influence urban planning tools).
We found that although the term resilience is not directly mentioned in any of the studied planning tools, there are several aspects in the tools addressing resilience attributes and variables, positively or otherwise. This was a surprising finding because the overall idea in Chile is that, before the 2010 earthquake, there was no resilience approach to the development of cities. Hence, acknowledging that urban planning tools are influencing the resilience of cities is the first big step towards building community resilience. In this sense, it seems more relevant to improve and assure current planning actions that support resilience, and to modify those that restrict it, than to invest time and funds on creating new planning tools.
We also found that not every planning tool contributes to every attribute and variable of community resilience in the same manner. We actually think that this is a very good approach to building resilience. Two very well known premises under the concept of resilience are that we should diversify the system as well as add redundancies. Hence, the diversity of planning tools with different focuses is good for the resilience of cities, as is their redundancy in referring to the same topic (i.e. tourism in the case of Mehuin). If, for some reason (e.g. funding), a particular planning tool cannot develop a specific resilience variable, other tools can take its duty. Along the same lines, it is better that the development of resilience variables and attributes are included in different tools, taking care of assuring the appropriate coordination among them.
Overall, our study shows how planning tools are contributing to building community resilience to earthquakes and tsunamis in Mehuin and sheds light on the challenges for achieving resilient urban planning in this area. Moreover, the resilience study framework that we developed can be applied to other coastal communities, contributing to defining the government’s priorities as they follow through on a resilience planning approach. Although we acknowledge the importance and necessity of measuring resilience, we believe our approach represents a short cut for urban managers, allowing them to prioritize their interventions in areas where the planning tools have a weaker contribution to community resilience. This can prevent wasting of time and money associated with measuring and applying resilience actions that cannot be included in local planning tools.
Yet, there is no end for building community resilience, as resilience is a process, not an outcome. Besides, changes in the world, which may affect the equilibrium of a social system, are neither one hundred percent predictable or preventable. Accordingly, we believe there is no level of absolute community resilience to natural disasters; hence, measuring resilience is an approach, but not the solution. Tangible actions are applied through planning. In the case of the application of planning tools, the more the planning tools enhance any or every attribute or variable of resilience, the more resilient the community can be.
Ahern, J. (2011). From fail-safe to safe-to-fail: Sustainability and resilience in the new urban world. Landscape and Urban Planning, 100, 341–343.
Allan, P., & Bryant, M. (2011). Resilience as a framework for urbanism and recovery. Journal of Landscape Architecture, August, 34-45.Cutter et al., 2008
Cutter, S. L., Ash, K. D., & Emrich, C. T. (2014). The geographies of community disaster resilience. Global Environmental Change, 29, 65-77
Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2006). Resilience thinking: sustaining ecosystems and people in a changing world. Washington: Island Press.
Mina Fallahzadegan is an architect and regional planner. She has worked for several years with The Renovation Organization of Tehran and also Tehran Urban Planning & Research Center.
A review of Sustainable Stormwater Management: A Landscape-Driven Approach to Planning and Design, by Thomas W. Liptan with J. David Santen Jr. 2017. ISBN 13:978-1-60469-486-4. Timber Press, Inc. Portland, Oregon. 280 pages.
“If we are to create living environments in which human beings can lead happy lives, we must plan cities and devise policies for land use that restore harmony with nature”. — Daisaku Ikeda, Thomas Liptan’s mentor
Thomas Liptan’s response to Ikeda’s statement is contained in the set of solutions offered throughout the book. They are mainly oriented to promote the continuity of the natural and vital cycle of water as it passes through built environments, bringing all sorts of benefits to the quality of contemporary citizens’ life.
As promised in the book’s title, a landscape driven approach becomes a fact. The book is filled with illustrations and comprehensive examples that give deserved importance to specific points that urban work in public space design often leaves unattended.
In a very clear and pleasant way, the author puts his experiences within reach of diverse, specialized and non-specialized public. Supported in abundant illustrative photography the reading becomes easy and didactic, mainly for those committed with the detailed design and implementation of urban works. It does not provide just the solution to technical challenges, as can be found in hydraulic engineering manuals on the matter, but motivates sensibility in his readers leading them to reflect on everyday details, which often go unnoticed for many. The content of the book becomes the bridge between engineering technics, the concerns from biology in urban situations, and the resultant landscape. This approach requires a perception shift (p.21), highlights the author and encourages designers to be aware of the rain-capture potential, and simultaneously requests technicians to soften their usually hard, grey physical works of runoff control, since those can be consciously addressed to make a sound, responsible, and profitable management of stormwater.
Sustainable Storm Water Management could be also considered a synthesis of the principal author’s life in relation to water cycle management in urban environments. Liptan starts sharing his first motivation: to put into practice what he had academically learned. Trained as a landscape architect, his career began with a challenge he received from his boss in one of his first jobs: “Put the water in the landscape”. From there, he has dedicated most of his career to research, design, monitoring, and maintaining green solutions for stormwater management. He effectively demonstrates that water management is not a field exclusive to engineers, as it has often been assumed to be.
As the author states in the introduction: “Landscape stormwater management can catalyze urban design to become more integrated and alive, making communities more livable and sustainable” (p.17). This idea highlights the contribution of the storm water management in the achievement of a better life quality, which means that a good landscape design, bearing in mind that purpose, must go through the understanding and managing of each technical step: intercept rain, increase infiltration, slow and filter flows, facilitate evaporation, capture and redirects water for irrigation, and reduce flooding and emergency overflow.
Although most of the built examples illustrated in the book are located in Portland (Oregon), where Liptan worked for the Bureau of Environmental Services, he takes us on a journey through several places in the United States. Many cases are close to the west coast, around Oregon, California, and Washington; some in cities on the east coast such as New York, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia; and cases representative of the center of the country like Chicago, Nashville, Louisville, Phoenix, and Austin. This geographical span demonstrates broad success in the kinds of design proposed here, applicable in many climatic and biodiverse local conditions. The idea is also reinforced by examples brought from countries such as Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, and New Zealand.
The set of lessons presented in the book are well supported by sensitive, diverse, abundant, and eloquent illustrations that show the different steps through which the water flows, or could flow, as it passes through the built habitat, principally public space.
If we look carefully, all these steps are in every urban situation related to water. It is possible to notice them from the both large scale to minuscule scale examples, such as the porosity of the walkable city’s surface that passes unnoticed under the feet of the walker. An interesting and generally well received topic is rain gardens. Combining small slopes, calculated depth of water-accepting-vegetated-areas—as the author calls them—prevision of swale flow reduction and also prevision of destiny of eventual overflow, will permit an effective and low maintenance rain garden.
One of the main merits of the book is the way the authors merge two fields: the engineering view of water management and the benefits of doing it from the landscape perspective. The two blocks are logically ordered and divided under illustrative sub-titles that let the reader select or skip sections according to their interests. As promised in the book’s title, a landscape driven approach becomes a fact. The book is filled with illustrational and comprehensive examples that give deserved importance to specific points that urban work in public space design often leaves unattended.
Very small details, added together, can make a big difference. P. 99
Although the author refers to “landscape” as only the vegetated areas—apparently leaving aside the fact that landscape is much more than that, and that landscape integrates spatial morphology, local identity, welcoming to users, orientation and communication to them, and enhancing perception opportunities, among others—the text covers many details regarding careful interaction with stormwater.
It is understandable that landscape is represented in, as the author puts it, “…vegetative approaches, mimicking nature and natural processes to manage natural and manmade phenomena at the surface and breaking through our perceptions of the limits of urban development” (p. 91).
Small slots that can do a significant job in conducting water to free the sidewalk from the rain P.148.
The most relevant bibliography around the topic previously was principally directed, from a reduced technical perspective, at the subject of hydrology, hydraulics, engineering of environment and water, as it is the case of Storm Management by Wanielista and Yousef (published in 1993). Theirs is a quite comprehensive book that explores the economic, financial, political, and social feasibility of stormwater management projects, but still far from the landscape approach. The public and administrative sectors stormwater management has been studied principally by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in recent decades, and also there are contributions from other governmental authorities such as the U.S. National Park Service, the National Research Council or the National Resource Defense Council. In terms of shorter publications and journal articles, a good amount of literature can be found directly applied to technical aspects of storm water management and recently, some articles by landscape architects that relate those aspects to landscape.
Liptan delves into the subject and his contribution builds a bridge between the very scientific-technical level and the natural resources participation in the process, and approaches the topic from the sensitive and everyday experience. There is evidence of the beginning of Liptan’s notions of that association from least since 2000 when he presented a motivating paper, together with another author, to the Water Sensitive Ecological Planning and Design Symposium at the Harvard Design School. There they promoted the application of the (at the time) new urban-nature paradigm, displaying the convenience of symbiotic design principles for water plants and soil management, integrated in urban spaces.
The authors have dedicated a complete chapter to the grey to green revolution through the now common green roofs line and related techniques, which includes the vegetative cover of impervious surfaces; a different synergistic way to accept and guide the development and cycles of water and vegetation within the city. Once more, Liptan shares his personal involvement and devotion to the cause, showing the results of eighteen years of work on his own garage green roof. He explains in detail his personal experience, tracing, learning, monitoring and control, that give lessons which could be applied and examined deeply even to register the contents of certain minerals within the runoff. The chapter is complemented by interesting examples of green walls, trees on impervious surfaces, and climbers on trellises.
In general, the authors stress the importance of these steps to follow in contribution to the subject.
First—a very important one—is the testing of all the accumulated knowledge, built on the numerous experiences displayed in the book applying them on the tropical fringe of the world—such as that of the American continent—within particular less variable climatic conditions throughout the year, as well as a more biodiverse and exuberant growth that represent a huge challenge for strategies that become more and more relevant when the planet as a whole is facing several progressive environmental threats.
Second, cost considerations. Although it isn’t easy to change the way people see things, it is worth noting that green methods are the least expensive approaches; and bearing in mind that they provide additional perceptual and environmental benefits.
Third, a change in design inertia. Design through needless impervious areas removal, design with stream daylighting and design porous paving.
Fourth, operations and maintenance. The mentioned changes in design require new procedures in maintenance, that sure will bring costs saving.
In a phrase: “Designers need to be proficient and broadminded” (p. 248).
To end the work, the authors suggest a view of the future, hoping that the experiences detailed in the book will be “... useful to a better urban design, a more economical and ecological city, and the proliferation of beneficial urban vegetation and wildlife” (p. 248). In short paragraphs, like measured doses, the conclusions of the various chapters are easily collected and absorbed.
It is good to highlight the most relevant of these: that this is the time for new design thinking about long-standing issues, and that with this mission, “… the future rests on the shoulders of those who are most involved in designing every aspect of the urban environment” (p.248). On economics and policy, the authors remind us that green approaches also produce jobs in a wide branch of skills and that there is an urgent task to quantify and establish the economic benefit of vegetative systems when combined with sewer systems. It requires a clear—not easy but environmentally necessary—agreement between the public and private sectors, where the first promote vegetative systems although the sewer service cost rate decreases.
Towards the continuity of developing this landscape approach to stormwater management the authors invite us to remember that mistakes happen, but those few must not be allowed to condemn the success of many.
Definitely, the call to rediscover lost creeks and streams, is one of the topics that deserves more attention and determined efforts. The text leaves it just mentioned but it justifies all efforts. Those hidden water courses indicate the natural direction of hydrological flow; they trace fundamental axes for urban uses and occupation. But having been disregarded, they represent wasted potential in many senses, and require subsequent economical costs to imitate their function artificially. About vegetative stormwater management we should be reminded that “Plants can help us to save us from ourselves” (p. 252). but also that they provide enjoyment of the landscape, cohabitation habitats, and mental health.
Finally, the book is a great provocation to follow and complement the diverse topics related to urban water. It is a call to attend Ikeda’s thought that closes the text: “The challenge to keep something going is more difficult than the initial beginnings of an endeavor”.
From the very beginning, with the first urban settlements of Mesopotamia around 4500 BC, cities have required a clean water supply and some form of sanitation. As cities grew in size, the water supply tended to be sourced from further afield, with examples of aqueducts bringing clean water great distances from upland reservoirs or aquifers, where flows were reliable. Although the earliest cities had sewers and cesspits, treatment came much later, and it wasn’t until late in the 19th century, after cholera pandemics killed millions and scientists began to develop the germ theory of disease, that engineers created artificial filter-bed microbial ecosystems to treat sewage. The problem persists: there are still hundreds of major cities in the world that do not treat their sewage.
When city authorities begin to consider the fabric of the city itself as a rainwater collection facility, this changes the way people design and operate the urban landscape.
Cities, therefore, are part of a destructive, linear process, where water is brought from what is often a relatively “natural” area some distance from the city to be consumed, polluted, and then discharged into watercourses or the ocean. The consumption of water in the city has many profound impacts across a wide area. Pristine streams are dammed to create upland reservoirs. Dams prevent the migration and spawning of fish, forests are flooded, and silt, which once fed floodplains, is trapped behind dams. The pumping and treatment of water using electricity generated by burning coal or gas produces carbon dioxide. Once consumed by households and businesses and sullied, water is treated (using more energy) or perhaps not treated and then discharged, where further damage to aquatic ecosystems occurs. The excess of nutrients in wastewaters contributes towards eutrophication, with algal blooms, plunging oxygen levels, and the loss of the majority of species that require relatively clean water. The seas near some major conurbations are dead zones. Most of the plastic garbage in the world’s oceans originates from cities and enters the sea via rivers. Problems with city water supplies and associated impacts are predicted to become more severe because of population growth and climate change, which will increase the likelihood of drought in most regions. Civilizations—including that of the Mayans, for example, which ended around a thousand years ago—have collapsed because of prolonged drought.
Fixing these problems will involve a changing attitude towards water, preferably before severe shortages bite. There is much to do, but already there are plenty of good examples to follow. Instead of constantly seeking more sources of clean water (which are, in any case, dwindling), we need to seek ways of reducing demand, collecting rainwater in cities, and recycling wastewater. Much water is wasted before it even reaches the consumer and much can be done to find leaks (through improved metering and smart monitoring) and to make prompt repairs. For example, Tokyo, a city of 12 million people, was able to reduce leaks in its water supply network from 150 million cubic metres of water a year in 2000 to 68 million cubic metres a decade later.
The collection of rainwater is most commonly organized on a building-scale, with water directed from roofs into storage tanks and re-used for toilet flushing and other non-potable uses. Good progress has been made in recent years, with accreditation schemes such as LEED and BREEAM encouraging rainwater harvesting in new developments and states (like Tamil Nadu in India) making it mandatory. Singapore considers the whole city as a catchment for harvesting rainwater, with surface water drains channeling rainwater to several water bodies (including former estuaries), where water can be abstracted and treated for re-use.
When city authorities begin to consider the fabric of the city itself as a rainwater collection facility, this changes the way people design and operate the urban landscape. Efforts to reduce pollution become more intensive and finding ways of filtering and cleaning run-off can lead to new, well-funded, and strategically positioned green infrastructure interventions. Recycling wastewater is another way of reducing abstraction from the wider environment. In many jurisdictions, this process is forbidden or frowned upon, because of fears over public health; however, greywater (that is, lightly polluted water from showers and washbasins) can be easily cleaned (by using sand or membrane filters) to a state where it can be safely used for toilet flushing or irrigation. Toilet flushing can constitute up to 30 percent of domestic water consumption and greywater could be a reliable way of meeting this need.
Typical domestic greywater system. Image: Green Infrastructure Consultancy
Having considered the supply, consumption, treatment, and discharge of water and the wider implications of water use in cities, it is also important to think about the way water moves on and through the surface of the city itself. For example, until very recently, rain has been considered a substance that needs to be channeled away from buildings and streets and into pipes as quickly and efficiently as possible. This creates a number of problems, including downstream flooding, polluted watercourses, efforts to turn natural watercourses into concrete-lined drains, hot and dry buildings and streets, and biodiversity losses. Now, people are coming to realize that restoring ecosystems in urban areas and holding water in soil and vegetation within the urban fabric has many benefits.
This begins where the raindrops land on the roofs. If the roof has a well-designed green (or living) roof, it will include sufficient free-draining yet water-absorbing substrate (growing medium) to hold more than half of the water that lands upon it in any given year. Ultra-shallow green roofs should be avoided wherever possible because little water is intercepted and the roof tends to dry out to a point beyond which the parched vegetation cannot recover, even when rain returns. Water stored in the substrate of a green roof will be taken up by plants and transpired or evaporated directly from the substrate. Water lost through evapotranspiration is not wasted. It provides cooling, helping to reduce reliance on energy-hungry air conditioning. The evaporation from soils also proves useful when green roofs are combined with photovoltaic (or PV) panels (biosolar roofs). The cooling effect of the green roofs helps to keep the PVs close to their most efficient, optimum operating temperature. Green roofs can combine to improve the microclimate in whole neighbourhoods by reducing the urban heat island effect, preventing the sun’s energy from being absorbed into the dense materials of buildings and re-radiated at night.
Retrofitted biodiverse extensive green roof in London, designed for insects, bees, and spiders. Photo: Green Infrastructure Consultancy
Once water has left a green roof, it can be collected, stored and used for irrigation or directed into rain gardens, tree pits or similar green infrastructure elements. Rain gardens are landscape features designed to receive surface water or rainwater from downpipes. These interventions need to be created in places where they will readily receive water and must be free draining. Ideally, one rain garden overflows into another in a chain of features that, in combination, reduces the volume of water that enters watercourses. Water can evaporate from rain gardens, providing cooling in the way that green roofs do, and any water that flows out of rain gardens has been cleaned by the action of soil microbes. By directing rainwater from downpipes into planted features, it is often possible to eliminate or reduce the need for artificial irrigation. An example is the vertical rain garden on Tooley Street in London. Water from the roof of an apartment block is directed into tanks behind a living wall. Water enters the substrate of the living wall by wicking. Any excess water can overflow to the conventional drains; however, the volume of water entering the drains and contributing to the risk of localized surface water flooding is reduced. The wall has recently been doubled in size after more than a year of operation. See http://www.landscapeinstitute.org/news/London-Bridge-home-to-revolutionary-rain-garden
‘Vertical rain garden’ near London Bridge—a self-irrigating modular living wall with tanks filled via downpipes. Photo: Green Infrastructure Consultancy
Following prolonged or heavy rainfall, water that has not been intercepted and stored in cisterns, or the soils of green roofs or rain gardens, will eventually find its way into watercourses. When watercourses were considered no more than sewers, they were often placed underground. Where watercourses were too large to be put into pipes, they were often lined with masonry or concrete, thereby removing most of their ecological value. Although most urban rivers lost and damaged in these ways remain lost and damaged, there are now examples of rivers exposed once more to the sun, the so-called day-lighted rivers like, for example, the Saw Mill River in Yonkers. Where rivers have been straightened and vegetated margins erased, the process can be reversed through river restoration. City dwellers can begin to renew their acquaintance with rivers and can enjoy spending time close to what may be the most natural feature in their neighbourhoods. Linear features like watercourses can also become important corridors, part of a wider green grid that links together neighbourhoods and parks with footpaths and cycleways, helping to make the city more permeable to both people and wildlife.
The citizens of the water-sensitive city must bring together all these ideas and features as part of an ecosystem approach. The ecosystem approach (as advocated by the Convention on Biological Diversity) means people working together and working with the grain of nature so that a full range of ecosystem services is provided within the built environment as well as the wider countryside. The city needs to be considered as part of a wider ecosystem, watershed, and bio-region. This will require better cooperation between jurisdictions (sometimes across borders), sectors, and professionals, as well as full citizen participation. Everyone will need to be much more ecologically minded and water-wise. The idea of bringing much more soil, water, vegetation, and wildlife into cities will become mainstream. By thinking more carefully about water, whether it is in pipes, tanks and sewers, or the open-air ecosystems of the city’s green and blue infrastructure, urban areas will become more resilient to climate change. Water-sensitive cities will be kinder and calmer places to live, with people more closely connected to nature.
A review of Toward an Urban Ecology, by Kate Orff. 2016. ISBN978-1-58093-436-7. The Monacelli Press, New York. 272 pages. Buy the book.
Kate Orff, one of the leading ecologically-oriented landscape architects working today, and her firm, SCAPE, have put together an engaging and important book. The book describes what it means to pursue urban design, revitalization, and social engagement based on a firm foundation of ecological knowledge and the perspectives it supports. Although the book is rich with examples of creative, socially embedded designs, both built and envisioned, the work can always be traced back to sound ecological foundations. Because of its commitment to community-engaged design and practice, and its use of thoroughly considered future visions, the book stands out as an excellent example of the best of contemporary ecological design theory and practice.
Toward an Urban Ecology‘s breadth of practical, strategic, and conceptual richness lays out a comprehensive understanding of contemporary landscape architecture.
The book is visually attractive and intellectually well organized. Perhaps most significant to the success of the book is the variety of ways in which ideas, designs, and visions are presented. The text of the book is well written and easy to follow. There are compelling and thoughtful essays, many written by Orff herself, but also by other thinkers and practitioners, such as Jane Hutton, Thaïsa Way, Emily Eliza Scott, and Brian Davis. There are also insightful interviews with clients, scientific collaborators, community leaders, community scientists, and others. The interviews give life and immediacy to the role of engagement among disciplines and professions, and with diverse communities. The projects described are also diverse, including the well known “Oyster-tecture” plans for New York Harbor, but also lesser-known, equally visionary and grounded work ranging from Lexington, Kentucky’s Town Creek revitalization to projects in Minneapolis and Cleveland.
Most pages contain some images supporting the foundational thinking of the book; these give life to the projects. Design drawings, site photographs, digital representations of site futures, and the social and ecological functions of sites and their larger contexts are frequent subjects of these images. The paper has a nice heft, supporting high quality reproduction of the images.
The framing of the book, accomplished through four themes, is inclusive and clear, capturing the breadth of contemporary ecological urban design. The two introductory themes of the book are “Revive” and “Cohabit,” where revive delves deeper and beyond restoration, and where cohabitation includes biodiversity and diverse human communities. The Cohabit theme emphasizes an often-unsung client of landscape architecture: nature. Further themes are “Engage” and “Scale,” which deal with linked social and biophysical processes and acknowledge the place of design in local to regional interactions. Each chapter discusses examples of the practice of ecological landscape design and the diversity of strategies that are relevant to that theme. This breadth of practical, strategic, and conceptual richness lays out a comprehensive understanding of contemporary landscape architecture that honors the scientific understanding of open, dynamic, social-biophysical systems, all while following the creative and innovative skills honed in the design professions.
The book is not a textbook of the science of urban ecology. The “urban ecology” of the title is not restricted to the specific science that I know and practice. However, it is a very successful and stimulating dialogue between that science and the motivation, theory, and practice of landscape architecture. Those interested in ecological urban design will be well rewarded by exploring this book, and will be stimulated to think and act in more integrated ways to promote the ecological and social health of urban systems.
We need more young leaders all round the world, and parents who encourage and support their exploratory curiosity. The more they learn about their world, the more they will love it.
From early on as a family, we considered ourselves to be fairly knowledgeable about environmental issues, such as plastic pollution, deforestation, and global warming from all we’d learnt through the media. We recycled. We bought fair-trade items like chocolate and bananas. We also participated in environmental initiatives like a national beach clean-up in Southampton. But even with all this, it wasn’t until much later that we truly understood the impact of marine plastics and global warming.
Three years ago we had been living in England on a farm surrounded by daisy and poppy fields and small woods of oak, beech and coppiced hazel. The children, Leah and Peta, had built a den of fallen branches and moss, and watched snowdrops and daffodils take their seasonal turns. In late Spring we would hunt for wild orchids and watch tadpoles grow up. But it was not all bucolic harmony all the time. We also experienced nature red in tooth and claw. In the woods we sometimes stumbled upon carcasses of fowl picked clean by a buzzard or hen harrier, and every year we tried to save mallard ducklings from the talons and beaks of grey herons and red kites.
Wild orchid growing in farmland, Hampshire, UK. Photo: Olivia Tay
We often came across animal carcasses and skulls. Photo: Olivia Tay
Tropical diversity
When we moved to Singapore we thought we would be severely deprived of natural sights in this city-state. Even though there are nature reserves and parks in what is proclaimed as a “garden city”, we were not initially convinced that their charms could replace those of rural Hampshire.
Then one Saturday, to get fresh air but also out of curiosity, we joined a guided tour of the MacRitchie Nature Reserve organised by the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Toddycats—a group of local university students who care about the environment. It turned out to be a pivotal experience for us. Not many steps into a trail we were electrified when a snake raced across the path between our feet. Our guide was delighted and remarked that it was the first time that a snake had surprised her like that, adding that it was most likely a Common Malayan Racer, Coelognathus flavolineatus. The incident jolted us from our complacency and we began then to really pay attention to what our guide had to say.
She helped us put names to many unusual local and non-native trees and plants in the forest reserve. There was the cluster of nibong palm, Oncosperma tigillarium(nibungis thorn in Indonesian) with sharp thorns that could be used as blow darts. And fruit much like the horse chestnut conkers of Europe, but which come from a native species of chestnut, the Kertak Tangga, Castanopsis schefferiana. We saw the beautifully wrinkled trunks of the Tembusu, Cyrtophyllum fragrans(the old scientific name used to be Fagraea fragrans) and learnt about the chewing gum tree, the Jelutong, Dyera costulata. There was the vivid Wild Ixora, Ixora congesta, which prefers being in the forest shade. The rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis, once a highly valuable crop and originally from South America, we could now distinguish from other trees by its three-leaved saplings and three-lobed fruit.
A Kertak Tangga conker. Photo: Olivia Tay
Wild Ixora. Photo: Olivia Tay
It was through the Toddycats that we learned about the government’s plans to tunnel an MRT (Singapore’s subway) line under part of the forest anid how this could harm MacRitchie’s ecosystem and along with it the wildlife of the Central Catchment’s forests, of which MacRitchie is a part. Having been jolted from our complacency, we now started to really understand the significance of conservation, and of reserving natural spaces for wild flora and fauna, as we stood to lose a place, we’d come to cherish
After MacRitchie we went on another guided walk, this time among the diverse habitats of Pulau Ubin’s Chek Jawa district. Pulau Ubin (Ubin Island) is only a 10-minute boat ride from the eastern end of Singapore, but it is a time capsule of a Singapore from a not-too distant past. Village houses roofed in corrugated iron partly line a single road that almost circumnavigates the entire island. Chek Jawa, on Ubin’s eastern flank, had been earmarked for resort development but virtually at the last minute was given a 10-year reprieve. The National Parks Board (NParks) seized its chance and restored and created new boardwalks that the public could use, enabling greater ease and safety for the public to learn about the unusual richness of Chek Jawa’s ecosystem – it has six habitats: rocky shore, sandy beach, mangroves, coastal hill forest, seagrass lagoon and coral rubble.
Green spotted puffer at Chek Jawa, Pulau Ubi. Photo: Olivia Tay
It was on the mangrove boardwalk that we spied a pufferfish, the adorable Green Spotted Puffer, Dichotomyctere nigroviridis (syn. Tetraodon nigroviridis). It ignited Leah’s interest in mangrove and marine creatures. Her keenness led us to volunteer with NParks’ Intertidal Watch, a citizen science group that records marine life biodiversity in the intertidal zone of Singapore’s coasts. Both Leah and Peta enjoy mucking about in the sand, sifting through seaweed or seagrass to peer at snails and crabs, delighting in discoveringnew animals like sea hares.
A Geographic Sea Hare (Syphonota geographica) found just off a popular beach in Singapore. Photo: Olivia Tay
This is not uncommonly seen at low tide: a Sea Pen (Pteroides sp.) and its tenant, a little Painted Porcelain Crab (Porcellanella picta). Photo: Olivia Tay
It was from these intertidal surveys that our experience of Singapore’s natural bounty broadened. Our coastal waters are so rich in invertebrates and fish, nurtured by the seagrasses and off-shore coral reefs. On our own intertidal walks, we have come across varied sea cucumbers, crabs and sea stars. Once we rescued a baby moon crab, Ashtoret lunaris, which had been hidden in seaweed trapped in a large plastic bag. Luckily we had emptied the bag of seaweed before binning as the tiny creamy-yellow crab plopped onto the sand before scuttling away. And this lead us to more fully understand the urgent issue of pollution and littering. While it is amazing to record all the fauna on each intertidal survey, we also saw first-hand how human trash, especially plastic products, impede and outright harm marine life.
The juvenile Spotted Moon Crab liberated from a plastic bag filled with seaweed. Photo: Olivia Tay
Marine plastic litter is a ubiquitous blight. Here a Pink Warty Sea Cucumber (Cercodemas anceps) rests on a plastic cup. Photo: Olivia Tay
It is now not just about terrestrial habitats which need conserving, but the protection of Singapore’s diverse marine life.
From participating in various nature surveys (for birds, butterflies, and intertidal flora and fauna), we began to help with the NUS-NParks Marine Debris Sampling project, bagging fine sand for the researchers to examine for microplastics, and engaging in more beach clean-ups.
Recycling our knowledge
Eventually we tried our hand at being guides ourselves when we returned to Pulau Ubin for this year’s “Balik Chek Jawa” (Chek Jawa Homecoming) event with the nature group, Naked Hermit Crabs. It was our turn to infect other members of the public with an appreciation for Singapore’s biodiversity. If we can share our ideas and knowledge with members of the public, perhaps they too will want to protect the amazing things we can see in and around Singapore.
Mangrove forests are rare now on mainland Singapore, but this stand on Pulau Ubin’s Chek Jawa, is an important fish nursery, a crucial store of carbon and is a barrier to storm surges. Photo: Olivia Tay
At home, Peta is now running a biodiversity survey in our neighbourhood park, using NParks’ app, SGBioAtlas. The data will go into NParks’ database, BIOME, and will show them what species there are, and what is common or uncommon. Only a week ago Peta and Leah spotted a Tiger Shrike, Lanius tigrinus,in a Tanjung tree, Mimusops elengi, as it is now the autumn migration season and we should be seeing more bird visitors. NParks would be able to use this data to help the animals, which could mean choosing different plant species to attract them.
Leah is organising a regular beach clean-up to monitor the amount of rubbish collected at the same location over time. Although her Scout pack does a yearly beach clean-up for the International Coastal Clean-up event, Leah felt that once a year would not be as effective, especially to reinforce the idea that preserving a pristine natural environment is every person’s responsibility and not just the job of a contract cleaner.
Looking back over the past few years, our feelings towards Singapore’s natural biodiversity have certainly evolved, from ignorance to curiosity and now determination to conserve as much as we can.
The younger generation taking the lead
It is heartening to know that young people like Leah12 and Peta 9, are exploring the natural ecosystems in a densely populated city-state like Singapore. They are discovering that the diversity of species can co-exist with humans in a wide range of habitats. More importantly, they are documenting the rich flora and fauna in urban and natural ecosystems, building up a growing population of citizen scientists, sharing their biodiversity data and proactively conserving our rich biodiversity. If more young people monitor and record the biodiversity in their neighbourhood, we will be able to accumulate a rich database of the plants and animals living around us. With that invaluable information, we can proactively encourage people to plant suitable species that will function efficiently as ecological corridors.
We need more of these young leaders all round the world, and parents who encourage and support their exploratory curiosity. The more they learn about their world, the more they will love it. After all, it is their planet and their future that they are saving for themselves and their descendants.
Leah Thorpe, Peta Thorpe, Olivia Tay and Lena Chan Singapore
It is important to examine not only the relationship between sustainability and resilience, but also the embedded cross-scale effects of decisions about whose future should be made more sustainable or resilient.
In recent years, city plans, international organizations, private foundations, and policy discourse more broadly have presented resilience as a necessary characteristic for communities to cope with natural hazards and climate change. Numerous cities around the world are now developing resilience strategies or implementing policies with the stated aim of becoming more resilient.
Resilience agendas and efforts are often justified by the need to guarantee security, reduce risks, and foster sustainability. A more critical take on the “resilience renaissance”, however, suggests that resilience may be a more appealing goal for policymakers because it focuses our attention on managing short-term threats and maintaining the status quo, rather than system transformations required for long-term sustainability.
We can debate the underlying motivation, but there is no doubt that more and more cities are striving to become resilient. In the policy realm, this is widely heralded as a positive development. Within the academic literature, there is greater disagreement about the merits of resilience.
We appreciate these critiques but also see that they have not stymied cities’ resilience policies. In a recent paper, Chelleri and colleagues argue for a more critical and nuanced approach to urban resilience: one that recognizes that many urban policies prioritize certain risks, groups or scales at the expense of others, and acknowledges, documents, and negotiates these trade-offs. Unfortunately, to-date there has been limited research on resilience trade-offs. Published studies suggest that resilience-related strategies seeking to reduce the exposure or sensitivity to certain stresses can exacerbate existing inequalities by disproportionately affecting disadvantaged groups or favoring the interests of others.
This is where our new project comes in.
Leveraging the Urban Resilience Research Network (a virtual platform with more than 250 members), we are crowdsourcing case studies of trade-offs that emerge in resilience-building efforts from all over the world. We will analyse the results to identify common trade-off patterns and to develop a trade-off typology. This can help decision-makers to think through the potential unintended or undesirable consequences of resilience policies and to be transparent about who they seek to benefit and at what scale (resilience for whom, what, when, where, and why?).
What is an urban resilience trade-off?
An urban resilience trade-off occurs when an effort to build resilience by increasing adaptive capacity and/or reducing sensitivity and/or reducing exposure leads to a reduction in adaptive capacity and/or an increase in sensitivity and/or exposure at another spatial or temporal scale, for other individual(s), or to another threat. These trade-offs can occur across spatial scales (one community or city enhances its resilience at the cost of increasing the vulnerability of other places), groups (one group’s resilience increases the vulnerability of others), between threats (when a solution to, e.g., drought implies increasing social fiscal pressures), or even across temporal scales (when a short-term solution results in the lock-in of a particular unsustainable trajectory). As this last point suggests, there can also be trade-offs between resilience and sustainability, a tension that has been discussed in prior TNOC posts.
It is helpful to examine these dynamics in the context of a current event. At the time of writing, “day zero” was rapidly approaching in Cape Town—the day when the taps of four million inhabitants could have run dry because of a historic drought. After almost three years of diminishing rainfall, and notwithstanding recent water use restrictions, the city should have been prepared for this contingency. Indeed, the city is actively working on water transfers, an emergency plan for day zero, and four desalination plants that should already be operational. While day zero has very recently been indefinitely delayed, discussions continue about long-term policies for reframing water management. When addressing these pressing water concerns, however, city officials should consider other aspects of resilience and sustainability beyond the current drought emergency. For example, the energy required to operate new desalination plants could threaten energy resilience and sustainability in a country where electricity is primarily generated from fossil fuels, and long-term supply continuity is unreliable.
In this example, enhancing resilience to one threat may undermine resilience in another system and have negative environmental consequences, thus illustrating a potential trade-off between urban resilience and sustainability. Additionally, the media and policymakers’ focus on the potential day zero heightens local debates about whose needs are most urgent and how funding is prioritized to guarantee fresh water from dams or desalination plants, all within a context of persistent urban informality. Indeed, informal settlements have long had to grapple with periodical flooding and sub-standard water, energy, and sanitation facilities.
Trade-offs related to ‘resilience for whom’ often extend far beyond municipal boundaries. In Morocco, for example, solar power plants built in the semiarid south through the DESERTEC project aim to provide renewable solar power to Europe. However, as reported in a recent publication, the Ouarzazate solar plant almost doubled water consumption in the region, resulting in a dramatic increase in the social-ecological vulnerability of neighbouring oases and increased urban migration.
These two examples highlight the need to examine not only the relationship between sustainability and resilience, but also the embedded cross-scale effects of decisions regarding whose future should be made more sustainable or resilient.
How and why to contribute to our database
To engender these critical discussions, the Urban Resilience Research Network (URNet) is opening a new section on its website featuring short case studies of urban resilience trade-offs. The aim is to gather evidence from different parts of the world, illustrating these trade-offs and lessons learned from urban resilience implementation. The global database will be presented in Barcelona, during the international conference entitled “Reframing Urban Resilience Implementation”, co-organized by URNet, UN Habitat City Resilience Profiling Program, the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC), and the International Forum of Urbanism (IFoU). We encourage every scholar, practitioner, or individual critical of “business as usual” framings of resilience to contribute to our database and help advance our collective understanding of the (un)intended consequences of resilience efforts. Simply fill out our short questionnaire (it should take no more than 10 minutes to complete) and your thoughts and case studies can be published on the URNet website and presented and discussed at the Barcelona conference, thereby contributing to international debates on resilience. We thank you in advance for helping us reframe resilience to avoid trade-offs and better align resilience, sustainability and social justice.
Sara Meerow is an Assistant Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. She is an interdisciplinary social-ecological systems scientist working at the intersection of urban geography and planning.
The restoration of the Great Leaks pollution hot spots has become a springboard for local communities to convert areas that were once a detriment to economic growth into valuable community and economic assets.
Cleanup of Great Lakes pollution hot spots has not been easy, and required networks focused on gathering stakeholders, coordinating efforts, and ensuring that the results promote the public interest. Even with the compelling case of the Great Lakes being a continentally- and globally-significant natural resource, it has proven incredibly challenging. For those working in the trenches of ecosystem-based and watershed management, it is best described as a challenging puzzle requiring a marathoner’s discipline and perseverance.
The Great Lakes are freshwater seas that contain nearly one-fifth of the standing freshwater on the Earth’s surface. They are also a shared resource between Canada and the United States. Approximately 34 million people in the U.S. and Canada live in the Great Lakes Basin. Both countries depend on the Great Lakes for drinking water, transportation, economic opportunities, power, and recreation. For example, 48 million people in the U.S. and Canada get their drinking water from the Great Lakes. Cargo shipments on the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway system generate $US 34.6 billion of economic activity and 227,000 jobs in Canada and the U.S. The Great Lakes directly generate more than 1.5 million jobs and $60 billion in wages annually and provide the backbone for a $5 trillion regional economy that would be one of the largest in the world if it stood alone as a country. Recreation on the Great Lakes—including boating, hunting, fishing, and birding opportunities—generates more than $52 billion annually for the region. Commercial, recreational, and tribal fisheries in the Great Lakes alone are collectively valued at more than $7 billion annually and support more than 75,000 jobs.
Given the level of population density, and commercial and industrial development, it is not surprising there have been considerable environmental impacts. From extirpation of beaver during the fur trade, to sedimentation and loss of habitat during the logging era, to waterborne disease epidemics in the early 1900s, to cultural eutrophication starting in the 1950s and continuing to the present, to toxic contamination as a result of the industrial revolution, to the introduction of exotic species, and climate change in more recent years, the Great Lakes have experienced substantial human use and abuse.
Canada and the U.S. have worked together for over a century to resolve problems along their common border. For example, the 1909 U.S.-Canada Boundary Waters Treaty provides the principles and mechanisms for preventing and resolving disputes concerning water quantity and quality along the entire border. Far ahead of its time, the Boundary Waters Treaty also states that waters shall not be polluted on either side of the boundary to the injury of health or property on the other side. As such, this treaty is often described as the world’s first environmental agreement. The International Joint Commission (IJC) was established under the Boundary Waters Treaty to foster binational cooperation in resolving trans-boundary environmental issues.
The IJC is an independent and objective advisor to the U.S. and Canada, and works for the common good of both countries in preventing and resolving any disputes regarding boundary water management issues. The IJC uses experts, serving in their personal and professional capacities, to undertake independent fact-finding and to provide independent advice for problem resolution. Its processes have compiled agreed-upon and trusted scientific and socioeconomic data, and have interpreted these data in a public fashion to build broad-based understanding and support for action. More recently, IJC processes have fostered use of a systematic and comprehensive ecosystem approach.
The Canada-U.S. Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement was initially signed in 1972 and revised in 1978, 1987, and 2012. As such, this agreement is described as an evolving instrument for ecosystem-based management. It represents a commitment between the U.S. and Canada to restore and protect the waters of the Great Lakes and provides a framework for identifying binational priorities and implementing actions that improve water quality and ecosystem health. Canada and the U.S. are responsible for final decision-making under the agreement and for the involvement and participation of state and provincial governments, tribal governments, and other stakeholders.
Since 1973, the IJC’s Great Lakes Water Quality Board, the principal advisor to the IJC on matters about the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, has periodically assessed the state of the Great Lakes. As part of these assessments, the Great Lakes Water Quality Board identified specific harbors, embayments, river mouths, and connecting channels where one of more jurisdictional standards or general or specific water quality objectives of the agreement were not being met. Initially termed “problem areas”, they were later called “Area(s) of Concern” (AOCs).
The list of AOCs changed over time due to the implementation of remedial and preventive programs and improvements in water quality, and the emergence of new problems and/or reinterpretation of the significance of earlier reports. The major problems identified also changed in response to the evolution of scientific understanding of ecosystem problems, improved ability to detect and measure problems, and progress in environmental cleanup and ecological restoration.
Despite progress in abating bacterial and phosphorus pollution in many AOCs, the Great Lakes Water Quality Board reported in 1985 that progress had been stalled in 42 AOCs where general or specific objectives of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement were not being met. This failure had caused or had likely caused impairment of beneficial use or of the area’s ability to support aquatic life. A 43rd AOC was identified in 1991 (i.e., Presque Isle Bay, Erie, Pennsylvania). Impairment of beneficial use means a change in the chemical, physical, or biological integrity of the Great Lakes ecosystem sufficient to cause any of the following:
Restrictions of fish and wildlife consumption;
Tainting of fish and wildlife flavor;
Degradation of fish and wildlife populations;
Fish tumors or other deformities;
Bird or animal deformities or reproductive problems;
Degradation of benthos;
Restrictions on dredging activities;
Eutrophication or undesirable algae;
Restrictions on drinking water consumption, or taste and odor problems;
Beach closings;
Degradation of aesthetics;
Added costs to agriculture or industry;
Degradation of phytoplankton or zooplankton populations; or
Loss of fish and wildlife habitat.
As a result of the recommendation of the Great Lakes Water Quality Board, the eight Great Lakes states and the Province of Ontario, with support from the federal governments of the U.S. and Canada, committed in 1985 to developing and implementing a remedial action plan (RAP) to restore all beneficial uses in each AOC within their political boundaries. This RAP commitment was then codified in the 1987 Protocol to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.
Each RAP identified the use impairments and causes, the remedial and preventive actions needed to restore use impairments, the agencies or organizations responsible for implementing the actions, and the timeframe for implementation to increase accountability. Further, RAPs adopted an ecosystem approach that accounts for the interrelationships among air, water, land, and all living things, including humans, and involves all user groups in management. RAPs have been implemented in an adaptive management fashion where assessments are made, priorities set, and actions taken in an iterative fashion for continuous improvement.
Figure 1. AOCs in the U.S.-Canada Great Lakes Basin Ecosystem. Adapted from a map provided by the U.S. EPA
Since the commitment to RAPs in 1985, it is fair to say that there were 43 locally-designed ecosystem approaches to use restoration in AOCs (Figure 1). In total, as of 2016, seven AOCs have been delisted, two AOCs have been designated as Areas of Recovery, 18 AOCs have implemented all remedial actions deemed necessary for use restoration, 65 of 146 known use impairments identified in Canadian AOCs have been eliminated, and 62 of 255 known use impairments in U.S. AOCs have been eliminated. Although much has been accomplished, much remains to be done to restore all impaired uses and delist all AOCs.
Overall, it is fair to say that progress has been challenging and slow. However, it took over a century to create these problems, and it should not be surprising that restoration would be a long-term process. In such urban, environmental restoration work, benefits assessments have proven to be an important tool to help make the case for restoration and requisite funding, sustain momentum over decades, and manifest return on investment. Further, such economic benefits studies have attracted considerable backing in support of sustaining seed funding from governments to finish the job of cleaning up AOCs that has helped leverage money. Selected examples of benefits assessments are presented below.
Detroit River
During the 1960s, the Detroit River was one of the most polluted rivers in the Great Lakes Basin. Considerable remediation has occurred in and along the Detroit River resulting in substantial ecological recovery, including the return of bald eagles, peregrine falcons, osprey, lake sturgeon, lake whitefish, walleye, mayflies, wild celery, and more. This restoration has laid the foundation for the revitalization of the riverfront with the building of the Detroit RiverWalk for all (Figure 2). The Detroit RiverWalk is now one of the largest, by scale (5.5 miles in downtown Detroit), urban waterfront redevelopment projects in the United States, resulting in over $1 billion in economic benefits in the first ten years. The Detroit RiverWalk has utilized democratic design to achieve benefits for all. The Detroit RiverWalk has also helped reconnect citizens to continentally-significant natural resources and has helped Detroit become an urban getaway for outdoor recreation.
Figure 2. The Detroit RiverWalk is a gathering place for people and wildlife. Photo: SmithGroupJJR
Hamilton Harbour
Hamilton Harbour lies at the western tip of Lake Ontario near the cities of Hamilton and Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Hamilton is considered the “steel capital” of Canada. Contaminated sediments are a major problem. Located in the harbor is Randle Reef, a 148-acre contaminated sediment hotspot where sediment remediation is underway (Figure 3). The cost of sediment remediation of Randle Reef is $138.9-million. Local businesses are projected to realize about $600 million in gross accumulated benefits with full sediment remediation. Likewise, recreational users are projected to realize about $500 million in gross accumulated benefits with full remediation.
Figure 3. Sediment remediation underway at Randle Reef in Hamilton Harbour, Ontario, Canada. Photo: Environment and Climate Change Canada
Muskegon Lake
Muskegon Lake is an over 4,000-acre inland coastal lake along the eastern shoreline of Lake Michigan. It has over a 100-year history of anthropogenic impacts from lumbering, industry, and urbanization. Considerable restoration has occurred, including remediation of contaminated sediment and restoration of habitats. A considerable portion of the shoreline that was once natural wetlands had been filled in with foundry materials. A $10 million shoreline restoration project was implemented to soften the shoreline and restore wetland habitats. An economic benefits study has shown that this $10 million shoreline restoration project on Muskegon Lake will generate more than $66 million in economic benefits, resulting in a 6-to-1 return on investment.
Kinnickinnic River
The Milwaukee Estuary in Wisconsin was designated an AOC primarily due to contaminated sediments and loss of habitat. In 2009, a Great Lakes Legacy Act project dredged a 0.4-mile section of the Kinnickinnic River on the south side of Milwaukee. In total, 158,000 yd3 of contaminated sediment were removed and disposed at a cost of $22.4 million. Milwaukee literally transformed this former toxic hot spot into a waterfront destination for businesses, recreation, and tourism. Direct benefits to Milwaukee from this sediment remediation included: adding more than 100 jobs; supporting more than $1 million in wages for new workers; increasing revenues along the Kinnickinnic River, realizing more than a 30 percent increase when Pier Milwaukee reopened alone; and creating and restoring 26 boat slips, with 23 more planned in the future, yielding the potential for increased revenue from slip rentals and tourism.
Figure 4. Buffalo River restoration has been a catalyst for creating waterfront public spaces in Buffalo that have generated considerable economic benefits. Photo: Joe Cascio
Concluding thoughts
The cleanup of pollution hot spots in the Great Lakes has proven difficult and has spanned many decades. Such restoration work has helped reconnect people to their waterfronts in ways that enhance community well-being. Indeed, the cleanup of such legacy pollution has become a springboard for local communities to convert areas that were once a detriment to economic growth into valuable community and economic assets for all. Economic benefits assessments have proven to be important tools to: sustain long-term momentum in urban environmental restoration work; manifest return on investment; and attract champions and advocates for sustaining funding from governments, foundations, and businesses to help finish the job of cleaning up AOCs. Other key lessons include:
establish a compelling vision that can be carried in the hearts and minds of all stakeholders;
recruit a well-respected champion;
establish networks with broad support from key stakeholder groups;
establish core delivery team, focused on outcomes and success;
build trust and ensure cooperative learning;
secure seed funding for projects that will attract other funding partners;
evoke a sense of place in all projects;
measure and celebrate successes to sustain momentum; and
recruit and train sustainability change agents and facilitators.
A key to the Urban Systems Community of Practice Ecosystem being explored is how to create and use structures that give the highest levels of participation, whatever the level within the system. For this, fractal systems were explored.
The Festival attempted to push boundaries to radically imagine our cities for the future; its stated aim was to explore how to build better cities for nature and all citizens. The virtual festival spanned 5 days with programming across all regional time zones and translations provided in multiple languages. Our event sought to build on the guiding philosophy of the moment in these strange times:
A lot of what we are trying to do with this event is experimental… Lots of people, time zones, languages, ways to interact. We might make some mistakes along the way. Please be patient.
Translocal adventures in TNOC’s Imagined City, artwork by Frida Larios
What was tried
ECOLISE is the “European Network for Community-Led Initiatives on Climate Change and Sustainability” and is the chief driver of these three interconnected projects. The overall aim of the work is to enable massive citizen-led system change to counter Climate Breakdown. The domain that this Urban Systems Community of Practice Ecosystem supports is nothing less than full eco-social just transition, to return the scope of human activity back within the limits of planet earth. Or to reconnect our ecological and economical worlds, as Satish Kumar so wonderfully put it some time back.
ECOLISE spent most of 2019 developing a new action platform, a rallying point for everyone and anyone to organise around, a toolkit of tricks to radically change our own backyards. Inspired by the wonderful Fridays for Future movement, they created Communities for Future and launched it last September.
The TNOC event was an experimental step, to try to move the process further down the road of change. It aimed to share the story so far, maximize guest participation, allow diverse discussions to develop, harvest insights from the group, and encourage wider participation in the CfF CoPs Ecosystem process after the event. The event’s structure was based on UrbanA’s “Community Conversation” (CoCo) format and was part of the 3rd stage development of the UrbanA Community of Practice (CoP). The structure of the 1.5-hour long event was divided into 3 distinct sections:
1st half-hour: General presentation + intro questions.
2nd half-hour: Breakout rooms + Listening Rooms. These happened at the same time.
3rd half-hour: Feedback, to hear back from the Breakout Rooms & Listening Rooms in Plenary. This was followed by open discussion.
A key to the Urban Systems Community of Practice Ecosystem being explored is how to create and use structures that give the highest levels of participation, whatever the level within the system. For this, fractal systems were explored. The introduction presentation briefly explored the use of city river basins, and mini basins, as fractal systems for the design of ecocities, nested local community assemblies, as An Ecobarrio for Curitiba? (2018) explored. (The recent Indigenous legal victory of the Māori tribe of Whanganui was also remembered; We are the river, the river is us) A recent academic publication from Jamila Haider was also looked at, to assist this idea of scales of activity: Rethinking resilience and development: A coevolutionary perspective.
Fractal structures; From river basins to an urban community assembly process
In the UrbanA section of the intro presentation, some space was given to outlining some of the theory behind this concept; Communities of Practice, or what in academic shorthand we refer to as CoPs. This included Margaret Wheatley’s wonderful 2006 work on Emergence theory developing in three Stages to bring about system change:
Networks (Discovering Shared Meaning and Purpose)
Communities of Practice (Developing New Practices Together)
Systems of Influence (New Practices Become the Norm)
The method used normally in the UrbanA CoCos during the 2nd half-hour is a series of Breakout Rooms of about 4–10 people, to open up spaces for all voices, maximise discussion and enable a process to feed critical insights, questions, or relevant links to projects into a Harvest Document. These moments are normally not recorded, to maximize openness. Noticing in previous sessions that not everybody wanted to participate in such a fashion, or perhaps due to language difficulties, or that some people just preferred to listen to great stories about great projects, the UrbanA team began to add a simultaneous process during the 2nd section, the Listening Room. They never had more than one, and it was used to expand on the core presentation idea or explore a specific case study on the topic. The projects were presented in greater detail for 20 minutes, followed by a 10-minute Q&A session, with responses given to questions typed in the Zoom chat. These sections were recorded and shared later on the UrbanA blog.
In keeping with TNOC’s experimental streak, for this session, newer dynamics were tested. Breakout Rooms and Listening Rooms were divided into 4 themes; following the design system developed by the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN); The 5 Dimensions of Sustainability which sees a system divided into 4 main dimensions: Social, Cultural, Ecology, Economy, with the extra dimension of Whole System or Integral Design, integrating all four dimensions into one. This structure forms the base of The Ecovillage Map of Regeneration and the Ecovillage Design Cards, which can be explored here.
Event structured using the Global Ecovillage Network’s “5 Dimensions of Sustainability”
For the event, the structure of the event itself was the Integral Design, with the Breakout Rooms and Listening Rooms both divided into the 4 Dimensions.
Lastly, to realise the event, a call-out went out to friends and colleagues for assistance, with not much time to organise and prepare before the event. This resulted in a group of 15 people joining forces from different countries, backgrounds, and communities or projects. Although the group had never worked together before, there was a willingness and excitement to try something new, plug into the experimental world of TNOC. Hopes were high.
How it went
There were good points and bad points. On the macro, outside level, it worked very well in pulling the somewhat disparate processes of UrbanA and Communities for Future closer together, enabling new working relationships to form. The group of 15 mostly found the experience enriching, the discussions stimulating, and enjoyed connecting into the TNOC festival.
It was an experiment, it worked pretty well. Some people had trouble finding their way to the exact Zoom link, maybe others couldn’t find the event? The explanation of the Breakout rooms and instructions were not clear enough and much time was lost between sections 1 and 2 trying to transfer to this section. Also, due to numbers being less than hoped for, not all the rooms happened. We attempted to do three simultaneous listening rooms but, in the end, only the Ecology Listening Room happened with MiT. Three of the four Breakout Rooms happened, Social lost out. The Harvesting Document was filled out and interesting feedback was shared in the plenary, with viewpoints from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The World map was filled in a bit, the general document for sharing of info, links, and projects was not used, so we don’t have a good record of what sort of projects were represented from the experience. Perhaps we tried too much but, overall, we feel it was a success. Here are some of what was shared.
Giorgia welcomed the 25 people who turned up for the event and Duncan gave an overview of the event structure and housekeeping (screens on, locations, and projects in name). Duncan then gave the main presentation about ECOLISE, UrbanA, and Communities for Future, this finished with some slides at different scales from the CfF CoPs Ecosystem workspace on MIRO. From this, Sara took the reins and opened up the MIRO board, giving a guided tour walk-through, explaining the work done so far in this process and where we hope to go with it.
Here are the Harvest findings
From Social:
Discuss the question
How best can your community contribute to the Urban Systems Community of Practice?
New concept, hard to add things, seems unclear
How CoP look like? How to interact with other CoP in practice?
How to work with Miro? > can be applied to different scale
CoP: a community with shared interest go deeper in key topics (domain)
MiT have tutors and pioneers > learning together how to implement MiT better | events > facilitator for tools, virtual events, talks; circles of interactions
How to identify knowledge/skill gap (toolkit)? How it is organized esp. in conflict? How to apply in different contexts beyond Europe?
Ex: Sociocracy 3.0 method for governance and interaction with each other in communities with diversity, complexity, different world view. Need to create trust to use methodology, move forward despite conflicts
Ex: MiT toolkit to co-design in urban planning > worked with citizens, designers, politicians
In relation to question:
Governance model is essential, brings security that people are being heard
What? Who? Why? Decentralized not managed by one group of people but facilitated
Transparent collaboration and responsibilities
Sense of ownership is important
From Economy:
Discuss the question
How best can your community contribute to the Urban Systems Community of Practice?
Identifying needs and harvesting information about how these needs are being addressed and covered. Promoting self-responsibility.
Need: Exchange of best practices of grassroots mobilization and public sector advocacy.
Public parks as places of education for sustainability and political expression.
Places of demonstration of best practices that be upscaled.
Experience of structural constraints (dictatorship) of the market economy on transformative public policies.
Need: Combine bottom-up and top-down approach.
Need: Advocacy for the taxation of externalities and the redistribution the income of that taxation directly to the people.
From Culture:
Discuss the question
How best can your community contribute to the Urban Systems Community of Practice?
Supporting cultural and sports events (e.g. Brazil – football, volleyball)
International cities (high migration %) are a place where many different cultures intersect
How to better accommodate intergenerational modes of living and sharing
How to reimagine study-work relationship (e.g. sem estudo sem trabalho)
Community-dancing (sport, exercise)
Food can open the gate to cultural knowledge and exchange
Natural and cultural sites
Edible or flower cities (e.g. vertical gardens as culture and colour)
Religion (shift towards eco-spirituality)
To finish up, people were thanked and everyone was invited to participate further in the Urban Systems Ecosystem and to help shape content in the Knowledge Commons of the various projects: ECOLISE, UrbanA, Communities for Future. For those that wish to, there is a chance to participate in a key project of the ECOLISE project: The Status Report. The 2019 Status Report PDF can be found online here.
Thanks to everybody who participated in this event.
Translocal adventures in developing an Urban Systems Community of Practice
Giorgia completed with honors her Master degree in Environmental Science at Pisa University (Italy) and her bachelor studies at the Faculty of Mathematical, Physical and Natural Sciences at Florence University. Giorgia joined DRIFT in 2014, and she is currently working on various international research projects such as URBANA and TOMORROW.
Sara is a landscape architect and a facilitator for sustainability in Portugal. She is the co-founder and coordinator of Cidade Mais, as well as a co-creator of the Awakened Life Project.
COVID-19 is a stark reminder that the world around us has drastically changed. In the Anthropocene we need to think and act differently. Our thinking needs to be more ecocentric and less anthropocentric. Our behaviors need to be more social and less ego-centric. We need to overcome our fears of others and avoid looking for simple causes for a very complex world.
This essay is a conversation between an economist and a psychologist who live and work in China and Kenya and who exchange observations and are despairing about the impact of COVID-19 on their individual and social lives. Both come to a common point in terms of how much of this pandemic exposes narrowminded perceptions, biases, and lack of social or political commitment to make more positive change amid the pandemic.
Franz:
As a resource economist who lives and works in China and travelled to Europe end of January 2020, I was forced to stay in Berlin and could not return to China, due to the COVID-19 outbreak. In late February 2020, I was on my way back to China. While walking through the streets of Berlin I get the opportunity to pick up what people are talking about. The public media don’t miss making headlines to report the latest numbers. The coronavirus has arrived in Europe and at that time was already spreading in Germany. By mid-April 2020 the numbers of infected people in Germany had surpassed those in China and end of April Germany had 157,700 and China 84,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19. By June 12 those numbers increased to 186,691 infections and 8772 deaths in Germany and 84,216 infections and 4,638 deaths in China.
While in Berlin, I had witnessed a pedestrian shouting at two Asian-looking teenagers: “You Chinese Corona Scum”. A few weeks later, in China, the fear of re-imported cases grew and similar discriminatory expressions against foreigners in China had been reported by the German consulate in Guangzhou. Simple-minded thoughts associate the infectious disease to ethnicity, although the virus makes no such distinction.
Still in Germany on a train from Berlin to Düsseldorf airport, train passengers exchange the latest news about the novel Coronavirus. More cases were confirmed in days that went by. Important events like the International Tourism Exhibition in Berlin (ITB) had been cancelled and more COVID-19 cases were being confirmed daily. The same train passengers who just discussed the infectiousness of the virus, left the train, flocked to the elevator and squeezed in tightly, instead of taking the stairs. Despite just having discussed an infectious health emergency and the need for keeping distance, their social behavior didn’t change.
Maybe the virus has arrived in Europe and in the brains of people, but it hasn’t yet led to a change of group behavior. It seems as if the knowledge of the virus is insufficient to create a new reality and respective social behavioral change. If there isn’t a rule for it, which is in use, it can’t be real. People seem to be creating an imaginary distance between an inconvenient truth and the reality they feel comfortable with and are unwilling to give up for a new one. This process of changing behavioral rules, like social distancing, was then discussed for weeks among German politicians and the public and as the numbers of infections grew, the rules became stricter. While in February and March the wearing of masks in public was still officially described as being ineffective and unnecessary by Germany’s Chancellor, Minister of Health, the country’s top virologist and other authorities, by end of April, it was obligatory for all to wear a mask in public.
How can this strange behavior of people and politicians be explained? It seems that people’s knowledge about something in one moment is not taken into account by their actions in the next moment. It takes time to change behavior and it needs to be based on rules. Knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient reason for behavioral change. It is not that people are not intelligent enough, rather individual intelligence is not enough for changing social behavior. Maybe people want the freedom to choose over their own health, however, when individual freedoms impact those of others, we are treading a thin line between individual freedom and social change.
The virus has no intention. It has evolved from environmental circumstances created by people and simply does what it does best: it looks for a new host for reproduction. By doing so it coincidentally is also taking people’s freedom to choose how to put their own health at risk. Smoking or eating unhealthy food is a choice we make by trading off health against pleasure. It is the freedom of choice by trading off health with pleasure, which every smoker makes every time lighting a cigarette. The danger of the new virus, it’s infectiousness, potential deadliness and the fear of a collapse of the healthcare system, prevents people from making that choice.
At my next transfer airport in Frankfurt, no one is wearing a mask. Neither the immigration officers, the police, the airport staff, nor the crew, nobody, except for specific people coming from or going to China. Independent from the question of how effective it is to wear a mask, it is an indication of people’s conscious response to a new, potentially life-threatening reality. Wearing a simple mask may be insufficient for protection against a virus, however it is also a passive protection of others. Thereby it becomes a symbol of not only caring about one’s own health but also of that of other’s. Although the protection effectiveness may be low, above all, wearing the mask is a statement of respecting other people’s health, independent of whether a person is infected or not. Those who do not wear it seem to be silently saying “I am healthy”, making others look like “they are not”. Thereby, wearing a mask when the majority doesn’t, can be misconceived as a stigma.
The virus uncovers these human and societal peculiarities and also opens a political pandora box. Taiwan, largely sidelined by the World Health Organization (WHO), stands out as a country which, according to earlier (than late February) predictions should have been affected more seriously, but hasn’t. Most likely that is due to the fact that authorities and experts reacted fast and took rapid measures, instead of punishing early warnings by medical doctors for spreading rumors and instead of blaming another for mismanagement. South Korea was similarly successful. Not only rapid response is critical to mitigate the spread of an infectious diseases, also early response and precaution. If information flows are constrained, controlled and censored, obviously it takes time to process this information and decide whether someone is spreading rumors or giving early warnings based on expertise and facts.
The virus has tested the responsiveness of different political systems. It has become obvious that leadership, authority and responsiveness is necessary for reacting rapidly and freedom is required for information, data and knowledge to reach decision-makers and people. The combination of both is what Duit and Galaz (2008) have referred to as a robust type governance of complexity. In this emergency situation a society needs to react collectively. Some valued personal freedoms need to be sacrificed for the sake of public health, while information about the transmission behavior of the virus needs to flow freely. The right mix of freedom versus constraints seems essential for a successful containment and robust governence of a pandemic like COVID-19.
What seems to matter is that people act on the basis of the knowledge available and that information can flow in order to create the knowledge we need to act appropriately in response. We have termed this circular flow of information, the “data metabolism” of a society: Data is transformed into knowledge and knowledge into action and the action in response to an event creates further data on the basis of which new action is performed. Between knowing what to do and doing it, is a filter of societal rules. If behavioral change needs to happen fast, this layer of rules needs to be in place before an emergency occurs. It is in essence a learning cycle. Regardless of cultural, political or ethnic differences, we can only improve our collective learning and response towards a virus as infectious as COVID-19 if we make such learning cycles work and thereby improve society’s collective intelligence.
Manasi:
We now change perspective. As a psychologist I take a closer look at the psychology of the human behavior which Franz has described above and suggest addressing the issues under the following themes:
Transformational leadership
Opportunity to address pending public health issues
Rapid social policy response
Acknowledging individual freedoms while prioritizing social responsibility
Destigmatization
Transformational Leadership. Transformational leadership is defined as a leadership approach that generates change in individuals and social systems. It helps in developing capabilities at individual and systems level. It is open to accepting vulnerabilities and offering timely strategies/interventions for collective behavioral change. Contrary to the responses of the key global players, this leadership style enables development of person-centered and inclusive style of relating to public and one’s key constituents. Racist and xenophobic stereotyping (this is “Chinese virus”, “came from Asian people”, etc., African countries are “shit hole countries”) are actively steered away from. This leadership style also allows championing of evidence based and historically annotated, scientifically, rationally, and ethically sound arguments and decisions to be made. Concerns on distributive and social justice are at the heart of political decisions.
A transformational leadership would gather public opinion in favour of promoting collective well-being and not succumb to narrow and short-term political gains. It would allow champions at different cadres of policy, social advocacy, science and economics to lead the way than become a unilateral decision-making force.
Opportunity to address adverse social determinants of health. COVID-19 has thrown open numerous challenges decision makers would encounter around unaddressed public health issues namely sanitation, drinking water access, access to services, safe and minimum housing and education opportunities. The current health crisis is also an opportunity to address these issues. In countries and communities where these issues remain marginalized by local decision makers and actors, COVID-19 has created even more severe rifts and fissures that are hard to be filled. In addressing this pandemic there is a silver lining to find ways to address disparities that the first section of our essay talks about.
Transforming racial, gender, and class related disparities into success stories of community mobilization and awareness building would be critical. For example, the early COVID-19 days politics of masks where Asian origin travelers wore masks as though trying to protect us all from the spread that was coming from them.
How COVID-19 associated social isolation and lock down impacts the most vulnerable and how it impacts services and functioning for those who are most vulnerable needs to shift into the focus of attention as well. Discussion in the UK around the disproportionate burden of deaths amongst general population as well as frontline workers being those from ethnic minorities and people of color is a stark reality. As a psychologist who lives and works in Africa, let alone treatment and management problems, there are not enough masks or other personal protective equipment (PPE) available.
A rapid adapted social policy response towards multisectoral collaboration and timely Information flow from key political leadership are critical to the development of a well-buffed up response. How rapidly social policies and governance mechanisms are tweaked to respond to the pandemic is critical.
One of the arguments we are making is that when an optimal social response is made which tries to create a social space, prioritize the most marginalized and offer a space for people to utilize their capabilities to best act to prevent severe socioeconomic debilities. The consistency with which public health messages are communicated and complied by from the highest to lowest levels of governmentality and civil society is critical. In that regard, being scared and nervous about the corona virus, smoking or taking elevators avoiding the challenge of extra physical strain of using stairs in the airport or public places, is interesting. In several presidential press briefings at global level we can notice the discordance between the divisive and narrow messages of highest-ranking officials of the country and what the science or social policy needs, given the morbidity and mortality around this pandemic.
Key information and responses from leadership within the US, Brazil, and India have been worrisome. The hiatus between political responsibility and the need to provide socio-economic measures and the need to prioritize medical and behavioral interventions for the more vulnerable has been noticeable in some of these countries where the wrath and the might of this pandemic has not been fully understood.
Acknowledging individual freedom while prioritizing social responsibility. There is also a political and ethical stance we have in relation to responding to this pandemic. If countries and political regimes can action a response without curbing and violating human rights and dignity, strengthening their own ability to communicate well and in time-limited manner, using science and not propaganda, not only can we tackle the virus, also health, racial and social disparities that wreak havoc no less than any pandemic on any single day.
We need a polis and civility that have the ability to stir human and collective capability in a unified and proactive manner. Individuals who are not subjects of biases of all sorts but who choose to act and think rationally and responsibly, both consistently to make an impact. A polis that doesn’t suppress the voices of its people but allows opportunity to relay their concerns and become a participant in active public action.
We also know that despite the grave mortality and pain this pandemic has caused, there is a silver lining around the relief to the environment through reduction of invasive human activity footprint. Animals and ecosystems around the globe must feel lighter, freer, and more alive with all of us tucked inside. This relief would not have been possible without a pandemic of this scale. There are many issues that would beg the question of collective might and responsibility such as how many people live and die in abject poverty without any pandemic, how many people die of suicides and mental ill health, how many people in the world never have access to clean water, sanitation or even basic medical services. We have to return to these questions as we tackle COVID-19.
Destigmatization. Destigmatizing people is another issue we want to tackle head on in the context of COVID-19. It is not people of Chinese origin (or all those who “look Chinese” in the unfortunate ignorant world we inhabit), people who are living in less sanitized environments or those who are involved in serving patients, from whom we need to maintain a distance. It is also critical to address the full import of intersectional stigma. In some parts of the world, especially in India, where nurses and doctors were beaten up and actively ostracized due to their involvement with COVID-19 patient care. In Wuhan by contrast, severe police atrocities accompanied such as punitively locking affected families from coming out of their homes, or physically and roughly removing family members from COVID-19 patients was seen. In many parts of Kenya, a day or two after the lockdown severe police atrocities were reported by people who were returning from work or caught unawares about the lockdown.
We have to also work towards providing services and looking after people with multi-morbidities such as those with HIV, disability, elderly, and those in challenging situations of life such as poor women about to deliver babies. Stigma can easily be attributed to those who do not live in sanitary conditions, where as in reality the people who may have spread the virus inadvertently were global travelers and clearly better resourced people. In this sense this virus is a greater leveler. It will affect good and bad, rich and poor, high and low cadre equally. We know that stigma mitigation needs strong institutional responses. We also know that those in power and in public offices can show sensitivity and awareness in tackling these stereotypes and biases we uphold without cross-checking facts or reality. In addition, we need people to be aware of their unconscious biases that trigger further injustice and disparity. The pandemic is offering us an opportunity to think through this and make fundamental transformational changes—not just to respond better during the next pandemic but also to improve general societal grievances.
What facilitates human behavior in response to environmental change are institutions and the informal and formal rules, values, and norms a society puts in place to regulated interactions among people and in response to changing environments. In times of public health emergencies, institutions need to be in place, which keep data and information flowing but at the same time constrain certain freedoms and change business as usual. So that an early and rapid collective response is possible, by means of which the spread of an infectious disease can be slowed and contained. People’s fears and prejudices, largely due to a lack of knowledge, need to be taken serious and taken away by knowledge dissemination on how the virus spreads and how its spread can be prevented or slowed. Fears of loosing freedoms are also caused by mistrust in a political leadership which has allowed social inequalities to emerge. Regaining trust in political institutions and leaders is an enormous societal task which requires transparency, communication and shared rights and responsibilities in society. New forms of democracy must be actively created which are beyond either the market or the state.
Together:
With COVID-19 the world has hopefully woken up and noticed how much local and global institutional structures, legal and ethical instruments, checks and balances have been purposefully weakened or made ineffective and economic, political and social imbalances and inequalities have been created. Robust governance must find new paths from treading the thin line between individual freedom and social change towards newly transformed societies, preparing themselves for global collective action.
COVID-19 is a stark reminder that the world around us has drastically changed. In the Anthropocene we need to think and act differently. Our thinking needs to be more ecocentric and less anthropocentric. Our behaviors need to be more social and less ego-centric. We need to overcome our fears of others and avoid looking for simple causes for a very complex world in which we now live, because if we do not think and act together, we all lose. We now know how positive and powerful individual behavioral change can be, even it has involuntarily been imposed on us. The planet is taking a breath from us not traveling around the world to the next business meeting, for example.
At this time our plea may sound confusing but it is critical to begin this new interconnected thinking and to give voice to science, rights based advocates, civil society actors and find ways of addressing needs of the most vulnerable for whom this pandemic is not only about their health but also their economic survival.
Franz Gatzweiler and Manasi Kumar
Xiamen and Nairobi
Duit, A and Galaz, V 2008. Governance and Complexity—Emerging Issues for Governance Theory, Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions21(3): 311–335
Manasi Kumar lectures at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. She works on disparities in health systems in lower and middle income countries with a focus on mental health systems strengthening and maternal, child and adolescent mental health research.
We urge urban forestry advocates to not forget about the suburbs when planning tree planting actions to increase tree equality. Suburban neighborhoods that are low-income or with many people of color may be important places to focus efforts to increase tree canopy if we are to aim for a city in which all households have adequate nature nearby.
Urban trees and their canopy cover provide many benefits for urban residents, reducing air pollutant concentrations, mitigating stormwater runoff, maintaining water quality, encouraging physical recreation, and improving mental health. But just as urban ecologists are quantifying more and more benefits of urban trees for health, other research increasingly shows that tree cover is unequally distributed in many cities, with low-income neighborhoods and minority communities often having less tree cover. These patterns have been found both within the United States and in other nations, with many studies quantifying tree inequality for case study cities or for sets of cities.
My colleagues and I recently published a paper mapping tree inequality across the United States, to answer some simple questions: How widespread tree inequality? Where is it worst?
We measured the extent of tree cover inequality and its effect on temperatures for almost 6,000 communities across the United States. We were able to use open-source cloud computing on the Google Earth Engine Platform to map tree cover and summer surface temperatures at a 2m resolution, overlaying this information with US Census data on income, race, and ethnicity.
Tree inequality was ubiquitous. In 92% of US cities, low-income neighborhoods have less tree cover than high-income neighborhoods. The rich have, on average, about 15% more tree cover and live in neighborhoods that are around 1.5⁰C coolerthan the poor. This trend extends to race as well: in 67% of US communities, people of color (POC) neighborhoods have less tree cover than white neighborhoods, even after accounting for trends in income.Perhaps not surprisingly, we found that the gradient from urban to suburban is correlated with tree cover. In most American cities, richer, predominately white households have fled to the suburbs, which have a lower percentage of their area covered with impervious surfaces and more space for trees. Conversely, low-income and POC households are still predominately in city centers, which have a higher percentage of their area covered with impervious surfaces and thus less space for trees. There are, of course, exceptions to this trend (for instance, many neighborhoods in Manhattan are dense, rich, predominately white, and have a lower tree cover than the other boroughs of New York City), but in general one reason low-income households have less tree cover is that they live in denser neighborhoods than high-income households. There are, of course, many other reasons for tree inequality that other scholars have pointed out, such as historical patterns of de jure segregation, redlining practices, and other explicitly or implicitly racist decisions.
What is perhaps more interesting for readers of TNOC is the question of where tree inequality is the worst. When you compare neighborhoods at the same population density, you find that there is still a clear effect of income and race. High-income and white neighborhoods have more tree cover than equivalently dense low-income and POC neighborhoods. Surprisingly (at least to us!), the inequality in tree cover is greater in low-density neighborhoods than in high-density neighborhoods. For instance, for neighborhoods in the Very Low population density category (below 2000 people per square km), which is typically single family homes on large lots in suburban style developments, there was a gap of 7.5% in tree cover between high- and low-income areas. In the Moderate density category (4,000-8,000 people per square kilometer), there was only a gap of 1.9% tree cover. And for the High Density category (>8000 square kilometers), the trend is actually revered: low-income neighborhoods have slightly more (1.5%) tree cover than high income neighborhoods do.
Tree cover as a function of income. We classified census blocks based upon the income distribution within its urbanized area, calculating the percentile of the income distribution that block has. For ease of display, blocks were grouped into income categories (0-5%, 5-10%, etc.) and the population-weighted median tree cover (%) across the entire study area calculated. Averaging across all urbanized areas, the least affluent quartile of census blocks (red squares) had a median tree cover of 19.7%, while the most affluent quartile (green triangles) had a median tree cover of 34.9%.
Why then does tree inequality look stronger in the suburbs than in city centers? There are at least two possible reasons. The first is a technical/statistical reason. In low-density neighborhoods, there is a greater fraction of the neighborhood that is not impervious surface cover, and so there are lots of places where trees could in principle be planted. There means there is a large range of observed forest cover, from 0% to above 50% in some neighborhoods. Conversely, in high-density neighborhoods, a greater fraction of the land is impervious, so that is a limit to how many trees could in principle be planted. This means there is a small range of observed forest cover, from 0% to around 10%. This limited range makes it more likely the difference in tree cover between rich and poor neighborhoods will be smaller.
The second is causal reason. Commonly, in the urban core where people live at high density, a greater fraction of the land area is in public ownership, either as parks or as part of the road right of way, as compared to lower density blocks in the suburbs or in rural areas. While there certainly have been recorded cases of differences in municipal investment in public tree planting between rich and poor neighborhoods, whether through discrimination or just through neglect, much of the urban tree cover is the result of public sector management choices. To the degree cities have programs that are supplying this public good (urban tree cover), they may be trying to equalize tree cover provision between neighborhoods. Conversely in the suburbs and exurbs, a greater fraction of the land area is under private ownership than in higher density blocks. Thus, tree cover in the suburbs is particularly shaped by the actions of private landowners. We speculate that low-income households may be less able to afford the cost, in money and time, of planting trees and maintaining them. Moreover, low-income households are more likely to be in rental units and are thus likely less involved in making decisions about land management. Owners of these rental units are primarily interested in reducing maintenance costs and thus may have less of an incentive to plant and maintain trees than the unit’s residents.
Whatever the reason for the trend toward greater tree inequality in the suburbs, we urge urban forestry advocates to not forget about the suburbs when planning tree planting actions to increase tree equality. Our research suggests that low-income and POC suburban neighborhoods may be an important place to focus efforts to increase tree canopy if we are to aim for a city in which all households have adequate nature nearby.
We need a rethink of the way cities are planned and built. That is why ecology, biology, and climatology are disciplines that have acquired a greater relevance in landscaping and the planning and design of urban open spaces.
The functions of today’s green are defined mainly by the needs that were conceived in the hygienist movement linked to the industrial city of the nineteenth century. Environmental pollution was the driving force behind public open spaces at that time, and at that time, the need for socialization and recreation was recognized. Today’s green space is heir to the industrial city, and although the need for clean air and social interaction continues, the environmental challenges facing cities in the 21st century involve reformulating the concept of green space.
Today’s urban green needs to be understood as an ecological infrastructure, which acts as a structuring element of the ecological functions needed in the city. It is fundamental in the reproduction of so many natural processes in the city: constituting corridors of connection with the natural habitats of the environment, increasing the degree of biological diversity and the auto-generative capacity of the ecosystem itself, as well as an important role in the prevention of the “heat island” effect, the resilience of cities to climate change, among others.
The functionality of green, in terms of urban infrastructure, refers to the possibility of assuming the urban green system as an instrument to attenuate and guide the urban development of the city, giving it a connotation of high environmental quality, in which the green infrastructure forms the structure. The reality is that the systemic approach of the territory must be translated into a systemic approach of the city, which forms part of the territory, in such a way that the city must be reconnected to the territorial biophysical matrix. That is why green spaces play a central role: to respond to ecological and environmental problems.
Another of the ideal conceptions of current green spaces is that they are intended to constitute a system, that is to say, that they are conceived as a communicated and continuous whole, where the set of the different pieces has more value than the simple sum.
The continuity of the green system is opposed to ghettoization. The city must incorporate green areas as part of its own fabric, and not as a good to be sought far from it. When configured in the urban fabric in the form of a complex network and related to the system of peri-urban open spaces, it represents an effective solution for the improvement of the urban ecosystem. In this sense, the urban green network assumes the connotations of a true and own infrastructure that, along with the others, assumes structural functions of the organization of the city.
Thus, the new green systems are built from the idea of recovering lost ecological connectivities, but also on the basis of each of the new spaces that can be established. A concept that goes hand in hand with an integral vision of the landscape, whether natural or human-made. This integral vision allows a better protection of the landscape through the introduction of corridors that link the urban space with the rural and forest. This initiative is evident in the planning of cities such as Amsterdam, Munich and Berlin.
Urban ecology and green infrastructure
Urban ecology proposes a different way of understanding the city, as an ecosystem. The idea of analyzing the city as a living system is nothing new, there is no notion of this concept since Patrick Geddes, considered the father of urban ecology, in 1904 with his “City developments”. But it was not until 1973 that the importance of urban ecosystem analysis was seriously recognized in UNESCO’s Man and Biosphere program.
To better understand the concept, reference is made first of all to the natural ecosystem, which is nothing more than a set of biotic and abiotic elements that interrelate with each other, producing flows of matter and energy between them. Biotic elements (living beings) need to degrade energy and materials to stay alive, but in natural ecosystems it is only plants that have the possibility of regenerating this energy through photosynthesis.
The following is a brief summary of the characteristics of the city that are derived from urban ecology:
Cities do not produce any of the resources they consume and need to exploit other ecosystems in order to function. This is why, from the point of view of ecological productivity, the urban ecosystem is considered a heterotropic system (Naredo and Rueda, 1998), which feeds on others, depending on other natural and agricultural ecosystems that are often found at great distances from the city.
In the city, most of the flow of resources that it imports to function—matter, energy and information—is done horizontally (through transport systems such as railways, highways, energy networks), unlike natural ecosystems that do so, in most cases, vertically. In other words, the metabolism of cities is linear (Rueda, 1999). Dependent on fossil fuel and emitter of greenhouse gases
The resources (matter, water and energy) once consumed and metabolized in the city, are returned to the ecological system in the form of solid (waste), liquid (wastewater), and gaseous (air pollution) pollution.
In urban areas the “natural” conditions of a territory are transformed, from the soil and subsoil, altering the water permeability, the reduction of the vegetal layer, the climate etc. Giving rise to altered natural processes, which therefore will no longer be altered, becoming ecological processes proper to the urban system.
The alteration caused by cities on natural ecosystems can be felt through micro-climatic modifications and imbalances in natural cycles, mainly carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen (N), carbon monoxide (CO), sulphur dioxide (SO2), ozone (O3), the natural water cycle. These alterations caused by the city are collected by the following areas of environmental action:
Atmosphere. The atmospheric affectation is characterized mainly by the increase of the environmental pollution, pollution, especially increase of the emissions of CO2 and CO, linked to the consumption of fossil fuels. This is closely related to the model of a city dependent on transport networks to obtain the resources it needs and to function internally. At the same time, nitrogen dioxide (NO2), produced by combustion in motor vehicles and power plants, when reacting with volatile organic compounds, such as hydrocarbon gases, in the presence of abundant sunlight, generates tropospheric ozone (O3), which is why there will be higher ozone concentrations when solar radiation is more intense, in the case of Panama, this would occur mainly during the dry season. It should be noted that ozone causes health problems ranging from eye irritations, nostrils, bronchial tubes and lung infections.
Water cycle. Cities affect the water cycle through the extraction of water in natural spaces, and water pollution, causing alteration of natural aquifers, and generating floods in the urban environment, due to the lack of vegetation cover in the city, increasing surface runoffs.
Energy. The high consumption of energy in the city contributes to the exhaustion of non-renewable energies, which in turn increases greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to climate change. At the same time, the phenomenon (heat island effect), generated by urban models of the high density of constructions and heat accumulating materials (concrete, asphalt, etc.), raises the urban temperature.
Finally, energy combustion also releases other substances that contribute to air pollution by deteriorating air quality.
Biodiversity. The urbanized space has usually led to the loss of a natural land cover, in not a few cases this translates into loss of habitat for fauna and flora. In addition, cities represent an interruption of the territory’s ecological connections, making it difficult in both cases to conserve biodiversity.
Cities form complex systems in which numerous relationships and exchanges of matter and energy take place, but at the same time they are the main exploiters of natural ecosystems and their connections extend over the entire planet, being responsible for global entropic growth. In such a way that the cities have become parasites of the environment, consuming resources and at the same time contaminating the ecological systems that in turn deteriorate the habitability of the city itself. In this scenario, it is evident the need for structural changes in urban spaces, in different areas. One of them is the reconversion of urban vegetation in such a way that it responds, not to all of them, but to several of the urban environmental problems and future challenges.
The role of tree planting in the construction of green urban infrastructure
How can vegetation and green spaces respond to the ecological and environmental problems of the city, and provide solutions to achieve an environmentally balanced urban planning? The new approaches to nature in the city are no longer limited to a pleasant space and ornamental vegetation, now are priority objectives ranging from the habitability of open spaces for the population, the importance of spatial continuity within the city, habitat for biodiversity and climate change.
Water cycle
The water cycle when entering the urban system suffers a series of alterations that translate into environmental impacts and hydrological risks, which can be prevented or mitigated with various tree planting strategies. On the one hand, excessive urban water consumption prevents the long-term protection of water resources and, on the other hand, the rainfall regime is changing due to climate change. Extreme events alternate, droughts and high intensity torrential rains are expected to become more frequent, as global temperatures continue to rise. As a result, the risk of droughts and floods increases.
This translates into the promotion of sustainable water consumption, which in terms of green infrastructure implies the use of vegetation adapted to the climate, so that during the dry season irrigation is not required. At the same time, rainwater in an impermeable environment such as an urban one conflicts with the water network that naturally crosses urban areas, which as a whole represents a risk of flooding. Therefore, an urban policy of green infrastructure must be aimed at the recovery of the banks of urban rivers, mainly with the planting of riverside tree vegetation, and also the increase of the vegetated surface within the urban fabric. The creation of urban forests is essential to control erosion and protect the water network of cities.
Every year, floods cause considerable damage in urban areas.
Green infrastructure can contribute to rainwater management, absorbing water in a greater percentage of vegetated surface, through controlled and designed temporary flooding systems of squares (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2016), or systems of bio-retention of rainwater, turning these into fundamental equipment in the design of squares, urban and periurban parks, and even in green cords of public roads. At the same time, tree-planting not only helps to absorb rainwater, but also controls runoff at source, reducing erosion and pollution in water courses (Vargas et al 2008).
The conservation of gallery forests and the maintenance of banks of rivers free of construction are fundamental strategies in the constitution of a green infrastructure that prevents floods. Photo: Graciela Arosemena. Former Clayton Fort, Ex-Canal Zone (Panama).
Implications for improving air quality
City trees can reduce some air pollutants. Pollution is reduced directly when dust and smoke particles are trapped in vegetation. In addition, plants absorb toxic gases, especially those caused by the combustion of motor vehicles.
At the same time, high temperatures accelerate the formation of pollution, such as tropospheric ozone (O3). In this sense, the moderating effect of vegetation, especially trees, can reduce temperatures and in turn reduce the formation of pollutants. Recently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recognized that arborization is a measure to reduce O3.
Carbon dioxide is another air pollutant that contributes to climate change. Urban arborization can reduce CO2 levels by capturing the gas through its leaves with photosynthesis, and sequestering CO2 in the trunk, branches and roots while it is growing; in addition, regulation of the urban microclimate reduces extreme temperatures and reduces the energy consumption associated with air conditioners. (Sorensen, Barzetti, Keipi, & Williams, 1998).
Trees extract pollutants in two main ways:
They incorporate gases and pollutants through the stomata of their leaves. The gases enter the interior of the leaves, where there is a lot of water. Many gases dissolve and change state.
They capture particles on the surface of the leaves.
Ideally, the tree should have many leaves and be large in size.
They absorb polluting gases (e.g. NO2, SO2), intercept PM10 (dust, ash, dust and smoke).
In a study of urban forests in Honolulu (Hawaii), it found that 43,817 trees in the city remove about 9 tons of air pollutants, an environmental service estimated at $47, 365.00 dollars (Vargas, McPherson, Peper, & Et. al., 2007).
Thus, when choosing tree species to be located in urban open spaces, consideration should be given to the morphological characteristics that are most suitable for the functions of absorption of polluting gases, or for the prevention of ozone formation. Ornamental aspects are thus left in the background.
Road trees are essential to keep the passage of automobiles shaded and to prevent pollutants such as NO and non-metallic hydrocarbons from mobile sources (automobiles) from becoming ozone due to the action of solar radiation. Photo: Graciela Arosemena
Climate regulation and resilience to climate change
One of the main issues facing urban societies in the 21st century is how to curb their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the already present effects of climate change. In Panama, for example, one of the effects associated with climate change is the increase in absolute temperature, which could increase by between 1 and 3ºC during the months with the highest temperatures: April and May (CATHALAC, 2008). And absolute maximum temperature events above 38ºC would be exceeded by 2020. (CATHALAC, 2008).
In cities with hot climates, extreme temperature episodes are expected to be more severe due to adverse baseline conditions associated with the ‘urban heat island’ effect (UN-HABITAT, 2011). A problem generated by the high density of constructions and heat accumulating materials (concrete, asphalt, etc.), by the concentration of anthropogenic heat generating activities (traffic, air conditioning, etc.). In fact, according to the climate change vulnerability maps of the different ecological units in Panama, in terms of temperature, the Pacific Metropolitan Area (Panama) has a high average vulnerability to changes in temperature increase (Tremblay & Ross, 2007).
Bearing in mind that the temperature increase of 1ºC implies an increase in energy consumption in air conditioning of between 3 and 4%, and can reach up to 10%, energy consumption could increase up to 30% with an increase in temperature of 3ºC.
In order to mitigate the effects of the heat island and reduce high energy consumption it is essential to plan the woodland as a natural climate for the urban microclimate.
Key environmental variables for human thermal comfort include solar radiation, urban surface temperature, air temperature, humidity and wind speed. Research has shown that urban tree planting can improve these environmental variables through the prevention of solar radiation and the reduction of heating of building surfaces, combined with the effect of reducing air temperature through evapotranspiration. (Akbari & et al., 1992) (Simpson & McPherson, 1996); (Georgi & Zafiriadis, 2006). In short, urban woodland intervenes in the modification of the climate in warm zones, mainly in the following three effects (Akbari H., 2002):
Shading: The treetops intercept solar radiation, preventing the heating of buildings, asphalt and pavements.
Evapotranspiration: The transpiration of the leaves requires heat energy captured from the environment, producing a decrease in the temperature in the environment.
The treetops generate a protective screen against solar radiation, minimising the heat island effect in cities. Photo: Graciela Arosemena.
The capacity of trees to modify the urban climate, above all to reduce high temperatures, depends fundamentally on the degree of tree cover, i.e. the percentage of urban surface located under the projection of the tree tops, as well as the type and density of the tops. On the refreshing effect of vegetation in urban environments, it has been reported that measurements made in different cities of the North, such as the study carried out in the Berlin Zoo (Hoerbert, 1982). In this study the temperature differences were 5-7°C and the relative humidity varied 10% and reported variations between 3 and 8 ºC for different compositions and species of trees, the measurements were also made at different times of the year.
Measurements on the effect of shadows have been made in studies where design, building typologies, landscape and climates were assessed, they found that energy savings would be around 25% to 80%. The greatest savings were associated with the density and extent of shadows, solar radiation being the largest source of heat gain (Simpson & McPherson, 1996).
Conservation of biodiversity and natural heritage
From an environmental point of view, urban open spaces, in addition to exercising functions of climate control or filtering atmospheric pollution, among others, must guarantee the conservation of biological diversity and a permeability that allows ecological connections, maintaining environmental and landscape values.
Cities can play a fundamental role in the conservation of biodiversity through strategies that include the introduction of ecosystems and habitats into the urban fabric, or the preservation of pre-existing ones, as well as the creation of continuous urban green spaces that guarantee biological connectivity and control territorial fragmentation (Generalitat de Catalunya, 2003). A fundamental objective of this is to establish as the backbone of the territory a continuous network of natural spaces that crosses the city and connects peri-urban natural spaces with urban natural spaces.
The need to increase the nature of the city and strengthen the connections between the city and its surroundings is evident, and one of the key pieces for achieving this are the urban tree planting strategies, aimed at effectively providing habitat for species of birds, mainly mammals. Trees provide habitat, shelter and food for local fauna. In order to guarantee an arborization that restores the ecological biodiversity in the cities, it is necessary to choose native plant species, which are the ones to which the fauna is accustomed. In fact, the use of exotic species is one of the direct causes of threat to biodiversity and ecosystem conservation, along with habitat destruction (Aguirre Muñoz & Mendoza Alfaro).
On the contrary, native tree species in urban environments provide food for fauna, which would be reduced or absent in the case of exotic trees. In addition, native trees increase the richness and diversity of fauna, so an important strategy of urban arborization is the recognition which native species of trees are habitat of certain fauna, in order to establish a biodiverse habitat in the urban environment.
Metropolitan Natural Park, in the middle of Panama City. Humid forest to dry tropical biodiversity reserve that provides environmental services such as sponge rainwater and sink of pollutant gases. For all these functions, it should be considered a green infrastructure facility of the city. Photo: Graciela Arosemena.
A new model of urban open spaces
The impact that local and global environmental problems are having on urban environments is unprecedented in urban history, and this calls not only for a rethink of the way cities are planned and built, but also for a new approach to the system of free and green urban spaces. That is why ecology, biology, and climatology are disciplines that have acquired a greater relevance in landscaping and the planning and design of urban open spaces.
No city can meet the environmental challenges of the 21st century without considering the construction of ecological green infrastructure.
Akbari, & et al. (1992). Cooling our communities: A Guidebook to tree planting and light colored surfacing. .U.S.A EPA, Ofice of Policy Anallysis, Climate Change Division, Washington, D.C.
CATHALAC. (2008). Potential Impacts of Climate Change and Biodiversity in Central America, Mexico and Dominican Republic.
Georgi, N., & Zafiriadis, K. (2006). The Impact of trees on microclimate in urban areas. Urban Ecosyst .
Hoerbert, M. (1982). A climatic and air hygienic aspects in planning of iner-city open spaces: Berliner Grosser Tiergartes. Energy and Buildings, 5 (1).
Naredo, J. (1997). Sobre el origen, eluso y el contenido del término sostenible. Cuadernos de Guincho .
ONU-HABITAT. (2011). Informe mundial sobre asentamientos humanos. Las ciudades y el cambio climático: Orientación para polítcas. Londres: Earthscan.
Rueda, S (1995) Ecologia Urbana: Barcelona i la seva Regió Metropolitana com a referents. Ed. Beta Editoria
Simpson, J., & McPherson, E. (1996). Potential of tree shade for reducing residential energy use in California. Journal of Arboriculture (22).
Sorensen, M., Barzetti, V., Keipi, K., & Williams, J. (1998). Manejo de las áreas verdes urbanas. Documento de buenas prácticas. Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. División de Medio Ambiente del Departamento de Desarrollo Sostenible., Washington, D.C.
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La arborización en la infraestructura verde urbana
El impacto que están generando los problemas ambientales, locales y globales, sobre los entornos urbanos no tienen precedentes en la historia urbana. Es fundamental un nuevo planteamiento del sistema de espacios libres y verdes urbano. Es por ello que la ecología, biología y la climatología, son disciplinas que han adquirido una mayor relevencia en el paisajismo, en la planificación y diseño de espacios abiertos.
Las funciones del verde actual están definidas principalmente por las necesidades que fueron concebidas en el movimiento higienista vinculado a la ciudad industrial del siglo XIX. La contaminación ambiental fue el impulsor de los espacios abiertos públicos en aquel momento, y paralelamente, fue reconocida la necesidad de socialización y recreación. El espacio verde actual es heredero de la ciudad industrial, y aunque la necesidad de aire limpio e interacción social continúan vigentes, los retos ambientales – a los que se enfrentan las ciudades en el siglo XXI, implican reformular el concepto de espacio verde.
El verde urbano en la actualidad requiere ser entendido como una infraestructura ecológica, que actúa como elemento vertebrador de las funciones ecológicas necesarias en la ciudad. Es fundamental en la reproducción de tantos procesos naturales en la ciudad: constituyendo corredores de conexión con los hàbitats naturales del entorno, incrementando el grado de diversidad biológica y la capacidad auto generativa del ecosistema mismo, así como un importante papel en la prevención del efecto “isla de calor”, la resiliencia de las ciudades al cambio climático, entre otros.
La funcionalidad del verde, en términos de infraestructura urbana, se refiere a la posibilidad de asumir el sistema verde urbano como instrumento para atenuar y orientar el desarrollo urbanístico de la ciudad, imprimiendo a este una connotación de elevada calidad ambiental, en la cual la infraestructura verde conforma la estructura.
La realidad es que la aproximación sistémica del territorio se debe traducir en una aproximación sistémica de la ciudad, que forma parte del territorio, de tal forma que la ciudad debe ser reconectada a la matriz biofísica territorial. Por eso los espacios verdes, desempeñan un papel capital: responder a los problemas ecológicos y ambientales.
Otra de las concepciones ideales de los espacios verdes actuales es que se pretende que constituyan un sistema, esto es, que se conciban como un todo comunicado y continuo, donde el conjunto de las distintas piezas tenga más valor que la simple suma.
La continuidad del sistema verde se opone a la guetización. La ciudad debe incorporar las áreas verdes como parte de su propio tejido, y no como un bien que hay que buscar lejos de él. Cuando se configura en el tejido urbano en forma de red compleja y se relaciona al sistema de los espacios abiertos periurbanos, representa una solución eficaz para el mejoramiento del ecosistema urbano.
En este sentido, la red verde urbana asume las connotaciones de una verdadera y propia infraestructura que, a la par de las otras, asume funciones estructurales de la organización de la ciudad.
Así, los nuevos sistemas verdes se construyen desde la idea de recuperar las conectividades ecológicas perdidas, pero también sobre la base de cada uno de los nuevos espacios que se pueden establecer. Concepto que va de la mano de la visión integral del paisaje, ya sea natural o antropizado. Esta visión integral permite una mejor protección del paisaje a través de la introducción de corredores que vinculen el espacio urbano con el rural y forestal. Esta iniciativa se hace evidente en la planificación de ciudades como Ámsterdam, Múnich y Berlín.
Ecología urbana e infraestructura verde
La ecología urbana plantea una forma distinta de comprender la ciudad, como un ecosistema. No es nada nueva la idea de analizar la ciudad como un sistema vivo, se tiene noción de este concepto desde Patrick Geddes, considerado el padre de la ecología urbana, en 1904 con su “City developments”. Pero no fue hasta el año 1973 cuando fue reconocida seriamente la importancia del análisis del ecosistema urbano en el programa Man and Biosphere de la UNESCO.
Para comprender mejor el concepto, se hace referencia primeramente al ecosistema natural, el cual no es más que un conjunto de elementos bióticos y abióticos que interrelacionan entre sí, produciéndose entre ellos flujos de materia y energía. Los elementos bióticos (los seres vivos), necesitan degradar energía y materiales para mantenerse vivos, pero en los ecosistemas naturales son únicamente las plantas quienes tienen la posibilidad de regenerar esta energía, a través de la fotosíntesis.
A continuación, se resumen brevemente cuáles son las características de la ciudad que se desprenden de la ecología urbana:
Las ciudades no producen ninguno de los recursos que consumen y necesitan explotar otros ecosistemas para poder funcionar. Es por ello que, desde el punto de vista de la productividad ecológica, el ecosistema urbano es considerado un sistema heterótrofo (Naredo, 1997; Rueda, 1995), – que se alimenta de otros -, al depender de otros ecosistemas naturales y agrícolas que muchas veces se encuentran a grandes distancias de la ciudad.
En la ciudad, la mayor parte del flujo de los recursos que importa para funcionar – materia, energía e información -, se realiza en sentido horizontal (a través de sistemas de transportes como el ferrocarril, autovías, redes de energía), a diferencia de los ecosistemas naturales que lo hacen, en la mayoría de los casos, de forma vertical. En otras palabras, el metabolismo de las ciudades es lineal (Rueda, 1999). Dependiente de combustible fósil y emisor de gases efecto invernadero
Los recursos (materia, agua y energía) una vez consumidos y metabolizados en la ciudad, son devueltos al sistema ecológico en forma de contaminación sólida (residuos), líquida (aguas residuales), y gaseosa (contaminación atmosférica).
En las zonas urbanas las condiciones “naturales” de un territorio son transformadas, desde el suelo y el subsuelo, alterando la permeabilidad hídrica, la reducción de la capa vegetal, el clima etc. Dando lugar a procesos naturales alterados, que por tanto ya no lo serán más, pasando a ser procesos ecológicos propios del sistema urbano.
La alteración provocada por las ciudades sobre los ecosistemas naturales se pueden palpar a través modificaciones micro climáticas y de los desequilibrios en los ciclos naturales, principalmente del dióxido de carbono (CO2 ), del nitrógeno (N), monóxido de carbono (CO), dióxido de azufre (SO2), ozono (O3), el ciclo natural del agua. Estas alteraciones ocasionadas por la ciudad son recogidas por los siguientes ámbitos de acción ambiental:
Atmósfera. La afectación atmosférica se caracteriza principalmente por el aumento de la contaminación ambiental, polución, especialmente aumento de las emisiones de CO2 y CO, vinculados al consumo de combustibles fósiles. Esto está estrechamente relacionado con el modelo de ciudad dependiente de redes de transportes para obtener los recursos que necesita y para funcionar internamente. Paralelamente, el dióxido de nitrógeno (NO2), producido por la combustión en vehículos motorizados y plantas eléctricas, al reaccionar con compuestos orgánicos volátiles, como gases hidrocarburos, en presencia de abundante luz solar, genera ozono troposférico (O3), es por esto que habrá mayores concentraciones de ozono cuando la radiación solar es más intensa, en el caso de Panamá, esto ocurriría principalmente durante la estación seca. Cabe señalar que el ozono provoca problemas para la salud desde irritaciones en los ojos, fosas nasales, hasta bronquios e infecciones pulmonares.
Ciclo hídrico. Las ciudades inciden sobre el ciclo del agua a través de la extracción de agua en espacios naturales, y la contaminación de las aguas, provocando alteración de acuíferos naturales, y generando en el medio urbanizado inundaciones, debido la falta de cobertura vegetal en la ciudad, aumentando escorrentías superficiales.
Ámbito energético. El alto consumo de energía en la ciudad contribuye al agotamiento de energías no renovables, que a su vez aumenta emisiones de gases efecto invernadero, contribuyendo al cambio climático.
Paralelamente el fenómeno (efecto de ‘isla de calor’), generado por modelos urbanos de la alta densidad de construcciones y materiales acumuladores de calor (hormigón, asfalto, etc.), eleva la temperatura urbana.
Por último, la combustión energética además libera otras sustancias que contribuyen a la contaminación atmosférica deteriorando la calidad del aire.
Biodiversidad. El espacio urbanizado, usualmente ha conllevado la pérdida de una cobertura de suelo natural, en no pocos casos ello se traduce en pérdida de hábitat de fauna y flora. Además, las ciudades representan una interrupción de las conexiones ecológicas del territorio, dificultando en ambos casos la conservación de la biodiversidad.
Las ciudades forman sistemas complejos en las cuales se producen numerosas relaciones e intercambios de materia y energía, pero a su vez son las principales explotadoras de los ecosistemas naturales y sus conexiones se extienden sobre todo el planeta, siendo responsables del crecimiento entrópico global.
De tal forma que las ciudades se han convertido en parásitos del entorno, consumiendo recursos y a su vez contaminando los sistemas ecológicos que a su vez deterioran la habitabilidad de la propia ciudad. En este escenario, es evidente la necesidad de cambios estructurales de los espacios urbanos, en diversos ámbitos. Uno de ellos es la reconversión de la vegetación urbana de forma tal que responda, no a todos, pero a varios de los problemas ambientales urbanos y los retos futuros.
El papel de la arborización en la construcción de la infraestructura verde urbana
¿Cómo la vegetación y los espacios verdes puede responder a los problemas ecológicos y ambientales de la ciudad, y dar soluciones para conseguir un planeamiento urbano ambientalmente equilibrado’. Los nuevos planteamientos de la naturaleza en la ciudad ya no se limitan a un espacioagradable y con vegetación ornamental, ahora son prioritarios objetivos que van desde
la habitabilidad de los espacios libres para la población, la importancia de la continuidad espacial dentro de la ciudad, hábitat para la biodiversidad y el cambio climático.
Ciclo del agua
El ciclo del agua al entrar en el sistema urbano sufre una serie de alteraciones que se traducen en impactos ambientales y en riesgos hidrológicos, que pueden ser prevenidos o mitigados con diversas estrategias de arborización. Por un lado, el consumo urbano desmedido de agua impide la protección a largo término de los recursos hídricos y, por otro lado, el régimen de precipitación pluvial se está modificando a causa del cambio climático. Los eventos extremos se van alternando, sequías y lluvias torrenciales de alta intensidad se espera que sean más frecuentes, toda vez que continúa aumentando la temperatura global. Como resultado, el riesgo de sequías y de inundaciones se incrementa.
Esto se traduce en la promoción del consumo sostenible de agua, lo que en términos de la infraestructura verde implica el uso de vegetación adaptada al clima, de tal forma que durante la estación seca no sea requerido el riego. Paralelamente el agua lluvia en un ambiente impermeable como el urbano, entra en conflicto con la red hídrica que naturalmente atraviesa las zonas urbanas, lo que en su conjunto representa un riesgo de inundación. Por lo que una política urbana de infraestructura verde debe estar encaminada a la recuperación de las riberas de los ríos urbanos, principalmente con la siembra de vegetación arbórea de ribera, y además el aumento de la superficie vegetada dentro del tejido urbano. La creación de bosques urbanos es fundamental para controlar la erosión y proteger la red hídrica de las ciudades.
Cada año, las inundaciones causan daños considerables en las zonas urbanas.
La infraestructura verde puede contribuir a gestionar el agua lluvia, absorbiendo agua en un mayor porcentaje de superficie vegetada, a través de sistemas inundación temporal controlada y diseñada de plazas (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2016), o sistemas de bio retención de agua lluvia, convirtiéndose estos en un equipamiento fundamental en el diseño de plazas, parques urbanos y periurbanos, e incluso en cordones verdes de las vías públicas. Paralelamente, la arborización además de contribuir a absorber el agua lluvia, controla la escorrentía en el origen, reduciendo erosión y contaminación en los cursos de agua (Vargas, McPherson, J, Simpson, Peper, Gardner, & Xiao, 2008).
La conservación de bosques de galería y el mantenimiento de márgenes de los ríos libres de edificación, son estrategias fundamentales en la constitución de una infraestructura verde que prevenga inundaciones. Foto: Graciela Arosemena. Antiguo Fuerte Clayton, Ex-Zona del Canal (Panamá).
Implicaciones en la mejora de la calidad del aire
Los árboles de la ciudad pueden reducir algunos contaminantes del aire. La contaminación se reduce directamente cuando las partículas de polvo y humo quedan atrapadas en la vegetación. Además, las plantas absorben gases tóxicos, especialmente aquellos originados por la combustión de vehículos motorizados.
Paralelamente, las altas temperaturas aceleran la formación de contaminación, como es el caso del ozono (O3) troposférico. En ese sentido el efecto moderador de la vegetación, especialmente de la arborización puede reducir las temperaturas y a su vez reducir la formación de contaminantes. Recientemente, la Agencia de Protección Ambiental de Estados Unidos (EPA), reconoció que la arborización es una medida para reducir el O3.
El dióxido de carbono es otro de los compuestos contaminantes del aire que contribuye al cambio climático. La arborización urbana puede reducir los niveles de CO2 mediante la captación del gas a través de sus hojas con la fotosíntesis, y el secuestro de CO2 en tronco, ramas y raíces mientras está creciendo; y además la regulación del microclima urbano reduce las temperaturas extremas y se reduce el consumo energético asociado a los aires acondicionados. (Sorensen, Barzetti, Keipi, & Williams, 1998).
Los árboles extraen contaminantes de dos formas principalmente:
Incorporan gases y contaminantes a través de las estomas de sus hojas. Los gases ingresan al interior de las hojas, donde hay mucha agua. Muchos gases se disuelven y cambian de estado.
Capturan partículas en la superficie de las hojas
Lo ideal es que el árbol tenga muchas hojas y sea de gran tamaño.
En un estudio sobre bosques urbanos en Honolulu (Hawaii), encontró que 43,817 árboles en la ciudad remueven cerca de 9 toneladas de contaminantes atmosféricos, un servicio ambiental estimado en $47, 365.00 dólares (Vargas, McPherson, Peper, & Et. al., 2007).
De forma tal que, en el momento de escoger las especies de árboles para ser ubicados en los espacios abiertos urbanos, deben considerarse las características morfológicas que sean más idóneas para las funciones de absorción de gases contaminantes, o para la prevención de formación de ozono. Los aspectos ornamentales quedan así en un segundo plano.
El arbolado viario es fundamental para mantener sombreado el paso de los automóviles y evitar que, por la acción de la radiación solar, los contaminantes como NO, y los hidrocarburos no metálicos, provenientes de fuentes móviles (automóviles), se transformen en ozono. Foto: Graciela Arosemena
Regulación del clima y resiliencia al cambio climático
Uno de los principales aspectos que deben afrontar las sociedades urbanas en el siglo XXI es cómo frenar sus emisiones de gases invernadero y adaptarse a los efectos ya presentes del cambio climático. En Panamá por ejemplo, uno de los efectos asociados al cambio climático es el incremento de la temperatura absoluta, la cual podría aumentar entre un 1º y 3 ºC, durante los meses en los cuales hay mayores temperaturas: abril y mayo (CATHALAC, 2008). Y los eventos de temperaturas máximas absolutas superiores a 38ºC serían rebasados hacia el año 2020 (CATHALAC, 2008).
En ciudades de climas calurosos, los episodios extremos de temperatura que se prevén son de mayor gravedad debido a las condiciones adversas de base, asociadas al efecto de ‘isla de calor urbana’ (ONU-HABITAT, 2011). Un problema generado por la alta densidad de construcciones y materiales acumuladores de calor (hormigón, asfalto, etc.), por la concentración de actividades antrópicas generadoras de calor (tráfico, climatización, etc.). De hecho, según los mapas de vulnerabilidad al cambio climático de las distintas unidades ecológicas de Panamá, en lo referente a la temperatura, el Área Metropolitana Pacífica (Panamá), tiene una vulnerabilidad media alta a cambios en el incremento de la temperatura (Tremblay & Ross, 2007).
Teniendo en cuenta que el aumento de temperatura de 1ºC supone un incremento de consumo energético en la climatización de entre 3 y 4%, y puede llegar hasta un 10%, el consumo energético podría aumentar hasta un 30% con un incremento de temperatura de 3ºC.
Para atenuar los efectos de la isla de calor y reducir los altos consumos energéticos es esencial la planificación del arbolado como climatizador natural del microclima urbano.
Las variables ambientales fundamentales para el confort térmico humano incluyen radiación solar, temperatura en las superficies urbanas, temperatura del aire, humedad y velocidad del viento. Se ha demostrado en diversas investigaciones que la arborización urbana puede mejorar estas variables ambientales a través de la prevención de la radiación solar y la reducción del calentamiento de las superficies de las edificaciones, que se suman el efecto reducción de la temperatura del aire a través de la evapotranspiración. (Akbari & et al., 1992) (Simpson & McPherson, 1996); (Georgi & Zafiriadis, 2006). En resumidas cuentas, el arbolado urbano interviene en la modificación del clima en zonas cálidas, principalmente en los siguientes tres efectos (Akbari H. , 2002):
Sombreado: Las copas de los árboles interceptan la radiación solar evitando el calentamiento de las edificaciones, asfalto y pavimentos.
Evapotranspiración: La transpiración de las hojas, requiere energía calorífica capturada del ambiente, produciéndose un descenso de la temperatura en su entorno.
Las copas de los árboles generan una pantalla protectora contra la radiación solar, minimizando el efecto isla de calor en las ciudades. Foto: Graciela Arosemena.
La capacidad del arbolado para la modificación del clima urbano, sobre todo para la reducción de las altas temperaturas, depende fundamentalmente del grado de cobertura arbórea, es decir el porcentaje de superficie urbana situada bajo la proyección de la copa de los árboles, así como de la tipología y la densidad de las copas.
Sobre el efecto refrescante de la vegetación en ambientes urbanos, se ha reportado que mediciones hechas en distintas ciudades del Norte, tal como el estudio realizado en el parque zoológico de Berlín (Hoerbert, 1982). En este estudio las diferencias de temperatura fueron de 5-7°C y la humedad relativa variaba un 10%[1] y reporta variaciones de entre 3 y 8 ºC para distintas composiciones y especies de árboles, las mediciones se hicieron también en distintas épocas el año.
Mediciones sobre el efecto de las sombras se han realizado en estudios en donde se valoraban diseño, tipologías de edificio, paisaje y climas, encontraron que el ahorro energético estaría alrededor del 25% al 80%[2]. Los mayores ahorros fueron asociados con la densidad y extensión de las sombras, siendo la radiación solar la mayor fuente de ganancias de calor (Simpson & McPherson, 1996).
Conservación de la biodiversidad y patrimonio natural
Desde una óptica ambiental, los espacios abiertos urbanos, además de ejercer funciones de control climático, o de filtro para la contaminación atmosférica, entre otros, debe garantizar la conservación de la diversidad biológica, y una permeabilidad que permita las conexiones ecológicas, mantenido valores ambientales y paisajísticos.
Las ciudades pueden jugar un papel primordial en la conservación de la biodiversidad a través de estrategias que incluyen la introducción de ecosistemas y hábitats en el tejido urbano, o la preservación de los preexistentes, además la creación de espacios verdes urbanos continuos que garantice la conectividad biológica y controlen la fragmentación territorial (Generalitat de Catalunya, 2002). Un objetivo fundamental de ello es establecer como elemento vertebrador del territorio una red continua de espacios naturales, que atraviese la ciudad y conecte los espacios naturales periurbanos con los espacios naturales urbanos.
Es evidente la necesidad de aumentar la natura en la ciudad y fortalecer las conexiones entre la ciudad y su entorno, y una de las piezas claves para conseguirlo son las estrategias de arborización urbana, orientadas a proporcionar efectivamente hábitat a especies de aves, mamíferos principalmente. Los árboles proveen hábitat, refugio y alimento para la fauna local. Para garantizar una arborización que restaure la biodiversidad ecológica en las ciudades, debe escogerse especies vegetales nativas, las cuales son a las que la fauna está acostumbrada. De hecho, el uso de especies exóticas es una de las causas directas de amenaza de la biodiversidad y la conservación de ecosistemas, junto con la destrucción de hábitat.
Por el contrario, las especies nativas de árboles en ambientes urbanos proveen alimento a fauna, que sería reducida o ausente en el caso de árboles exóticos. Además, árboles nativos incrementan la riqueza y diversidad de fauna, con lo cual una estrategia importante de arborización urbana es el reconocimiento cuáles especies nativas de árboles son hábitat de determinada fauna, con tal de establecer un hábitat biodiverso en el entorno urbano.
Parque Natural Metropolitano, en medio de la ciudad de Panamá. Bosque húmedo a seco tropical reserva de biodiversidad que brinda servicios ambientales tales como actuar de esponja de agua lluvia y sumidero de gases contaminantes. Por todas estas funciones, debe ser considerado un equipamiento de la infraestructura verde de la ciudad. Foto: Graciela Arosemena.
Un nuevo modelo de espacios abiertos urbanos
El impacto que están generando los problemas ambientales, locales y globales, sobre los entornos urbanos no tienen precedentes en la historia urbana, lo cual amerita no solamente repensar la forma de planificar y construir ciudades, sino además, es fundamental un nuevo planteamiento del sistema de espacios libres y verdes urbano. Es por ello que la ecología, biología y la climatología, son disciplinas que han adquirido una mayor relevencia en el paisajismo, en la planificación y diseño de espacios abiertos, para la configuración de verdaderos equipamientos urbanos.
Ninguna ciudad puede afrontar los retos ambientales del siglo XXI, sin considerar la construcción de una infraestructura verde ecológica.
Akbari, & et al. (1992). Cooling our communities: A Guidebook to tree planting and light colored surfacing. . U.S.A EPA, Ofice of Policy Anallysis, Climate Change Division, Washington, D.C.
CATHALAC. (2008). Potential Impacts of Climate Change and Biodiversity in Central America, Mexico and Dominican Republic.
Georgi, N., & Zafiriadis, K. (2006). The Impact of trees on microclimate in urban areas. Urban Ecosyst .
Hoerbert, M. (1982). A climatic and air hygienic aspects in planning of iner-city open spaces: Berliner Grosser Tiergartes. Energy and Buildings, 5 (1).
Naredo, J. (1997). Sobre el origen, eluso y el contenido del término sostenible. Cuadernos de Guincho .
ONU-HABITAT. (2011). Informe mundial sobre asentamientos humanos. Las ciudades y el cambio climático: Orientación para polítcas. Londres: Earthscan.
Rueda, S (1995) Ecologia Urbana: Barcelona i la seva Regió Metropolitana com a referents. Ed. Beta Editoria
Simpson, J., & McPherson, E. (1996). Potential of tree shade for reducing residential energy use in California. Journal of Arboriculture (22).
Sorensen, M., Barzetti, V., Keipi, K., & Williams, J. (1998). Manejo de las áreas verdes urbanas. Documento de buenas prácticas. Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. División de Medio Ambiente del Departamento de Desarrollo Sostenible., Washington, D.C.
Tremblay, L., & Ross, E. (2007). A Preliminary Assessment of Ecosystem Vulnerability to Climate Change in Panama.McGill University and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama.
United States Environmental Protection Agency. (2016). Green Infrastructure and Climate Change. Collaborating to Improve Community Resiliency.
Vargas, K., McPherson, G., Simpson, J., Peper, P., Gardner, S., & Et al. (2008). Tropical Community Tree Guide. Benefits, Costs, and Strategic Planting. United States Department of Agriculture. Forest Service. Pacific Southwest Research Station.
Notas
[1] Mascaró, L. R. AMBIÊNCIA URBANA = URBAN ENVIROMENT. Sagra-D. C. Luzzatto, Porto Alegre, 1996.
[2]Meier, A.K. STRATEGIC LANDSCAPING AND ARI-CONDITIONING SAVINGS: A LITERATURE REVIEW. Energy and Buildings. 1990.
I carefully placed the oak in the hole, and we moved back the forest earth with our fingers. It felt like a homecoming, like a renewed vow, like having the whole forest as a witness, and at the same time, being witnesses for it. Life, vouching for life. Reciprocity.
In the last days, with the air finally above the freezing point, and the grey silhouettes of the barren twigs dripping with fine silvery moisture against the faint morning light, I have been drawn into the forest. Every morning, I unlocked the chain securing my bike to a low metal arc between the parking cars, brushed away the water from the saddle and the handlebars, and rode two blocks into the Grunewald forest, often in an early spring drizzle.
The Grunewald is a huge woodland in the southwest of the German capital. It stretches 4 miles from east to west and 6 miles from where I live to the south. Deep inside of it, you don’t hear any traffic noises, only the chirp of the black tit or the tune of a song thrush, the silent thunder of a leaf slowly falling to the ground. There are protected species like the rare and huge hermit beetle. There are joggers, mountain bikers, mothers with small kids and dogs—and some fantastic swim spots with their northern European policy of bare skin and extremely wide tolerance. In the early mornings and evenings, especially now in spring, you almost surely bump into a couple of wild boar. That’s the typical Berlin mixture of these times: considerable wildlife, but more weird people doing weird things.
Photo: Andreas Weber
The Grunewald is about tenfold the size of New York’s Central Park, and nearly equally accessible. The woods are open as a porous skin from many access points of the city. Behind one bend, the trees. When I go there, I first have to get past the roar of the six-lane Heerstraße main traffic artery, and next take the bridge over five curved railroad tracks bluntly sparkling in the mist. Then I cross into the trees. First underbrush, littered with trash, then pine, birch, black cherry, oak. Leaves carpet the floor, punctuated by heath, moss, and withering stumps.
In these last mornings, I have been longing for touch, for the earthly touch of transformation. I was longing for the mutuality which now seemed so overdue after three months of unusually severe winter cold, isolating me mostly inside. When I entered the forest on my usual narrow trail it felt like moving through a wall. Although it was still cold, the forest atmosphere immersed me in the scent of wet leafy soil, of cold bark covered with algae, of moulds and plant parts half transformed into phosphorous, nitrogen, and air.
I rode slowly, the wheels leaving deep tracks in the thawing floor, and breathed in the air. There it was already, I thought, the earthly touch for which I had longed. I did not even need to bend down. I inhaled the air, and exhaling gave back something of myself. My breath flowed as steam through the branches. Oxygen and carbon and water vapour condensed into tiny droplets of silvery transparency. Breath is touch as well: a mutuality, bound together on the thin surface of each of my lung’s alveoli, where the world enters into my body like an acorn dips into the surface of a puddle. I pedaled slowly beneath the stems and branches on which the cold gleaming drops hung, occasionally bursting into a sudden rain shower on my coat when I brushed along them.
Photo: Andreas Weber
I thought that the surface with which we respire is not that much different to a water droplet. The innermost layer of the lung consists of delicate bubbles of the most subtle tissue layer which in the end are watery bubbles themselves. They are membranes through which the thin spheres of vapour, transpired by the plants, crystallized as hoarfrost, condensed as dew, enter my own body, merging with its translucent blisters like an iridescent soap bubble merging with another, reflecting the world on its shimmering surface until it bursts.
I was on the way to “my” oak. When something important is under way, I always check in with that particular tree to see what to make of it. Being there helps me access the fact that I also am only enabled to thrive by means of the light from above, and that whatever is weighing me down will ultimately be taken back by the earth, without a trace of labour. Trees breath. They are manifestations of the sky inhaling the earth and the earth being washed over by the sky. When the soil inhales sun and air, trees grow. If you looked at a forest through a time-shift lens, you could see its different patches rhythmically swell and decay, like an ocean, the respiration of its waves changing the shores. Trees are breath, on a very large scale.
Photo: Andreas Weber
Last summer, I invited the lady, who is now my wife, to my oak. It was high summer, the air balmy, the undergrowth rustling with life. Some of the 500 species, mostly insects, who are obliged to live on oaks as their only habitat, were buzzing around our heads, while we leaned against the bark with its deep clefts, holding hands, not being able to embrace the whole stem, not by far. Oaks are the trees with the highest number of life-giving relationships in the northern hemisphere. Even if we did not speak it out explicitly, our embrace around the oak’s stem was a promise. It was the pledge to remain tuned into the other’s breath. To remain breathable, edible, vulnerable. To remain earth, fertile, fragrant.
Being edible is the basic condition which we share with all other life. It is the door through which our communion comes, the pleasure to eat, and the consolation of being transformed into the bodies and the blossoms of other beings. Understanding that we need to accept being edible leads to understanding that only as vulnerable beings we are able to be real, and to connect with others. Doing this is a profoundly embodied, sensual process.
Photo: Andreas Weber
I estimate that my oak is about 400 years old. It was already a thriving tree before Descartes decreed that all nonhuman bodies are just machines, and only the human godlike rationality real after all. Another Berlin oak, named “Dicke Marie”, “fat Mary” by Alexander Humboldt and his brother Wilhelm (because the two played at its feet in the Tegel forest near to their manor, and because the kitchen chef of their home was a somewhat strict and pretty obese lady), is estimated to be 800 years old, bringing us straight back into the middle ages.
Breath means to give something back when you receive something. It means giving back something of yourself when you inhale something which belongs to other. I have often been thinking that if we would organise more of our human ways as breath, many problems would settle all by themselves. Imagine teaching schoolchildren conceived as breath. Becoming with-other as mutual breathing in and out. Agriculture as breath. Breath is linked to eating. It is the other half of the respiration cycle in which food becomes body and body air. Breath is a fundamental reaching out to the other, and a substantial welcoming of the other as a necessary condition to be a self. Trees, the stem pushing upwards, the branches reaching for the void air, are a form of how breath becomes body.
Trees grope for the other. They reveal space as a relationship. They reveal relationship as breath. Breath, in which I constantly give away something from myself and constantly receive something from another being, incorporating it into my own existence. We have heard so much of the world’s forests being “green lungs” and therefore needing protection. This plea, however, has not been that successful. Maybe it would help to feel that forests are not only lungs in a technical sense. They are breath. Their way of being, and of relating to us, is an ever so slow rhythmical tide of breathing out myself, breathing in the other, of total, completely entangled reciprocity.
Breath means community, means sharing, means letting yourself be imagined by others: by humans, by non-human others, by non-animate others, as stone, and sand, and air. In the summer, after we had met under the oak tree and joined in its vow of reciprocity, we spent entire nights in its neighbourhood, stretched on the forest floor on a blanket. The wiry forest grass tickled our skin while we looked up to see the foliage flow into the approaching darkness of the night. The thrush’s song gave way to the grunt of wild boar and scattered sounds of stomping feet, while the beasts of the night were closing in on us, creatures among other creatures.
We were there, speechless, amidst a profound encounter of curious and needful bodies, caressed by the night, brought to life by the night. The primordial myth of Eros, as Ovid has written it down, is such a beginning in mutual tenderness, reciprocal fertilization: the primeval wind impregnated the primordial night, giving birth to a silver egg, says Ovid. Out comes Eros. He is a god because he is the tender curiosity for other, the force that yearns for touch and hence begets connection, and thus creates newness. The primordial night being inseminated by the primeval wind, that is also the archetype of breath. Breath is the precursor of what is there in solid form, its precursor in the form of desire.
When I entered the woods in these very early spring mornings of 2018, it was all about touch and reciprocity, all about sensing my skin adjacent to others, of being permeated, embraced, entangled. This touch was pretty faint, a fine mist, a delicate inhalation. My encounter was already touch before I even felt it as such, just by being breathable, by being the space from which I renewed myself. I experienced the world yearning for spring as profoundly mutual. Its fertility relied on the confidence that mutuality would remain possible, would remain the soil from which we all grow.
That’s not always the most obvious thought in a metropolis like Berlin, full of humans, trying to function the best they can, trying to make their lives ever so special, coping with expectations and constraints, all this in the short, busy time they are given.
Berlin is by far not a megacity, but still a place where mutuality often falls short. There is, for instance, a more than 50-percent-chance that your marriage will fall apart, far higher than in most rural settings of my home country. Breathing is not always easy in Berlin. From this angle, it makes things a little simpler that there are far more trees than humans populating the German capital. Berlin streets are lined with over 400,000 oaks, lindens, birches, cherries, sycamores, and other towering fellow beings. Fellow beings like us, who have a youth, born from the tiny shell of an acorn, groping for light, groping for contact, yearning to be, blossoming and bearing fruit, which, as my wife from time to time reminds me, means to understand that becoming mature means to become edible.
As the Berlin trees are on German soil, they are all precisely taken account of. If you look closely, you can discover a little green tag with a number on it nailed to the bark of every stem. In Berlin, if you feel lonely as a human (many do, as surveys reveal), you can at least go out of your house and directly hug a tree. (Beware of dog droppings, though). You can hug it and think of the invisible bubbles it transpires from its leaf surface and the concealed bubbles deep inside your body merging into one another in one tidal wave of breath.
Last November, my wife gave me an oak for my birthday. It was quite a decisive birthday, my fiftieth, so receiving an oak felt somewhat consoling. The oak was a pretty juvenile tree, a slender stem, not much higher than 50 inches, with a couple of short barren branches, to which two or three brown leaves clung, in a pot filled with earth. The oak was in deep hibernation, waiting for spring. It had arrived in a huge box packed with straw. When the temperatures climbed above freezing point in these last days, I suddenly thought of the baby oak and its fate.
My wife had carried the tiny oak for my birthday all the way from the post office. Having it stand there on my special day was a pretty surprise. She had carried the baby oak in its straw cardboard casing all the way into our flat on the third floor while I was traveling. The tree was small, but given the pot, packaging and all, it was an exhausting job for her to drag the tree up to our flat. I did not even know that you could do this: having trees shipped to a condominium in the heart of the German capital.
There it sat, beside the table with the more practical-seeming gifts, in the heated air of our apartment in late autumn, waiting for the earth to take care of it again. She gave me an oak to renew her vow—as we had done for the first time, under that other oak. Now, I thought, looking at that fragile young tree sitting in a tiny pot with some earth, surrounded by the wrapping paper that had hidden it, it is up to me to give something back to the oak. To give it life actually.
As it was too hot in the room, we put the baby oak out on the balcony, still half in its wrapping. There it sat in a corner, between all the summer stuff half-heartedly left there, folded chairs, boxes, empty flower pots. The soil over its roots became dry. We nearly forgot about the plant, until storm Xavier hit the capital in early December. I remember finding a shared car to rescue my wife from her workplace, as all public transport was shut down. The streets were awash with objects drifting around: tree branches, boards from hamburger stands, fragments of billboards, bicycles, plastic debris, driving leaves, in fact, whole trees across lanes and no one around to put them away.
We hurried to check on the devastation that had befallen our balcony. The straw mats that had been fixed to the railing hung in the branches of the surrounding oaks and sycamores. The oak sapling lay upside down under a deck-chair, the earth strewn around. I did not feel very well seeing that. I felt as though I had violated an important obligation. But what to do with it? We did not have a garden. We were impatiently waiting to be allotted a piece of land in an urban gardening area close to the forest but were very low on a long waiting list, and still are.
When the winter cold kicked in, I felt this uneasiness even more considerably. At least when I allowed myself to feel it. When I thought of the baby oak, a slightly startled feeling came up. Was the tree baby ok? Would the earth in its pot freeze through, killing it? Would the frost eat its tiny buds, already protruding from the empty twigs? This went on for some weeks. I visited the balcony, literally held my breath, then closed the door and tried to stop thinking of the tree.
I started moving when I saw the devastation the storm had done to the Grunewald. The forest administration estimates that 40,000 trees were lost here in December 2017, in only an hour’s time, when the worst of the storm hit. Since then, it has been difficult to access the forest by my usual tracks. Fallen trees blocked every path, one after the other. But it was not the devastation that finally made me think of the little oak again. It was the way the forest administration dealt with it. They sent in private contractors to clear cut every affected tree—including the ones badly beaten, but still standing.
One cold and grey morning, on a walk with my dog, I visited my old oak friend (which had weathered the storm unaffected) and cycled back, the poodle in her grey parka against the cold racing from one side of the track to the other. I stopped at another old oak which had been battered but had remained about two thirds intact. I had seen it in the days before since I had been coming back after the storm. If you look at old paintings of oaks you realize that there is nothing that stops them thriving. Here however, I stopped in my track, as the battered oak had been felled and cut to pieces. Cleared away, it was a painful sight.
Photo: Andreas Weber
What these guys were doing here was not simply tidying up the wrong way. It was literally breathtaking. They used the storm as an occasion to step out of the relatedness that thrives on mutuality. The five hundred or so species that rely on oaks as food or dwelling space (like the hermit beetle) do so because the oak is alive even if half crushed, half rotten, already half transformed into other beings.
The oak’s substance is visibly made of other beings. It is itself—in a majestic and towering way—precisely by being other. By this it is, more visibly than other species, breath, open to be breathed in, ready to take up my exhalation, and even more so the breath of the hermit beetle, of the black tit, of the woodpecker, the ants and hornets dwelling in its holes and crevices. Cutting and carrying away a half-dead oak seemed like disallowing relatedness to happen. It was the deliberate act of creating a life in isolation, lonesome and locked in. It is the standard forest policy, not only in the capital but in 99.8 percent of German woodland.
We wrapped our baby oak in long stretches of packing paper and carried it to the 136 bus, and then to the X49 bus. Nobody looked at us and our heavy load. Wildlife and weird people, and we apparently belonged to both. I even carried a spade, rusty from leaning against a damp basement wall. It was a grey, quite chilly day, the forest floor just above freezing solid. When we left the bus and walked the few steps to the forest entrance, we fell silent. A ceremonial feeling came upon me. And then it was also so weird.
What we were doing seemed very much like carrying owls to Athens, or rather, oaks. Planting an oak in an oak forest. Throwing water into the ocean. Besides, this was surely illegal. In a city where there is an individual identification number for each tree, it is hard to imagine that it would be acceptable for citizens to set their own plant specimens to roam free in the woods. At least, we told ourselves, the oak was not an alien species. We were offering the forest what the forest was continuously offering to itself.
Dusk began to fall already. We had selected the place carefully beforehand, a clearing, close to the tree that had been cut. The air was chilly. Our breath formed white clouds of tiny droplets, mine mixing with that of my wife, and then perfusing into the shrubs and among the stems. When I pushed in the spade, the earth under the loose grass gave away easily. It was a thing of few minutes. I dug a hole, and we moved out the remaining sediment with our fingers, touching the cool, soft, velvety sediment, touching our hands with one another, caressing the earth, being caressed back by its sheer touch, caressing one another. Then I carefully placed the oak in the hole, arranged the compact form of roots and earth that had come out of the pot so it sat straight, and we moved back the forest earth with our fingers.
It felt like something we both had long needed to do. It felt like a homecoming, like a renewed vow, like having the whole forest as a witness, and at the same time, being witnesses for it. Life, vouching for life. Reciprocity, celebrated by sheer and simple touch. Just being there, connected. Becoming earth again. What we were doing there was a very simple thing, a kind of natural play, and it was also, by being that simple, a kind of deep understanding. It made us see, in a way, that a vow to stay in reciprocity is respiration. It is a pledge to be earthly: vulnerable, accessible, fertile, nourishing. Also love, after all, is breath.
Planting that slender, lonesome oak in the soil where so many of his brethren already vouched for aliveness (by sharing the own self with others) did not seem different from that moment before falling asleep together when your breath somehow becomes the breath of your beloved, of your partner, your child. Planting the oak in the cold and grey eve of the Berlin forest felt like exchanging a long and tender kiss: the encounter of two sensitive surfaces in a way that forever changes both.
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