How much should we worry about exotic species in urban zones? How do we reduce damage from exotic invasives when management resources are limited? Are there conflicts between management or eradication efforts and building general support for urban biodiversity?

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Pippin Anderson, Cape Town
Cape Town is heavily invaded, most significantly by Australian species. But many of the original reasons for their introduction still hold.
David Burg, New York
A surprising number of our millions of residents are willing to volunteer their time to keep the parks and green spaces they love weed free
Mark Davis, St Paul
It is important to remember that ‘harm’ or ‘damage’ is in the eye of the beholder
Ana Faggi, Buenos Aires
Ordinary people do not see differences between exotic and native species at all!
Katie Holzer, Davis
Attempts at invasive species management that don’t succeed in the long run may simply be a non-ideal use of limited resources, but there is also increasing evidence that many intensive management actions have the potential to directly or indirectly harm native species.
Madhusudan Katti, Fresno
A surprising number of our millions of residents are willing to volunteer their time to keep the parks and green spaces they love weed free
Deborah Lev, Portland
Inviting community stewardship of our natural lands is a tremendous opportunity to introduce people to nature and build an appreciation for natural systems, ecosystem services, and the value of biodiversity.  
Timon McPhearson, New York
We should worry. Urban exotics species often have negative ecological and economic impacts and understanding the complex interactions among simultaneous exotic effects is very challenging. Let New York serve as a case study since it is one of the most “infested” states in the U.S.
Matt Palmer, New York
Cities are heterogeneous. There are habitats that should be managed to maintain indigenous species. But also there are neglected green spaces—often with exotic species. These could be managed with a more inclusive view of urban nature.
Toby Query, Portland
I have shifted my thinking from  “combat all evil invasives” to a more nuanced approach that targets thresholds and moves the system to a healthier state with the lowest overall impact.
Carmen Silva, Los Rios
We would prefer to design and plan parks and plazas with native plants only; however, the cultivation of native species and the knowledge about their management ) and behavior is still limited in Chile.
Glenn Stewart, Christchurch
In the southern hemisphere our cities are filled with cultivated gardens and lawns dominated by Northern hemisphere grasses, woodlands full of species from around the globe, urban birds from every continent and mammals from the European hedgehog to the Norway rat!
Paula Villagra, Los Rios
We would prefer to design and plan parks and plazas with native plants only; however, the cultivation of native species and the knowledge about their management ) and behavior is still limited in Chile.
Peter Werner, Darmstadt
We should not be worried about exotic species in urban areas! Some species are pests or cause diseases, but that is not only true for exotic, also for native species.
Pippin Anderson

about the writer
Pippin Anderson

Pippin Anderson, a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, is an African urban ecologist who enjoys the untidiness of cities where society and nature must thrive together. FULL BIO

Pippin Anderson

Invasive alien plants in the City of Cape Town present a real conundrum. The City is heavily invaded, most significantly by Australian species, in particular Acacias and Eucalypts. These species were actively introduced for various reasons and have since run rampant, with huge losses in indigenous biodiversity, much of which is endemic. They use more water than indigenous flora with hydrological losses of a scale worthy of attention. As species from a similar fire-driven system, they are favoured by the fires that sustain the Cape Flora, but their much higher fuel loads serve to alter fire regimes and create hotter and longer fires, to the detriment of the local flora. So at a glance it seems like a clear case where the call for the eradication of these alien invasive species is imperative and without question the right thing to do.

However, the original reasons for their introduction in some cases still hold. For example Acacia cyclops and Acacia saligna were introduced to stabilize mobile dune systems across the Cape Flats. While obviously it would be ideal to have pristine, and indeed mobile, dune systems, the truth is that now these areas are heavily inhabited, largely by the City’s poor, and if these dunes started to move once again it would present a massive management problem. The indigenous flora of the Cape is typically shrub dominated, with few trees. In light of this, large stands of woody invasive aliens are a source of wood, used both for energy provision and as a livelihoods supplement by the urban poor who gather wood and sell it by the side of the road. A further complicated benefit is in the government public works schemes, such as Working for Water, which employs the indigent to clear invasive aliens to improve water gains.

So where does that leave us? I certainly feel the problem needs to be contained, and that there should be no further loss in biodiversity to invasive aliens. But in the case of Cape Town, the plight of the poor is no trifling matter and associated benefits of these emergent novel ecosystems have to be taken in to consideration. So, I would put my money behind biological control. Biological control requires that some of the original population of any invasive species remains to serve as host population to the control agent, but sees the invasive species contained. Much research is needed in this area, so that would be an area of critical importance. An additional spin off might be an associated public works scheme with the poor employed in control distribution, the clearing of die off, and the cultivation of control agents for distribution.

So it seems to me to be a problem that does not present an either-or answer, but rather one that requires a middle-road.

David Burg

about the writer
David Burg

David Burg has been working on the environmental issues of New York and other metropolitan regions for over thirty years. He first started working as a naturalist in 1966, as a field assistant for the Department of Ornithology at Yale University. He subsequently worked odd jobs while hitch-hiking around North America, Central America, and Europe before resuming his naturalist career in New England and Israel.

David Burg

The real Invasive Worm in the Big Apple

Like most mega cities, New York has worlds within worlds. There are the well known human divisions of class and culture; most of us know that even if we live on the edge of an outer borough we can hop on a bus to a subway and travel from neighborhoods of chitlins and greens to Kosher Bukharian lamb, of Sichuan soup dumplings or gnocci Bolognese. But there is another New York.

Visit Breezy Point Queens in mid-winter and snow buntings swirl with real snow while white gannets dive for fish offshore. Almost every year a snowy owl roosts by day on the white dunes and watches the white breakers curl over the green waves. Or visit Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx in summer when the Great Granny Oak stretches her ancient limbs towards the Golden Meadow where goldenrod flowers are visited by clouds of butterflies and shiny green native bees. Prairie grasses nod in the wind next to little white orchid blossoms, all a three minute walk from the egrets feeding in the high marsh of Long Island Sound. In the blue dusk a great horned owl lands in the old oak and hoots softly while the fire flies twinkle below. Yes, there is real nature in cities, and it is good. Yes, we should be very afraid, very afraid of invasive species that wipe out our remnants of ancient ecosystems.

Even in the most highly built sections of cities wild nature persists. Native cherry trees and daisy flea bane flowers duke it out with invasive ailanthus trees in abandoned vacant lots. Peregrine falcons and red-tailed hawks breed on the cliff-like walls of the concrete canyons. We can do much more to encourage nature in the cities but we need to start by understanding and protecting what we still have.

Because big cites are global transit hubs they are often epicenters for invasive species, as they are for new diseases of humans. The cities are where the wooden boats brought in the first farm weeds from Europe, and where containerized cargo ships now bring in insects pests like Asian long-horned beetles that have stowed away in wooden packing crates. Cities are where jet liners bring in people with HIV and ebola and West Nile Virus.  Preventing new invasions of pathogens should be a much higher priority than it has been. Ounce of prevention vs. pound of cure is trite but true.

On the other hand, when it comes to the expense of dealing with invasive plant control cities and suburbs have a built in advantage. A surprising number of our millions of residents are willing to volunteer their time to keep the parks and green spaces they love weed free. In more than thirty years of working to protect nature in cities there has been  nothing more gratifying to me than the last twelve years of hands-on work to remove the few rampant invasive species that pose a threat. The Earth Tenders program of WildMetro has organized invasive control events to protect native diversity with a terrific diversity of humans. Everyone from an hundred bank employees doing community service to small numbers of inner city youth have helped. As in many such programs in cities around the world, people from eight to eighty are happy to get involved. Great exercise, great comaraderie — a classic case of doing well while doing good.

And except for a couple of times when we accepted some gloves and hand tools, we cost the city nothing. We use no power tools, no chemicals and we plant nothing. No need to. In site after site one sees that given a whiff of a chance even delicate species like wild roses come roaring back. Such conservative and cheap management of nature has a long history, and it is just common sense. While we were working in our quiet, patient, labor intensive way we were surprised to learn of the Bradley Method. This is a nearly identical approach developed by two sisters in Australia. We have not used any conservation grazing yet, but around the world, and even in New York City, goats and other animals are being carefully used to control weeds. Volunteers and other animals are the sensible, and affordable way to tackle the weed problem.

Sadly, these simple methods are not popular now with most government or non-profit agencies. Currently favored means of nature management and invasives control may indeed jeopardize public support for nature protection. Right now in New York City and much of the rest of the United States, the standard way of handling weeds is to use a variety of harmful options. So many government agencies now use what I call the 4Ps approach. They use Plowing, Plastic mulch, or Poison, then they Plant. These are modern industrial techniques at work. No thought of using careful slow hand work to nurture and protect the last of our ancient lineages of native species with their unique genetic heritage. We have had to overcome obstacles to just get permission to volunteer in parks, even though our results have been outstanding.

There are two really troubling aspects to current methods. The first is that tons of herbicides being supplied. New evidence continues to emerge about the dangers of even “safe” poisons like Round Up, one of the most commonly used formulations. Yes, the same chemical Monsanto developed to spray on genetically modified corn just went off patent and various formulations are now widely used in natural areas. And in addition to the harm they do in the environment, there is risk in the manufacture, storage, transportation and handling of any toxic substance. I recently learned that several government agencies in the city have been using Oust, a poison that is designed to kill all plants and seeds even before they emerge in the spring. Though some chemicals can be carefully painted on cut stems, I have recently seen the city using broad cast spraying of these poisons. This kills indiscriminately. Both the target species and the last native plants are eliminated.

But never fear, the agencies have a solution to the scorched earth policies they use.  Giving the lie to the affordability argument, New York City alone is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to come in and plant trees. This is the second troubling aspect of current vegetation control. The trees they plant cost an average of $1400 a piece. They are a mix of native and non native, but few are raised from local seed. What is so insane about this is that even on vacant lots it takes work to keep trees from coming in on their own. Each tree can produce hundreds of thousands of seed a year. Many are carried by wind and birds. Planting trees in an abandoned lawn or meadow is a case of carrying coals to Newcastle. It is only a matter of time before citizens get outraged at this harmful waste. I only hope they do not turn against all urban nature protection in reaction.

Invasives are not the only threat to urban green spaces. For several years now New York and other cities have developed a mania for paved asphalt recreation roads for bicycles, roller blades and other devices with wheels. I love bikes, but these are often placed in the last green spaces. One such road (to add insult to injury they are often called Greenways) that was built on Staten Island went right through a patch of rare plants. Another one planned for Pelham Bay may be about to go right through a patch of rare iris and native sunflowers. And any large green space, especially near waterfront or low income neighborhoods, is fair game for housing development, sports stadiums, new highways and recently new gas pipelines. The impact of invasives on our last bits of urban nature is only one of many threats that are working together to unravel our green blanket. These weeds are, however, one of the more controllable problems. In cities we still have the opportunity to reweave the blanket, if we only have the will. The real worm in the Big Apple is not an invasive plant or animal species. It is greedy and ignorant people.

Mark Davis

about the writer
Mark Davis

Mark Davis is Dewitt Wallace Professor and Chair of Biology at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA.

Mark Davis

Like native species, some non-native species cause problems, some produce desirable effects, and most we do not think much about. When it comes to management, it is important that we worry about the right things. We should always worry about species that threaten human health, negatively affect the economy, and/or undermine ecological services. We should worry much less about species that are not producing any of these effects but are simply altering the composition of communities and other ecological processes. We should worry less about the latter species because we need to utilize the public’s limited management resources on the first group of species. Cities simply do not have the luxury to consider as harm mere ecological change.

It is important to remember that ‘harm’ or ‘damage’ is in the eye of the beholder.  Normally, there is little disagreement over what constitutes a harmful species when the harm consists of threats to human health, the economy, and/or to ecological services.  However, citizens may differ dramatically in how they view other non-native species.   While a non-native plant may be viewed as harmful to a nativist simply because it is occupying space that could be occupied by a native plant, the same species may be viewed as desirable by an herbalist, and beautiful to someone else. Urban managers need to be careful not to assume that their view of such species is shared by all, or even a majority, of the public, i.e., those who are paying their salaries and funding their departments and agencies.

While we should worry about some non-native species, we need to remember that many non-native species are contributing positively to the environment and to the life of urban residents (human and non-human). For example, like native plants, non-native plants fix carbon, provide shade and reduce air temperatures, reduce erosion, provide habitat and food for native animals (including native pollinators), and many enhance the aesthetic experience of urban human residents. Since, in many instances, these species are growing in places where native plants do not thrive, eradicating the non-natives actually will compromise ecological services and quality of life of the human residents.

Without question, the traditional nativism approach to managing urban biodiversity has created obstacles to gaining widespread public support for the management of urban environments. While most of those schooled in conservation over the past several decades have been taught to prefer native over non-native species, simply on the grounds of their origins, many in the public have continued to take a much more nuanced approach to species, judging individual species on their actual effects and not on how long they have been here. Since many of these species have been in the city longer than any human currently alive, some of the non-native species actually contribute to the residents’ sense of place. A good example of this is the recent public backlash in San Francisco against a proposal to remove thousands of eucalyptus trees from a park and natural area. The wooded environment provided by these non-native trees had been highly valued by many area residents. If destroying a place they loved were not enough, the eradication methods were to involve large amounts of chemicals.

The public is getting smarter and less tolerant of the types of methods commonly used to eradicate and manage non-native species. Unless managers of urban environments abandon the simple-minded nativism approach, and begin following the public’s wisdom and start taking a more nuanced approach to species, they can expect to encounter an increase in public backlash in the future.

Ana Faggi

about the writer
Ana Faggi

Ana Faggi graduated in agricultural engineering, and has a Ph.D. in Forest Science, she is currently Dean of the Engineer Faculty (Flores University, Argentina). Her main research interests are in Urban Ecology and Ecological Restoration.

Ana Faggi

How much should we worry about exotic species in urban zones?

Urban habitats are more or less intense modifications of the original matrix and native plants are often either eradicated or replaced with exotic ornamentals, since the structure of the city is heavily influenced by the cultural tastes of society and its fashions.

Urban green is in many cities a necessary component to improve the microclimatic conditions and make cities more livable. In Argentina, the urban forest in towns located in arid or semiarid zones are almost entirely composed of exotic trees such as blackberry, poplar, ash, etc. In such cases, there is no real chance of having an urban forest composed only by native woodland.

As cities extend across the rural landscape, they bring about the fragmentation of biotopes, thus creating novel habitats for alien organisms. Nevertheless, a certain degree of “naturalness” can be found in the riverine vegetation along watercourses, although natives species coexist with exotic trees and shrubs. This vegetation has important benefits for human welfare. In my opinion, the positive of promoting native species is that people can become familiar with them. Exotics, provided they are not invasive, are welcome, taking in account that they are very much appreciated.

How do we reduce damage from exotic invasives when management resources are limited?

Here it would be necessary to involve the local community in eradication programs. Students of forestry, agronomy and environmental science could lead projects involving other volunteers of all ages. These actions are ideal opportunities for the local community to connect more deeply with nature working together towards a common goal. Simultaneously they would allow people to understand the relationships between cultural and ecological processes.

Are there conflicts between management or eradication efforts and building general support for urban biodiversity?

Ordinary people do not see differences between exotic and native species at all! Generally they do not understand why the exotics should be eradicated. Therefore, exotic management in the city needs to be well communicated to the public, explaining with concrete examples the grim consequences of invasions in the local ecosystem.

Katie Holzer

about the writer
Katie Holzer

Katie works with city managers to create urban natural areas that benefit both people and wildlife. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Conservation Ecology at the Univ. of California-Davis.

Katie Holzer

What are major goals for urban natural areas, and how do invasive species management actions fit, or not fit, with them? In the face of continued urban growth worldwide and rapid climatic changes, one major goal for urban natural areas may be to create and maintain resilient, functional, and healthy ecosystems into the future, which may or may not be comprised entirely of native species. Another major goal for urban natural areas could be to provide a place for local residents to connect with and enjoy nature.

Cities house over 50% of the world’s human population, but take up less than 3% of the land surface. This demonstrates that cities may not be priority areas for conservation of rare native species, but they may be the most important place for many humans to develop an appreciation for, and connection with, nature. By understanding that they are part of nature, rather than removed from it, this can make people more likely to work to preserve it. If child in a city ventures out to a local pond to wade among the cattails and catch a frog, does she care more that there is a pond, cattails, and a frog that she can interact with, or that those species are native?

I think almost everyone can agree that it is important to isolate introduction pathways and vigilantly apply early detection and rapid response techniques to prevent introduction and spread of invasives in cities. It is of course also important to make sure that urban exotic species don’t become invasive outside of cities. But what about species that were introduced decades or centuries ago and are now well established in altered urban ecosystems? Control of established invasives is often more difficult in cities than elsewhere both because the landscape is more disturbed and because cities are a patchwork of management agencies, organizations, and private owners with differing goals, schedules, means, and methods. Consequently, particular invasive species are often controlled over small areas or short timeframes with low long-term success.

Holzer picture_urban youth
Urban youth enjoying pond with native and non-native species

Attempts at invasive species management that don’t succeed in the long run may simply be a non-ideal use of limited resources, but there is also increasing evidence that many intensive management actions have the potential to directly or indirectly harm native species. This harm can occur for a number of reasons, many of which are more pronounced in urban areas. Invasive control actions can produce substantial short-term disturbances (e.g. mowing or chemical removal of large stands of plants) which have the potential to negatively impact native species in any landscape, and can be especially detrimental in small, isolated urban natural areas where native organisms may not have other suitable places to move to for refuge. Urban organisms are often already stressed by many other factors, making them less able to cope with a sudden loss of cover.

In addition to potential increased harm by control methods, it is possible that urban wildlife species are less in need of maintaining entirely native species composition. Most native wildlife species have not been able to persist in urban habitats, and the subset that do are often those able to rapidly adapt to novel ecosystems and make use of new habitats that they may not have experienced before. These relatively adaptable species are often more able to utilize introduced plants as habitat than species that do not occur in cities.

Due to the unique challenges, potential harms, and possible lessened necessity of some invasive management actions in cities, invasive species management may not always have a strong place in working towards the major goals of urban natural areas.

Madhusudan Katti

about the writer
Madhusudan Katti

Madhusudan is an evolutionary ecologist who discovered birds as an undergrad after growing up a nature-oblivious urban kid near Bombay, went chasing after vanishing wildernesses in the Himalaya and Western Ghats as a graduate student, and returned to study cities grown up as a reconciliation ecologist.

Madhusudan Katti

Reconciling native and non-native species in urban biodiversity

Humans are the most invasive species on Earth. Our cities, ecosystems we build and replicate around the world, are also focal points from which other species have invaded native habitats. Just as wanderlust defines our species, so does the biophilia which makes us take living elements of our habitats with us wherever we go. Carrying a suite of species as sources of food, comfort, companionship, and beauty, has always been part of our cultural and evolutionary baggage. Invasiveness is something evolution tends to reward, and our own evolutionary success springs from a certain restless invasiveness.

We have spent millennia figuring out how to make some species grow where and when we want them. Meanwhile, other species have latched on to our coattails making the most of this new mode of hyper-efficient long-range dispersal: the hairless ape that travels the world, with baggage. Only recently have we realized the often devastating consequences of bringing exotic species into native habitats. Invasive species fuel some of the most intense debates among conservationists, often laden with hysterical rhetoric about alien, exotic, invaders who must be exterminated. Yet we tiptoe around the fact that we are the most invasive, disruptive species on Earth.

Cities are where most humans now live, where we often first introduce new species, and whence some of these species launch invasions into new habitats. Indeed, cities themselves seem like invasive habitats proliferating in and destabilizing ecosystems around the world. Cities must therefore be central to our efforts to address the challenge of invasive species. Cities embody the contradiction between our desire to control nature, shaping entire ecosystems to suit our purposes, and our growing desire to conserve nature and biodiversity.

How do we reconcile our innate desire to build habitats for our own biological and cultural needs with a growing awareness that perhaps we should leave nature alone? It must start with owning our central role in this ecological conundrum. It requires us to transform our role beyond the dichotomy of active perpetrator / passive bystander in the drama of invasive species. We must embrace the role of more deliberate stewards of the lands we now dominate.

As more people recognize the problems of invasive species, many now seek ways to build native species friendly urban landscapes. Ecologists are good at understanding the effects of non-native species in native habitats, and in raising the alarm about invasive species. We haven’t done enough to actually transform the practices that contribute to the invasive species problem. Urban ecologists have been lax in engaging with one group who arguably wield the greatest influence on this challenge: gardeners, nurseries, and landscapers. The growing desire to make urban gardens native-friendly is constrained by lack of available species options in local nurseries, and of expertise in nurturing native species. Ecologists must fill this knowledge gap by developing better ways to support native species in urban habitats in partnership with the people who actively transform the landscape.

Forget “leave nature alone”; in cities we must become better ecosystem engineers, designing habitats more consciously to enhance native biodiversity while limiting opportunities for non-native species. We must also recognize that some non-native species have become naturalized to play important roles in their adoptive ecosystems, so simply eradicating them is not the ideal solution. People move and grow plants and animals to fulfill complex social, cultural, aesthetic, and emotional needs. We must develop a broader vision of biodiversity that includes both the ecological roles of species and their cultural resonance for people. Balancing these will be key to managing invasive species in and around urban landscapes.

Deborah Lev

about the writer
Deborah Lev

Deborah Lev is about to retire from the position of City Nature Manager for Portland Parks & Recreation in Portland, Oregon, overseeing natural area management, environmental education, urban forestry, and community gardens.

Deborah Lev

As an increasing percentage of the world’s population lives in cities, biodiversity becomes more an urban issue. In recent decades, authors have expressed surprise and delight at the discovery of urban biodiversity hot spots. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Throughout history, people have gathered and established settlements in locations where we would expect biological diversity: the confluence of rivers, along estuaries, and at geographic transitions such as mountains to plains. Over these same few decades, we have seen an expansion of the world’s cities and an attendant expansion of invasive species.

It is not a surprise that high concentrations of people beget high concentrations of invasive exotic species; managing urban natural areas, it is apparent that invasive species are the primary threat to remaining habitat patches. Most of the terrestrial plant invaders that threaten our natural areas were brought to the region intentionally by people as garden ornamentals or land reclamation projects. People also serve as unintentional vectors of invasive species. Naturalized invaders from adjacent gardens and compost piles threaten our urban natural areas while hikers, bikers and their pets inadvertently spread seeds along park roads and trails.

People, of course, can be part of the ongoing management of these species as well.  Inviting community stewardship of our natural lands is a tremendous opportunity to introduce people to nature and build an appreciation for natural systems, ecosystem services, and the value of biodiversity. Raising the awareness of invasive species in the urban population is necessary to combat these pests on private lands as well as public spaces. Community volunteer stewardship can also become a valuable tool in the resource constrained efforts to control invasives. Our integrated pest management system includes hand pulling of weeds by volunteers as well as use of herbicides by state-licensed staff and contracted crews. We deploy volunteers on sites where we will continue to invest in maintaining the improved conditions. Often, volunteer hand-pulling of vines and ground cover weeds is paired with the work of professionals to remove invasive trees or apply chemical herbicides where required.

ivy_removal
Removing ivy.

Another way to manage scarce resources in the invasive species battle is to prioritize where to fight. Portland Parks & Recreation (PP&R) manages more than 8,000 acres (> 3000 ha) for habitat. A matrix of sites with axes of ecological health and ecological function potential dictates where resources are deployed. In general, we focus on maintaining the ecological health of sites already in good condition and improving the health of sites where ecological function can be achieved by combatting the invasive species. Other factors considered in setting work priorities include connectivity to other sites and community support, especially from an organized friends group willing to assist in management activities.

As a local government land manager we directly treat terrestrial plant invaders. We are also well aware of the key role that urban areas play in the migration of other critical invasive species. One example: international cargo ships, potentially harboring invasive species, call at coastal ports, primarily in urban areas. Entomologists predict that the Asian long-horned beetle is likely to appear in Portland via cargo ship. We are training park staff and volunteer partners to recognize this insect and its characteristic damage to trees. The preferred target species for these insects are maple trees which comprise 40% of Portland’s street trees and 60% of the trees in Forest Park, at 5200 acres (2100 ha), our largest City natural area. Portland is a likely entry spot for the continent — just one example of a potential threat in one port city.

Timon McPhearson

about the writer
Timon McPhearson

Dr. Timon McPhearson works with designers, planners, and local government to foster sustainable, resilient and just cities. He is Associate Professor of Urban Ecology and Director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School and Research Fellow at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Timon McPhearson

Exotic invasive species are damaging but here to stay

We should worry. Urban exotics species often have negative ecological and economic impacts and understanding the complex interactions among simultaneous exotic effects and feedbacks is ecologically very challenging. Let New York serve as a case study since it is one of the most “infested” states in the U.S.

Forests across New York State, including urban forests, are filled with exotic earthworms. Exotic earthworms have slowly re-invaded these forests since the last glaciation, first arriving with European settlers in the balls of soil around plants and soil used for ballast in ships. The earthworm invasion hasn’t stopped, if anything it is probably accelerating. For example, when people buy worms for their urban compost bins they buy exotic worms, and these get out and spread to local backyards and forests. Now there are about 45 species of exotic earthworm species in the New York region.

So what? For starters, exotic earthworms change nutrient dynamics and thereby alter the community structure and species assemblages of forests. Most forests have a layer of decomposed material (duff) that was laid down over thousands of years through the accumulation of deciduous trees dropping their leaves in the fall. Duff protects soil from erosion and provides critical habitat for many native species (ferns, wildflowers, salamanders). Earthworms chew through this later, aerating it, releasing carbon (a greenhouse gas), adding nitrogen, and thereby changing soil chemistry. This can completely alter forest diversity, structure, function, and may affect the provisioning of urban ecosystem services.

Indeed, scientific studies are showing that native plant species grow better when there aren’t any worms. Not only that, where exotic earthworms have invaded, so do other exotics, like Japanese barberry and Asiatic bittersweet, both invasive plants that are damaging forest diversity. So, exotic invasives not only can have direct negative ecological impacts, they can also create the conditions for further invasion by other exotics. How many simultaneous and interacting exotics can our natural areas handle before they shift into complete different system states or even collapse?

emerald ash borer map ny 2014
Quarantine areas in New York State for the Emerald Ash Borer.

EmeraldAshBorerNew York City (NYC) is an epicenter for invasive species in the U.S. and functions as a major pathway for invasive species to the rest of the continent. One of the challenges we have in managing urban ecosystems is dealing with the wide variety of exotics, including their ecological interactions and feedbacks. Natural resource managers in the NYC region have to worry about Asian longhorn beetle, Emerald ash borer, Hemlock wooly adelgid, and many other insects pests, in additional to a wide range of aquatic (zebra mussels, water chestnut) and terrestrial (kudzu vines) exotic invasives. Chestnut blight wiped out American chestnut populations — more than 9 million acres of American chestnut forest from Mississippi to Maine. Ash trees, which are common in towns and cities, as well as in backyards of homeowners, are likely to experience the same fate from the Emerald ash borer (EAB). This beetle has killed 50 million ash trees in Michigan alone since 2002 and it is closing in on New York City. Unlike chestnut blight, EAB will probably end up killing off 20 different species of ash trees. As Ash trees start dying, removing the dead trees before they fall and cause property and other damage will be financially costly for municipalities and homeowners. The USDA Forest Service has estimated the emerald ash borer will cost communities in a 25-state area as much as $10.7 billion by 2020. In New York City, forested areas include 900 million ash trees, approximately 10% of the total NYC urban forest.

Map of outbreaks of Emerald ash borer across New York State. New York City is under quarantine to prevent infestation of the urban forest. (Source: NY Department of Environmental Conservation)

The impending decline of ash trees, is just one of a very long list of major ecological and economic effects of invasive exotic species. In urban areas like NYC, where we are trying to promote natural areas that both preserve native biodiversity and provide important ecosystem services for urban residents, invasives pose a difficult management challenge since multiple interacting species are already well established. Realistically though, we have probably already lost the battle over exotic invasives and need to begin turning our attention toward adaptation. Like climate change, exotic species are here to stay, and we need to spend some portion of the money spend to control invasives to develop innovative ways to harness their rapid growth, fast reproduction, and competitive ability for green infrastructure solutions to pressing urban challenges. For example, we may find from stormwater absorption, flood control, and air pollution to carbon removal and urban cooling, that some exotics are more effective than native species. Comparative scientific studies in cooperation with local management could go a long way towards improving our understanding of the potential benefits of exotics and how they can be employed to meet sustainability and resilience goals.

Matt Palmer

about the writer
Matt Palmer

Matt Palmer is a senior lecturer in the department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University. His research interests are primarily in plant community ecology, with emphases on conservation, restoration and ecosystem function.

Matt Palmer

Some exotic species are certainly causing problems in cities. In patches of remnant native vegetation, invasive exotics may be the primary threat to preserving native biodiversity. Those native species are important not just for the services they provide (e.g., habitat for wildlife, stormwater management, aesthetics), but also for the role they can play in connecting people to the nature of a specific place. In cases like this, managing invasive exotics — while almost always difficult — is probably a fight worth fighting.

For example, the Thain Family Forest in the New York Botanical Garden is a 16 ha old-growth forest in New York City. It is one of the few places that one can experience the landscape that once covered most of the city. There are several invasive exotic species present that displace native species. Staff from the Garden manage the forest quite intensively — including removing exotic species and planting native species — in an effort to maintain the forest in its historic condition. Urban restoration efforts like these may require so much effort that they essentially become gardening, but if the end goal is the preservation of indigenous species in their historical landscapes then intensive management may be the only way to succeed.

This being said, cities are full of wild or semi-wild areas that bear little resemblance to their historic condition. The environment has very likely changed with altered microclimate, hydrology, soil composition, and other factors. The kinds of disturbances and their frequency and intensity have likely changed — fires, floods, trampling, and pest outbreaks all have different dynamics in an urban matrix. And the plants, animals, and microbes that live in these areas are almost certainly different than those that were there before the city arrived. There’s a distinct set of cosmopolitan urban species — the “weeds” and “pests” familiar all over the world.

These weeds and pests — the classification of which is subjective — provide services that are generally undervalued. Exotic species in highly disturbed sites may be most of the biomass, which means those are the species doing the “greening”. For example, if the primary services provided by vegetation on a vacant lot are capturing some stormwater, cooling the air through evapotranspiration, and providing some habitat for insects and birds, these functions can be accomplished by both native and exotic species.

Some might argue that the urban ecosystem services provided by exotic species are less than those provided by native species. This may be correct, though I don’t think there is much convincing data on this question. However, it’s not really appropriate to compare the services from exotic species (which are often abundant in cities) with the services that could be provided by native species if they were present. If the native species are absent, rare, or declining, it generally consumes a lot of resources to manage them in a way that maintains their abundance. Those kinds of management require long-term investments of resources and face many practical challenges. There’s a much lower investment required to increase whatever services are desired from the species already present without worrying too much about which are native or exotic. It’s easier to tweak the system with the species you already have than to try to rebuild some historic system.

Cities are heterogeneous places. In almost every city, there are habitats that should be managed to maintain their indigenous species. But every city also has the neglected green spaces — often populated with exotic species — and these could be managed wisely with a more inclusive view of urban nature.

Toby Query

about the writer
Toby Query

Toby Query is a father, husband, and ecologist. As part of the City of Portland’s Revegetation Program since 1999, he stewards natural areas for all Portlanders. He founded the discussion group Portland Ecologists Unite! which created spaces to learn, discuss, and connect over ecological issues.

Toby Query

As a manager of natural areas for the City of Portland, Oregon for the past 15 years, I have slowly shifted my thinking from one that “combats evil invasives” to a more nuanced approach. This approach targets thresholds and moves the system to a healthier state with the lowest overall impact. Interventions to restore habitat need to better evaluate the impact on the ecosystem as a whole.

In the past our crews cut down invasive Armenian blackberry (Rubus bifrons) around our planted seedlings in the middle of bird nesting season. We destroyed the occasional nest in blackberry bushes, but didn’t realize that many were “species of concern” including the little willow flycatcher (Empidonax traillii brewsteri). In 2006, another City of Portland initiative, the Terrestrial Ecology Enhancement Strategy, published documents demonstrating how to avoid damage to nesting birds. These documents, along with discussions with wildlife biologists, led us to shift our treatments to avoid the bird breeding season along with goals to reinstate lost structure and function for target species.

Each invasive species should be evaluated for its current and projected impact to the system, how well it is established, and if its presence is a sign of a degraded system or it is the cause of a community shift. In my experience, established invasive species will resist eradication even with the best orchestrated attempts unless they are detected early on. Thus, we should shift resources towards prevention of new arrivals and start to embrace some of our invasive species.

An example of this involves the much-reviled Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense).  It occurs on most restoration sites that we manage, but how much damage is it doing, and can we effectively replace it? Canada thistle arrived in North America in the 1600’s and other species have been coevolving with it ever since. The seeds are an excellent food source for goldfinches, and the plant and nectar are valuable habitat for many native bees and butterflies. With this knowledge, ecologists, including myself, are starting to accept it, putting value on its services for our regions’ wildlife.

Our “love to hate” invasives mantra has led us urban restoration practitioners to potentially harm wildlife in our quest for eradication and control. Restoration performance success often involves meeting a minimum threshold of invasive plant species cover percentage. This needs to be re-evaluated, especially in an urban context, and instead use goals and objectives involving habitat structure and function. By choosing focal species’ preferred habitat (i.e. dense patches of shrubs for the flycatcher) or desired functions (like shading a stream), we will have a clearer path forward without jeopardizing what we seek to improve.

We need to do more evaluation of the causes of the stress to the system and fix those, rather than address the symptoms of a disturbed habitat (which can be expressed through the abundance of invasive plant species). Some of these fixes are outside the ecologist’s hands, such as nitrogen deposition and hydrological changes, but we can work to advocate for these solutions. This approach can save resources as well as build public support. When we frame our work as land managers as a war against invasives, rather than well thought out plans to improve ecological health, we have the potential of making simple decisions that don’t solve the problem. When evaluating an invasive species, we need to involve ornithologists, herpetologists, entomologists and others to more accurately assess what the effects of the “war” might be on the system as a whole. We need a more complex dialogue to reflect the challenges that we face as ecologists and continue to seek new pathways to enhance our urban wildlife habitat.

Glenn Stewart

about the writer
Glenn Stewart

Glenn Stewart is Professor of Urban Ecology, Lincoln University, NZ. Current research is on Southern Hemisphere urban ecosystems and invasive species, successional processes and predicted changes in global climate.

Glenn Stewart

These are my views from the colonies of Empire downunder. Here I am including South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Although some of these thoughts and issues probably relate to North America as well. To put my views in context you need to know a quick bit of history here. The British Empire (god bless their soul) carried all things familiar to them to the colonies (to make them “feel at home”). And they took “exotic” plants and animals from the colonies back to mother England (but that is another story for another time). So in New Zealand for example we have many species of plants and animals that “do not belong”. Add to this the fact that the native flora and fauna evolved over millions of years in the absence of mammal browsing and in the absence of mammalian predators. That is why we have flightless birds and strange and wonderful ancient plants! At least 85% of all native plants, birds, frogs, and reptiles found in NZ are endemic to NZ. That is why we are one of the 25 global biodiversity “hotspots”. So what is the situation now after 800 years of Polynesian settlement and 150 or so years of occupation by Europeans? Here is a quick summary (numbers approximate):

2300 species of native plants, 2700 species of naturalised exotic plants (that reproduce and are invading), 33 species of naturalised mammals (the only terrestrial mammals prior to human settlement were 3 species of bats), and countless species of exotic birds. We also have on the order of 30,000 to 40,000 species of exotic plants in cultivation. And one of these species becomes naturalised every 3 months! That’s why NZ has such a stringent border control program!

So what does this mean for urban environments in New Zealand? Basically it means that our cities are dominated by exotic plants and animals — cultivated gardens of exotic species, lawns dominated by Northern hemisphere grasses, woodlands constituted of species from around the globe, urban birds from every continent on the planet and mammals from the European hedgehog to the Norway rat!!! And many of these mammals are predating our native birds and invertebrates. So one of the biggest challenges we face is to reduce the “exotic” influences and enhance and restore indigenous nature. Hence a real focus in the last 20 years or so on restoring native plant communities, and associated bird life. It is an enormous challenge!!

So the removal/reduction of exotic animal and plant species are one of the foremost issues that challenge us in restoring indigenous biodiversity in our cities. And also in restoring vital ecological services to enhance sustainable ecosystems.

Paula Villagra

about the writer
Paula Villagra

Paula Villagra, PhD, is a Landscape Architect that researches the transactions between people and landscapes in environments affected by natural disturbances.

Paula Villagra and Carmen Silva

Our thoughts on this topic are influenced by our experience in landscape planning, design and ecology in the Chilean environment which lack of enough nurseries to produce native plants in the amount and standards needed for the development of urban landscape projects. Of course, we would prefer to design and plan parks and plazas with native plants only; however, the cultivation of native species and the knowledge about their management (e.g., water requirements in urban environments) and behavior (e.g., survival to municipalities’ management practices) is still limited (although developing fast!).

In this context, exotic plants are useful, because they are easily available, grow faster than many natives (at least faster than ours in Chile) and depict dramatic seasonal changes in terms of color and canopy density, which adds visual and temporal diversity to urban sites, making them attractive to people.

Nonetheless, including exotics in urban zones can be highly problematic if the selection and management is not taken care of. Exotic plants have higher water demands which on one hand is not sustainable, and on the other hand, if enough water is not provided, exotics take it from other plants, deteriorating the overall design and affecting mostly our natives (which do not have the standards to compete with them). Under extreme conditions, the exotic plants die faster, creating unattractive environment.

Other exotics usually used in urban sites in Chile (e.g., Acacia dealbata) can expand due to their invasive qualities and the ‘comfort’ they find in urban parks and plazas where water is provided regularly. Indeed, this kind of issue is usually ‘solved’ with environmentally toxic insecticides, diversifying the problem into the environment.

Besides, native plants commonly used in our cities increase health problems. Some (e.g., Platanus orientalis) cause severe allergies by the spread of seeds in the reproductive times of the year. While others (e.g., Melia azedarach), pollute the urban environment after the fruits fall and glue themselves to the pavement.

In terms of species interaction, the overuse of exotic plants has increased the presence of exotic over native fauna, altering urban “natural” systems. For example, exotic species are chosen due to their ornamental benefit (e.g., the fruit of the Cotoneaster sp.), which can be very attractive visually. However, they do not provide food for birds, which, as a result, leaves the urban environment resource-poor and require wildlife to search for other sites with better survival advantages.

All together, the problem of introducing exotic plants in urban sites affects ecological aspects, visual landscape qualities, and human well-being. In addition, it can cause a deep misunderstanding among the public, influencing human behaviors and the developing of environmentally unfriendly urban practices. In terms of the private landscaping developed by the general public, most people copy from public parks and plazas what they like and see. Hence, to overcrowd the public areas with exotics plants can convey urban dwellers the wrong message. If that is the case, people will introduce exotics into their private gardens (or increase the amount they have), which in turn, can intensify the problems exposed before, developing a local culture unaware about the role of native plants and their ecological and social values in urban sites.

We do not disagree with using exotics in the design and planning of urban environments when other options are not available; however, in our experience, the selection of exotic plants, the amount which they are introduced, and their distribution should be carefully studied by experienced professionals in landscape and urban ecology. Good results can be achieved when natives already on site are included in the landscape design, when exotics are chosen due to their aesthetic as well as ecological values, and when the community is involved during the process of design.

Carmen Silva

about the writer
Carmen Silva

Carmen Paz Silva is a PhD student at Universidad Austral de Chile and is particularly interested in the effects of urbanization on biodiversity.

Peter Werner

First of all, I have to state that I know more about plants than animals and that I have an European bias.

My answer for the first question is rather clear. We should not be worried about exotic species in urban areas! Some species are pests or cause diseases, but that is not only true for exotic, also for native species (e. g. rats, allergic potential of hazelnut). Exotic species and urban areas — these belong together. Why?

Cities are centers for political power, money, culture, ideas, goods, and so on. Therefore, they are locations of exchange and accumulation. They are market places, connected with the world, and that includes goods, which come from outside. Introduction of nearly everything is an inevitable feature of cities. It is estimated that around 16,000 ornamental plant species were brought to European cities from all over the world (Dehnen-Schmutz et al. 2007).

Urban areas are also places where strange, foreign persons, ideas, and things can exist, rather than outside of cities. The German phrase “urban airs makes you free” underlines it, describing a principle of law in the Middle Age. That includes the idea that exotics are not dangerous per se, but they are an enrichment for the society. Many humans become scared of the otherness.

In my mind you can transfer that picture to plants and animals, too. That means, as I mentioned above, you cannot imagine a livable, busy city in which exotics, including plants and animals, do not play an important role.

As you look to the fact, then you can see the following. Native species represent the majority of species in cities, more than exotics, and this is valid for birds and plants (see publication of Aronson et al. 2014, a working group which analyzed more than 100 cities worldwide). Common native species are still the dominant species in European cities, and that is also true for the inner urban areas. With respect to the species richness, the exotics enrich the fauna and flora in urban areas and compensate the lost of native species. The number of flowering plants, especially of the ornamental plants, and their blossom time over the year are increased in cities, and a lot of insects, notably pollinators, benefit from them.

Some species, for example the goldenrod (Solidago gigantea) in German cause problems in natural and semi-natural areas, but not in cities. Many people like the goldenrod as an ornamental plant in their gardens or gather it from wasteland, as I see it in my neighborhood, to bring it at home for a bunch of flowers. A problem can be that such exotic plants spread out from gardens to the outside, like fashion, which spread out from cities to rural areas, impacting cultural and natural landscapes.

The Puzzle of Delhi’s Air Pollution

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radhika Khosla
Delhi

On The Nature of Cities

 

What Do People See in the Landscape? The Metamorphosis of Ecosystem Services After Disaster

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

My interest in learning about the services that natural areas provide to the community begun after the earthquake that hit south-central Chile on February 27, 2010. Though no major infrastructure damage occurred, the earthquake, tsunami and countless aftershocks caused great fear in the population, who were in particular insecure to return to their homes. For this reason, the community gathered in the open space, including natural areas. As it has been recorded in other parts of the world (Link 1; Link 2; Link 3), the open space was mostly used for camping, refuge and as escape routes, while natural areas, both inside and outside the city limits, became a source of provisioning services such as water and firewood (for heating), and cultural services, for gathering, camping and the provision of urban supplies.

The various studies we have undertaken since 2010 have made us realize that the services provided by natural areas in particular, or ecosystem services, are context specific and are conditional to what people see in the landscape. Ecosystem services vary on one hand, on the physical attributes of natural systems, meaning their elements and organization, which in turn, affect their provisioning capacity, their appearance and the way people perceived them. On the other hand, ecosystem services vary with the socio-cultural aspects of a community, which influence the possibilities of people to value natural areas as useful for their specific needs at specific times. Our studies also support the idea that people’s perception of nature and their capacity to perceive potential uses after disaster depends on their knowledge and familiarity with the landscape. For instance, ecological knowledge can help to differentiate between water bodies useful for drinking, among others which are useful for washing only. Similarly, a high familiarity with the landscape can help discover services in natural areas, such as hidden recreational pathways in the forest, which can be much valued as evacuation routes after a tsunami.

For these reasons, not every park, hill and wetland among other natural sites, are used in the same way after disaster. Why does utility vary between sites? Are the uses of natural areas for daily life and for a post-disaster situation compatible? And most importantly for landscape professionals, can design and urban planning improve the role of natural systems after disaster?

Yes! By identifying the biophysical attributes that are perceived by people, understanding the manner in which they are organized, the services they provide, and the meanings (e.g. uses) they convey after disaster, we have useful information to make landscape interventions which are compatible with both, nature and people’s needs.

These questions motivate the research we have been carrying out since 2010 in different cities of Chile affected by earthquakes and tsunamis, with particular emphasis on the use and role of natural systems located both inside and outside the city limits (See link 4). We know that landscape properties are valued due to both, the services landscapes provide (provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services)(link 5) and to the capability of the people to see them. This  idea has been widely explored and proved in other landscape types and urban areas, with a focus on the study of affordances, or the ‘useful things’ that people ‘see’ in the environment (Gibson, 1979; Heft, 2003). Affordances are not things themselves but are resources that arise between the interactions of the properties of the environment and of the perceiver (Chemero, 2003); hence, are available for people that are capable of perceiving and using them. Landscapes elements are typically valued because they are useful in some way at specific times, in relation to people’s abilities and in particular contexts.

The case studies I present next provide further insight in the context after disaster.

Structure affects use: camping versus water extraction

In the inland city of Concepción, urban lagoons, which are the remnants of ancient riverbeds, were used to collect water, and also for overnight stay, meeting and for gathering information after the earthquake of February 27, 2010 (Mw 8.8) (To see a full range of photographs that show the use of the open space after the earthquake in Concepción see Link 7).

Figure 1. Variation in the management and design of meadow areas in Tres Pascualas Lagoon, Concepción. Photos: Paula Villagra
Figure 1. Variation in the management and design of meadow areas in Tres Pascualas Lagoon, Concepción. Photos: Paula Villagra
Figure 2. Different intervention types (landscape management to the left and landscape design to the right) at the Los Patos and Mendez lagoons, Concepción. Photos: Paula Villagra
Figure 2. Different intervention types (landscape management to the left and landscape design to the right) at the Los Patos and Mendez lagoons, Concepción. Photos: Paula Villagra
Figure 3. Upland areas of wetlands in Concepción with different interventions and human cues (paths and urban furniture). Photos: Paula Villagra
Figure 3. Upland areas of wetlands in Concepción with different interventions and human cues (paths and urban furniture). Photos: Paula Villagra

The urban wetlands of Concepción were our pilot study (Villagra et al., 2014; Villagra and Dobbie, accepted), which provided inspiring and highly suggesting information. It shed light on the role of urban wetlands to support everyday life and life in times of crisis, which is conditioned by the biophysical aspects of the wetlands. Aspects such as water visibility and the presence of pathways, fences and buildings are elements in the wetland areas that define landscape utility before and after disaster, and which, at the same time, can be manipulated by planning and design. The meadows (Figure 1) — or wetland areas close to water with different grasses and herbs, and which lack of excessive urban cues — were found to be useful for ‘observing nature’ before disaster, and for ‘water extraction’ after disaster. Other areas such as the uplands (Figure 3) — closer to urbanized environments and with a mix of paved and grass areas with trees and urban furniture — were described as for ‘playing’, ‘jogging’ and ‘walking’ before disaster, and for ‘camping’ and the provision of ‘goods and services’ and ‘security’ after disaster. The study of the use of urban wetlands in Concepción assured us that the use of nature in cities is conditioned by the structure of open spaces and it changes according to people’s needs.

Familiarity influences survival: escape and safety

The case of the city of Dichato on the coast, revealed a different scenario and different service types. Dichato was affected by the tsunami after the 2010 earthquake, which flooded almost 100% of the urban area (Link 10). For this reason, the only place that was available to use post-tsunami was the hill, located outside the city limit and over 20 meters over sea level. Thanks to the familiarity of the local community with the streets that reach the highest points of the hill, were various ‘lookouts’ are placed, the streets were used as ‘evacuation routes’ and the lookouts as ‘safety zones’. These, in addition, were valued for providing visual information about the tsunami effects in the city. All type of electronic communication was disrupted after the tsunami; hence, being in an elevated area improved visibility, keeping the community informed. In the case of Dichato, the usual touristic and recreational activities provided by the hill — characterized by its elevated areas, the forest and the sea views — were transformed into survival activities, particularly for escaping and being safe. In this case, and in addition to the case of Concepción, the use of natural areas was also conditioned by the extreme effect of the disturbance on the urban space.

Figure 4. Effects of the tsunami in the urban space of Dichato. The image shows the remaining infrastructure (concrete bathrooms) after the tsunami and the hill at the back. Photo: Paula Villagra
Figure 4. Effects of the tsunami in the urban space of Dichato. The image shows the remaining infrastructure (concrete bathrooms) after the tsunami and the hill at the back. Photo: Paula Villagra
Figure 5. The view from the hill to the city was perceived as a useful service after disaster. Photo: Paula Villagra
Figure 5. The view from the hill to the city was perceived as a useful service after disaster. Photo: Paula Villagra

Time affects meaning: water resource versus waste dump 

The case of the city of Valdivia, adds to the results from the Dichato and Concepción case studies. After the 1960 earthquake (Mw 9.5), changes in the landscape were so dramatic (see previous blog: Link 8), that changed the physical geography of the city. New wetlands were created in the periphery of the city, which used to be agricultural land, providing space for the development of ‘agriculture’ and ‘grazing’ activities, ensuring food for the community. After the earthquake, this land changed into a mix of dry and wet lands, providing ‘water’ as well as suitable areas for installing ‘temporary shelters’ to accommodate more than half of the population who lost their homes (35,000 people) (See link 9 for a photographic collection of the use of open space after the 1960 earthquake).

In addition, built up areas flooded by the river that crosses the city — formerly used as neighborhoods — were transformed into ‘escape routes’. People moved through these suburbs using boats available by most of the community before the earthquake, usually used to cross between both sides of the river. The case of the city of Valdivia after the earthquake of 1960 revealed that although the natural system was completely transformed by land use change (from agricultural land to wetland areas, and from urban areas to riverbeds), the natural system provided services for post-disaster recovery (Villagra, 2012). This can be explained because at the same time the physical geography changed, human needs were modified, and the transformed landscape provided the necessary services for survival.

Knowing the spatial and temporal context in which the use of the natural system for post-disaster recovery unfolds, is very important, as it was revealed by the study we performed about the use of the same wetlands of Valdivia, but in 2012. Through a rigorous research process, we explored what would be the use people give to these wetland areas in a hypothetical earthquake situation nowadays, finding surprising results. The same wetland areas used for temporary housing and water extraction in the 1960, would be used today as places for the ‘disposal of debris and garbage”, regardless of the water they contain. This can be explained because of the change in the biophysical attributes that are visually appealing for the community. The beautiful landscapes of Valdivia’s wetlands in the 16th hundred, described as full of swans and herons (Guarda, 2009), has over time changed into a waste looking land, with overgrown vegetation, lack of urban public infrastructure and accessibility, which in turn has changed the meanings these wetlands convey.

Figure 5. The appearance of urban wetlands in Valdivia illustrate lack of accessibility and hence, utility. Photos: Paula Villagra
Figure 5. The appearance of urban wetlands in Valdivia illustrate lack of accessibility and hence, utility. Photos: Paula Villagra

In the same manner, the survival values assigned to wetland areas in the 1960s after the earthquake, are no longer embedded in the community’s perception of wetlands, unlike the case of Concepción, where the lagoons that provide daily recreation and depict evident cues of urban design intervention and management, were perceived as highly valued by the community after the earthquake. The value assigned to urban wetlands in Valdivia today, as a place for urban waste, most probably rely on their negative appearance as a result of mismanagement over the last 50 decades.

We know that natural systems provide invaluable provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services. Flood and climate control, urban water cleaning, biomass and atmospheric oxygen production, recreation, aesthetic experiences and wellbeing, are only few of the services provided by natural areas. However, it is important to highlight the role they take in the post-disaster context. There are ecosystem services that are not relevant during everyday life but this does not mean they are less important. Some services are dormant resources, which are activated only after a major disturbance; such is an earthquake or tsunami. The role of wetlands, dunes and mangroves to mitigate tsunamis and floods, as well as the role of vegetation communities with flora which is fire retardant are well documented in the literature (Chiang et al., 2014; Hoehn et al., 2003; Link 5; Walker and Salt, 2006) and used in the planning and design of urban environments. In the same manner, it is important to keep exploring and including in the planning and design of cities the role of nature to provide cultural and provisioning services at the local scales after disaster, such as those revealed in the cities of Concepción, Valdivia and Dichato.

Ecosystem services after disaster and at the local scale are affordances, conditioned by the interaction between the needs of the community after disaster, the possibilities of the natural system to satisfy such requirements, and the biophysical aspects that shape the utility of the space. Therefore, these services are rooted in a specific physical and cultural context, and not transferable from one community to another. Accordingly, the capacity of metamorphosis of the natural systems after disaster and of the values people assign to them, changing from their usual recreational and/or economic use to places that provide provisioning and cultural services, should be taken into consideration during the planning and design of cities. Different needs emerge in cities after disaster which can be satisfied by the use of natural systems within and between urban environments. As a consequence, the ‘nature of cities’ after disaster change, including physical landscape change and the way people perceive, use and afford it.

Paula Villagra
Los Rios

On The Nature of Cities

 

Links of interest

1. http://www.pennyallan.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Resilience-as-a-framework.pdf

2. http://www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci-discuss.net/2/4263/2014/nhessd-2-4263-2014-print.pdf

3. http://www.unocha.org/top-stories/all-stories/nepal-preparing-earthquake-kathmandu-valley

4. www.pru-lab.cl

5. http://www.unep.org/maweb/en/Index.aspx

6. http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances_and_design.html

7.http://prontus.diariosregionales.cl/prontus_sube/site/edic/base/port/aniversario_terremoto.html 

8. http://www.thenatureofcities.com/TNOC//TNOC//2014/01/12/can-devastated-landscapes-inspire-planning-and-adaptation/

9. http://www.museo1960.cl/

10. http://www.dichatovive.cl/asi-quedo-dichato/

References

Chemero, A. (2003). An Outline of a Theory of Affordances. Ecological Psychology, 15(2), 181-195.

Chiang, L.-C., Lin, Y.-P., Huang, T., Schmeller, D. S., Verburg, P. H., Liu, Y.-L., et al. (2014). Simulation of ecosystem service responses to multiple disturbances from an earthquake and several typhoons. Landscape and Urban Planning, 122, 41-55.

Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Guarda, G. (2009). Cuatro Siglos de Evolución Urbana Valdivia 1552-1910. Valdivia: Universidad Austral de Chile.

Heft, H. (2003). Affordances, Dynamic Experience, and the Challenge of Reification. Ecological Psychology, 15(2), 149-180.

Hoehn, J. P., Lupi, F., & Kaplowitz, M. D. (2003). Untying a Lancastrian bundle: valuing ecosystems and ecosystem services for wetland mitigation. Journal of Environmental Management, 68, 263-272.

Villagra, P. (2012). Landscape change and urban resilience: the role of natural and urban landscapes in earthquake recovery of the city of Valdivia, Chile. Paper presented at the International Conference on Urban Sustainability and Resilience, London.

Villagra, P., & Dobbie, M. (Accepted). Design aspects of urban wetlands in an earthquake-prone environment. Journal of Urban Design.

Villagra, P., Rojas, C., Ohno, R., Xue, M., & Gómez, K. (2014). A GIS-base exploration of the relationships between open space systems and urban form for the adaptive capacity of cities after an earthquake: the cases of two Chilean cities. Applied Geography, 48, 64-78.

Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2006). Resilience thinking: sustaining ecosystems and people in a changing world. Washington: Island Press.

 

The Rhythms of City Life

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

A friend once told me about the time he started finding dry dog food pellets mysteriously appearing in his pockets every time he put on a freshly laundered and dried pair of pants. Dr. Will Turner had a dog, of course, and recognized the pellets as the same kind he offered his dog in a bowl out on the porch every morning. But he wasn’t in the habit of carrying them around in his own pockets, so how did the pellets end up there, day after day? It took him a few days of detective work to figure out what was going on.

A graduate student of urban ecology, and living in one of the burgeoning cities in the American Southwest, Will was conscientious about his environmental impact. So, among other things, he relied on the desert air to dry his laundry rather than using an electric dryer like too many urban dwellers in these energy hungry western cities. A clothesline in the yard, an oddly oft-forgotten bit of technology, is after all lighter both on the city’s energy supply and a grad student’s wallet. Will’s clothesline stretched across their yard, off the porch with the bowl of dog food.

ScrubJay-PeanutIt took a few days of clothesline- and bird-watching to solve the mystery of the pellets in his pockets. Among the various wild creatures who shared Will’s yard was a Scrub Jay, a consummate city slicker of the not-so-wild American West. This bird, like so many of its Corvid cousins in cities all over the world, is a generalist and opportunist with a not too picky appetite for the veritable smorgasbord served up by us, both purposefully through bird feeders and wastefully when we throw out food and organic garbage. Dog and cat food make for delightful morsels for these omnivores, and it didn’t take long for my friend to notice that his Scrub Jay neighbor regularly pilfered the pellets out of his dog’s bowl on the porch.

Scrub Jays are particularly intelligent, even among Corvids, and have even been shown to be capable of planning for the future. They do this by caching away any extra food tidbits they find, to be eaten later during lean times in the wild. They cache acorns all over their native Oak savannah habitats, for example, digging them up to eat months later during the winter. This ability to cache food, and then to remember the locations of hundreds of cache sites, has evolved as an adaptation to the unpredictable nature of food supplies in their drought-prone semi-arid native country. An experimental study a few years ago found them capable of tracking day-to-day variations in food availability, and caching preferred foods based on what they might (not) get for breakfast the next morning—a form of mental time-travel and planning for the future not seen in too many non-human species. This level of intelligence and opportunistic flexibility of behavior may well be the key to this species’ success in the relatively new cityscapes that have displaced so much of their native habitats.

Will’s Scrub Jay friend had gotten into the habit of not just eating the dog food pellets when hungry, but also hiding them away for potential later use. In the wild, a Scrub Jay caches each acorn carefully, usually in a separate location to minimize the risk of losing them all to potential thieves, parasites, or decay. Seeds may be buried in the ground, or stuck in the crevices of rocks or trees, relatively stable places that are somehow marked down in the Jays’ mental maps for later retrieval. Unsurprisingly, they continue to cache food in the city, finding all kinds of novel hiding places. Such as the pockets of pants hanging on clotheslines conveniently located near bowls of magically refilling dog food pellets. For that was how the pellets were ending up in the pockets of Will’s pants, as he discovered after a few days of yard birdwatching.

Pants, however conveniently they may hang near food sources, can hardly be reliable caching locations. Yet this bird continued to stuff the pellets into the pants, as if driven by sheer habit, even though the cache kept disappearing along with the pants on a daily basis. You can find Scrub Jays use a similarly bewildering variety of odd, unstable locations to cache foods in the suburban jungle. Putting extra food away for a non-rainy day is evidently a habit that has become hardwired into their behavior. Never mind if the cache location itself is ephemeral and unreliable. After all, there is enough food available to these birds in the city that they don’t really depend on their caches so much any more. Caching, then, is rather like how we often put extra food away in the fridge after a big meal, only to throw it away days or weeks later. Who wants to eat leftovers when fresh meals are readily available?

I remember this story, and retell it here, because it illustrates one of the key features of urban habitats for many species: they are relatively predictable habitats offering a reliably steady supply of food. Yes, we build cities by ripping out and paving over more natural habitats, destroying most of the natural food sources for the native creatures. Yes, we shatter the landscape into too many fragments in a patchwork of green/brown/grey which can be transformed over and over at our whims. Yet, amid this increasingly heterogeneous, dynamically patchy space, we do seem to reduce variability in time, establishing new rhythms of renewal of food and water in the urban ecosystems, often to suit our own daily cycles. Any other species that can survive on our excess food subsidies, and find a way to fit into the urban landscape matrix, is free to come along for the ride.

BonnetMacaque-CandyFlossSo what is the ecological rhythm of life in the city, for species that share our urban spaces with us? Dr. Ajith Kumar, one of my professors at the Wildlife Institute of India, while teaching us the methods of documenting and measuring primate behavior in the wild, made the observation that the daily time-budget and diet of monkeys—Bonnet Macaques—in Chennai (and other South Indian cities) consist of hanging around people’s kitchens and eating idli (steamed rice-and-lentil cakes) for breakfast. Just like the human inhabitants of those cities. Nearby, House Crows watch people keenly and dart into kitchens through open windows in sudden snack attacks that startle the human inhabitants but seldom draw more than a frustrated yell or an expertly dodged broom thrown in retaliation. Like their Scrub Jay cousins in California, and other corvids around the world, these Chennai residents have figured out when and where to obtain food reliably in the urban maze.

tea with sparrowsHouse Sparrows in many a quaint European city start their mornings—and likely spend the rest of the day too—hanging around the outdoor tables of streetside cafes, waiting for crumbs of croissant or baguette (maybe bagel for their cousins who’ve settled across the Atlantic) dropped accidentally or on purpose by the patrons. Meanwhile in Tempe. Arizona, in the xeriscaped backyard of Dr. Dave Pearson, an entomologist at Arizona State University, large flocks of birds show up every dawn like clockwork. These mixed flocks include non-native city slickers like the House Sparrow and Inca Dove alongside Sonoran Desert natives like Abert’s Towhee, House Finch, White-Winged Dove, Cactus Wren, and Curve-billed Thrasher. And they all wait patiently (but not for long) every morning for Dave to bring out bags of birdseed to replenish the feeding stations at designated spots throughout his yard.

Sea gulls fly deep inland from the California coast during the winter to survive on urban garbage dumps and roost on the wide lawns of local schoolyards and parks. Alongside migratory and resident geese who honk at passersby, especially in the public parks, aggressively begging for food handouts not unlike the squirrels nearby or the more remote monkeys of southern India. Raccoons and Skunks come out at dusk, patrolling back alleys especially on nights before garbage collection days. Bears too, come rooting through garbage cans, and in some places have found that food supply steady enough through the winters to allow them to give up hibernating altogether. Its a year round party in the city if you know where and how to find it, and aren’t too picky about what you eat.

Gulls-GamlaStan-StockholmExamine the city from an ecological perspective, as an ecosystem built for humans, and a few features about the rhythm of city life stand out. We built cities to escape the vagaries of nature, its seasonal cycles and annual and decadal fluctuations which make life challenging. In the city, we shelter from extremes of climatic cycles, insulating ourselves in increasingly climate-controlled indoor environments. Outdoors, cities even create their own local climate bubbles, heat islands which mitigate the northern winters and herald a globally warmed up future. We have now altered the flow of food and water across the planet, funneling much of the products of plant/animal/human labor into cities that blanket the lands as busy hubs in an ever tightening web of highways and railways. Our network of cities in this globalized world is thus the culmination of our millenia-long quest to free ourselves from the contraints of nature’s cycles. So we can now eat mangos and cherries in the middle of a northern winter, and never seem to be too far away from an all-you-can-eat buffet of foods fast and slow. In harvesting so much of the Earth’s primary productivity for ourselves, we have succeeded in raising and flattening out the fluctuations in natural cycles of nutrient flows. Where our ancestors (and some increasingly small indigenous communities even now) flowed across the landscape keeping a close eye on the flushing of leaves, blooming of flowers, ripening of fruits, and the local or long-distance migrations of fish and bird and mammal, worrying about where the next meal was coming from, we now mostly worry about when the bakery around the corner opens in the morning so we can get in line before the fresh bagels are sold out. The ebbs and flows in our food supplies have been replaced by a more steady stream, and the rhythm of food availability now pulses to a new urban beat, set more by the convenience of our social arrangements rather than the rotations of the planet or its cycling around the sun.

While we bask in this triumph… yes, I know, it is hardly an unmitigated triumph given the litany of environmental damage in its wake as often documented on this very blog; and I know that this steady flow of food and resources is not equally available to all humans even in the cities let alone outside; but, despite those persistent knotty problems, we have nevertheless triumphed over nature’s vagaries in large parts, uneven and ephemeral as our triumph may turn out to be. So… while we bask in this triumph, it shouldn’t surprise us to notice that many other species have also been watching our success and have been riding our tailcoats into the new Anthropocene Earth. It shouldn’t surprise us that the list of species hopping on to our urban gravy train is still growing, as more species respond to the changes wrought by global urbanization, and succumb to the evolutionary challenge of adapt or go extinct.

In the wild, successful species must evolve finely-tuned physiologies that track the regular beat of the seasons and the pulses of tropical storms and the less regular longer rhythm of El Niño cycles which shape the availability of water and food. So the wildflowers and cactuses of the Sonoran Desert or the Namib wait for the unpredictable “monsoon” winds to bring rain which triggers quite an immediate dance of life that ripples quickly across these desert ecosystems. And so the bears and the frogs hibernate through temperate winters while herds of large mammals (used to, still try to) flow across Alaska and Africa, and the birds fly across oceans and mountains, chasing seasonal peaks of sunshine and rain captured by plants and turned into food cascading through complex food webs. Once we began to figure out these nutrient flows, however, and learned to capture and control and divert the planet’s primary productivity to ourselves, we inevitably drove many other species, our competitors and predators, to extinction locally and globally. In the process, we also changed the pressures of natural selection acting on these species. Those species that didn’t go extinct began to evolve adaptations allowing them to fall through the cracks into our own habitats which we don’t really control as well as we think we do. Extinction, while inevitable, is only one of two choices every species must face in life. The other option is to adapt, and many species have and are adapting to the rhythms of urban life.

Evolutionary consequences of our action are, if you think about it, quite inevitable. Set up feeders in your suburban yards to feed the poor birds starving through an English winter, and don’t be surprised if some of those birds change their migratory behavior and begin to split into new species. Such is the tale of the European Blackcap Warblers, which evolved to exploit the continent’s spring flush of insects and fruits to raise broods in the summer before heading south to warmer climes in the winter. When bird fanciers in England and Ireland started setting up bird-feeders, a few of the Blackcaps found they didn’t need to undertake the arduous risky migration towards Africa after all; much easier to hang out in the British gardens where the bipedal primates with the funny hats keep up an endless supply of bird food. That way, not only does a warbler have a better chance of surviving over-winter, it can also be among the first to fly back to its nearby German breeding ground and be in prime position to make the most of the continental summer. The longer-distance migrants arrive later, and must mate among themselves. Thus a few individuals who perhaps flew the wrong way, and who might in the past have simply died in the winter, have now grown into a distinct population thanks to the predictable generosity of human bird feeders. Since migratory behavior, including direction of migration, and choice of mating partners, are all part of the genetic legacy passed from parent to offspring in these birds, the European Blackcaps are now well on their way to splitting up into two distinct species: the German traditionalists who continue to migrate south, to Mediterranean villas or African woodlands for the winter, versus modern urbanists who simply hop across the channel into English and Irish gardens. The new rhythms we have introduced into the cycles of nature sure can alter the age-old evolutionary dance.

Ask humans about the rhythm of city life, however, and they will tell you it is not the same everywhere. New Yorkers, Mumbaikars, Londoners, and Edokkos (or Tokyokkos) have a faster cadence to their walk to the subway stations, and get impatient if their coffee is not served fairly quickly, while Kolkatans and Parisians prefer to linger in their coffee houses, and the lazy beach bums of Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro lounge in the sun and sand. These rhythms turn out to be more than mere cultural stereotypes. My Fresno State colleague, the psychologist Dr. Bob Levine, who studied the geography of psychological time across human cultures, measured how fast people walk in different cities and found that walking speed correlates quite well with these cultural stereotypes. More recently, physicists Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt of the Santa Fe Institute took a big data approach to document the social, economic, cultural and energy metabolism of cities worldwide, and also found patterns confirming the cultural stereotypes: there are indeed fast cities and slow cities, their different rhythms seemingly driven as much by population density and economic activity as by cultural practices and preferences. While many cities aspire to the faster trajectories of the more conventionally successful metropolises, others, like in Italy, are banding together in a new Slow Cities campaign to augment the Slow Food movement.

What does this cultural variation in the rhythms of city life, urban metabolism, mean for other species that are adapting to our habitats? We are only just beginning to appreciate, measure, and understand the evolutionary adaptations of the slowly growing list of species that constitute our urban wildlife. As I described above, the overarching trend of steadying food and water supplies to make them predictably available year round is allowing many species to adapt to our perennial smorsgasbord. Yet, in the finer details, these adaptations must also be tuned to the culturally driven rhythms of who puts out food for birds or monkeys when and where, how and how often garbage is collected and disposed off in different cities, and whether people in desert cities can stop growing lawns to plant more water wise gardens.

Having passed a rubicon recently by having a majority of humans living in cities, are we now also on the threshold of another profound planetary change where human culture sets the dominant beat defining the natural rhythms of food availability for other creatures? Or have we already passed that threshold too, obliviously? In the recent alarming declines of House Sparrows in Eurasia, we are already seeing the consequences of rapid technological and cultural changes, which can destabilize even our most seasoned companion species. In drawing other species into the vortex of urbanization with our predictable food subsidies, are we setting up more of them for longer-term evolutionary failures? Or can we learn quickly from their successful adaptations and figure out how to enjoy the benefits of a culturally diverse city life which also includes a fair bit of biological diversity?

The answers to these questions lie in our own cultural adaptability and flexibility. We have the ability to develop this new understanding of the evolution of species in urban environments, and harness it towards improving the quality of life for all species concerned. We also have the capacity to carry on blindly with ingrained cultural habits, much like the Scrub Jay stuffing dog food into pants pockets without realizing the futility of that caching effort. The answers to these questions, and how quickly we find them, could be keys to how the music of urbanization unfolds across our planet, into a life-sustaining harmony or a cacophonous crescendo that either slows down or accelerates the pace of the sixth mega-extinction we are now wreaking in the history of life on Earth.

Madhusudan Katti
Fresno

On The Nature of Cities

Driving Social and Ecological Change: My Experiment with Guerilla Gardening

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

Spurred on by some students who asked me earlier in the year what sort of personal activism I pursue in relation to my views around the importance of forwarding and preserving functioning urban ecologies, I decided to embark on a bit of guerilla gardening in the form of a seed bombing exercise.

Quill bombingIn addition to the interest and enthusiasm of my students, and a personal desire to re-initiate some activism in myself, the exercise takes its inspiration from, and was informed by, two emerging threads in recent landscape, urban ecology and restoration ecology literatures. The first relates to the application of landscape ecology principles in a constructive, futuristic, manner to the urban context and the second to the notion of using ‘charismatic’ species to engage society, emerging in the restoration ecology literature. A third, more personal consideration, relates to the notion of activism, and in how we position ourselves as participants in a relatively young democracy in South Africa (and one that was significantly informed by activism) in response to current causes.

And then of course there is the seed bombing itself, which was the happy culmination of these various musings.

This kind of flush of informed indigenous green would is the kind of pop up ecology sought
This kind of flush of informed indigenous green would is the kind of pop up ecology sought

Dynamic urban landscapes and ‘popup ecologies’

The landscape and urban ecology literature at the moment notes the importance of not just spatial, but also temporal shifts in the landscape (Ramalho and Hobbs, 2012). What is described brings to mind a dynamic 3D graphic of patches in the landscape changing from occupied, to unoccupied, to variably occupied, and changing in size, shape and purpose, through time. The relief of this is green and brown field sites that are connected, then disconnected, and potentially reconnected in space and time. If these historical shifts are so relevant in understanding contemporary ecological function, then why not take a more active role in manipulating the ecology of those relief spaces in the urban fabric in time? What is presented is often fleeting moments and there might be no long-term potential where every plot is likely to change with the next owner, planning iteration, or political regime. So why not take an opportunistic approach and pursue what David Maddox cleverly termed ‘pop-up ecologies’. We need to view the future urban fabric as an ever-dynamic temporal and spatial matrix where the opportunities for connection and continuity, and pursuit of biodiversity, in space and time are numerous.

Charismatic species to garner public support 

A constant point of debate in restoration ecology is ‘restoration to what end?’ We are familiar with at least some of the more obvious answers put forward to this question around functional ecologies, conserving rare and endangered species or systems, and more recently for the delivery of ecosystem services. A fresh answer to that question suggests a more socially-informed response where one of the purposes of restoration should be to engage the interest of the broader public and to use ‘charismatic’ species to this end (Standish, Hobbs and Miller, 2013). Here the suggestion is to avoid the perhaps more ecologically-hardworking, and to aim for the showy, eye-catching species, that might better serve as ambassadors for nature in cities.

A seed bomb
A seed bomb

Urban activism 

The last point of entry is around activism itself. Having grown up in a relatively politically and socially active community through the apartheid years, I have recently become disturbed by the lack of civic activism in South Africa. Given our heritage where our democracy emerged out of generations of trained and committed activists I feel this spirit should be a positive and healthy legacy of what was a dark and negative era. When I look around now I see very little activism. It’s there of course, but it plays out only really only among the most desperate and there appears to be a significant complacency, especially among the middle classes. So when my students asked me what I actually ‘do’ by way of making my views public and acting on my belief in the importance of an informed urban ecology, I was struck by my own apathy. I have a cause, but was failing to ‘march’ or, as we do in South Africa, to ‘toyi-toyi’.

Note: To ‘toyi-toyi’ is to stamp your feet and chant, generally used in political protest marches in southern Africa. Described by one activist as the weapon of the people where large toyi-toyi-ing masses is an effective intimidation tactic.

Making seed bombs

So the confluence of these various musings saw the organization of a guerilla gardening event to make indigenous seed bombs with a view to shaping the ecology of vacant lots, using ‘charismatic’ species, in my neighbourhood. I ordered seed from our local National Botanical Gardens, Kirstenbosch, and opted for showy annual indigenous species. I purchased seed of 6 species, and a grand total of 25 000 seeds.  Putting the word out quickly secured an enthusiastic crowd who spent a jolly Friday evening at my house mixing clay and potting soil into golf-ball sized ‘bombs’, which were then carefully rolled in seed ( a quick internet search will guide you through the what’s and how’s of making seed bombs). After three hours of hard work we had just over 600 seed bombs.

Quill, Pat and Russellmaking seed bombs III making seed bombs IV - Copy making seed bombs VOur seed bomb making event was fortuitously followed by a day of rain and on Sunday morning we targeted vacant lots and road verges. We made sure our sites had limited alien grass cover to reduce overwhelming competitive dynamics and were well positioned for maximum public benefit. Then we bombed these sites hard. We tossed over-arm, we threw under-arm, we chucked them hard at the ground to watch them break apart, we competed to see who could throw the highest, and we jumped on some, and placed some gently in divots in the ground. We had so much fun! The act of hurling a seed bomb was warming to the heart. To throw something is such a physical act and really did galvanize the activist in me giving me all the gorgeous feelings of righteous action.

Local kids throwing seed bombs
Local kids throwing seed bombs

Now we wait and see. The rain is promising and we will watch our sites closely. Personally, I am not too anxious. If the seeds germinate and come up and something of a ‘pop up ecology’ is achieved, and there is a showy bloom or two that catches the eye of the public that will all be bonus to me. What I take away from the event is the re-ignition of the activist in me. I do believe we should be more active in our beliefs and that people need to take charge of the ecologies of their cities.

Pippin Anderson
Cape Town

On The Nature of Cities

Special thanks to Katrine Claasens, Russell Galt, Georgina Avlonitis, Jackie van Niekerk, Patrick O’Farrell, Quill O’Farrell, Hero O’Farrell, Frances Taylor, Susi-Jo Beyers, Paul Hoekman, Anna James and Rachel  Browning for their assistance in making and distributing the seed bombs.

References
Standish, R.J., Hobbs, R.J., Miller, J.R. (2013) Improving city life: Options for ecological restoration in urban landscapes and how these might influence interactions between people and nature. Landscape Ecology 28(6):1213-1221. doi:10.1007/s10980-012-9752-1

Ramalho, C.E. & Hobbs, R.J. (2012) Time for a change: dynamic urban ecology. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 27(3):179-188. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2011.10.008

 

It’s Up to You: A Vision for 90% Less Greenhouse Gases for Manhattan’s Fourteenth Street

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

If Thoreau were alive today, he might move to Brooklyn, not the woods. Cities of the early 21st century are where life can be lived most intensely, the place for sucking, routing, shaving, and driving life into the corner, as Thoreau famously described the purpose of his retreat to Walden Pond. Cities are where innovations happen, and he needed new ideas.  He thrived on them. At 28, instead of cabin on the edge of town, Henry David could find the marrow of life while renting a walk-up in Greenpoint or Gowanus and exploring the ecosystems of the city. He certainly had the beard for a Brooklyn existence:  a proto-eco-hipster.

Mannahatta2409.org is an on-line forum to help New Yorkers develop and share sustainable and climate-resilient designs for New York City.
Mannahatta2409.org is an on-line forum to help New Yorkers develop and share sustainable and climate-resilient designs for New York City.

Thoreau would come to the city to explore the possibilities. For modern day explorers, we’ve constructed a portal to help people see and shape the nature of the city: Mannahatta2409.org.

Henry David Thoreau – proto eco-hipster?  Credit:  Benjamin D. Maxham in the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, from Wikipedia.
Henry David Thoreau – proto eco-hipster? Credit: Benjamin D. Maxham in the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, from Wikipedia.

Mannahatta2409.org is a visionmaking tool. “Visions” are composed a combinations of ecosystems, lifestyle choices, and climate scenarios, where ecosystems include buildings and streets as well as forests, wetlands and beaches. Based on these combinations, the mannhatta2409.org estimates metrics of environmental performance in four categories:  water, carbon, biodiversity, and population. In all, sixty-five measures are calculated and compared over three time points:  the user’s vision, the area of the user’s vision as it exists in Manhattan today, and the area of the user’s vision as it existed 400 years ago, before Thoreau or the city, when the island of Manhattan was called Mannahatta, an exemplar of the wilderness. (Read more here.)  The goal is to test the bounds and find consensus about what the nature of the city should be.

Mannahatta2409.org is meant for everyone.  Since the release of the prototype in January, about 10,000 visionmakers have included students, architects, scientists, urban planners, and lots of people we know nothing about. (It is the Internet after all.)  Video tutorials are available. It’s free to use, fun to play.  Visions are for dreaming, sharing, investigating, and discussing. Visions can be worked on privately for as long as you like, and then can be made public by flipping a digital switch.  Each vision comes with a URL that can be spread by twitter or posted to Facebook and Google+.

Here is an example:  I used mannahatta2409.org to create a vision for Fourteenth Street in Manhattan with 90% less greenhouse gas emissions. I call it “Terra Nova 14th Street” because it deploys strategies from a book I wrote last year about making better cities:  Terra Nova:  The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs.

Fourteenth Street is a major thoroughfare, business and residential district on Manhattan in New York City.  The orange line indicates the extent of the vision.  It is defined with the vision extent tool, which is the top tool of the second set of tools on the right side of the interface.
Fourteenth Street is a major thoroughfare, business and residential district on Manhattan in New York City. The orange line indicates the extent of the vision. It is defined with the vision extent tool, which is the top tool of the second set of tools on the right side of the interface.
Mannahatta2409.org provides access to a reconstruction of the ecosystems of Manhattan Island four hundred years ago.   Ecosystems are mapped over a 10 x 10 m grid system.  The dark green indicates oak-hickory forest, shades of light blue are different kinds of wetlands, beaches are light yellow, and the estuary waters of the Hudson River (left) and East River (right) are blue.
Mannahatta2409.org provides access to a reconstruction of the ecosystems of Manhattan Island four hundred years ago. Ecosystems are mapped over a 10 x 10 m grid system. The dark green indicates oak-hickory forest, shades of light blue are different kinds of wetlands, beaches are light yellow, and the estuary waters of the Hudson River (left) and East River (right) are blue.
Manhattan today is also composed of ecosystems, albeit ones constructed by people.  Reds and pinks indicate different building types; yellows and oranges, different transportation types; and blue, estuary waters.  The ecosystem painting tools are the top set of six boxes on the right side of the interface.  The second tool in the second set provides a grid inspector, which allows users to select any cell and interrogate its identity in the vision, 2010 and 1609.
Manhattan today is also composed of ecosystems, albeit ones constructed by people. Reds and pinks indicate different building types; yellows and oranges, different transportation types; and blue, estuary waters. The ecosystem painting tools are the top set of six boxes on the right side of the interface. The second tool in the second set provides a grid inspector, which allows users to select any cell and interrogate its identity in the vision, 2010 and 1609.
Terra Nova 14th Street.  Mannahatta2409.org allows users to develop and share their own visions for Manhattan’s future.  In this case, my vision includes a light rail line down the middle of 14th Street, photovoltaic panels, a small patch of forest and an urban garden.  It is also inhabited by New Yorkers making deliberate choices to reduce environmental impact by walking, bicycling, and taking electrified public transit (like the subway and light rail.)  Eco-hipsters also prefer and are willing to pay a slight premium (10 - 15 cents / kWh) for renewably generated electricity.  To read more about the ideas underlying this vision and how they might be achieved, check out Terra Nova:  The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs.
Terra Nova 14th Street. Mannahatta2409.org allows users to develop and share their own visions for Manhattan’s future. In this case, my vision includes a light rail line down the middle of 14th Street, photovoltaic panels, a small patch of forest and an urban garden. It is also inhabited by New Yorkers making deliberate choices to reduce environmental impact by walking, bicycling, and taking electrified public transit (like the subway and light rail.) Eco-hipsters also prefer and are willing to pay a slight premium (10 – 15 cents / kWh) for renewably generated electricity. To read more about the ideas underlying this vision and how they might be achieved, check out Terra Nova: The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs.

The Terra Nova strategy is straightforward and effective: (1) use electrified transport, (2) generate as much renewable electricity as you can yourself, and (3) get the remainder from renewable sources elsewhere. Fourteenth Street is a main crosstown thoroughfare in lower Manhattan, dividing Greenwich Village from Chelsea and Midtown South. Mannahatta2409.org estimates that the blocks on either side of 14th Street house approximately 34,500 people currently (comparable to the US Census Bureau estimates), with about 18,700 working in that area. Average daytime densities top 49,000 people / square kilometer; nighttime densities (without workers) 30,000. Today the most common three ecosystems are sidewalks, boulevards, and apartment buildings. Four hundred years ago, oak-hickory forest, salt marshes, and the estuary existed in the same swath. The collected buildings, parks, and streets, and the energy production to supply them, produce an estimated 1.6 billion kilograms carbon dioxide per year, mainly from burning fossil fuels. On Mannahatta, in contrast, the trees and grasses took in one million kilograms carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere, estimated as plant growth minus respiration.

Terra Nova 14th Street replaces the four lanes of boulevard that currently constitute street with a light rail system, which connects with rail-lines on the Westside and the FDR Drive on the east, and streetcars on every other cross street, i.e., no cars.  Bike lanes extend along 14th Street between the train and sidewalks in both directions. I painted photovoltaic panels on top of all of the buildings and added a windmill in a garden and tidal energy generator on the East River shore. Union Square Park is still green, but now with an oak-hickory woodland instead of a fenced off lawn and street trees. The trees also extend down the sidewalks in tidy rows to the island’s edge.

The most important alteration, however, was not ecosystemic, but rather lifestyle-oriented: my vision is inhabited by eco-hipsters. “Eco-hipsters” are one of the five lifestyles currently available through the interface (average New Yorker, average American, average Earthling, and Lenape person, a Native American tribe inhabited Manhattan in 1609, are the others). The eco-hipster lifestyle is based on the average New Yorker but with some tweaks to reduce environmental impacts. Eco-hipsters prefer to walk or bicycle over short distances and take the bus or subway over middling distances. On vacation, they ride the train. In town they heat and cool using electricity, living in slightly smaller apartments than the average New Yorker. (If that seems impossible, then consider the Lenape-standard dwelling with 50 square feet for a family of four.) However the most important choice that eco-hipsters make is to obtain all their electricity renewably from wind, solar, geothermal, or other real-time power generators.  Electricity deregulation in New York and many other states makes this a matter of a phone call today.

Mannahatta2409.org allows users to estimate the environmental performance of their vision in comparison to the same area of the city today and the same area as existed 400 years ago, before the city.  The dark brown line indicates the performance of the city today, the gold line the performance of the vision, and the green line, Mannahatta.  Four categories of indicator are shown, from top to bottom, for the water cycle, carbon cycle, biodiversity and population.  Other tabs in the dashboard allow the user to comment on the vision, see a flow diagram, and download a detailed readout.  In this case, the Terra Nova 14th Street vision produces an estimated 93% less carbon emissions than 14th Street today.
Mannahatta2409.org allows users to estimate the environmental performance of their vision in comparison to the same area of the city today and the same area as existed 400 years ago, before the city. The dark brown line indicates the performance of the city today, the gold line the performance of the vision, and the green line, Mannahatta. Four categories of indicator are shown, from top to bottom, for the water cycle, carbon cycle, biodiversity and population. Other tabs in the dashboard allow the user to comment on the vision, see a flow diagram, and download a detailed readout. In this case, the Terra Nova 14th Street vision produces an estimated 93% less carbon emissions than 14th Street today.

The result, as laid out in the dashboard of environmental performance indicators, is 93% lower carbon dioxide pollution from 14th Street (106 million kilograms CO2 per year as compared to 1.6 billion kg CO2/yr) with a slightly higher population and nearly 10,000(!) more jobs. The economy of the future will thrive with eco-hipsters in charge.  If those same people also rode all electric trains instead of partly diesel powered ones, then the greenhouse gas emissions could be brought to practically zero.  The increases in green space and street trees also help absorb all the stormwater flows, at least for moderate precipitations events experienced with the baseline climate, defined for the years 1971 – 2000. (Feel free to suggest I use a changed future climate: mannahatta2409.org allows you to choose climate scenarios from 2020, 2050 and 2080, as well as 1609). Biodiversity is up in Terra Novan Manhattan, with habitat for an estimated 56 more types of plants and vertebrate animals than we have today, which is good, but still lags behind Mannahatta’s potential of 548 species in the same area.

Having constructed my vision in my own private workspace, the interface allows me to communicate my idea with the world. In the “Manage Saved Visions” dialogue, a switch attached to each vision is labelled: “Share with:.” The options are “me” or “everyone.” Others are free to view, probe, and analyze all the visions that have been shared. If they disagree, they can copy the vision into their own workspaces and modify it using the same ecosystem painting tools I used, re-publishing with the switch to everyone else. The goal of mannahatta2409.org is to obtain as many visions as possible of Manhattan (and eventually other parts of New York City) and then from those visions to develop some notion of what future we all want to create. Levittown in Midtown? Predator Cities? Eco-hipster-ville? Walden Pond?  It’s really up to us.

Who will create the future?  Visionmakers like these:  the skeptical, the intrepid, and the imaginative working together.  Credit:  Eric W. Sanderson.
Who will create the future? Visionmakers like these: the skeptical, the intrepid, and the imaginative working together. Credit: Eric W. Sanderson.

To be fair, when Thoreau did visit in New York City in 1843, he found it a difficult place, mean, crowded and expensive. He wrote his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “But I must wait for a shower of shillings, or at least a slight dew or mizzling of sixpences, before I explore New York very far.” (Many New Yorkers still share the same sentiment.) What Thoreau did like was the beach nearby, on Staten Island. “The sea-beach is the best thing I have seen. It is very solitary and remote, and you only remember New York occasionally. The distances, too, along the shore, and inland in sight of it, are unaccountably great and startling. The sea seems very near from the hills, but it proves a long way over the plain, and yet you may be wet with the spray before you can believe that you are there. The far seems near, and the near far.”

Cities that work with nature not against it seem far away, but I think they are nearer than we imagine.

A concept for a future beach on Staten Island from SCAPE / Landscape Architecture PLLC and partners for the Rebuild By Design competition.  Read more about this vision here.  The US Department of Housing and Urban Development is providing nearly a billion dollars to make visions like this one come to pass.  Credit:  SCAPE / Landscape Architecture PLLC.
A concept for a future beach on Staten Island from SCAPE / Landscape Architecture PLLC and partners for the Rebuild By Design competition. Read more about this vision here. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development is providing nearly a billion dollars to make visions like this one come to pass. Credit: SCAPE / Landscape Architecture PLLC.

Eric Sanderson
New York City

On The Nature of Cities

Acknowledgments:  Mannahatta2409.org (version 1.0) was created by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).  WCS envisions a world where wildlife thrives in healthy lands and seas, valued by societies that embrace and benefit from the diversity and integrity of life on‑earth.  Development of the forum has been generously supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s New York City Cultural Innovation Fund, the Biomimcry 3.8 Institute with support from the Summit Foundation, and the Bay & Paul Foundation. Terrapin Bright Green and the City of New York’s Department on City Planning advised on the project.  In-kind support for GIS analysis has been provided by esri through an arrangement with The Nature Conservancy. We continue to seek support to improve and extend the website. If you would like to support the project, please contact us at [email protected].

 

 

 

Blue Urbanism: Connecting Cities and the Nature of Oceans

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

While we are increasingly a planet of cities, we must not forget that we live and share space on the blue planet. We rarely put these two realms (or words) together, but we must begin to. By some estimates, two-thirds of our global population lies within 400 kilometers of a shoreline. As oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer, Sylvia Earle, wrote in her important book, The World is Blue, “Everyone, everywhere is inextricably connected to and utterly dependent upon the existence of the sea” (Earle, 2010).

There are dangers associated with rising sea levels, of course, presenting a need to grow and plan cities in ways that better respect these increasingly dynamic edges. But we are drawn to water, to the sights, sounds, smells of marine environments, and there is a deep biophilic impulse and need at work here that visiting the seashore starts to satisfy. There is at once calmness and intensity and a mysterious world just beyond our reach. Research by Michael DePledge and his team at Exeter University demonstrates what we have always known, which is that we enjoy visual and physical proximity to water and that these settings deliver immense emotional and therapeutic benefit (DePledge and Bird, 2009; Wheeler, et al 2012).

Our human fate here on the blue planet is, not surprisingly, intimately tied to ocean health. And oceans are suffering in many ways—acidification and other impacts of global warming, industrial over-harvesting of fish and seafood, the accumulation of the immense detritus and pollution of modern life, from plastics to chemicals to crude oil.

http://islandpress.org/ip/books/book/islandpress/B/bo8998182.html
http://islandpress.org/ip/books/book/islandpress/B/bo8998182.html

Is there a chance that growing cities can muster their wealth, creativity and political influence to come to the aid of oceans? The vision of Blue Urbanism (the subject of my new book) suggests yes! From the redesign of coastal edges and the promise of blue urban design, to new approaches of promoting sustainable, local seafood, to a variety of ways to build new emotional connections to the sea, there is much that cities can do.

At the heart of an urban-ocean agenda is the belief that cities, and the people who inhabit them, can and must exert the leadership needed to protect, conserve and care for the marine world. It is in our self-interest to do so, of course, but there is a broader ethical duty to the immense marine life found there and to all the life on the planet that depends on healthy oceans.

How then, and in what ways, can cities be profoundly ocean-friendly? What does a deep blue urbanism suggest about the ways in which we occupy space near oceans and the many different ways in which urban consumption and lifestyle impact the ocean world? Oceans, moreover, harbor immense amounts of biodiversity, and hold the promise of stoking our collective sense of wonder and enhancing in important ways the quality and meaning of our lives.

How to foster emotional bonds and connectedness between urbanites and oceans is a challenge. For many cities, from Seattle to San Francisco to Singapore, ocean nature is a big part of the nearby nature, and there are many wonderful opportunities to educate and also enhance quality of life and meaning in these cities. Whether through citizen science programs or public education efforts, there is much that can be done and is being done already. Beach Naturalists in Seattle are helping visitors learn about the marine organisms they see at low tide, amateur scuba divers are monitoring and helping to restore kelp forests off the coast of Los Angeles, and citizens along many coastlines are monitoring water quality through the Surfrider Foundation’s Blue Water Task Force.

Images of the Taputeranga Marine Reserve, on the south coast of Wellington, New Zealand, and some of the marine life there. Photos: Tim Beatley
Images of the Taputeranga Marine Reserve, on the south coast of Wellington, New Zealand, and some of the marine life there. Photos: Tim Beatley

“Out of Sight, Out of Mind” might be one way to describe why we give less priority to oceans. We simply lack the daily imagination to fully appreciate the nature that lies beneath and around when we only have modest glimpses into the water world when a harbor seal or whale provides a glimpse of the mystery there.

One way ocean-friendly cities can help is by supporting research that uncovers and sheds new knowledge on and appreciation for the marine biodiversity and nature around it. Singapore, a Partner City in the Biophilic Cities Project, is the midst of a comprehensive marine biodiversity survey that has already resulted in identification of 14 species of marine life that are likely new to science. This marine inventory is wonderfully described by Lena Chan in a recent Nature of Cities post. Other cities have taken similar steps. Wellington, New Zealand, another partner city, sponsored the world’s first Marine BioBlitz in 2007, which took place over the course of a month and also discovered new species.

New technologies make it possible for cities to participate directly in the collection of important ocean data. A company called Liquid Robotics now sells a kind of sea-faring surf board, called Wave Glider, which can be set off on months-long journeys. Propelled forward using the power of waves, the Glider collects a variety of data which could be sent back to and displayed in prominent places (such as city hall? elementary school classrooms?). Cities rarely see themselves as co-generators of knowledge, but could begin to, by helping to drive the push to wire, and better understand, the ocean realm in important ways.

Could coastal cities (especially) begin to understand that part of their mission is the advancement of knowledge about the marine realms on which they are perched? Similar to establishing the position of municipal archeologist (not uncommon these days), cities could expand their roles to include marine research and scientific data collection. Perhaps a “hard sell” to make in times of limited budgets, but I can imagine forward-looking cities investing in their own research vessel, ROV (or remotely-operated vehicle, essentially a tethered submersible), a smart buoy, or a Benthic Lander (that sits on the sea floor and collects sediment and other data).

There are other ways to foster ocean connections, for instance through art in the city. For several months, we had the pleasure of living in Fremantle, the port city in Western Australia. It is a city alive with the images and shapes and forms of the marine world, integrated into the design of buildings, bus stop waiting structures, even cemented into sidewalks. The floor of the city hall boasts a most impressive tile mosaic that features a stingray and hammerhead shark. It is possible also that we might be able to create creative real time visual and aural connections to underwater environments, such as  the windows at the Ballard Locks in Seattle, which allow visitors to see migrating salmon, or the underwater dive-cam at a ship wreck near Albany, Western Australia, that provides a 24-hour window onto this world.

I like the idea of harnessing the power of our now-ubiquitous hand-held technology to foster new connections, such as through smartphone applications like Whale Alert and Shark Net. In the case of the latter, one can select and follow a specific tagged shark, monitoring their movements over time (the brainchild of Stanford marine biologist Barbara Block).

In the port city of Fremantle, in Western Australia, images of the marine world are found everywhere, even on the floor of the lobby of city hall (left image). Photos: Tim Beatley)
In the port city of Fremantle, in Western Australia, images of the marine world are found everywhere, even on the floor of the lobby of city hall (left image). Photos: Tim Beatley)

A major challenge, and a necessary step towards blue urbanism, is to re-define the spatial bounds and borders of cities. In many cases, city governments will have limited jurisdictional authority, with state and federal levels having the lion’s share of control, for instance over establishing new marine parks and protected areas. Nevertheless, cities can again assume leadership and begin to re-define the spatial bounds of their planning, taking into account the immense natural majesty and marine biodiversity, often just a few meters away from shore’s edge. Depicting this marine nature in some form on planning maps and diagrams would be a helpful step, as well as a variety of other steps that would acknowledge, celebrate and otherwise make visible this urban nature.

Fostering a pride of place about marine nature is an essential step. I had the chance to interview Brian Meux, Marine Program Manager for LA Waterkeeper. “My dream,” he told me, “is that people here [in Los Angeles] are as proud of our kelp forests as Hawaiians are of their coral reefs.” Pride about, indeed even basic knowledge of, the marine nature near to where many city residents live is limited and the chance to develop that pride of place has been limited as well.

Despite these limitations, there is immense ocean nature near many coastal cities. There are the near shore environments, and many biologically diverse and unique habitats are only a boat ride away. Along the mid-Atlantic US coast, for instance, there are a series of major submarine canyons, often taking the names of the nearest city. The Norfolk Canyon, for instance, is one of the largest—and about 60 miles offshore from Tidewater Virginia. Known to deep sea fishers, few residents of the city of Norfolk probably even know of its existence, nevertheless the nature it harbors (though there is some information on display at the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center and a local brewing company O’Connor Brewing that produces a Norfolk Canyon Pale Ale!). This submarine canyon is home to a great quantity and diversity of organisms and habitats (from Blackbelly Rosefish to Bubblegum Coral to Bobtail Squid).

The spatial planning vision a city holds and promotes is important as well, and here there are a handful of cities beginning to extend their visions to include the aquatic and marine worlds. Wellington, New Zealand has had a Town Belt dating back to the founding of the city in the mid-1800’s and in more recent years has developed an extensive network of greenbelts that surround this city. Impressively, the city has begun to expand this vision to include the Blue Belt, encompassing the harbor, and other offshore ocean habitats, as well as ocean-flowing creeks and streams, in this peninsular-shaped city. Precisely what the Blue Belt will mean in practice, what implications it will have for planning and what specific actions will flow from it are still a bit unclear. But as an expanded new vision of the nature and spatial planning boundaries of this city, it is quite powerful. The mayor of Wellington, Celia Wade-Brown, is herself a diver and so it is perhaps not a surprise that Wellington would be a pioneer in this approach.

In a film made as part of our Biophilic Cities Project, Mayor Wade-Brown speaks passionately about the importance of this connection to the ocean realm to Wellingtonians:

When I visited Wellington in August 2013, I had the chance to see firsthand the efforts in this city to educate about and foster connections with the ocean environment. On the south coast of the city sits the Taputeranga Marine Reserve, a 9 square kilometer protected area, only a short distance from the center of Wellington. A biologically rich area, its location includes overlap of three major currents. The diversity of life here is amazing, with some 400 different species of seaweed. There are many different ways to enjoy this nature, including through a “snorkel trail,” where one might see starfish or limpets or anemone. Or, through “rock pooling,” exploring the shallow and deep rock pools along the edge of the shore.

I had the chance to visit the City’s Marine Education Centre located there, and to see the ways in which visiting children, many quite young, were enjoying the Centre’s touch tanks. There were volunteers on hand to allay fears about touching things and to convey to kids some of the fascinating organisms they were seeing and experiencing. The overall feeling that day was one of elation and joy and you could see in the faces of these kids an innate glee and delight at experiencing a little part of the mysterious marine world in which their city and home were embedded. There has been a strong effort over the years to integrate the center and reserve into the education of Wellington children. Staff of the Education Centre regularly visit Wellington schools, as well as host visitors at the center.

The touch tanks at the Island Bay Marine Education Centre in Wellington, where kids can experience marine life up close. Photos: Tim Beatley
The touch tanks at the Island Bay Marine Education Centre in Wellington, where kids can experience marine life up close. Photos: Tim Beatley

What else could blue cities do?

Some ideas include:

— Speak out for ocean conservation and marine organisms and habitats; find ways to provide urban leadership for ocean conservation

— Cut greenhouse gas emissions and develop and implement an aggressive climate change action plan

— Reduce nonpoint and other pollutants and their impacts on coastal waters

— Sponsor research of the marine biodiversity and ecosystems, nearby and not-so-nearby

— Develop green ports and green port/marina facilities and practices

— Support and subsidize the development of Community Supported Fisheries (CSF’s, that build connections between consumers and local fishermen) and closed-loop, aquaponic systems that have the potential to reduce some of the pressures on global fisheries

— Create and subsidize programs that make it easier and more affordable to sail, scuba dive, and otherwise enjoy the marine environment

— Teach students in schools about oceans, and help all citizens reach a minimum “oceans literacy”

— Work to understand the many ways that local consumption and lifestyle choices impact oceans and seek new ways to reduce these impacts;

One of my favorite ideas, though admittedly a bit unusual, is the notion of a city establishing one or more “ocean sister cities.” It might be a seamount or canyon, or a coral reef community, but adopting and embracing one or more specific spots on the ocean, getting to know it intimately, visiting and studying it, if possible, might build bonds of caring and friendship, in ways similar to conventional sister cities.

There are many things that cities, both coastal and inland, can do to educate and raise awareness about the marine world, and to exert leadership on its behalf. These are but a few ideas.

What else could cities do to further deepen their commitments to the blue? What is your city already doing that makes it ocean-friendly?

Please let me know: [email protected], and visit blueurbanism.com.

Tim Beatley
Charlottesville

On The Nature of Cities

 

References

Beatley, Timothy, 2014. Blue Urbanism: Exploring Connections Between Cities and Oceans, Washington, DC: Island Press.

Earle, Sylvia. 2010. The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One, Washington, DC: National Geographic.

DePledge, Michael and William Bird, 2009. “The Blue Gym: Health and Wellbeing From Our Coasts,” Marine Pollution Bulletin, Vol 58, pp.947-948.

Wheeler, Benedict, et al, 2012. “Does Living By The Coast Improve Health and Wellbeing?” Health and Place, Vol 18, pp.1198-1201.

 

 

 

Environmental education in cities focuses on youth and community development, restoring ecosystems, building green infrastructure, and more. But is urban environmental education really anything new? What should its goals and practices look like?

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Janice Astbury
Urban environmental education is emerging as a distinctly different approach. It is about learners doing transformative things in their own habitats and learning through practice.
Chankook Kim
After rapid urbanization and industrialization of past decades, citizens in the urban areas of Korea became more interested in quality of life with green spaces since 1990s. Along with such demand for green spaces, there have been two seemingly different approaches in environmental education.
Marianne Krasny
By using environmental activities to realize youth and community goals, programs at places like Rocking the Boat, East New York Farms!, or township schools in South Africa simultaneously address community and environmental issues.
Alex Kudryavtsev
Cities are evolving ecosystems, and we still learn how to manage them for desired ecological and social outcomes. Urban environmental education, which can be viewed as part of the larger system of environmental governance, helps us perform this task.
Miguel Luna
Our local communities represent an opportunity to provide our youth with such learning experiences and nature portals that will create a shift in the way we perceive conservation and appreciate nature.
Pepe Marcos-Iga
Urban Environmental Education (EE) is nothing new. It’s been around since the beginning of the field. What’s new is this growing wave of community led efforts that in one way or another amount to urban EE, even if being called something else.
Candice Russell
Just as we know that kids need nature, we’re learning that in many ways nature needs them too.
Soul Shava
Urban environmental education should highlight and promote community driven environmental sustainability practices (such as urban gardening and small livestock rearing) taking into consideration their contribution to maintaining diverse local cultures.
Philip Silva
Urban EE, done right, listens before it leaps into action. It aims to grow a new generation or urban environment-oriented community activists.
Shubhalaxmi Vaylure
If you ask me whether urban environment education should be aimed at youth or children, I would say families. It’s important make environment study a family hobby so that the impact is greater.
Janice Astbury

about the writer
Janice Astbury

Janice Astbury is a Research Associate at the University of Sheffield where she is working on the Breathing Infrastructures project undertaking action research related to green infrastructure, air quality, wellbeing and connecting schools with urban nature in Buenos Aires.

Janice Astbury

I believe that urban environmental education is something new precisely because it involves all of the things mentioned in the question posed. Environmental education (EE) has traditionally focused on either nature education or sustainability education. The focus in the former has tended to be on nature ‘out there’ with which a distant or passive relationship is often presumed and sometimes prescribed (given that humans are seen as playing a primarily destructive role). Sustainability education, which has dominated EE in recent years, has combined information about global environmental challenges with encouragement of practices aimed at reducing our impact. While it is important to develop this sort of awareness and capacity, young people often describe feelings of fear and powerlessness leading to despair and denial. This seems to be a reaction to being asked to make seemingly shallow gestures in the face of planetary crisis.

Urban environmental education is emerging as a distinctly different approach. It is about learners doing transformative things in their own habitats and learning through practice. First hand experience has been shown to be particularly conducive to learning and this has led to a growing interest in place-based education. As more and more of us dwell in cities, our ‘place’ is increasingly urban, i.e. within human dominated ecosystems (which are more appropriately viewed as ‘social-ecological systems’). Many of these are characterized by ecological disturbance and face growing challenges in sustaining human livelihoods.

In this context, what we need to learn is how to restore ecosystem functioning in support of human health and wellbeing. This involves not so much conserving and protecting nature but rather collaborating with nature. Here humans play a role in cultivating ecosystem functions and services, thus contributing to development and maintenance of green infrastructure, which is good for people and nature. Given that our urban habitats are characterized by complexity and change, it is important that communities as a whole act and learn together, and that the role of young people is emphasized. The latter will be increasingly called upon to create new and adaptive livelihoods for themselves

The goal of urban environmental education should be to develop a systems perspective, adaptive capacity and social capital. This because in order to live well together on this planet, we need a deep understanding of the workings of the social-ecological systems of which we are a part; we need a broad range of skills and a willingness to continually learn and change our perspectives and approaches; and we need relationships with other members of our communities in order to support one another and to effect meaningful change. It is a form of education that is grounded in place, that occurs largely through the process of collective action, and that produces positive social-ecological transformations, which in turn empower participants, inspire hope and engage others.

One of the challenges that this sort of educational practice throws up is that it is completely at odds with the dominant narrative about what education looks like — it has no relation to classrooms or timetables or tests. It is not the sort of educating that most formal educators have been trained to do and it sets off health and safety alarm bells for institutions charged with educating young people. As a result, the pathway toward broad implementation of effective urban environmental education remains elusive. It probably involves some combination of teachers and schools with experimental tendencies, collaborative efforts involving a wide range of community organizations, and encouragement and support for citizen-led, including youth-led, initiatives.

I would be particularly interested in a discussion about the elements of an implementation strategy — and proposals for how to proceed!

Chankook Kim

about the writer
Chankook Kim

Chankook KIM is an assistant professor in the department of environmental education at Korea National University of Education.

Chankook Kim

In Korea, the term “urban” environmental education is not popularly used among either academic researchers or environmental educators, although there are many of environmental programs in urban areas. As the word ‘green’ has different meanings to those who live in urban areas and in rural areas, ‘urban’ may have special meaning to urbanites or environmental educators. If there are any features of urban environmental education in Korea, it is not because such practices of environmental education are implemented in geographically urban areas but because at least the practices have special meaning to those who are urban citizens in the context of their daily lives.

After rapid urbanization and industrialization of past decades, citizens in the urban areas of Korea became more interested in quality of life with green spaces since 1990s. Along with such demand for green spaces, there have been two seemingly different approaches in environmental education. From early 1990s, a group of Korean environmental educators have made their efforts to bring students to wilderness and provide learning opportunities in the nature. From late 1990s, the other group of environmental educators with different perspectives on the environment and environmental education started to focus on the context of daily lives of learners. They rather considered small patches of green spaces in urban areas and made efforts to restore such green spaces if possible.

As environmental educators, we could bring students to wilderness areas for watching migratory birds or to encourage young citizens in urban areas to monitor nests of Korean magpie, one of sedentary birds in their neighborhoods. The former approach is based on views of nature as a place apart from the environment where most urban citizens live, while the latter is environmental education based on views of environment as the place where we live, where we work, where we play, and where we learn.

As an example of the whole-school approach, the School Forest project is closely related to the desire to expand green spaces and ways of environmental education in urban areas. A school community in the project transforms barren school grounds into environmentally friendly forests or garden areas. With more than 700 schools participated as model schools since 1999, the project has started with a central question of how children living in cities enjoy nature and forests in their daily lives.

If there are any other features of urban environmental education in Korea, they may be related to efforts to expand the borders of environmental education with resources of “cities” such as human capital and information technology. Recently a group of high school students in Korea have developed information boards on plants in a small-sized urban park for their project-based learning. The information boards were equipped with quick response codes or near field communication tags. Thus, any citizen who wants further information on the place can easily get it using their iPhone or smartphones. In Korea, there are many examples of environmental education which utilized well-developed IT systems in the country such as high speed internet systems and social networking systems to make the urban areas more desirable and greener.

In sum, the features of “urban” environmental education in Korea is closely related to such practices in environmental education to foster citizens who understand the context of their daily lives and who lead change in their lives utilizing and cultivating diverse resources. Urban environmental education needs to develop competencies of citizens while fostering positive functions of the urban environment.

ChankookKimKoreanPark

Marianne Krasny

about the writer
Marianne Krasny

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”).

Marianne Krasny

Rocking the Boat, a non-profit organization in the Bronx (New York City), exemplifies urban environmental education. The organization has six goals — five of which have to do with youth and community development — things like helping young people feel respected and cared for, become aware of future opportunities, set and achieve goals, and make positive contributions to their community. The sixth goal is about the environment — “Introducing South Bronx community members of all ages to their local natural environment and providing opportunities to enjoy its waters aboard the organization’s fleet of student-built wooden boats and to actively contribute to its restoration and preservation.”

Like Rocking the Boat, other urban non-profits that the Cornell Civic Ecology Lab Education and Learning initiative has worked with often state their goal as youth and community development. The environmental activities — whether sampling water quality, restoring oyster populations, pruning street trees, or community gardening — are a means toward the youth and community development ends. Yet, as demonstrated by the research of Alex Kudryavtsev (also a contributor to this panel), participants in these programs do learn about the ecology of the place where they live and work — for example, they learn about egrets and beavers along the Bronx River, and about the very existence of the Bronx River itself.

By using environmental activities to realize youth and community goals, programs at places like Rocking the Boat, East New York Farms!, or township schools in South Africa simultaneously address community and environmental issues. How such programs achieve this near seamless integration of the social and ecological is one thing youth and community development and education professionals can learn from urban environmental education programs.

But there’s more. Urban environmental education often takes place in stressed communities — neighborhoods experiencing disinvestment, poverty, crime, contaminated soils and water, and lack of green space. Yet despite facing multiple stresses, programs such as Rocking the Boat see potential in small plots of land or stretches of water — so-called urban “sustainability fallows.” And by converting paved over lots into artificial wetlands, or transforming barren median strips into tree lined walkways, these programs realize “fallows” as assets. Importantly, professionals working in urban environmental education also help young people deal with loss — sometimes profound loss such as the death of a sibling or friend, or loss of a valued community green space. The ability to help people deal with loss, transform eyesores into assets, work in communities facing multiple stresses, and integrate community and environmental issues are all ways in which urban environmental education can contribute to the suite of non-profit, government, and private efforts needed to address ongoing issues of environmental degradation and disinvestment. Such capacity is also critical as we face larger issues of climate change.

Some folks may feel that programs that have youth and community development as their primary goal are not environmental education. Yet they truly contribute to environmental learning while simultaneously empowering youth and communities. In this way, urban environmental education reflects contemporary integrated social-ecological systems thinking of scholars and practitioners alike, and offers important lessons for the future of environmental education.

References and further reading 

http://www.rockingtheboat.org/ 

http://www.eastnewyorkfarms.org/ 

DELIA, J. E. 2013. Cultivating a Culture of Authentic Care in Urban Environmental Education: Narratives from Youth Interns at East New York Farms! MS, Cornell University.

KRASNY, M. E., LUNDHOLM, C., LEE, E., SHAVA, S. & KOBORI, H. 2013. Urban landscapes as learning arenas for sustainable management of biodiversity and ecosystem services. In: ELMQVIST, T., FRAGKIAS, M., GOODNESS, J., GÜNERALP, B., MARCOTULLIO, P. J., MCDONALD, R. I., PARNELL, S., SENDSTAD, M., SCHEWENIUS, M., SETO, K. C. & WILKINSON, C. (eds.) Urbanization, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: Challenges and Opportunities. New York City, NY, USA: Springer.

KUDRYAVTSEV, A. 2013. Urban Environmental Education and Sense of Place. PhD, Cornell University.

LIDDICOAT, K. R., SIMON, J. W., KRASNY, M. E. & TIDBALL, K. G. 2007. Sharing programs across cultures: Lessons learned from Garden Mosaics in South Africa. Children, Youth and Environments, 17. http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/17_4/index.htm

ODERMATT, A. & BRUNDIERS, K. 2007. Places of sustainability in cities: an outdoor-teaching approach. In: REINFRIED, S., SCHLEICHER, Y. & REMPFLER, A. (eds.) Geographical Views on Education for Sustainable Development. Lucerne, Switzerland: International Geographical Union Commission on Geographical Education.

Alex Russ

about the writer
Alex Russ

Alex Kudryavtsev (pen name: Alex Russ) is an online course instructor for EECapacity, an EPA-funded environment educator training project led by Cornell University and NAAEE.

Alex Kudryavtsev

Urban environmental education is a varied subfield of environmental education. Urban environmental education programs focus, for example, on community environmental leadership, positive youth development, preserving urban wilderness, urban environmental restoration, green infrastructure, sustainable urban planning, green jobs, environmental art, urban agriculture, and environmental justice. Despite the diversity of such programs, most of them contribute to both environmental integrity and human well-being in cities.

Cities are evolving ecosystems, and we still learn how to manage them for desired ecological and social outcomes. Urban environmental education, which can be viewed as part of the larger system of environmental governance, helps us perform this task. This task is tough because cities are incredibly complex: they are engines of innovations, producers of pollution, sources of prosperity, consumers of natural resources, and labs for solutions of environmental problems. Cities have to develop mechanisms for long-term sustainability, which depends on human creativity, communities’ adaptive capacity, our understanding of biophysical and social systems, human and social capital, and our participation in urban planning and environmental stewardship. These are some characteristics of cities that urban environmental education programs are trying to enhance through different educational approaches.

Last week, on my road trip around the United States, I have visited four different urban environmental education programs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For example, at the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center educators use birds and outdoor play to promote environmental literacy and comfort in outdoor settings among youth children and families. In a community food systems organization called Growing Power, one of their programs involves high-school students in internships that provide experiences with green houses, aquaponics, beekeeping, urban livestock, rain catchment, and other features that educate students from underserved neighborhoods about food choices and production. The Urban Ecology Center at Riverside Park, Milwaukee, features a green building, solar power station, public art, urban wasteland being transformed into park, riparian habitats, classrooms and a climbing wall, all of which are intended to improve visitors’ environmental experiences, knowledge, and behavior. In a high school called Escuela Verde, educators work with urban students from diverse backgrounds using student-led and place-based education such as boatbuilding, environmental filmmaking, cultural preservation, promoting healthy commons, learning multiple perspectives, and developing a sense of place. Educators who I met in these programs have shared how they think their programs influence young kids, students, families, ecosystems, and neighborhoods.

These and other urban environmental education programs differ a lot in their educational approaches, audiences, settings, and specific outcomes they are trying to achieve. But we still can call them “urban environmental education” because these programs are trying to improve the urban environment, including people, communities, and ecosystems — often by collaborating with community members, families, urban planners, scientists, and environmental organizations.

Using the term “urban environmental education” also conveys our excitement about cities as potentially sustainable ecosystems, and opens up a conversation about different ways to contribute to improving cities through education for people and the environment.

Miguel Luna

about the writer
Miguel Luna

Miguel Luna is native of Colombia, an avid reader and longtime advocate of community playing an active role in city, state and nationwide policies. An urban resident of Los Angeles for 25 years, he’s been commuting mostly on bike and public transportation after giving up his car in 2005.

Miguel Luna

Words like watersheds, climate change, and sustainability are part of lessons and quizzes in our classrooms today. Some charter schools have even made the environment and sustainability the focus of their studies. The Law has even stepped in to ensure that all children in our state (California) have a chance at being exposed to environmental curricula. In 2003, a California legislator authored legislation that required the state to develop an environment-based Kindergarten through 12-grade curriculum to all California public schools, The Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI) Curriculum. However, while some schools have had success in implementing this curriculum, many struggle to incorporate the lesson plans. Standardized testing under the No Child Left Behind Act, a system that determines how much federal funding a school gets based on test scores, makes high-score-testing the priority leaving very little time and incentive for teachers to supplement or add anything new to the norm established curriculum.

My respect goes out to those wonderful educators in the system that take on the challenge and find creative ways to incorporate environmental learning in the classroom. But nature lessons must also be approached from outside the school system, absent of objectives, standards, and a letter grade. These lessons must be advanced through life experiences. Our local communities represent an opportunity to provide our youth with such learning experiences and nature portals that will create a shift in the way we perceive conservation and appreciate nature.

City planning can play a very important role in exposing our children to nature. By addressing access to nature from a city planning lens, we can also make our communities the classroom. Our cities are transforming, and before us is an opportunity to shape the way our children see their city and interact with it. If a child grows up walking on a sidewalk that uses parkway swales to capture water when it rains rather than having to jump over flooded streets on their way to school, they grow up appreciating stormwater and not seeing it as a nuisance. A simple walk to the grocery store can become a learning experience by exposing a child to hummingbirds suckling on salvias and bees and butterflies interacting with CA poppy’s and coyotebush (plants native to our local region).

We can design our sidewalks to have destinations. Our front doors can lead us to local parks and these can link with each other via green routes. We can utilize our local parks as portals for children and their parents to be shuttled, as a family, from inner sections of the city to a national park for the day: “Green Routes to Nature”. There is a need for these routes. A recent article by High Country News “Parks for All?” points to a 2011 National Park survey reporting that Hispanics accounted for fewer than 10 percent of American visitors, African-Americans made up just seven percent, and Asian-Americans only three percent. During that same year, President Barack Obama announced the American Great Outdoors Initiative Report. The report outlined the combined efforts of 15 federals agencies that, amongst its six broad goals, would result in: “accessible parks or green space for our children and create a new generation of great urban parks and community spaces.”

If we seek to foster future generations that will not only care for nature but also vote for measures that protect natural spaces, then our children must visit these places and establish a connection. If we are to see a shift in culture around conservation and nature, then our environmental educational goals should expand beyond the school classroom, siloed from the communities they are surrounded by. Our practices must be geared by life experiences that encompass the child’s day-to-day activities and includes the family.

3-year old walking on Elmer Avenue, a green street pilot project in Sunland, CA
3-year old walking on Elmer Avenue, a green street pilot project in Sunland, CA
Pepe Marcos-Iga

about the writer
Pepe Marcos-Iga

Jose “Pepe” Marcos-Iga, PhD, is an environmental educator that helps other educators become more effective, by providing the networking and capacity building tools they need.

Pepe Marcos-Iga

No. Urban Environmental Education (EE) is nothing new. It’s been around since the beginning of the field. What’s new is this growing wave of community led efforts that in one way or another amount to urban EE, even if being called something else. Some of these efforts sparked from seeds planted a long time ago by larger organizations, others from the willingness of community members to make a difference in their neighborhoods. But what they all have in common is the need to create more resilience in these growing urban communities, as more and more rural populations move into urban areas around the world.

It is important to acknowledge the work done by organizations and individuals that build up to the current wave of urban EE, just like when doing science, we are building on the body of knowledge and moving an issue forward, the shape and form of today’s urban EE movement is the result of the combination of many factors. We must stop asking if urban EE is a new thing, it is not productive to measure the value of any practice by how innovative it is, we have to stop claiming it has been done before (or it’s never been done before).

Instead, let’s measure the value of an urban EE experience by asking questions such as:

•Is it relevant to the people who participate?

•Is it effective in generating resilient communities?

•Does it emerge from/with the needs and concerns of the communities it serves in mind?

•Are all the voices in the community being heard?

•Does it provide connections to the natural world within and without the urban area?

•Does it increase the environmental literacy, stewardship and civic engagement of the participants?

I could keep going. And you could probably generate a very different list.

In essence, urban EE is environmental education that takes place in an urban area. I state the obvious to make a point: What defines urban EE is the type of environment where it takes place. That’s it. Beyond that, any type of EE practice can qualify as urban EE. A zoo or museum program, a backyard habitat or edible community garden or one that takes place in an urban nature park. And yes, there is a tendency to associate urban EE with goals that address urban community issues, such as youth and community development or building green infrastructure, but this signals more to the needs and priorities of urban communities, and to the fact that effective EE has always incorporated the needs and priorities of the communities it serves, be it those of farming and fishing communities in a rural area or those of a violence stricken inner-city neighborhood.

So the type of urban EE described in this roundtable question does not describe a completely new version of EE, but simply a new manifestation of high quality EE (that reflects many of the standards set by the NAAEE’s Guidelines for Excellence). But there is a growing difference in the way many of these new practices are taking place. A certain humbleness in their approach, a certain willingness to collaborate, learn from others, establish new connections, step outside our comfort zone and acknowledge that we do not have all the answers and that the learning experience is not one that will be delivered by us the experts to you the learners, but one that will involve a more democratic approach to learning, were everyone is a learner and an educator. This is just one more manifestation of the field of EE evolving and continuing to be relevant to a constantly changing society.

Candice Russell

about the writer
Candice Russell

Candice Russell is a girl gone green & passionate EE practitioner in Los Angeles, managing environmental education programs for TreePeople & CREEC.

Candice Russell

Urban environmental education is growing in scope and complexity. Summer camps, scouts, nature centers, natural history museums, and other similar programs have introduced young people to the natural world for generations. These programs have created an opportunity to learn about the environment which resulted in wonderful immersive experiences that for many of us were a part of childhood, a rite-of-passage, and simply a pleasant way to spend our time. In this way, youth development through urban environmental education is not new at all.

While programs designed to expose youth to nature still exist, in the minds of many, teaching young people about the environment has evolved from an enriching experience to a necessary intervention. We know that children spend less time outside than they did in the past — by some accounts as much as 50% less than they did 20 years ago. From Nature Deficit Disorder as described in Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods, to the well-documented American childhood obesity epidemic, it’s clear that our children need nature and environmental education to enrich and repair lives increasingly spent indoors.

But just as we know that kids need nature, we’re learning that in many ways nature needs them too. Educating students about issues of increasing environmental urgency such as climate change, and the desire to grow an environmentally literate society has escalated youth development through environmental education from wonderful opportunity to a critical emergency response.

TreePeople, an environmental non-profit in Los Angeles celebrating its 40th anniversary of planting and caring for trees and educating the students of Los Angeles in fact exists because an urban kid got out of the city and into nature. Our President and Founder Andy Lipkis was a 15 year old summer camper in the San Bernardino Mountains near Los Angeles when he was inspired to plant and care for trees, an action that later lead to him founding TreePeople as a teenager. Every time we plant a tree at TreePeople the Citizen Foresters and volunteers gather around and together say, “Trees need people, people need trees,” as part of the naming ceremony. This is because in cities trees face many threats, from high carbon emissions to flying soccer balls and need us to care for them until they are well established. Helping young people understand that their continued action is necessary for the survival of the trees they’ve planted is an important part of our work. The truth is that our youth can no longer afford to have a “Giving Tree” relationship with nature. They must recognize what they have to give as well. Our youth will be called upon to solve the critical environmental issues of our time, and will bear the burden if they can not and will not understand what’s at stake. It is the urgency surrounding the movement to couple traditional experiential education with a deeper understanding of environmental problems and solutions that is new. And it is necessary to help our students understand all that nature has to give, and all they will be asked to give in return. Trees need people, and people need trees.

Soul Shava

about the writer
Soul Shava

Dr Soul Shava is an environment and sustainability education specialist.

Soul Shava

Urban environments, as transformed landscapes, appear not be ideal contexts for environmental education. However, these possibilities have been explored by urban communities in their efforts to make such environment conducive for their livelihoods. I remember these efforts from growing up in the cities in Zimbabwe. because my father was a railway worker, we moved around cities and resided in several townships among other migrant workers from all over southern Africa, particularly from Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and from within Zimbabwe. As I recall from our stay in Victoria Falls and later in Bulawayo, we grew up experiencing a myriad of cultural activities, including initiation ceremonies, dance festivities, weddings and funerals of the Kalanga, Lozi, Lubale, Ndebele, Nyanja/Chewa, Quilimane, Shangaan, Shona, Sotho, Tonga and Venda peoples among whom we stayed.

Backyard gardening was a common practice among all cultures, where the emphasis was mainly on providing food to supplement the household incomes and to provide food plants that would not be normally found in the modern shops. As we grew up we sampled various traditional cuisines from the homes of friends and neighbours and grew to associate the food crops in people’s backyard gardens with their cultures, even though there was also much sharing of gardening plants and recipes. We sampled dishes of mufarinya (pounded cassava leaves) and fish from family friends and neighbours from central Africa (Malawi and Zambia), muboora (pumpkin leaves) and nhopi (made from pumpkin and peanut butter) from the Shona, madhumbe (yam — Calocasia esculenta) from the Manyika in Eastern Zimbabwe, umxanxa (butternut and sour milk) from the Ndebele. Other crops that people grew included sweet potatoes, round nuts (Voandzea subterranea), mealies (Zea mays), pumpkins, water melons, spiny cucumbers (Cucumis metutliferus), water melon (Cucumis melo),

Most community members also kept small livestock such as chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs for food. These were reared in backyard cages. As boys we used to go and collect grass and leaves for rabbits and guinea pigs from the wild veld of known plants that were edible to them and would not poison them.

The city was a place where people could lose their identity and origins and blend into the uniformity of modern consumer life. However, despite their urban location and constraints of city life, most of the indigenous communities were still able to sustain their traditional cultural practices in the city, maintain the link with their origins. This is form of urban Indigeneity that is seen to permeate urban spaces today, supported by gardening spaces created by local communities. The knowledge of gardening and livestock rearing was passed down the generations, sustaining these cultural practices.

Urban environmental education should highlight and promote community driven environmental sustainability practices (such as urban gardening and small livestock rearing) taking into consideration their contribution to maintaining diverse local cultures.

Philip Silva

about the writer
Philip Silva

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.

Phillip Silva

Is urban environmental education really anything new? 

This question only matters to people who get paid to put concepts in different boxes (researchers) and people who get paid for their purported prescience on “real world” issues (consultants). Is it old? Is it new? Did I name it first, or did you? I am both a researcher and a consultant—but I am also a teacher and a learner. This is a dead-end area of inquiry because it does little to advance actual teaching or learning and distracts us with quibbles over creation myths. Let’s move on.

What should its goals and practices look like?

The goal of any learning experience should be transformation. The Brazilian educator and activist Paulo Freire argued that teachers and students must share the power to define that change — to set goals for teaching and learning together in response to a specific issue of immediate concern. Urban EE, done right, listens before it leaps into action. It aims to grow a new generation of community gardeners in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn to change the local economics of food access. It aims to empower a constituency of voters savvy in the science of wetland restoration along the levees of New Orleans to prevent future floods.

If there is one single universal goal in urban EE, it should be this: avoiding, as much as possible, the imposition of universal goals. Keep the learning local.

Urban environmental educators need access to training opportunities, mentorships, and coaching. They need help thinking critically about their craft. They need to develop skills as facilitators, storytellers, and explorers. They need to practice a form of teaching that is more than just telling.

The urban EE world worked itself into a lather last year when Toys R Us aired an impish T.V. commercial based on the premise that underprivileged kids enjoy running amok through a toy store more than sitting through another ho-hum “can you guess what kind of tree this is?” field trip in a forest. The ad took an admittedly cynical view of environmental education, and shamey shame shame on Toys R Us for its antisocial hijinks. How very disappointing.

But now that we’ve all taken turns putting the Big Giraffe in a “time out,” maybe we can afford a little introspection. What was it about this ad, aside from its cynicism, that hit such a raw nerve? It isn’t all that difficult to imagine a real-life “Ranger Brad” struggling through a boring lesson built on the half-baked idea that kids should be able to name trees they’ve never heard of. I’ve personally seen this exact approach to environmental education happen more times than I care to remember. It’s bad pedagogy, and it comes from too little training for the legion of young educators working in underfunded non-profits throughout cities in the U.S.

Kids love toys. So do many adults. Toys are tools for imaginative storytelling. They give us tactile ways to knit narratives in real-time. They satisfy what Morse Peckham called humanity’s “rage for chaos” —for safe spaces to break rules and tinker with reality. Toys have always played into childhood explorations of nature, and archaeologists in the future will puzzle at the thousands of action figures and doll heads they discover buried in creek mud and encased in petrified logs.

Urban environmental educators need to set aside their Sand County Almanac and pick up books like Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude or Junot Diaz’s Drown to start finding compelling stories about toys and playtime in an actual urban environment. What other stories should we pull down from the shelf?

Shubhalaxmi Vaylure

Being an environmental educator at BNHS’s Conservation Education Centre all my life in Mumbai, urban biodiversity was my all time favourite topic. While many urban educators felt that environment education should be imparted to rural areas, I differed in believing rural India’s carbon footprint was much smaller than the urban India. Moreover I found rural people were still connected with their immediate environment unlike the city borne people who had severed their natural connection. However I always struggled to seek funds for programmes or projects that were linked with urban environment education, somehow it didn’t appeal the funders who probably wanted me to have the rural component. Nevertheless I kept my belief intact and worked on urban environmental educational modules targeting schools, colleges, families and corporations.

My first initiative

I initiated citizen science programmes under a catchy title — Be a Scientist for a Day. The programme encouraged participation of local people in the monthly biodiversity survey carried out at BNHS Nature Reserve. This programme largely attracted a wide range of audiences however participation by youth between 14-25 years was higher. The students benefitted by learning the research methodologies through hands on training and earned extra credits. The programme succeeded in infusing interest among amateurs for field research. The uniqueness of the programme could be one reason it was covered repeated in print media including cover stories.

My efforts were however strengthened when attended the Conference of Parties (COP 10) in 2012 wherein I presented the findings of Be a Scientist for Day programme in the Communication Education for Public Awareness (CEPA) section. The idea was well received as urban biodiversity was one of the core areas COP11 identified. Since then I started developing citizen science projects and programmes focussing urban ecosystems however it was difficult to get the funding.

My latest endeavour

In my latest attempt, I developed a concept of developing mobile apps based on Audubon eguides model for study of urban trees, birds and butterflies in four metros of India. With help of the mobile apps, a citizen science programme will be launched in 10 schools of each metro. The students will send data on local sightings using the mobile app. This will be part of their project work. The data collected across the metros will be used to compare population trends. This programme will address John Louv of ‘Last Child in the Woods’ concern that children prefer to spend time with their gadgets instead of going outdoors. This programme will make a better use of the smartphone and drive children outdoor to observe nature.

So if you ask me whether urban environment education should be aimed at youth or children, I would say families. It’s important make environment study a family hobby so that the impact is greater.

Urban environmental education in India

First of all urban environmental education as a term is still unheard in cities atleast in India, secondly awareness about urban biodiversity is still in its nascent state. Nevertheless environment education has been happening in formal or informal manner in cities, the term is new. After Hyderabad the first Indian city to develop City Biodiversity Index has inspired other cities to follow the trend. The State Biodiversity Boards have now made it mandatory to the city municipal councils to develop People’s Biodiversity Register (PBR). This ambitious initiative of government hasn’t seen the day light yet. This could be possible if citizen science approach is used wherein city people are involved in documentation of their own local flora and fauna.

Therefore the primary goal of urban environment education would be to create awareness about local environment. It is a common notion in my country that nature study is best done in forests and cities are just concrete jungle with no life. It is therefore important to glamourize local environment by highlighting the unique flora and fauna found therein. Then identifying the flagship species as well as the indicator species which could be represented as species of healthy environments. Such positioning always appeals city people who are exposed to constant commercial advertising. The target groups should include children, youth families and corporate employees. Educational resources need to be developed and disseminated. Corporate employees could also be engaged in study of their local environment as part of the Corporate Social Responsibility, this could be on medium of funding such local initiatives. Print and social media plays an important role as far as awareness is concerned, thus usage of newspaper articles,  blogs and posts on Facebook and tweets on Twitter will be best medium to bring communities together for a common cause. At the end, I would summarize that the best approach for urban environment education will be to use lifestyle technology of urbanites and influence them.

The Rise of Resilience: Linking Resilience and Sustainability in City Planning

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

Cities around the world are making plans, developing agendas, and articulating goals for urban resilience, but is urban resilience really possible? Resilience to what, for what, and for whom? Additionally, resilience is being used in many cases as a replacement for sustainability, which it is not. Resilience and sustainability need to be linked, but with care and clarity.

The rise of resilience

Resilience as a planning and managing priority for cities is on a meteoric rise with NGOs, governments, planners, managers, architects, designers, social scientists, ecologists, and engineers taking up the resilience agenda. The rise of resilience is evidenced by the most recent resilience conference. In May 2014 the Resilience Alliance hosted Resilience 2014, in Montpellier, France. With over 900 attendees, the diversity of topics presented by researchers was overwhelming. If you only look at the Twitter activity under the hashtag #Resilience2014 you can see how the research community is grappling with concepts that vary from social justice, to planetary boundaries, to unsustainability. (Most of the presentations are already online, so feel free to catch up on this discussion).

Resilience is now being bantered around as sustainability has been for more than a decade, which is to say with little meaning and often as a label to fit conveniently on top of pre-existing agendas. In fact, some argue that resilience has already replaced sustainability as the main concept in the urban discourse. A recent op-ed in the New York Times filed shortly after Superstorm Sandy described this new wave of resilience thinking as forming major agenda setting in the United States. But what is urban resilience, and how does it relate to sustainability? In recent discussions I’ve had with city planners, government officials, natural resource managers, researchers, and practitioners it is clear that what resilience means is definitely unclear.

Aerial views of the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy to the New Jersey coast. U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Mark C. Olsen.
Aerial views of the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy to the New Jersey coast. U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Mark C. Olsen.

Resilience and sustainability

The large overlap in the meaning of the resilience and sustainability threatens to make both concepts weak. I fear we are quickly losing hold of the specificity of these influential concepts, and therefore the power of the resilience approach to improve human wellbeing in urban contexts. Other scholarshave begun voicing similar concerns.

I came away from the Resilience2014 conference with the realization that we still have serious work to do to understand how all this research and discussion on the benefits of urban nature and ecosystem services relate to the rapid rise of resilience planning, resilience design, and resilient cities initiatives. I’ve discussed the utility of resilience theory for understanding complex systems previously in this space, but see also other contributors that have also discussed the relationship between resilience and sustainability (see Maddox, Sanderson, Mancebo and Elmqvist for examples).

Defining resilience

More often than not resilience is still mostly discussed as “bouncing back” from a disturbance. For example, in the New York City post-Sandy resilience report, “A Stronger, More Resilient New York from the NYC Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency, the focus is very much on rebuilding and recovery, a particular engineering resilience perspective. This is not unique to New York, but is quite common in many other cities around the world. However, the current, more ecological concept of resilience is not only about bouncing back and recovery but also about the ability to adapt, often discussed as adaptive capacity. In this context resilience is the capacity of a system to experience shocks while retaining function, structure, feedbacks and, therefore, identity.

Definition of sustainability and resilience concepts (after Folke et al. 2010 and Tuvendal and Elmqvist 2012)
Definition of sustainability and resilience concepts (after Folke et al. 2010 and Tuvendal and Elmqvist 2012)

If you buy the idea that we need to be building social-ecological resilience, then city planning still has a long way to go towards definition or understanding of social-ecological resilience that moves beyond recovery and rebuilding following disturbance. Additionally, resilience needs to be linked to sustainability so that the resilience we are trying to plan and design for actually helps us move towards desired future sustainable systems states, and not undesirable ones. Current resilience planning and management efforts may just as likely be locking our urban systems into undesirable trajectories, away from sustainability.

For example, after Superstorm Sandy hit New York City and the New Jersey coastline, there was much discussion about large technical infrastructure solutions for dealing with expected future storm surge and coastal flooding: for example, closeable sea gates at the narrow section of the entrance to New York harbor. But the sea gates proposed to deal with these serious threats to the social-ecological system of New York, if implemented, could lock the city into energetically, resource, and economically unsustainable long-term maintenance costs that also have serious ecological side effects.

Sea gate proposed in the report, “A Stronger, More Resilient New York” from the NYC Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency
Sea gate proposed in the report, “A Stronger, More Resilient New York” from the NYC Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency

Spurred by the recognition that we have to plan and design ways to avoid the level of devastation that Superstorm Sandy inflicted on the New York City region when faced with future storms, the Rebuild by Design program was initiated to articulate visions for climate change resilience in the New York City region. The fundamental idea of “rebuilding” is not necessarily antithetical to resilience, but it underlines the focus within governments at national and more local levels to think about resilience to extreme events from a primarily technical and infrastructural level. To be fair, improving social-ecological resilience is difficult, and when thinking about a very large and complex system like New York City, we can forgive some path dependency, or inertia, in the discourse and design innovations. Still, we have to remain vigilant about the way we use resilience as a concept and a planning and management priority lest our best intentions lead us towards more unsustainable futures, despite perhaps achieving some measure of “resilience”.

Resilience of what? To what? And for whom?

Resilience is understood as the ability to adhere to or lock-in a specific pathway. The generalizability of this concept means it can be applied in multiple kinds of systems. It also means that resilience can both help us achieve desired future states, as well as lock institutions, political structures, ecosystems, or cities into undesired, unsustainable system states. For example, though we rarely read about it in our scientific discourse, corruption and organized crime are incredibly resilient, and yet most would agree are not part of our visions for sustainable futures.

At the same time, given the often enormous inequities in our cities, we need to be thinking about resilient of what, to what, and perhaps especially, for whom? For example, though the installation of a sea gate in the New York harbor might improve resilience to storm surge and flooding for some Manhattan and Brooklyn residents, it could have negative effects in other areas, such as decreasing resilience for residents and ecosystems in Staten Island, New Jersey, or Long Island. Urban resilience planning and management has to take seriously a combined social-ecological perspective so that outcomes contribute to equity, as well as human well-being and ecological integrity.

Dense urbanity?

Sustainable city initiatives are often those that maximize efficiency, minimize energy, and reduce redundancy and material use. Yet, redundancy is one of the hallmarks of a resilience system. Sustainability goals and resilience goals, if not examined carefully can be completely at odds with each other.

One conundrum that scholars and planners have not taken seriously is the problem of urban density. In the sustainability discourse dense urban centers are the key to a sustainable future, and yet, the more dense our urban settlements, the more socially and economically vulnerable they may be to disturbance whether it is coastal flooding, disease outbreaks, political unrest, or economic disturbances. The tight connectivity within dense urban systems — dense in population, but also infrastructure, social ties, and biogeochemical and economic flows — can contribute to resilience, or increase vulnerability. We must be careful not to assume density is positive or negative, but carefully consider, probably on a case-by-case basis, how urban planning, governance, and management for both resilience and sustainable futures can ensure resilience goals that overlap and support sustainability goals.

Harnessing resilience

Understanding urban resilience and urban sustainability as two concepts that promote a plurality and diversity of solutions to social-ecological problems implies that urban planning needs to take on-board yet new metaphors and paradigms to further transform cities (Wilkinson 2012). Resilience can reinforce both sustainable and unsustainable developmental pathways. Harnessing resilience to reinforce system dynamics that promote sustainability is key to achieving future desired sustainability states.

Coda: if you want to get involved

Resilience researchers Gary Peterson and Daniel Ospina are asking for the resilience research community to participate in defining the important questions for the next wave of resilience research. They have created a Google based survey to ask a broad community of researchers and practitioners interested in resilience what research areas they believe are key for advancing resilience research. You can participate in the forum by clicking here. Additionally, the Resilience Alliance is launching a new resilience online network in fall 2014. You can find out more information here.

Timon McPhearson
New York City

On The Nature of Cities

What Species Return? Natural Disasters and the Nature of Cities, Part II

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

In my first blog way back in December 2012 I introduced you to the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 and the devastation that followed to our beautiful “Garden City”. And also to vegetation studies that I initiated in the “Residential Red Zone” (RRZ), where c. 8,000 properties were abandoned in Feb 2011. So what is happening now in the RRZ?

Greening the Red Zone

With property abandonment, the sudden cessation of mowing, weeding and spraying raised some interesting ecological questions for us: what plants will regenerate? Will they be native or exotic species? What native trees were on the properties anyway? Which ones should be saved? What were the threats to them thriving? And so on.

We expected to see lots of exotic species pop up, as many exotics have quite long-lived seeds. They can lie dormant in the soil for decades, and only germinate when the conditions are right — for example, when the soil has been disturbed. In comparison, the seeds of most native species aren’t long lived, and need to germinate in a year or two, or they will die.

So it was a bit of a surprise (and very exciting) to find that oodles of native species were regenerating — cabbage trees for Africa (Cordyline australis), akeake (Dodonea viscosa), karamu (Coprosma robusta), taupata (Coprosma repens), ngaio (Myoporum laetum), Pittosporums (P. tenuifolium, P. eugenioides), lacebarks (Hoheria sextylosa, H. angustifolia), hebe (Hebe salicifolia), ribbonwood (Plagianthus regius).

Hebe salicifolia seedlings that established in the red zone after the Feb 2011 earthquake. Photo: Glenn Stewart
Hebe salicifolia seedlings that established in the red zone after the Feb 2011 earthquake. Photo: Glenn Stewart

Why? It seems that birds were the answer. About 75% of the tree and shrub species that were regenerating have fleshy fruits and were being dispersed by native (silvereye, bellbird) and exotic (blackbird, thrush) birds.

New Zealand native bellbird. Photo: www.naturewatch.org.nz
New Zealand native bellbird. Photo: www.naturewatch.org.nz

We also found quite a few exotic species. These included bird-dispersed species like yew (Taxus baccata), elderberry (Sambucus nigra), Prunus (plums and cherries), and some nasty invasive species like gorse (Ulex europeaus) and broom (Cytisus scoparius). But on the whole the future looked bright for a regenerating native forest.

We have continued to visit those properties and some new ones as well, to see what species are thriving. But sadly we are now being limited — contractors are mowing and spraying herbicide over properties to “lower the fire risk”. Not only that, but with demolition occurring at an increasing rate our treasured seedlings are being scrapped away by heavy machinery. Those diggers are also disturbing the soil on the abandoned properties and exposing the seeds that have lain dormant, which means a lot of those invasive exotic seeds are now germinating.

Cleared residential property in the red zone. Photo: Glenn Stewart
Cleared residential property in the red zone. Photo: Glenn Stewart

And there’s another force at play that’s giving the exotics the upper hand — species that were being controlled by gardening practices now have free rein. Buddleja davidii (butterfly bush), golden locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), elm (Ulmus), ash (Fraxinus), Prunus, blackberry (Rubus fruticosus), sumac (Rhus sp) and elderberry (Sambucus nigra), and many other species are sprouting up in lots of places.

In the course of our surveys we have also discovered some awesome native treasures that have survived on residential properties: a huge hard beech (Nothofagus truncata) in Avonside, several miro (Prumnopitys ferruginnea) loaded with fruit, a massive hinau (Elaeocarpus dentatus) in Dallington, kauri (Agathis australis), native beeches (black, red and silver beech), kanuka (Kunzea ericoides), kahikatea (Dacrycarpus dacrydioides), totara (Podocarpus totara), the list goes on.

Native New Zealand podocarp tree Prumnopitys ferruginea (miro) in full fruit in the red zone. Photo: Glenn Stewart
Native New Zealand podocarp tree Prumnopitys ferruginea (miro) in full fruit in the red zone. Photo: Glenn Stewart

There are some majestic old exotic trees as well, especially in older suburbs such as Avonside and Dallington — walnuts (Juglans sp.), weeping elms (Ulmus), maples (Acer sp.), magnolias, rhododendrons, and many others. We don’t need the silver birches (Betula pendula) though — they are allergenic and this could be a good time to get rid of them. As for sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus), now is also a perfect opportunity to get rid of this nasty, invasive tree as well.

One thing that has become quite noticeable on recent red zone visits is that many treasured old native and exotic trees are now dying for some inexplicable reason. Maybe it is exposure, caused by the removal of houses and surrounding tree that were sheltering them. Maybe the demolition heavy machinery is damaging their roots. Whatever the cause, these trees will be lost.

We don’t yet know what the future will be for this land. John Key (NZ Prime Minister) has said that by the middle of this year we might have a clearer picture. It’s now the middle of this year!

Parkland created by the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) after residential property demolition in the red zone. Photo: Glenn Stewart
Parkland created by the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) after residential property demolition in the red zone. Photo: Glenn Stewart

At the moment the cleared areas are being grassed and fenced into small parklands of scattered trees and shrubs. But that is not a long-term, biodiverse, or even sustainable solution. Grassed parklands need mowing and weed control. They are expensive to maintain. A biodiverse forest, dominated by native trees and shrubs but also containing components of the cultural and historical heritage of the area is a much more sustainable option.

We could speed up the return of our iconic wildlife by allowing the remaining small patches to regenerate and by supplementary planting of native species known to attract the native birds, invertebrates, and geckos that are essential in our native ecosystems. This would include the large, long-lived podocarps that naturally grew in parts of what is now the red zone: matai (Prumnopitys taxifolia), kahikatea and totara.

New Zealand green gecko – important pollinators for many native plant species. Photo: New Zealand Department of Conservation.
New Zealand green gecko – important pollinators for many native plant species. Photo: New Zealand Department of Conservation.

The native vegetation has tremendous resilience, but only if we understand nature and how it works. In years to come, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren could have a huge biodiversity asset in the form of an amazing native forest running through their vibrant green city. But to achieve that for them, we need to take care of what is left and make sure the invasive exotic weeds don’t get a stranglehold.

You can help. We need to know what’s happening in all parts of the residential red zone. So we’ve set up a project on naturewatch.org.nz for people to post photographs of the plants and animals they see there. You don’t have to be expert. You don’t even need to know what it is you’re photographing — experts on NatureWatch NZ can help to identify species for you. But by contributing, you’re helping us understand just what’s going on.

NatureWatch NZ logo. Photo: www.naturewatch.org.nz
NatureWatch NZ logo. Photo: www.naturewatch.org.nz

The environment we leave for our children is in our hands. Help us to ensure it’s one they will thank us for.

To contribute to the NatureWatch Christchurch residential red zone project go to www.naturewatch.org.nz and search for “Chch residential red zone” under “Projects”.

Glenn Stewart
Christchurch

On The Nature of Cities

 

The Cooperative Governance of Urban Commons

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

From my office, on the 9th floor of a tall building in an academic campus in Bangalore, I have a birds-eye view of the city’s peri-urban surroundings. To the west, I can see a 6-lane high-speed highway choked by traffic, full of people frenetically commuting from their homes in city to their jobs in the globally famous Information Technology campuses located just outside. To the east, I am fortunate to witness a completely different picture. A tranquil marshy wetland and freshwater lake, with dozens of cows grazing and cooling down in the water while the mid-day sun blazes overhead, accompanied as companions by hundreds of cattle egrets feeding on the insects that annoy the cattle. This idyllic picture of cooperation, mutualism, and rural bliss has evolved and been sustained over centuries in Bangalore. (Bangalore’s lakes are not natural, but were created and maintained by local communities, with a history that can be traced as far back as 450 AD.) Yet even this picture is marred by construction and dumping of large mounds of debris onto the wetlands at one side of the lake.

Manjunath-B-An-intact-peri-urban-lake-managed-by-the-local-village.jpg
Manjunath B—An intact peri-urban lake managed by the local village

Such contradictions of livelihoods and lifestyles, urbanity and rurality, shared cooperation and rampant self-interest, may be typical of many Indian cities but are certainly not unique to India. Certainly, the situation I have just described in Bangalore could be familiar to people in many other countries, even continents. Conflicts such as these just described have given rise to, and are exacerbated by, some of the worst inequities that the world has ever experienced. A recent Oxfam report, released on the occasion of the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos, quotes a staggering figure: the world’s richest 85 people now collectively own as much money as the world’s poorest 3.5 billion! In a world that seems to be moving towards increasing self interest, and growing private control of the environment and natural resources, how can we ever hope or plan for a better future?

Following the example of Elinor Ostrom, who received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her pioneering work on the commons, we need to enlarge our discussion of models of urban governance to include a third alternative to the commonly espoused twin pillars of private and government administration, i.e., that of the community. Research from case studies in diverse contexts across the world has now proven clearly that multi-level collaborations between local community groups, civic society actors and government administration are essential for the effective, equitable and sustainable governance of natural resources. For such collaborations to be effective, they should however enable the scope for negotiations on an equal slate between different groups, such as high income apartment owners and slum residents, that are likely to have very different power structures. Developing the platform to allow negotiations at an equal level is particularly challenging in cities given the underlying context of high economic growth, which puts natural resources at stake. The imbalance between power structures becomes every more stark when natural resources are monetized, whether in the context of fracking and industrialization in China and the USA, or ground water withdrawal and water privatization in Latin American and Indian cities.

Harini-Nagendra-The-recently-restored-Kaikondrahalli-lake-in-Bangalore-restored-with-community-participation. Photo: Harini Nagendra
The recently restored Kaikondrahalli lake in Bangalore restored with community participation. Photo: Harini Nagendra

Effective governance is the key, obviously. Yet, to address these thorny challenges requires an adequate appreciation of the complexities of politics and political science, which is often lacking in approaches adopted by governments, influential thinktanks and international policy makers. Clearly, in today’s information age, lack of information does not constitute a barrier. More likely, it is the lack of dialogue, exacerbated by the imbalance in power, that creates barriers to cooperative governance for inclusive cities. It is the same lack of dialogue and imbalance in power between the urbanized landscape to the west of my office (with its character shaped by the shared use of large roads by high speed traffic), and the rural landscape to the east (with its character shaped by the shared use of wetlands by cattle and people), that leads to the dominance of the road over the lake, of the need for speed and linear growth over reflection and an appreciation of the cycles of life. Such an imbalance in appreciation, in ideology, almost inevitably leads to the disappearance and decay of these commons in urban areas. Cities thus become oceans of gray in a quest for endless economic growth, swallowing up all the little islands where commoners once thrived and flourished in respectful contestation and adaptive dialogue with nature.

A formerly large lake which has dried up due to encroachment of the water channels that feed the lake. Photo: Harini Nagendra
A formerly large lake which has dried up due to encroachment of the water channels that feed the lake. Photo: Harini Nagendra

Our studies, as well as practical experience with community governance in the context of Bangalore’s lakes, has strongly highlighted the role for dialogue between communities and city government in providing the conditions that are inductive for effective co-management. This is particularly important in high growth urban contexts, which face political economic challenges of rent seeking, corruption and economic profit-making that can bias planning towards short term profit seeking, at the expense of long term sustainability. Fortunately, Bangalore seems to doing well in this regard, with a number of lake communities coming forward to reclaim derelict lakes in their neighborhood, supported by civic action in the form of Public Interest Litigations and an active judiciary that places pressure on city administration.

Such initiatives cannot be taken for granted, however, and are few and far between at the national level in India and indeed, in most countries with fast growing cities. Our only hope for scaling up such action is to enable outreach at a mass scale, through interdisciplinary education that crosses boundaries, engages with students, local communities, policy makers and private actors, and facilitates respectful contestation across groups of actors joined in the common goal of seeking equitable pathways towards greater urban sustainability. Engaging with problems of sustainability in an equitable, fair and just manner will require the fresh perspectives engendered by such discussion.

Harini Nagendra
Bangalore

On The Nature of Cities

Note: This blog post draws substantively on the article ‘Reflections’ by Harini Nagendra in The Commons Digest: Publication of the International Association for the Study of Commons, Spring 2014: Number 15, pp. 15-18.

 

The Palo Verde in My Backyard

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Dramatically reduce city parking requirements.

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

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

— Legalize garage conversions.

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

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

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

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

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

 Stephanie Pincetl
Los Angeles

 

On The Nature of Cities

 

Weaving Nature for Biodiversity Enhancement in African Urban Landscapes

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

This article is a follow up on the worldview on urban nature that illustrated the fragmentation of urban natural landscapes. The aim of this article is to take the discourse further by assessing possible approaches for appropriate mixes of built up form and nature that can be integrated through reconfiguring urban landscapes. The proposed approaches for a mosaic of urban form are not intended to provide detail of urban form but an overview of issues necessary for configuring urban landscapes that have high biodiversity.

With examples from several cities across East and West Africa, it is recognized that there is no framework for analysis and planning to integrate natural resource management in sustainable urban development (Lwasa, 2014). Contemporary planning frameworks continue to treat ecological zones that are separated from other land uses. Some ecological zones like wetlands have only recently been recognized and conserved for their ecological services and economic benefits. Thus, urban ecological zones in cities of Kampala, Nairobi, Ibadan, Addis Ababa, Dar es Salaam have been conserved through ad hoc interventions by individuals, organizations and municipalities often driven through landscaping for ‘beautification’ or legally binding requirements of RMSAR convention (Shaheen et al., 2010). Experience shows multi-level practices involving multiple actors from community to city-scales. Yet cities are now increasingly realizing the need for enhancing ecosystem services from within to reduce on ecological footprints in hinterlands (Lwasa et al., 2013). This is due to the shear increase in population and degradation of the ecosystem services coupled with heightened drive for local ecosystem services enhancement.

Fragmented landscapes

In my last contribution which talked about the worldview of urban nature, the importance of rethinking ecology of cities in ‘urbanscapes’ was highlighted due to the contemporary fragmentation of urban nature, in which development disrupts and compartmentalizes nature, rather than being embedded within it as an integrated matrix. was highlighted. In many developing cities, the trajectory for urban development is likely to continue with the process of fragmentation and indeed this will be a feature of urban development. The reason for this continued fragmentation is that most urban areas are founded on earlier urban development principles and structures, among which is the separation of ‘incompatible’ land uses (Habitat, 2009).

Though this principle has been applied largely to ‘urban uses’ like industry, residential and commercial zones, it continues to permeate most urban developments and extensions into the city-regions. Examples are extensive and usually massive clearance for new housing projects; infrastructure installations and industrial parks that often replace natural patches with landscape-designed patches. This transforms urban nature, in turn affecting biodiversity and ecosystem services. Though urban planning literature talks about ‘planning with nature’, this is often followed because of the difficulty it presents in design and construction. For example the influence of terrain in urban design for hilly and mountainous regions such as Kigali in Rwanda has opportunities for urban nature but economic and construction feasibility hinders such urban design. The resultant imprint of urban development is fragmentation of built up form and nature.

Contemporary planning of cities is slowly embracing the ‘planning with nature’ principle (Zhou et al., 2010) which is motivated by recent discourse on global environmental changes. This implies that urban planning should ‘weave’ built up imprints on to natural landscape where new developments would be developed with renewal of natural landscapes for already urbanized regions. This article attest to the process of conceptualizing, planning and realization of nature-built-form weaved landscapes. The article uses this framework drawing from examples across several African cities that have demonstrated both deliberate and inadvertent policies for weaving nature with urban development. The major aim is to map ways in which cities can integrate nature for biodiversity to enhance ecosystem services into future urban development.

Demise of nature in cities

Historically, the imprint of cities in Africa has been influenced by economic, geopolitical and strategic reasons for which urban land uses and activities were configured (Mukwaya et al., 2010). Land use separation for efficiency or risk minimization meant that some areas, such as industrial, residential and commercial zones, were occurred as extended built up landscapes with small patches of green areas where permissible or otherwise desirable (MCHG, 2011). These three urban land uses also place the highest demand on urban land. Factors including density, lifestyle, and social class have coupled to influence the destruction or conservation of nature in urban areas. Different standards on density were applied to correspond to different social groups.

On the other hand large scale, often centralized infrastructure created built up patches that sometimes were isolated from the densely populated areas such as sewage treatment plants but which over time. These however have been annexed through sprawl overtime (Adelekan, 2012; Vermeiren et al., 2012). The dynamic processes of construction and extension have long led to the destruction of nature in many cities. Cities including Ibadan, Kampala, Dar es Salaam include the remains of previous natural landscapes that have been reduced by the high density urban cores to form extended built up mosaics. While urban lifestyle, largely defined as living in modern housing, leisure, mobility and circulation, has influenced the behavior of urban dwellers, that in turn influences how urban actors value biodiversity and ecosystems.

Thus, paved courtyards and driveways have replaced natural landscapes and have cumulatively created extended hard surfacesimpervious surfaces with minimal natural patches. Differences exist between historical areas of the city for some social groups as compared to other social groups (Miraftab, 2009; Owens, 2010). For example in Ibadan and Kampala, historical downtown areas for commercial and industrial occur as extended built up form. On the other hand high social class areas in both towns containhave larger green patches compared lower social group areas of high densities with minimal green patches. Over time these differentiated landscapes in the cities have influenced biodiversity, with some having fauna that are typically found in nature parks and or exitu conservancies.

Kololo suburb turned civil area in Kampala. Photo: Shuaib Lwasa
Kololo suburb turned civil area in Kampala. Photo: Shuaib Lwasa

The resurgence of natural landscapes in cities

The need for biodiversity enhancement in cities notwithstanding, social systems akin to mid-19th century planning for ‘country homes’ or summer gardens have now started to penetrate new urban developments in Africa. Though this is not entirely new, the dimension this process is taking differs from the ‘garden city’ concept to include natural areas with multiple uses. It is also arguable to attribute this resurgence to urban planning or response to dynamic urban dwellers changing lifestyles. But the key feature of the resurgence is what in this article is referred to as a weave of nature and built up form.

In Nairobi, for example, the Karura Forest is contained by predominantly built up areas but has rich biodiversity of tree species, several fauna species of monkeys and is partly used for leisure and recreation. Although it may have been conserved through efforts of a single environmentalist with support of the Green Belt Movement that she founded, the forest stands as an example of new forms of urban development that can have ecosystem service enhancement and co-benefits. In respect to co-benefits, one cannot miss the high-class luxurious hotels close to the park that take advantage of the rich biodiversity for nature walks as well as leisure sports.

In Ibadan, the extended forest and botanical gardens of University of Ibadan are home to a range of flora and fauna species yet the University is surrounded by dense residential and mixed-use developments. Also in Ibadan, the army cantonment is characterized by extensive patches of green areas, some of which are used for agriculture, while a large part still has natural habitat. Accomplished deliberately or inadvertently, the processes behind the conservation of these natural areas in these cities have weaved nature with built up form. This illustration is important for developing cities as well future cities.

The motivation for weaving also lies in the fact that many of these cities including Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Dar es Salaam, Kampala and Ibadan sit on or are surrounded by highly productive land. In some cities the rsurgence has also been associated with the need for enhancement of ecosystem services that may include conservation of water towers, as the case of Nairobi Ngong region, or conservation of wetlands as the case of Kampala for treatment of sewage and flood attenuation. Directly the conservation does not only weave nature with built up form but it also conserves biodiversity. In newly developing urban areas within city regions, there is increasing conservation of natural areas some of which are designed with corridors that allow fauna to periodically migrate (Fields, 2009; Mapes and Wolch, 2011).

Ibadan City mosaic. Credit: Shuaib Lwasa
Ibadan City mosaic. Credit: Shuaib Lwasa
Kampala City mosaic. Credit: Shuaib Lwasa
Kampala City mosaic. Credit: Shuaib Lwasa
Nature on residential plots. Photo: Shuaib Lwasa
Nature on residential plots. Photo: Shuaib Lwasa

Navigating a dynamic urban landscape

Changing or controlling urban lifestyles, livelihoods, value systems and densities in cities will be some of the key limiting factors for weaving nature with built up form. These factors are behavioral in nature and although urban planning has long been used to influence behavior, such an undertaking is a challenge. The reconceptualization of urban densities, historically linked to social class segregation is even a more challenging issue given the recent call for compact cities, mixed uses and green belt urban models for sustainable cities (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2005; Jenks et al., 2000). However there is a promise in rethinking densities and spatial configuration. Densities play a significant role and can enhance strategies for promotion of biodiversity. High densities have been characterized by continuous built up form for efficiency but adequate attention is yet to be given to mixed density buildings and patchy developments that reduce on the contiguity of extended built up form. This would require the valuation of ecosystem services for biodiversity conservation through natural patches mixed with built up form. If this strategy is implemented, it will have costs associated with transportation and services infrastructure whose agglomeration efficiency can be reduced since the strategy of mixed densities can increased distances and area of coverage of such infrastructure. The role of valuation of biodiversity and nature areas is critical in changing urban densities.

Urban lifestyles differ by social class but the threads of such lifestyles involve circulation, mobility and leisure (Kenworthy, 2006; Næss, 2012; Newman and Kenworthy, 1996; UN-Habitat, 2012). This influences what modes of transport are used and choices regarding residential location. Thus number of trips, vehicle miles traveled and costs associated with mobility between work and home can be planned for minimization. On the other hand transportation systems and corridors have been used to influence the behavior associated with mobility. The systems of lifestyles and land use configuration have inherent resource consumption patterns. When integrated with changes in densities and strategies that increase green patchiness, the costs associated with this lifestyle may increase. Valuation of the ecosystem services related to mixed natural and built up form will be critical in enhancing biodiversity. There are some examples of urban areas that are using Transit-Oriented Development and mixed densities resulting into promotion of biodiversity (Busck et al., 2006). In respect to sewage treatment infrastructure, new models of service provision include decentralized systems, which rely on local ecosystem services as compared to centralized systems. This implies that for urban planning to play a role in biodiversity conservation, the valuation will have to be integrated in the planning process. For example in Kampala, decentralization of sewage treatment installations has taken into consideration the conservation of wetlands spread across the city. Such valuation will also require understanding tradeoffs between biodiversity and social economic benefits. Understanding and implementing tradeoffs can play a role on influencing the change in urban lifestyles and value systems for urban nature.

Community-scale interventions that need to go into planning and design are critical to realize the proper mix of built up form and nature. Several studies across cities in Africa have shown that at micro-scale, individuals are willing and can invest in keeping green patches on their plots (Adekola and Mitchell, 2011). This can be for ornamental, leisure, herbal medicinal or even livelihood purposes. In all these instances, biodiversity can have a place on core urban areas and along the urban-rural gradient. In the Kampala city region, community intervention has contributed to the conservation of a relatively small patch of forestry at Zikka with natural forest cover much to the dislike of the often aggressive actors in the urban land market. Valuation in this case for the ecosystem differs from valuation from the land market perspective. Planning in this case needs to embrace urban ecological approach and building on the existing good practices of community-level initiatives is critical for a proper mix of built up form and nature in cities. In Kigali, Rwanda the enforcement of environmental sustainability in the city through protection of wetlands has maintained the wetland lining with enhanced biodiversity. While in Ibadan the Bodija residential area is characterized by green patches. The motivation for the enforcement is the protection of ecosystem service of water provision that has had add-ons of biodiversity conservation in the cities. This is coupled with a deliberate beautification of the hills in these cities that can be a good practice which is adaptable and scalable in other cities.

Conclusion

The character of city growth in Africa will continue to fragment urban nature due to the shear numbers of people that will be living in cities. Densities will increase and continuous urban form extend into city-regions degrading ecosystems in immediate hinterlands. It is also now increasingly recognized that cities are rich in biodiversity although the ecosystems are under threat from expansion of built up form. Cities are now seen as potential areas for conservation of biodiversity.  Weaving nature with built up form as cities grow and expand in this century will require reconfiguration of built up form, valuation of ecosystem services and conservation of the existing natural resources on which cities sit.

This article does not delve into the details of urban biodiversity but gives an overview of approaches to appropriate mix of uses. This is context specific since cities have different landscape ecologies. With other ecological systems in rural environments under threat due to both expanding cities and competition with food, biofuels production, cities can play a role in conservation as illustrated by the several cases presented in this article. The concerted effort by conservationists, planners and advocates has to be appreciated. Valuation of the ecosystem services, mainstreaming into planning and support and scaling up community-level conservation practices are critical in weaving nature into built up form.

With possibly many cities in Africa yet to be built, it is important that the next generation of urban development practitioners take into account the importance of a nature-built up form mix.

Shuaib Lwasa
Kampala

On The Nature of Cities

 

References 

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A Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) on Cities and Human Settlements is competing for a place among the final United Nations SDGs that will be approved in 2014. If there were an explicitly Urban SDG, what would it look like? What should it say?

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Yunus Arikan, Bonn
Reality of an UrbanSDG refers to the fact that we are living in a new 21st Century Urban World. For the first time more than 1 of 2 people globally are living in urban agglomerations.
Genie Birch, New York
Why is the United States government dragging its feet about whether to support a stand alone goal for cities and human settlements?  
Benjamin Bradlow, Cape Town
The development of the SDGs, and the prospect of an urban goal, are significant for all of us who work to make cities more inclusive.
Maruxa Cardama, Brussels
Five suggested targets for the urban SDG.  
Thomas Elmqvist, Stockholm
If poorly defined and managed, urban SDG targets and indicators will almost certainly have unintended consequences and negative outcomes that will be difficult to reverse.
Julian Goh, Singapore
A standalone Urban SDG will allow us to focus. With the right leadership, cities can mobilize and act much more quickly, compared to the national governments.
Shuaib Lwasa, Kampala
An SDG on cities and human settlements would be useful if upfront the design would create opportunities for all categories of urban dwellers.
Anjali Mahendra, Bangalore
An urban SDG is an opportunity to mobilize all urban stakeholders—public, private, and civil society—towards solving global sustainability issues.
Mary Rowe, New York
We need an urban sustainable development goal because national governments, without one, will continue their outdated, tired bias of setting national policies that ignore the particularity of cities and attempt to apply homogenous policies that incorporate rural, less dense and dense areas all together.
Andrew Rudd, New York
We need an urban SDG because cities are still the world’s preeminent sites for sharing. An urban SDG must therefore aim for the (re)configuration of all human settlements.
Karen Seto, New Haven
Urbanization presents both opportunities and challenges to the sustainability of Earth’s life support systems. Rather than arguing for any particular urban SDG, I propose that the United Nations consider at least three criteria in the discussions of an urban SDG.
Lorena Zárate, Mexico City
Ten proposed targets for an urban SDG.  
Yunus Arikan

about the writer
Yunus Arikan

Yunus Arikan is the Head of Global Policy and Advocacy at ICLEI, actively involved in leading ICLEI´s work at the United Nations, with intergovernmental agencies and at Multilevel Environmental Agreements.

Yunus Arikan

I was one of those who left Rio+20 disappointed with the rather vague language around Sustainable Development Goals. After following the debates over two years, it has become very clear that addressing “the elephant in the room” — to reach a global political consensus on the scope of universality of SDGs to be applicable to all levels (global, regional, national subnational, local), to all dimensions (social, economic, environmental, as well as peace and security) and to all generations (of today and tomorrow, which urges for planetary boundaries to be taken into account) — still needs a lot of trust and confidence building.

The good news is that there is a growing consensus that a stand-alone goal on sustainable cities and human settlements, or sustainable urbanization or an UrbanSDG, is needed for the challenge of universality of SDGs through its three key assets: reality, harmony, diversity.

Reality of an UrbanSDG refers to the fact that we are living in a new 21st Century Urban World. For the first time in the history of human civilization more than 1 out of the 2 people globally will be living in cities or urban agglomerations globally. It is inevitable that the success of any approach to global sustainability will rely how it is perceived by the urban population. Any service, product or management model needs to be transformed and evolved based on the economic relations, social and cultural dynamics and environmental impacts of the way they are produced and consumed in these urban settlements.

Harmony of an UrbanSDG refers to the fact that cities or urban agglomerations are complex living organisms. In the 1990s and 2000s, Local Agenda 21 enabled localization of the concept of sustainability worldwide. But in order to achieve a global transformation of sustainable communities, we need inclusive, well planned-managed, innovative and holistic “urban solutions”, rather than isolated, piecemeal, ad-hoc and temporary “sector-specific projects”. Harmonious solutions need to be cross-cutting. It does not make any sense to have smart buildings without public spaces, electric cars without renewable energies, economic growth without incorporating cultural values, waste management without locally grown food, public health without urban biodiversity, or implementation of impressive plans without an effective engagement and ownership of local communities that will be the main beneficiaries.

Diversity of an UrbanSDG refers to the fact that all nations, at the end, consist of a broad variety of cities and human settlements. Be it a small rural town in Africa, or a specific district in Europe, or a complex metropolitan area in America, or a diverse city-region in Asia, situated at coastal zones or mountain regions, in the heritages of the past or to-be-built settlements for the generations tomorrow, sustainable development has to address the sustainability of their populations within the local context. Global solutions can be tailored to accommodate the needs of each and every community.

Finally, it has to be noted that the success of the UrbanSDG depends on the way it is planned or governed within multiple spheres of government and their citizens. The world has moved forward tremendously since the context of “local authorities” was first introduced in Chapter 28 of Agenda 21 in 1992. Building upon the experience of over two decades of participatory processes of the Local Agenda 21 in thousands of communities worldwide, supported with their recognition and engagement in the agenda setting, policy development and implementation of the national, regional and global processes as “governmental stakeholders” and the urgency of direct, ambitious and collective action, enable local and subnational governments to be recalled as among the primary partners of the national governments, intergovernmental agencies and civil society.

Genie Birch

about the writer
Genie Birch

Professor Genie Birch is the Lawrence C. Nussdorf Chair of Urban Research and Education, former Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Municipal Art Society of New York, and co-chair, UN-HABITAT's World Urban Campaign.

Genie Birch

Why is the United States government dragging its feet about whether to support a stand alone goal for cities and human settlements within the United Nations’ upcoming Framework for a Post 2015 Agenda when time is running out?

A bit of background will help you understand why I am asking this blunt question. A member-state driven effort, the final Framework will have 8-12 goals and associated targets that build on and replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) when they expire in 2015. The United Nations has appointed an Open Working Group (OWG), a 70 member/30 seat (vote), to develop the Framework. (The United States shares a seat with Canada and Israel.) This July, the OWG will present the Framework to the Secretary General for forwarding to the General Assembly in September. But the General Assembly will not vote on it until September 2015.

Despite this time lag, the hard decisions will be made in the next few weeks. This week, the OWG co-chairs promised to issue the Framework’s zero-draft around May 27. They also said that the current list of proposed goals still standing is too long. Over the past year, the OWG winnowed original list of 39 to the 16 still under consideration. Among the 16 is a proposal for a stand alone goal to “build inclusive, safe, sustainable cities and human settlements” with targets that cover urban planning, resilience preparedness, and the integration of housing, transportation and open space.

Remember, the predecessor framework, the MDGs, were the first-ever global consensus on development priorities. Experimental when first formulated at the turn of the 21st century, the MDGs were pioneering but not perfect. They largely ignored cities except for a nod to urban issues in a target for “achieving significant improvement in the lives of 100,000 million slum dwellers” as measured by the number of people living in slums. But this target, hastily constructed and added as an afterthought to Goal 7 — “To ensure environmental Sustainability” — was not only quickly met (and in fact, exceeded) but also proved essentially meaningless. By 2008, the world had more slum dwellers (1 billion) than in 2000 (760 billion).

Nonetheless, by its very existence among the list of targets, the slum metric stimulated a number of important efforts and offered key lessons for the upcoming Framework. First, it resulted in the creation of a definition of a slum dwelling as none existed before the MDGs. In 2003, UN-Habitat transformed this commonly used term into a measurable concept. (A slum dwelling lacks five qualities: access to improved water, access to improved sanitation facilities, sufficient-living area, not overcrowded, durable, structurally sound construction, and security of tenure. UN-Habitat further developed minimum standards for each quality.) Second, it stimulated a raft of innovative slum-upgrading techniques now practiced worldwide. Third, it showed today’s SDG framers that when it comes to sustainability in cities and human settlements paying attention to housing alone (even if the number is right) is insufficient. Needed is an integrated approach (participatory urban and regional planning) for providing a range of public goods (e.g. transportation, public space and housing) ensuring the efficient use of land to protect food supplies and ecosystem services and preparing for natural disasters. And these are the key elements of the proposed stand alone goal on cities and human settlements.

So this is why I posed the question at the beginning of this essay:

Why is the U.S. dragging its Feet on the Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements SDG?

Does our government lack recognition that the U.S. is 82% urban, the world is 51% urban and rapidly moving to 75% urban in the strongest megatrend of the 21st century? Does it still think we are living the Jeffersonian dream of an agriculture-driven economy? Does it really believe that a stand alone goal on cities and human settlements will really divide urban and rural interests irreparably as our US representative to the United Nations claimed last week? Does it really think that mainstreaming urban issues into other goals will substitute for the unique, spatial considerations and integrating functions that a city/human settlements goal will offer as our US representative asserted last week? The current U S position evokes three big questions among reasonable and thoughtful folks.

First, can’t our representatives read? The goal encompasses all human settlements. Rural people live in settlements that experience similar concerns as cities around housing, public goods/infrastructure and unmanaged growth but at a different scale than cities.

Second, does the U.S. government actually lack understanding of the inextricably linked fates of cities, peri-urban areas, suburbs, country villages, and farms in the 21st century? Cities are entirely dependent on the food-supplying and ecosystem services provided by non-urban areas. Rural places need access to city markets and services. Well-planned cities and regions will provide the foundation for achieving the expected sectoral goals on water, health, gender and food security.

Third, does the U.S. government really think that the world can move the needle on sustainable development without paying attention to cities, currently the source of 80% of the world’s GDP (and, in the U.S., 70% of patents, the indicator of innovation) AND 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions? Does it really lack an appreciation of the fact that worldwide population growth rates are much lower than land conversion rates — this is a fancy way of saying aren’t our leaders aware of sprawl or unmanaged urban growth and how it damages the rural areas by gobbling up fertile farmland, fragmenting forests, wetlands and other important ecological assets along the way? Do they really think that the world can continue to allow people to settle in places vulnerable to natural disasters? (This last query stems from an observation that surely our representatives suffered with the rest of New Yorkers when Super Storm Sandy crippled the city in Fall 2012 — maybe they weren’t in residence then, but certainly they must read newspapers, watch newscasts or follow social media on these matters? And maybe they even welcomed HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan to New York as he oversaw the Rebuilding by Design project and dispensed billions in recovery funds.)

You may think that the U.S. stance is bordering on the unbelievable. And let me assure you, that while our representatives are publicly saying that they are open to either a stand alone goal or mainstreaming targets, they are positioning the mainstream option. I witnessed this performance last Wednesday when I attended the 11th meeting of the OWG in New York City. In her testimony on the cities/human settlements goal, our representative detailed the mainstreaming option while ignoring the stand alone. Earlier on, when testifying on the proposed infrastructure goal, she maneuvered to remove references to “rural” calling for its replacement by “vulnerable.” While no one can possibly object to helping the vulnerable, this U S sleight-of-hand-word-substitution tactic may be setting up a justification for the elimination of the cities and human settlements goal by saying its elements are covered in other rewritten goals. Watch out…

I think its time for us to encourage the U.S. government to pull up their collective socks and run fast to supporting a stand alone goal on sustainable cities and human settlements.

Ben Bradlow

about the writer
Ben Bradlow

Benjamin Bradlow is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Brown University. His research investigates the role of urban politics and institutions in processes of democratization and redistribution in Brazil and South Africa.

Benjamin Bradlow

The development of the SDGs, and the prospect of an urban goal, are significant for all of us who work to make cities more inclusive. But much work is to be done, especially to ensure that an urban goal recognizes the deep divides of power, finance, and knowledge that characterize the decisions that drive urban development. SDI is one of a number of organizations that is demanding that the urban poor — the current losers but highest potential winners of such a debate — be located as central actors in the goals that governments and formal agencies adopt as the next development agenda. If we lose this opportunity, we will perpetuate a cycle of “development” that excludes so many and hides these failures behind empty rhetoric and cynical statistical tricks.

For the urban poor federations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, that comprise our network, development goals are about improving the lives of real people. As such, a goal on cities must be fundamentally oriented around the people who stand to gain — or lose — the most from the success or failure of such a goal. This means focusing on the poor and especially the large informal housing and livelihood sectors that characterize our rapidly growing cities.

A target for universal provision of well-located land, shelter, and basic services should be a minimum of an urban goal. Unfortunately, the Millenium Development Goals included a goal on slums that was very unclear and very unambitious. An urban goal should encompass a specific focus on inclusion and the rights of the poor in cities through universal access to these amenities (land, services, shelter).

One of the biggest advantages of having an urban goal is that it focuses policy-makers on a specific space and a scale of administration in which to make change. In particular, this means a much greater focus on both formal local government and the constellation of actors that drive local governance. These are inextricably linked, and it is folly to think otherwise. Strong local government requires a strong and organized civil society to drive both innovation and accountability in our cities.

A fundamental competency of strong local government is to have universal data on all slums in their cities. Without this data, local governments pursue urban development projects and policies that are unrealistic and skewed towards wealthier, formal areas of the city. An urban goal should include provision for data collection on slums, underpinned by a commitment to data on 100% of all occupied land of the city (informal or formal). Such a goal should therefore stipulate the necessity for official inclusion, legitimation, and support for community-collected data on the nature and scale of poverty and informality in cities, especially by municipal authorities.

SDI’s experience is that data on informal settlements is most accurate and most comprehensive when it is collected by people who live in informal settlements utilizing people-centred, standardized survey and mapping tools. We have collected such data on almost 7,000 slums across the world, and currently SDI federations are collecting data in seven primary cities in Africa with 100% coverage of slums in those cities. These data are housed in a database that will go live later this year to manage such data on slums collected by SDI federations and many other groups and agencies.

We cannot ignore this debate because it will define our work for years to come. Now is the time to do what previous development agendas have conspicuously avoided doing: putting the voices and tools of the informal majority of our cities at the center how we work. This is the real promise of an urban goal in the SDGs.

Maruxa Cardama

about the writer
Maruxa Cardama

Communitas Co-founder & Coordinator. Sustainable Development practitioner promoting socio-environmental justice & intergenerational solidarity for equitable communities

Maruxa Cardama

Communitas is the coalition for sustainable cities & regions in the SDGs, working as a task force of subnational and local practitioners to provide input to the SDGs process. Its core partners — Tellus Institute, ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability, nrg4SD Network of Regional Governments for Sustainable Development and UN-Habitat — work in close collaboration with a multi-stakeholder advisory committee, with the support of the Ford Foundation and the Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation. Communitas’ vision is to capitalize on the interlinkages between sustainable human development, the eradication of poverty and inequality, and democratization that must and can be leveraged with sustainable urbanization processes.

The prevailing social, environmental and economic challenges that impact the quality of life in cities are multiple and interconnected. For Communitas, poverty, equality, human rights respect, governance and democratisation, and planetary boundaries conform the overarching framework within which to address critical concerns related to current urbanisation models around: sprawl and conversion of land; land tenure; balanced territorial development for the rural urban nexus; participatory planning; access to housing and public services; safety and social cohesion; community infrastructure; resilience and climate change adaptation; natural resources management and connectivity. All these critical concerns are calling loudly for a truly integrated approach to cities and human settlements by means, on the one hand, of a stand alone SDG; plus an adequate toolkit for implementation, on the other hand. Critical tools within the kit will be, for instance: policy strategies elaborated with an integrated and systemic approach; mechanisms for participatory decision-making; synergetic governance arrangements between different levels of government; adequate national budgets, as well as financing schemes directly accessible by subnational and local authorities; transparent multi-stakeholder partnerships; capacity building initiatives for local practitioners; disaggregated data, and grass roots data collection systems.

Communitas advocates for an SDG on Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements that aims for all new and existing cities and human settlements of all sizes to be inclusive, safe, prosperous and sustainable places where all members and their communities can thrive. Therefore, the Goal is neither to increase rates of urbanisation nor the quantity of new cities built.

In the context of the ongoing and increasingly political process for the negotiation of the SDGs, the Communitas Secretariat has recently released its second draft proposals for such an SDG. The proposal below must be read in conjunction with ongoing discussions at the UN intergovernmental Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs OWG); as well as with the Focus Areas Working Document released by the co-chairs of the Open Working Group on 17 April 2014. Communitas’ proposals will be refined as the political process changes gears in the coming weeks. However, by no means do nor will the proposed urban targets seek to exhaustively cover all aspects of a new paradigm for urban policy in the 21st century.

By 2030:

Target 1. Eliminate slum conditions everywhere and ensure universal access to affordable, equitable, and sustainable land, housing and basic services for all rural and urban dwellers.

Target 2. Increase capacity for participatory integrated urban planning and management to reduce urban sprawl, improve the efficiency in the management of naturalresources, and promote balanced territorial development for both rural and urban development.

Target 3. Ensure universal access to inclusive, safe and green public space for enhanced social cohesion, security of citizens and cultural & natural heritage protection and promotion.

Target 4. Strengthen resilience to climate change, man-made and natural disasters to reduce the loss of lives, assets, housing and infrastructure.

Target 5. Provide universal access to affordable, equitable, safe and sustainable urban and peri-urban transport for connected and healthy communities.

There are notable interlinkages with other so-called ‘Focus Areas’ of the UN Working Document released last 17 April. Strong considerations on poverty, prosperity and inequalities; health; economic growth and infrastructure; gender; climate; natural resources, ecosystems and biodiversity; respect of human rights; and governance and participatory democracy; are all incorporated in the proposals for a stand alone SDG outlined above. Water, health and energy improvements are both targets and outputs of sustainable cities and human settlements, which are fully addressed under separate ‘Focus Areas’ of the official UN Working Document.

More detail on the latest proposals by Communitas is available from
communitascoalition.org | [email protected] | @SDGcommunitas

Thomas Elmqvist

about the writer
Thomas Elmqvist

Thomas Elmqvist is a professor in Natural Resource Management at Stockholm University and Theme Leader at the Stockholm Resilience Center. His research is on ecosystem services, land use change, natural disturbances and components of resilience including the role of social institutions.

Thomas Elmqvist

Since urbanization has the ability to transform the social and economic fabric of nations, and cities are responsible for the bulk of production and consumption worldwide, urban issues have to be at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goal Process. What would then an urban SDG look like? This has been intensively discussed at the UN Open Working Group meetings this spring and is a delicate and complex issue.

Many argue that an urban goal should centre around the sustainability of urbanization rather than sustainability of cities per se, and focus on the process rather than specific geographical locations. If we only address the city as a geographical bounded entity, we may end up with a set of targets and indicators addressing many important issues such as energy, waste, mobility, urban poverty, but we run the risk of completely missing how cities are influencing the biosphere and the potential local governments may have in developing effective resource management strategies. A focus on urbanization instead of cities, would have the advantage that crucial urban-rural interactions need to be considered and the long-distance effects of urbanization on resource extraction, energy, waste, etc. also would be included.

Such a goal may be formulated in rather general terms, e.g. by 2030 all local governments should have implemented policies for sustainable urbanization. However, to be effective such as goal must then be associated with a number of specific targets and indicators representing the operational mechanisms. For example, it would be possible to formulate targets and indicators that address to what extent local governments are putting policies and incentives in place (such as procurement measures) to ensure better stewardship of the all the distant ecosystems on which they depend. Furthermore, associated targets and indicators could be developed that capture the ratio between consumption and production of ecosystem services in the larger metropolitan landscape. Such targets and indicators would capture to what extent a city just may continue to be a large sink of consumption of ecosystem services or to what extent investments are made that reduce per capita consumption and investments done to increase production of ecosystem services.

To make this possible, scientists with urban and data expertise must actively support the technical discussions on selecting the SDG targets and indicators. If poorly defined and managed, targets and indicators will almost certainly have unintended consequences and negative outcomes that will be difficult to reverse.

In this context, silence from the urban scientific community may be the most dangerous path of all.

Julian Goh

about the writer
Julian Goh

Mr Julian Goh has extensive experience in both the public and private sector in the area of urban planning and development. He is currently a Director at the Centre for Liveable Cities (CLC), which is part of Ministry of National Development Singapore.

Julian Goh

Cities today are home to over 50% of the world’s population, account for over 70% of greenhouse gas emissions, and yet generate 70% of the world’s wealth. And this growth will accelerate. We cannot hope to have a sustainable world without sustainable cities. The current set of SDG will kick in from 2015 to 2030. We need to focus on cities right now. Or we would have missed the boat.

A standalone Urban SDG will allow us to focus. With the right leadership, cities can mobilize and act much more quickly, compared to the national governments. We have seen how cities like New York, Copenhagen, Suzhou an Surabaya have moved much faster, adopted more ambitious sustainability goals, compared to their national governments. At the city level, we can focus, channel resources, execute, scale up and achieve results.

So what would an Urban SDG look like? We believe that it should try to encourage cities to achieve three inter-related outcomes:

1. A high quality of life which means a safe, healthy living environment with proper housing for everyone;
2. A competitive economy that can attract investments and provide jobs; and
3. A sustainable environment with clean air, water and land.

An Urban SDG can set development targets and performance indicators towards these three outcomes. In drawing up these targets, the Urban SDG would have to be mindful of the diverse contexts and circumstances of cities worldwide and therefore should be sensitive to their different abilities to respond to these targets.

Setting goals are useful. But it is even more critical for the Urban SDG to articulate how cities can achieve these goals. And to do this, we can take reference from some of the cities that have successfully transformed themselves. Let’s take 4 cities from 4 continents: New York, Bilbao, Medellín and Singapore. Each of these cities is different from the other in terms of history, political structure, geography, people, character and urban challenges. Despite these obvious differences and uniquely complex challenges can we find commonalities in their urban transformation experiences? The short answer is yes.

In a working paper titled “The CLC Liveability Framework in Global Practice” by the Centre for Liveable Cities (CLC), Singapore we have captured some of these commonalities. Three of the notable ones are:

1. These cities have a vision of what they would like to achieve
2. There is a comprehensive plan on how to achieve them and
3. There is institutional support to carry out these plans

Take Singapore for instance. Singapore started out as a fledging city of the 1960s plagued by much of the common developing city challenges such as high unemployment, urban slums, congested roads, lack of sanitation, pollution, etc. However, in a matter of 40-50 years Singapore transformed into a thriving global city. How did Singapore do it? The visionary leadership of the time drew up long-term cross sectoral development plans and supportive pragmatic policies which they effectively and efficiently executed with support of sound institutions. Bilbao is another example of a city that has taken the lead to address an adverse alteration of structural conditions. The 1980s saw major changes to the city’s economy resulting in wide spread unemployment, disenchantment and unrest. The city as a whole reacted and its acclaimed recovery transformed risk into opportunity and has put it on the international map. Such commonalities can also be found in the turnaround experience of New York and Medellín.

The world needs an Urban SDG. The Urban SDG needs to have goals, but even more importantly, it should shed light on the path to get to these goals. Cities play the central role for the world to achieve sustainable development. And the time to act is now.

Shuaib Lwasa

about the writer
Shuaib Lwasa

Shuaib Lwasa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Makerere University. Shuaib has over 15 years of experience in university teaching and research working on interdisciplinary projects related to urban sustainability.

Shuaib Lwasa

Cities and human settlements are dominating the world in terms of consumption, resource use, innovation and creativity despite occupying only about 4% of the land surface globally. With over half the global population living in cities, this trend is likely to increase with current structure and path dependencies in Africa, which is urbanizing faster. Although many cities are demonstrating improved efficiency in resource use and began to work on efficient infrastructure systems, new cities will most likely follow the historical paths. This will have negative impacts of degrading environments, limiting economic opportunities, accentuating inefficiencies and affecting wellbeing. In view of current and possible future trends of urban development, a SDG focused on cites should be comprehensive enough to address the challenge of resource efficiency in cities and human settlements overall. Such a SDG goal would have to incorporate as focus areas minimization of resource use intensity, transformation of lifestyles, spatial reconfiguration and creation of economic opportunities.

A cities and human settlements SDG should have the following elements.

Urban lifestyles define the identities of individuals in cities and human settlements and have been associated with unsustainable resource consumption. Some of these lifestyles revolve around land use and transport systems. Sustainable urban systems will have to integrate land use activities with transportation with an aim of reducing trips and energy use. Likewise city-regional systems that would enhance utilization of local resources and minimize the ecological footprint where applicable would be necessary for sustainable cities and human settlements with a target of closing the loop.

Focus Areas under this element include: mixed densities in urban development, integrated planning or retrofitting urban activities with transportation, local economic development opportunities.

Resource minimization in cities and human settlements relate strongly with lifestyles and the spatial configuration of cities. Three linkages of resource flows to and from cities are described as: (a) Resources flow between cities and their hinterlands. Such flows can be in immediate hinterlands or rural environments; (b) Resources flow between cities and cities that are largely characterized by finished products or inputs into other production processes; and (c) the flow of resources between cities and other rural environments that are distant from the consuming cities. Often such flows can pass through other cities as conduits to the final destination. Minimization of intensive resource use in cities would have to directly develop strategies that reduce flows through substitution with locally available resources. Without putting a complete stop on current flows, creating incentives for use of city-regional resources in a sustainable manner is important.

Focus Areas for this may include: mining resources from shrinking cities, old cities or derelict areas, efficiency of in-city resource flows, waste-energy nexus, innovation in utilizing local resources including ecosystem services.

A SDG on cities and human settlements would be useful if upfront the design would create opportunities for all categories of urban dwellers. Current infrastructure systems, service systems in cities and human settlements are based on economics of profit maximization, which in turn limits opportunities for the urban poor. In many cities of developing regions, the urban poor are the majority and face the brunt of inequalities due to social, economic, environmental and political factors. Yet there are numerous micro-scale interventions (for example waster-to-energy, resource-based jobs, innovation in ICT) which have demonstrated possibilities for creating opportunities that can contribute towards improved wellbeing. A SDG on cities and human settlements requires harnessing the opportunities.

Focus Areas include: harnessing opportunities related to scalable resource efficiency, decentralized services and infrastructure, local employment and expanded markets, strategies that deal with urban poverty through livelihood opportunities.

Anjali Mahendra

about the writer
Anjali Mahendra

Dr. Anjali Mahendra is an urban planner & transport policy expert working at interface of research & practice on issues dealing with cities, transport, climate change & economic development

Anjali Mahendra

Here’s a statistic I like to use — combined, cities around the world occupy only 2% of land yet account for about 70% each of global GDP, energy consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions. This clearly shows how economic growth and resource consumption are inextricably linked and both are geographically concentrated in cities. With over half of the world’s population now being urban, cities are grappling with the heavy demand for urban services such as transport, energy, water and sanitation, housing, and solid waste management. In addition, the negative impacts of heavy resource consumption are manifested in poor air quality, dwindling water resources, deteriorating land and ecosystem resources, and public health impacts in cities, as well as climate and economic risks.

90% of the growth in urbanization comes from developing countries. These countries also face the maximum brunt of the above negative impacts because of a web of issues related to limited financing, limited government capacity, lack of data, lack of integrated urban planning, and governance issues, including high levels of corruption. These challenges are reflected in inadequate and unequal access to basic urban services in cities, particularly for the urban poor.

An urban SDG is an opportunity to mobilize all urban stakeholders — public, private, and civil society included — towards solving these issues. It would explicitly include targets for safeguarding basic rights to clean air, water, and housing for all urban dwellers, while preserving scarce resources like land and energy. It would include targets for the availability of safe drinking water and basic sanitation for all urban households, access to affordable housing, reduction of fossil fuel based energy consumption, reduction of urban air pollution, limits on the conversion of agricultural and ecologically sensitive land resources for urban development, and increased resilience of cities to the impacts of climate change.

Transport systems have become a major cause of traffic deaths, urban air pollution, lost economic productivity due to congestion, women’s safety issues, and decline in quality of life in many cities around the world. Therefore, targets for urban transport systems that reduce these externalities, improve conditions for vulnerable groups like pedestrians and cyclists, and increase safe, reliable mobility and access for everyone, must be part of an urban SDG.

Since transport improvements cannot be achieved without simultaneous consideration of land development, the urban SDG must also include targets to manage the rate of urban sprawl, conserve ecosystems in the face of increasing urban development, limit highly energy intensive forms of development, and use green technologies for improving and facilitating energy efficiency.

To achieve the above “physical” or infrastructure targets, several supporting targets related to governance must become part of the urban SDG. These include transparency of city level data, greater coordination across all levels of government with authority over urban jurisdictions, greater coordination across all urban sector agencies, accountability against performance measures (regarding how well cities are achieving the sustainability goals of environmental protection, economic development, and social equity), participation of all relevant stakeholder groups, and improvement in local governments’ technical and fiscal capacity.

These are some ideas on what an urban SDG should include. For more information, readers can look up an Issue Brief I wrote for the Communitas Coalition with some suggestions for targets to achieve universal access to urban services as part of an urban SDG.

Mary Rowe

about the writer
Mary Rowe

Mary W. Rowe is an urbanist and civic entrepreneur. She currently lives in Toronto, Canada, the traditional territories of the Anishinabewaki, Huron-Wendat and Haudenosauneega Confederacy, and works with government, business and civil society organizations to strengthen the economic, social, cultural and environmental resilience of the city and its neighborhoods.

Mary Rowe

I am sure my fellow contributors will expertly advance all the reasonable, learned arguments for why we need one of the sustainable development goals the UN will embrace next year to be focused on cities and human settlements. Because the world is rapidly urbanizing so it’s where most people will ultimately live; because economies are driven by cities as is economic and social innovation; because the war on climate change will be won or lost in cities. These are all worthy points and I trust my colleagues have made them persuasively.

My reason is blunter. And it’s problematic. We need a sustainable development goal focused explicitly on cities, because national governments, without one, will continue their outdated, tired bias of setting national policies that ignore the particularity of cities and attempt to apply homogenous policies that incorporate rural, less dense and dense areas all together. National governments don’t think about cities. They think about national security, natural resources, economic imbalances, wealth redistribution. And they think about large systems like transportation, housing, and agriculture. We need a goal that specifies the challenges that cities around the world are facing, so that federal governments will be forced to look to the local conditions of the cities in their nations. Otherwise, urban needs just get piled into national objectives, buried there beneath provisions to equalize and treat fairly every community. But cities actually need to be treated differently, and urbanists (such as my colleagues here) will argue how.

In addition to needing a specific goal that ensures urban challenges are prioritized, we also need one to make clear that cities contain the solutions to their own challenges, and the role of federal and state/provincial governments is to enable that ingenuity, not proscribe uniform approaches. Again this poses challenges for federal governments that are attracted to one-size-fits-all grand gestures that ostensibly provide national consistency and dole out largesse ‘fairly’, but are so often unable to be customized to suit the specific particulars of each city. Further, cities are full of innovators, working at every level: neighborhoods, businesses, community leadership, local agencies and government. They are closest to their own community’s needs. Locals are the ones who know best what needs to happen to their housing stock, their parks, their schools, their shorelines. But federal governments, who generally control the lion’s share of fiscal resources, are loath to cede control, and tend to release resources often with provisos that constrain local innovation. An urban SDG has the potential to be sufficiently challenging that national governments will be compelled to delegate both responsibility and resources to cities to accomplish the targets and goals.

Constitutional and legal impediments in countries around the world have made empowering cities difficult, but cities that do enjoy higher degrees of autonomy (e.g. Singapore, Hong Kong) have demonstrated positive results. And in places where the hierarchy remains, there are repeated examples where city governments have found their own ‘work arounds’ — through pilots, unique partnerships with communities or the private sector — in areas of where their federal governments have jurisdiction. The truth is no matter where you live, the challenges to make cities more livable as they grow and more resilient as they evolve can’t wait for elaborate jurisdictional haggling. We just need to get on with it. Federal governments can continue to provide leadership, guarantee citizenship and set national living standards to which its members (states and cities) must comply. But we need leadership approaches that support granular innovation — housing or mobility solutions won’t be the same here in New York as they will be in Medellin or Mumbai. But we need the imprimatur of global leadership to press national governments to then empower local ones to harness the ingenuity of their on-the-ground partners and build sustainable cities. And an explicitly urban SDG will also make clearer the interdependence of cities and the hinterlands that surround them: they are inextricably linked, but needing differentiated policies and programs. Strong cities mean strong rural communities.

The problem may be that we’re expecting too much from nation states. We’re asking them to call out and explicitly support a political unit that they may perceive poses a threat to their own authority. (If and when the electoral boundaries are better aligned to reflect population distribution this may become moot: federal chambers will actually reflect where the majority of people are choosing to live …). But let’s strike an accurate balance: the world urbanizing is a good thing. It brings with it higher standards of living, better health outcomes, lower carbon emissions, and the creation of humanities great technological and cultural achievements. And healthy cities spell a better future for rural, pastoral landscapes to be preserved and not diminished, but valued and protected. Hopefully, an SDG focused on cities and human settlements will help the world recognize the reality of how the world’s people are choosing to live, and we can globally embrace a new narrative of sustainability, that is urban.

Andrew Rudd

about the writer
Andrew Rudd

Andrew Rudd is the Urban Environment Officer for UN-Habitat’s Urban Planning & Design Branch in New York, where he leads substantive advocacy for the urban dimension of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (including the SDGs).

Andrew Rudd

I am writing from one of Fiji’s 332 islands where an urban SDG might seem like the furthest thing from my mind. Here my husband and I have found the perfect trifecta of being comfortable (including Wifi to email this piece) in a beautiful place with virtually no one else around. Our thatched overwater bure slips almost unnoticed between a coral-fringed beach and dense tropical forest and barely touches the earth on its pinpoint pilotis. At the same time, all of our fresh water comes from a hidden desalination plant, our uninterrupted electricity from a generator and our relatively mosquito-free evenings from regular fumigation. And we have brought with us the footprint of our (and countless other guests’) long-haul international flights. We hardly see one another. Yet, per person, our resource consumption and impact on the landscape are actually quite high.

I am trying not to feel too guilty about it, having just endured a brutal, vacationless New York winter in our one-bedroom apartment and on public transit. Sometimes we need a little luxury. Still, there is something fundamentally selfish about being simultaneously a part of everything and apart from it all. The more this becomes a way of life — e.g., as embodied in the classic American suburb, now being replicated the world over — the more we run up against planetary boundaries. If there is any hope for a sustainable future it lies in sharing the world’s resources better. But sharing is neither easy nor automatic. It is more than an abstract principle — it is about the very material reality of sharing space and resources.

We need an urban SDG because cities are still the world’s preeminent sites for sharing. An urban SDG must therefore aim for the (re)configuration of all human settlements — megacities, metropolitan regions, intermediate cities, market town and rural villages, whether existing or still to be built — to enable and encourage more efficient and equitable sharing. As cities are poised to double in size over the duration of the SDGs — 2015-2030 — setting the stage now for how they grow is critical. An urban SDG must address that which other, more sectoral SDGs cannot. And it must focus on more than just infrastructure, which is fundamentally amoral about sharing.

Specifically, an urban SDG should promote sharing in three ways:

First, cities are consuming too much land at their peripheries. In so doing they are also forfeiting their traditional agglomeration advantages. Instead, they need to share space better with the communities and rural areas around them. An urban SDG should provide the aspiration for more compact cities that reduce sprawl and achieve balanced territorial development, and back this up by incentivizing national urban policies.

Second, within cities too much public and green space is disappearing and spontaneous development still proliferates. In short, too much land has been given over to private use. Those without means are forced to the margins, which are frequently unserviced and segregated by default. The public realm suffers. An urban SDG should set a minimum standard for urban planning and design that includes securing public space and protecting rights of way. As cities achieve this they will be more integrated, with safe public space and common infrastructure.

Third, many cities are dealing with massive infrastructural backlogs at the same time as they face increasing vulnerability to natural hazards. Cities are innovative and action-oriented, but they cannot face these enormous challenges alone. Costs and risks have to be better shared. An urban SDG needs to lever national and international support for big projects such as public transit systems and climate change adaptation measures that will improve connectivity and strengthen resilience.

It’s all about (re)configuring our cities for sharing. Otherwise we face a wasteful and boring world, if indeed we face a world at all.

Karen Seto

about the writer
Karen Seto

Karen Seto is Professor of Geography and Urbanization at Yale. She is an expert on urbanization in China and India, forecasting urban growth, and climate change mitigation.

Karen Seto

The new era of urbanization involves a wide array of trends that can be described as either the biggest, fastest, or the first in history: the size and number of cities; the rate at which populations and ecosystems are urbanizing; the geographic shift from high-income to low and middle-income countries of large urban areas; the increased specialization of urban function; and the growing dominance of urban areas in national and global economic systems. The confluence of these characteristics presents both opportunities and challenges to the sustainability of Earth’s life support systems. Rather than arguing for any particular urban SDG, I propose that the United Nations consider at least three criteria in the discussions of an urban SDG.

First, urban SDGs should address the challenges and opportunities of urbanization that are beyond the scope of a single city or country. Such an SDG would need to address issues that would be achievable only if there were a global partnership.

Second, urban SDGs need to explicitly consider the aggregate impacts of urbanization on the supply and integrity of Earth’s life support systems. The focus here is on the aggregate impacts of urbanization on the global environment, and not just thinking about local environmental impacts.

Third, urban SDGs must be strongly linked with socio-economic development. Sustainable urbanization requires integrating economic development and human well-being explicitly, and includes elements such as human health and local livelihoods.

Lorena Zárate

about the writer
Lorena Zárate

Lorena Zárate is co-coordinator of the Global Platform for the Right to the City and former president of the Habitat International Coaltion.

Lorena Zárate

Sustainable cities and human settlements — Building inclusive, equitable, democratic, safe and sustainable cities and human settlements

a) By 2020 guarantee universal access to adequate, well located, affordable and sustainable housing, security of tenure and essential services (potable water and sanitation, energy, telecommunications, waste recollection and management) for all, eliminating slum-like conditions everywhere and protecting and guaranteeing housing and land rights for all (including self-produced housing and neighborhoods, occupiers, renters, individual and collective owners, traditional and cooperative forms, etc.).

b) By 2015 end — without excuses — all forced evictions and displacements and guarantee proper consultation, compensation measures and remedies for affected people and communities, as established in the international human rights standard-setting instruments.

c) By 2020 guarantee the definition and application of negative social impact assessments at the community level and with inhabitants´ participation, especially in the case of megaprojects and “development”-related public and private investments.

d) By 2020 guarantee that at least 50% of the available public and private resources for housing and neighborhood improvement policies are dedicated to supporting community-driven processes of the social production of housing and habitat.

e) By 2020 guarantee universal access to safe, accessible and sustainable essential community public facilities and social services (schools; hospitals; markets; cultural, recreational and sport facilities; public spaces, and public transportation).

f) By 2020 considerably improve participatory, democratic and meaningful decision-making processes at the city and national level, guaranteeing proper representation of marginalized groups and those communities living under vulnerable conditions.

g) By 2020 guarantee the full implementation of the social function of land and property, designing public policies that inhibit land speculation and land grabbing (including parking lots!) and promote equitable and sustainable use of available land and the reuse of vacant buildings, in favor of social housing and community projects for homeless people and populations living in inadequate and poor-housing conditions.

h) By 2020 guarantee a productive habitat for all, with job and income-generation opportunities at the community level by promoting, protecting and supporting the social economy, with links to housing and neighborhood improvement policies.

i) By 2020 guarantee the democratic, responsible and sustainable use and management of the commons, including natural and energy resources, and avoiding exploitative relationships between urban and rural areas.

j) By 2020 guarantee the full protection and democratic, responsible and sustainable use and management of cultural (material and non-material) and natural heritage, as public and collective goods for present and future generations.

According to available studies, around 60% of the housing in Mexico has been built by the people. Similar percentages can be found in several countries of the Global South. The dualistic conceptualization of formal-informal does not captures the richness and diversity of these processes, and usually translates into limited governmental interventions and very often in its criminalization. We prefer to understand them as “social production of habitat”, a self-managed effort from communities and families to realize their right to housing and their right to the city. References: Among others, please refer to some of the following publications: Enrique Ortiz F. y Ma. Lorena Zárate (eds.), Vivitos y coleando. 40 años trabajando por el hábitat popular en América Latina, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana y HIC-AL, México, 2002; Enrique Ortiz Flores y Ma. Lorena Zárate (eds.), De la marginación a la ciudadanía: 38 casos de producción y gestión social del hábitat, Fundación Forum Universal de las Culturas, HIC y HIC-AL, Barcelona, 2005; y Rino Torres, La producción social de vivienda en México. Su importancia nacional y su impacto en la economía de los hogares pobres, HIC-AL, México, 2006.
According to available studies, around 60% of the housing in Mexico has been built by the people. Similar percentages can be found in several countries of the Global South. The dualistic conceptualization of formal-informal does not capture the richness and diversity of these processes, and usually translates into limited governmental interventions and very often in its criminalization. We prefer to understand them as “social production of habitat”, a self-managed effort from communities and families to realize their right to housing and their right to the city.
References: Among others, please refer to some of the following publications: Enrique Ortiz F. y Ma. Lorena Zárate (eds.), Vivitos y coleando. 40 años trabajando por el hábitat popular en América Latina, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana y HIC-AL, México, 2002; Enrique Ortiz Flores y Ma. Lorena Zárate (eds.), De la marginación a la ciudadanía: 38 casos de producción y gestión social del hábitat, Fundación Forum Universal de las Culturas, HIC y HIC-AL, Barcelona, 2005; y Rino Torres, La producción social de vivienda en México. Su importancia nacional y su impacto en la economía de los hogares pobres, HIC-AL, México, 2006.
Especially during the past decade, social housing policies have been in place in different regions of the world, thanks to a combination of financial resources from worker’s savings, public and private sector. The emergence of thousands of units overnight, usually located at more-than-one hour commute from the city centre, is conceived more like “plantations of houses” than as new towns or cities, with almost no planning for educational, health or commercial uses and with a very limited approach to public space. References: José Castillo, “After the Explosion”, in The Endless City, Phaidon Press Ltd., Londres, 2007, pp. 183-184.
Especially during the past decade, social housing policies have been in place in different regions of the world, thanks to a combination of financial resources from worker’s savings, public and private sector. The emergence of thousands of units overnight, usually located at more-than-one hour commute from the city centre, is conceived more like “plantations of houses” than as new towns or cities, with almost no planning for educational, health or commercial uses and with a very limited approach to public space.
References: José Castillo, “After the Explosion”, in The Endless City, Phaidon Press Ltd., Londres, 2007, pp. 183-184.
Policies affecting land and space are a key tool to reproduce or change the huge inequities affecting our societies. What real opportunities are we giving to the young people, vast majority of the population in many of our countries, if 85% of the new jobs are created in the so called “informal” economy? At the same time, not having a place to live, an address is also a denial of other economic, social, cultural and political rights (education, health, work, right to vote and participate, among many others). What kind of citizens and democracy are we producing in these apartheid cities? References: UN-Habitat. State of the World’s Cities 2010-2011, Bridging the Urban Divide, Earthscan, London, 2008. Electronic version available at http://www.unhabitat.org/pmss/listItemDetails.aspx?publicationID=2917.
Policies affecting land and space are a key tool to reproduce or change the huge inequities affecting our societies. What real opportunities are we giving to the young people, vast majority of the population in many of our countries, if 85% of the new jobs are created in the so called “informal” economy? At the same time, not having a place to live, an address is also a denial of other economic, social, cultural and political rights (education, health, work, right to vote and participate, among many others). What kind of citizens and democracy are we producing in these apartheid cities?
References: UN-Habitat. State of the World’s Cities 2010-2011, Bridging the Urban Divide, Earthscan, London, 2008. Electronic version available at http://www.unhabitat.org/pmss/listItemDetails.aspx?publicationID=2917.

China’s New Urbanization Plan: Obstacles and Environmental Impacts

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

On 16 March 2014, China’s State Council released the “National New-type Urbanization Plan,” a long-awaited top-down effort to utilize urbanization as an engine for economic growth in the near future. The plan details an ambitious series of goals the government seeks to accomplish by 2020. However, speeding up the urbanization process will have far-reaching environmental and social effects for China.

Background of the plan

The Chinese leadership has attached great importance to the Urbanization Plan. It took 3 years to complete the plan and involved intensive collaboration across agencies. The effort was spearheaded by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) joined by the other 12 major government ministries.

The Urbanization Plan is strategically focused on the macro-level and aims to direct national-level policy. It is on the highest level of national plans much like the “Twelfth Five Year Plan.” Therefore, the Urbanization Plan can be seen as a coordinated, top-level effort to increase the population of China’s cities while addressing critical quality of life issues for urban residents.

Beijing Central Business District
Beijing Central Business District

Content 

Overall, the plan stresses what Premier Li Keqiang has referred to as “human-centered urbanization.” Fundamentally, this concept involves increasing the urbanization rate from the current level of 53.7% to 60% by 2020. Under China’s current internal household registration or hukou system, rural-urban migrants often lose out on social benefits once they leave their homes in the countryside. In order to assure better integration of new residents into urban life, the government has pledged to guarantee better access to schools and hospitals for 100 million migrants. In total, the plan calls for 45% of all the new urban residents who have moved into cities to receive urban hukous, a process that will place an immense strain on municipal resources. The question of integrating the remaining 55% of new residents with urban hukou remains an unresolved dilemma, as China cannot achieve full urbanization while the majority of the population moving into cities have no path towards receiving full social benefits.

Despite the Urbanization Plan’s ambitious targets, there is no clear mention of how local governments can raise the funds to accommodate the necessary upgrades to the provision of social benefits such as healthcare and education. In addition, a wave of migration to cities will put an immense strain on urban transportation and waste management infrastructure.  In order to reach these goals and avoid a rehash of the wasteful government spending on prestige projects during the post-recession stimulus, China will need to rethink changes to taxation, land use, and urban planning policy that will be integral to achieving financially and environmentally sustainable urbanization.

Urban Demolition in Shanghai
Urban Demolition in Shanghai

Tax reforms 

The central government needs to implement incremental tax reforms that give localities the ability to raise taxes for improvements in infrastructure. While there have been pilot property tax programs in Shanghai and Chongqing (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy: China’s Property Tax Reform: Progress and Challenges)[1], the government has no plans to expand these pilots. As most of the responsibility for providing social services lies with the municipal government, improving access to these benefits without sufficient investment is impossible. Local governments finance 80% of spending on health and education (World Bank: Financing Cities: Fiscal Responsibility and Urban Infrastructure in Brazil, China, India, Poland and South Africa)[2],  if cities are to accommodate a wave of new residents, fiscal reform needs to happen.

Implementing China’s new urbanization plan will present an enormous cost for China’s municipalities to bear. To achieve a more environmentally and sustainable form of urbanization, local governments need to cease unnecessary land seizures and take the initial steps towards putting a property tax in place. China’s cities have seen a surge in capital investments and new construction, however without a property tax much of the added value to all the construction is completely lost to the municipal government. Currently, Chinese property owners enjoy the benefits of public goods without bearing any of the fiscal responsibility. For example, a development located next to a newly completed subway line gains value, however the developer did not contribute anything to the public construction of the subway. This can be amended with a gradually phased in property tax. Such a tax would optimize land use and realign local government revenues with their expenditures. It would also create an incentive for the development of vacant or underutilized urban land.

Tianjin EcoCity
Tianjin EcoCity

New development should meet the critical needs that urban migrants will have upon arrival to the city. While the narrative of an oversupply in China’s housing market has gained traction in the Western media, however much of the new construction consists of costly high-rises on the periphery of urban areas. Despite the construction boom, Chinese cities have a fundamental lack of affordable housing. In order to be fully integrated in the urban fabric, new residents must be able to afford to live within the city in mixed-income neighborhoods rather than being ostracized in remote bedroom communities. The development of underutilized urban land within the city itself needs to make space for affordable housing. The government has signaled that it will spend more than $162 billion USD to redeveloping urban “shantytowns”, however there is no comprehensive plan in place to accommodate displaced residents badly in need of affordable housing.  To help alleviate the housing needs of residents, municipal governments should allocate underutilized industrial land suitable for habitation for affordable housing. They could also increase affordable housing supply by adopting an “inclusionary housing” program modeled after New York City. Inclusionary housing incentivizes developers to designate a portion of the property as affordable housing in return for bonuses such as increased floor area.

As key beneficiaries of municipal services, property owners should contribute to urban development by paying taxes. Therefore, local governments could benefit from increased land values, giving them direct incentives towards intensive-land use instead of wasteful, sprawling developments without residents. This would also resolve the cash flow problems of local governments so they would have more capital to invest in the urban infrastructure necessary to acheive the targeted urbanization rate.

Land use 

Under the current land use system, all rural land belongs to collectives. Farmers, as prospective urban residents, have very little land rights and cannot decide whether to buy or sell land without government approval. Without the ability to leverage their land as a source of income China’s rural population is at a critical disadvantage and will only fall behind urbanites if they choose to migrate to cities.

In order for this level of urbanization to occur, land ownership rights for rural land need to specified. Title registration needs to be improved upon and there must be a unified system of sales, contracts and procedures in order to define collective ownership and clarify ownership rights. This will protect citizen’s land from eminent domain seizures that develop rural land into private developments. Eminent domain needs to be restricted to land developed in the public interest, as opposed to merely enriching local government interests.

In the past few years, land requisition has been driven by administrative decisions as opposed to market demand. This has led to an urban growth pattern that is characterized by unnecessary sprawl. As a result, the average population density in Chinese cities has dropped by 25% in the last decade (World Bank: Urban China: Towards Efficient, Inclusive, and Sustainable Urbanization)[3]. Due to the funding gap between the central government and the localities, municipal governments have excessively relied upon and sales to provide services. By reclassifying rural land belonging to the collective as urban property, local officials are then able to cheaply convert this land and sell it at a higher price to property developers. This pattern of urban sprawl is completely out of sync with local market demand for new construction.  About 90% of prior demand for urban construction was met through rural land expropriation. Meanwhile, the existing stock of urban construction land sits by vacant and unused. Construction needs to follow the demand for new housing stock, and new development should take place on property already designated as urban land so as not to create excess housing far removed from the actual city limits.

In comparison with other countries in Asia, China still uses a significant portion of its urban land for industrial purposes. Low-density industrial land is by no means the best use of scarce urban land resources, and it takes up critical space that could be utilized by the services sector. According to the World Bank’s comprehensive report on China’s urbanization plan released this March, Seoul uses only 7% of its urban land for industrial parks while Hong Kong uses only 5%. If the current pattern of low-density sprawling growth continues, China will need an additional 34,000 km2 of land to accommodate new urban growth in the next decade (World Bank: Urban China: Towards Efficient, Inclusive, and Sustainable Urbanization). This is a problematic trend that must be addressed in order to reverse sprawl and transition to more productive and less pollution-intensive uses of urban space.

Urban planning

Urban planning has the ability to strengthen innovation and governance in society. Due to the fact that the pattern of China’s economic growth is changing, formerly manufacturing based economic growth is transitioning to a more service and technology industry led mode of development. In order to meet the growing needs of Chinese society, cities need to improve the function of public urban spaces.

The new urbanization plan also specifically mentions the need to strengthen the management and control of urban planning, accelerate the construction of green cities, and the implementation of air pollution control action plans to improve air quality. We believe that rational urban planning can indeed play a role in improving urban air quality. Since the transportation sector contributes to air pollution in cities, reducing car-dependence in favor of walking and public transit can alleviate the problem. Rational urban planning can reduce emissions generated in urban areas. Key principles of sustainable urban planning include reducing the size of city blocks, more road network density, mixed-land use, transit-oriented design, and reduced energy use. All of these factors have the potential to significantly impact urban sources of pollution.

These principles need to be put into action by city planners as soon as possible in order to stop the spread of air pollution in cities and counter the harmful effects it has on the health of residents. The physical layout of cities should also take into account how it contributes to the dispersion of air pollution: industrial zones should be located downwind of the city center; the main highway networks in a city should also be favorably located with regards to the urban dispersion of vehicle emissions. Green belts should also be utilized to limit undue urban sprawl and provide relief from vehicle exhaust. In high density urban areas along with the city’s main transport node, controlled ventilation systems have been proven to be effective in improving ambient air quality along those corridors. The construction of one such system has just started in Beijing.

Environmental impact

From an environmental perspective, the Urbanization Plan will result in a construction boom to build the approximate 30 million units of housing over the next 7 years.The effort to reach the 60% urbanization rate target detailed in the Plan will depend heavily on the construction industry. This will require an uptick in consumption of the three things China cannot afford to waste: water, energy, and land. Any new developments cannot proceed without exacting a significant toll on the environment as coal, cement, and steel manufacturing are all heavily polluting industries tightly linked to new construction. Further complicating the issue, some of these new development projects have received the designation of “eco-cities”. Unfortunately, attaching the “green” label to new developments is more often than not a useful marketing scheme. Wide streets, inefficient use of building materials, and car-dependent design ensure that these developments are “eco” in name only. Additionally, the practice of using land grabs to finance municipal expenses has created a pattern of sprawl found throughout the Chinese urban landscape. Without tax reform or changes to rural resident’s property rights Chinese cities will grow in a low-density, car-dependent manner that will only put a greater strain on the nation’s fragile environment. Furthermore, the government must adhere to strict international green building standards to ensure that all new construction meets benchmarks for sustainability. A large part of this process should involve retrofitting existing buildings to be more energy efficient. These retrofits are much more cost-effective and low-carbon when focused on existing developments near established urban cores.

Lastly, such top down urbanization measures cannot proceed in a sustainable manner without a shift in consumption. The leadership sees urbanization as a way to maintain growth and counter an economic slowdown by boosting the number of consumers, as urban residents have been shown to purchase significantly more goods and services than their counterparts in the countryside. Despite the economic benefits, a rise in the urban consuming class could exacerbate China’s environmental problems. According to a World Bank study, China’s urban residents use three times as much energy as rural residents (World Bank: China Urbanizes: Consequences, Strategies, and Policies)[4].  An exponential increase in energy demand without a paradigm shift towards more sustainable consumption would only lead to more congestion, air pollution, and associated threats to public health. All of this would occur while a significant portion of the urban populace is effectively disqualified from receiving health benefits. Given that its urban areas already suffer from air pollution, congestion, and a dearth of green space, can China really achieve the economic benefits of urbanization without exacerbating the severity of its environmental damage? These factors could potentially compound existing quality of life issues in Chinese cities. If China does not seriously consider reforms to fiscal, environmental, and land use policy it will soon see diminishing returns to urbanization.

Jack Maher and Xie Pengfei
Beijing

On The Nature of Cities

Notes:

[1] Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, China’s Property Tax Reform: Progress and Challenges (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy: Cambridge, MA April 2012).

[2] World Bank, Financing Cities: Fiscal Responsibility and Urban Infrastructure in Brazil, China, India, Poland and South Africa (World Bank: Washington, DC April 2017).

[3] World Bank, Urban China: Towards Efficient, Inclusive, and Sustainable Urbanization (World Bank: Washington, DC March 2014).

[4] World Bank, China Urbanizes: Consequences, Strategies, and Policies (World Bank: Washington, DC January 2008).
Pengfei XIE

about the writer
Pengfei XIE

Pengfei is China Program Director of RAP (Regulatory Assistance Project). RAP is a US based non government organization dedicated to accelerating the transition to a clean, reliable and efficient energy future.

Education, Communication and Mobilization: Is Urban Ecology the Way Forward for Urban Planning and Design in Brazilian cities?

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

Talking about biodiversity and nature in cities? If you do this in Brazil it will probably sound weird to a lot of educated people, including professionals and researchers on urban and ecological areas. And that’s exactly what I do most of the time. Actually, it is interesting how I got to what I do now, how I learned and became engaged in urban ecological planning and design after five decades living as if natural resources and landscapes were guaranteed forever!

Just a brief look at my history: I was born after the Second World War, and it was the time of the economic growth at any cost. This means that natural resources exploitation was the driving force to get to the American style developed society that everybody desired. Almost nobody was concerned about nature and fair distribution of income among people. Actually, there was fear of the red communist expansion in Latin America. This fear grew at a point when in 1964 there was a military coup and Brazil became a dictatorship right before I turned 11 years old. My father owned a fertilizer and pesticide company that was favored by the expanding agriculture frontiers. I remember the smell of the toxic elements that were imported in huge ships and docked in the port of Santos near his warehouse. And when I went to college the “natural” thing was to study Business Administration. Also, getting married and have kids early were part of the happiness package. I did everything right. But when I was about to turn 50 years old, I decided to look for something different to do, to be outdoors. I always enjoyed being in green areas, so I went for a garden design short course with a very special person: Cecilia Beatriz Veiga Soares at the Botanic Garden of Rio de Janeiro. Then, I found out that there was a new undergrad course on landscape design with one of the best Brazilian landscape architects, the late Fernando Chacel. In his first class, he opened a map of watersheds to show how to start analyzing the landscape, to teach how to plan and design with nature. I instantly knew that a new horizon had opened for me. From then on, I have studied and researched about how we humans, living in cities, need nature in our lives.

In the last years I was lucky to meet great people all over the world, and learn with them. I write for The Nature of Cities collective blog for two years now, and have written about the expectations the World Soccer Cup, the Olympic Games and other international events created with the investments flowing to change Rio de Janeiro. Also, I had a chance to tell about the frustration with the lack of systemic planning and the focus on urban expansion that happened in the last years over flood prone and sea level rise areas, forest remnants, Conservation Units, and so on.

Well, nature is still not part of the agenda in most of the Brazilian cities. But, there is hope to change the paradigm. There are some optimistic events that might help educate professionals in landscape planning and design and urban ecology.

Eliana Azevedo (ANP –Vice-President, center), Isis Gurken (landscape designer, left) and Flavia Morais (Congress Representative, right). Photo: João Jadão
Eliana Azevedo (ANP –Vice-President, center), Isis Gurken (landscape designer, left) and Flavia Morais (Congress Representative, right). Photo: João Jadão

Firstly, the regulation of the landscape architecture profession is under way in the Brazilian Congress. The ANP (National Association of Landscape Designers/Architects) is working hard to push the needed legislative bureaucracy to implement regular undergrad and graduation specific courses in Brazilian universities, and legalize the landscape architecture professional independently from architecture and agronomy. The Law Project 2043/2011 has already passed the Education and Culture Commission and had a positive opinion from Representative Rapporteur of the Urban Development Commission. There are still another two commissions to go, each one takes about one year! There are barriers to overcome, but we are working hard to put landscape in the realm of urban planning and design. It is a long process, and it might take more than four years before we start to fully educate professionals in specific undergrad and graduate courses.

SURE-BR Launching workshop – Juergen Breuste welcome to Brazilian Executive Committee. Photo: Cecilia Herzog
SURE-BR Launching workshop – Juergen Breuste welcome to Brazilian Executive Committee. Photo: Cecilia Herzog

During the SURE Urban Ecology Congress last July (2013) in Berlin, I proposed to create a Brazilian Chapter of the Society for Urban Ecology — SURE-BR. This is another important step to put forward the role of biodiversity and ecosystem services in cities. We have already implemented a few actions, and some results are quite surprising. In the beginning of 2013 we launched the Ecologia Urbana Facebook group that today counts with almost 600 members. After the congress we launched a survey to find out who was interested in Urban Ecology, 460 people responded to it until now. The SURE-BR already has a multidisciplinary Executive Committee with researchers from several universities that participated in the founding workshop in February. It is a hard task with little time and no funds yet. SURE-BR already has a tentative Statute that is under legal revision.

Closing session of the SURE Congress when the Brazilian Chapter was born. Photo: Cecilia Herzog
Closing session of the SURE Congress when the Brazilian Chapter was born. Photo: Cecilia Herzog

In Brazil everything is really complicated, costs a lot of money and takes a long time, so we can only go further if we have volunteer’s contributions. We are planning a Latin American Urban Ecology Congress in late 2015. The event shall take place at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro — PUC-RIO. Since 2011 Pierre-André Martin and I have offered short courses on Green Infrastructure and Urban Ecology. Now SURE-BR is also supporting this course, and we have been invited to give it in other cities.

Architecture and Urbanism

123

23%

Landscape Design

33

6%

Biological Sciences

167

32%

Earth Sciences

40

8%

Social Sciences

15

3%

Engineering

36

7%

Law

8

2%

Other

107

20%

Chart of the survey – in the Box the translation and percentages of different professional fields interested in Urban Ecology (note that Landscape Architecture is really inexpressive due to the lack of formal education in the area)
Chart of the survey – in the Box the translation and percentages of different professional fields interested in Urban Ecology. Note that Landscape Architecture is really low due to the lack of formal education in the area.

The constitution of the IBP — Instituto Brasileiro de Paisagem (Brazilian Institute of Landscape) is another possible driver to help shift to a paradigm where landscape and biodiversity in cities enter the mainstream in planning and designing urban environments. The IBP was conceived last March during the international seminar “Paisagismo(s) no Brasil”, when Martha Fajardo was an international speaker, and in her presentation she proposed the creation of the Brazilian Institute of Landscape inspired by the British Landscape Institute. Immediately all other participants and the audience were stimulated by this idea, and we came out with an oficial document to materialize the IBP. We are now working on two fronts, one is the Statute and the other is to develop the curriculum guidelines.

Seminar Paisagismo(s) no Brasil ( Landscape Architecture in Brazil). Photo: Jauvane Cavalcante de Oliveira
Seminar Paisagismo(s) no Brasil ( Landscape Architecture in Brazil). Photo: Jauvane Cavalcante de Oliveira

There is an evergrowing movement to green Brazilian cities with several actors interested in building livable and healthier urban environments. In May, the ATVerde Brasil (Brazilian Association of Green Techonologies) is organizing the 1st Forum on Green Infrastructure during a Roofing Show in São Paulo — TECOBI. INVERDE is officially supporting the event that will gather Latin American researchers and companies that are investing in greening our buildings and our cities. Experts on green infrastructure, roofs and walls, and related legislation are attracting a lot of people to the event.

I teach urban planning and design in interdisciplinary teams in undergrad and graduation courses. I also lecture in many universities and events. What really keeps my energy flowing is the student’s response and their interest in landscape and biodiversity related themes. I can feel how people are biophilic and want to learn more about, and do something to change their cities. I also have been trying to articulate several groups and associations. Mike Houck in his TNOC blog last April wrote about his experience in the Portland-Vancouver region, and it was very inspiring for me.

Residents’ mobilization to save trees in a square in Rio de Janeiro (2012), one of the several demonstrations of Biophilia that happen in our cities. Photo: Alfredo Piragibe
Residents’ mobilization to save trees in a square in Rio de Janeiro (2012), one of the several demonstrations of Biophilia that happen in our cities. Photo: Alfredo Piragibe

Another impetus coming from the Federal sphere is the translation to Portuguese of the 2012 “Cities and Biodiversity Outlook” led by Thomas Elmqvist. It will be released in the Biodiversity Day on May 22nd.

As part of the Tim Beatley’s Biophilic Cities Project, I am organizing together with Maria Fernanda Lemos — director of the architecture and urbanism course of Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-RIO), and INVERDE Institute the Conference “Biophilic Cities 2” in Rio de Janeiro. The event will probably happen in March 2015, and the objective is to put together cities’ representatives of the Biophilic Cities Project in a seminar, followed by a field trip and a workshop to plan a Biophilic Rio. We intend for the event to be open for students, practitioners, researchers, public officials and the general public. Tim Beatley has been very supportive and enthusiastic about this idea that was born in the first workshop last September at the Biophilic Cities Launch in Charlottesville by Nick Grayson from Birmingham — which, by the way, is the first official Biophilic City.

Tim Beatley opening the Biophilic Cities workshop in Charlottesville, October 23rd, 2013. Photo: Cecilia Herzog
Tim Beatley opening the Biophilic Cities workshop in Charlottesville, October 23rd, 2013. Photo: Cecilia Herzog

There is a great opportunity to change the course of our urban development. But, we urgently need prepared practitioners and scientists with a broad understanding of the social, ecological and technological aspects involved in urban landscapes to plan and design resilient and sustainable cities. We also need real participatory governance now, and leaders that have the power to bring together so many people, institutions and associations that are in one way or another trying to protect or increase green areas that offer irreplaceable ecosystem services to people living in cities.

It is a huge challenge to overcome cultural, educational, economic and political barriers. I am one of the many individuals seeking for new ways to build livable and healthier cities. On one hand I feel quite frustrated with the outcome of the huge investments that are flowing to my city, Rio de Janeiro, that are going in the opposite direction: graying a once greener city. On the other, I am happy that after only a few years after shifting my own paradigm I am collaborating to try to change the destructive urbanization pattern with the support of the institutions SURE-BR, ANP, IBP, ATVerde-Brasil. It is also very rewarding to be engaged in educational programs at PUC-Rio and UFRJ (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), and the short courses on green infrastructure and urban ecology with Pierre-André Martin that has been promoted by Inverde Institute in the last years, and in 2014 has been embraced by one of the best private universities in the country.

I strongly believe that cities can be regenerated if we educate, engage people and transform low social and ecological value landscapes (in any scale) in high performance multifunctional urban green infrastructure with and ecosystem services approach.

Cecilia Herzog
Rio de Janeiro

On The Nature of Cities

 

 

A Values-Based Approach to Urban Nature Research and Practice

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

The concept of values is frequently brought up in relation to environmental issues, and discussions about urban nature are no exception. In particular, values are frequently at the heart of dialogue about urban ecosystem services, especially in relation to economics and monetary valuation. This was demonstrated by the recent ‘roundtable’ discussion on this blog site.

I believe that understanding what people value in urban environments, and why, is fundamental to achieving sustainable and biodiverse cities. However, much of the work on urban ecosystem services has failed to explore the breadth and depth of the concept of values. In this post, I outline how taking a ‘values based’ approach to urban ecosystem services studies can complement current research efforts and provide new insights into how to plan and manage urban ecosystems. Focusing on what urban residents ultimately care about can help identify the synergies and tradeoffs between environmental objectives and other land use priorities. This information can in turn be used by managers to direct biodiversity actions and messages in ways that will enhance social receptivity.

Start with people

In February, I was part of a book launch here in Melbourne of the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook global assessment of urbanisation, biodiversity and ecosystem services. Australian journalist Virginia Trioli who facilitated the public event took a profound disliking to the term ‘ecosystem services’. Although it is often considered a useful term that can help bridge the divide between science and society, she considered it to be a piece of unnecessary jargon and difficult to understand. She preferred to rephrase ecosystem services simply as “the good stuff we get from nature”. It seems the concept of “goods and services” may not resonate as strongly with many of the public as we ecologists first thought. So what exactly is the “stuff” that we get from urban nature, and why do we think it’s good?

Urban ecosystem service research has proliferated over the past 5 to 10 years. Ecologists have generally sought to understand ecosystem services as properties of a system, just as they seek to understand how soil fertility influences Net Primary Productivity. However, there has been little consideration of ecosystem services as a complex set of interactions between people and their environment and landscape. Since ecosystem services are all about how people benefit from their environment, it makes sense that research should start with understanding people rather than properties of a system (which may exist whether or not people are present!). What if we started from the place of what people value, and then look at how the environment contributes to this?

Using the language of “goods and services” itself can undermine the importance of threatened species or other culturally relevant places, which often don’t contribute tangibly to human wellbeing. Rather than lumping all the intangible concepts such as these into the category of “cultural ecosystem services”, what would it look like to start from the place of understanding values? Recognising the functions and features of ecosystems that people think are important will help us to know when it’s appropriate to apply monetary values and why different values are assigned by different people.

There are multiple kinds of values that people assign to urban ecosystems

A recent project conducted by our research group has looked at the study of social values and activities for green open spaces (parks and reserves) in the Lower Hunter region of NSW, Australia. It is an area of rapid urban growth, alongside increasing coalmining activities and traditional agricultural land uses. We used Public Participation GIS methods (Brown, 2012) to ascertain the kinds of values and activities people considered to be important in different green spaces within their suburb. This entailed distributing paper maps to local residents along with a set of stickers that corresponded to different values and activities. Survey participants placed these sticker dots on the map to show which places within their local area they valued for different reasons (see the map below for an example of a completed map). The abundance of different kinds of dots can be seen in the following histogram.

An example of a returned map from the Lower Hunter open space survey. The numbered red dots are stickers placed by a survey participant, showing the green spaces that are valued for different reasons.
An example of a returned map from the Lower Hunter open space survey. The numbered red dots are stickers placed by a survey participant, showing the green spaces that are valued for different reasons.
The abundance of sticker dots placed by survey respondents representing values and negative qualities associated with green spaces in the Lower Hunter Region of NSW, Australia.
The abundance of sticker dots placed by survey respondents representing values and negative qualities associated with green spaces in the Lower Hunter Region of NSW, Australia.

It is clear that people assign many different kinds of values to urban parks, both positive and negative. Each of these values might theoretically contribute to the economic value of a park, but many may be considered incompatible with economic valuation. It is important to recognise that different places will have different values assigned to them (scenic values are typically higher in parks near to water), but also that individual people will assign multiple values to the same place.

Values that people assign to places are influenced by underlying values

Research has found that the values people assign to different places are influenced by both the characteristics of the place and characteristics of the person (Seymour, Curtis, & Pannell, 2010). One of the factors that has received relatively little research is underlying human values. Underlying values are desired end states or modes of conduct (e.g., social justice, integrity) and have been the subject of psychological studies for many years. Some studies have found that underlying values related to the environment can be grouped into three categories: biocentric (nature-centred), social-altruistic (other people-centred), and egoistic (self-centred)(Dietz, Fitzgerald, & Shwom, 2005). In a 2013 study conducted here in Melbourne, Dave Kendal (from the Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology) and myself found that these kinds of underlying values were related to the specific values people assigned to peri-urban landscapes (e.g. food production, biodiversity conservation, cultural heritage)(Ives & Kendal, 2013).

The relationship between underlying human values and assigned values (those specific to a place or landscape) is very important when considering how to promote nature in the city. Although sustainability and biodiversity conservation are important issues for many people, the matters that are of greatest value to people are generally not environmental. This was highlighted by a recent study into the issues considered most salient to Australians. In this study of over 1500 respondents, the three issues that most concerned the Australian public were food & health, local crime and public safety, rights to basic services.

Salience of general categories of social and economic issues for Australians. The level of concern indicated by Australians for a range of general issues. Reproduced from Devinney et al. (2012) with permission from the authors.
Salience of general categories of social and economic issues for Australians. The level of concern indicated by Australians for a range of general issues. Reproduced from Devinney et al. (2012) with permission from the authors.

Knowing the priorities of the general population is a useful way of connecting the composition and function of natural areas in cities to the matters that concern people the most. Economic valuation of green spaces and biodiversity may not always be the most effective way of promoting ecosystem services. Based on the above results, communicating the health benefits of urban nature may be the most persuasive argument for promoting ecosystem services. Conversely, if nature parks are seen to compromise the safety of urban areas, this may thoroughly undermine any other conservation or environmental quality benefits.

Public values need to be at the heart of urban ecosystem management

When seeking to enhance urban nature, the sheer number of people in cities means that social values need to be a central part of research and management. There are many benefits from such a values-based approach. First, understanding the different values people have for different areas can help in identifying potential conflict over the uses of spaces. For instance, knowing that some people value an urban park for mountain-biking and others for reflective walking means that conflict over a space might ensue. Alternatively, understanding the kinds of activities that people value in nature reserves can help manage human impacts when outright exclusion of people is unfeasible. Information on actual biodiversity within cities can also help to identify whether people’s values match ecological reality. A good example of this is provided by Amy Whitehead and collaborators in their 2014 study conducted in the Lower Hunter valley in Australia (Whitehead et al., 2014). In this study, they identified some areas in the landscape that were of ecological significance yet were considered by the community to be of low conservation value, while others were considered to be of significant conservation value yet possessed fewer important species.

Understanding values can also help managers communicate the importance of ecological systems and target the benefits of urban ecological systems directly to different people. This may include highlighting the monetary savings from tree shade for those who value economic efficiency, cultural benefits of social interaction for those who value social wellbeing or environmental protection for those who value biodiversity itself. Further, knowing how people value different natural areas in cities can help planners to provide a diversity of places that meet the needs of local residents. Some scholars have argued that people require a “portfolio of places” for their fulfillment (Swanwick, 2009), and such a portfolio is likely to be affected by socio-demographics (e.g., age, life stage), as well as individuals factors like a person’s underlying values.

Adopting a values-based approach to understanding urban ecological systems will challenge how land use and environmental management decisions are typically made. Rather than fitting the importance of urban nature into current paradigms of decision-making (often based on economic values and balancing fiscal budgets), public values can be used as a way of engaging people in the decision-making process of our cities. Beginning with an understanding of what people value and why, urban nature can be embedded more closely into the life of a city, rather than being presented as an alternative issue that only resonates with the environmentally conscious few.

Chris Ives
Melbourne

On The Nature of Cities

 

Dietz, T., Fitzgerald, A., & Shwom, R. (2005). Environmental Values. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 30(1), 335–372.

Ives, C. D., & Kendal, D. (2013). Values and attitudes of the urban public towards peri-urban agricultural land. Land Use Policy, 34, 80–90.

Seymour, E., Curtis, A., & Pannell, D. (2010). Understanding the role of assigned values in natural resource management. Australasian Journal of Environmental Management 17, 142–153.

Swanwick, C. (2009). Society’s attitudes to and preferences for land and landscape. Land Use Policy, 26, S62–S75.

Whitehead, A. L., Kujala, H., Ives, C. D., Gordon, A., Lentini, P. E., Wintle, B. A., Nicholson, E. and Raymond, C. M. (2014). Integrating biological and social values when prioritizing places for biodiversity conservation. Conservation Biology.

 

Marine Biodiversity Conservation in Coastal Cities: Tales from Singapore

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

The main picture prefacing the news article by Roger Harrabin on the BBC website on 8 April 2014 on the final draft report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was a stark black and white scene of strong high waves breaking against sea-walls.  It drives home the point that island and coastal cities will bear the hardest brunt of climate change.

The IPCC report did not have good news to share.  In fact, “emissions have been accelerating rather than slowing”.  A scan of the world map shows that coastal areas have the highest population density.  More than half the world’s population live in cities and more than half of this urban population live in coastal areas, and hence most of the people affected by climate change will be those living in coastal cities.  As coastal areas link land to sea, the activities of people living in these areas inevitably have impact on both terrestrial and marine ecosystems.  They are the very people who can make a disproportionate difference to biodiversity conservation.

Armelle Labadie-Ouedraogo, Isabelle Lavail-Ravetllat and Oliver Hillel highlighted the role that port cities can play in biodiversity conservation.  They shared the experience of Brest Metropole Oceane and the Maritime Territories International Network, a step in the right direction.  Tim Beatley had written about Blue Urbanism and posed the questions on what city citizens can do for marine conservation.

I would like to continue to expound on the issues raised by the previous authors by focussing on what the different residents of coastal cities can do to conserve their biodiversity and to prepare themselves for climate change effects by adaptation and mitigation.

We cannot conserve what we do not know.  Therefore, biodiversity surveys are essential. Singapore recently embarked on a Comprehensive Marine Biodiversity Survey.  The Comprehensive Marine Biodiversity Survey of Singapore (CMBS) is meant  to address the above challenge.  This ambitious national initiative, launched in 2010, was the first time that a concerted effort was made to comprehensively catalogue the marine biodiversity of Singapore.  Carried out in phases over five years, the CMBS brought  together the larger community of experts, non-governmental organisations, government agencies and volunteers to collect biodiversity information on mudflats, intertidal areas, coral reefs and the seabed of Singapore.  This was the key innovation of the CMBS — instead of relying on a limited pool of academia and naturalists to do the survey work, the CMBS set out to accomplish its objectives by bringing together a diverse group of people and organisations to contribute to a large-scale, multi-disciplinary project that is of national importance.

The CMBS has now completed two major expeditions in October 2012 and May 2013 Within 3 and half years, CMBS uncovered 64 possible new species, more than 188 new records and 9 rediscoveries.  There were numerous rare discoveries made during CMBS.  One of 14 species identified as possibly new to science is the “Lipstick” sea anemone. Found in the mudflats at Pulau Ubin, this predatory animal has a distinctive red mouth and may not have been recorded anywhere else in the world.  Another species identified as possibly new to science is the orange-clawed mangrove crab found in coastal mangroves and a small goby, nicknamed “Zee” found in mudflats off Lim Chu Kang.  Other new records for Singapore include species of jellyfish, stinging nettles, bristleworms, marine slugs, crabs, sea cucumbers, and fishes.  In addition, some crabs were also rediscovered during the survey.  The zebra crab, found in the Southern islands, was last seen in the early 1960s.  A rarely seen tree-climbing Nipah crab was predicted to be in Singapore 20 years ago but was not confirmed until 2012.  Even more surprising is the rediscovery of a large coastal catfish species last seen in Singapore waters over 100 years ago — how could we have missed it for so long!

Through this survey, we discover species new to science and gain a better understanding of the rich marine biodiversity that Singapore harbours despite the city state’s fast-paced development and port activities.

Clownfish co-existing with sea anemone Photo: Karenne Tun
Clownfish co-existing with sea anemone. Photo: Karenne Tun

It has been observed that the areas with richer hard coral biodiversity tend to recover better from coral bleaching than species poor areas.  Hence, it is important to know what species we have so that we can better conserve them.  Biodiversity surveys help us identify areas that need intervention for them to be enhanced if natural ecosystems are to be sustained.  Coastal erosion is one prevalent problem that causes biodiversity loss and could benefit from facilitated enhancement.  

We observed a site where the sea front mangrove trees were destabilized by strong currents.  The typical engineering approach would be to build a seawall.  We felt that a hard infrastructure would not solve the problem but would instead deflect the waves to another site which in turn would be eroded.  We wanted to replant it with mangroves but hydrological modelling indicated that the mangroves would not be able to withstand the strong waves.

We decided to test out a hybrid solution, i.e., intersperses a low rock revetment with mangroves.  The rock revetment formed a solid base to support the mangroves that were planted in biodegradable pots.  Several species of mangroves were used to emulate that of the natural environment.  The selection of the species was assisted by observing the species zonation in the surrounding wild patches.  Nature is the best teacher.

Hybrid coastal protection infrastructure comprising a low rock revetment interspersed with mangrove plants Photo: National Parks Board of Singapore
Hybrid coastal protection infrastructure comprising a low rock revetment interspersed with mangrove plants Photo: National Parks Board of Singapore

For the enhancement of marine ecosystems, a continuous supply of native species is necessary.  For the coastal protection project, a mangrove nursery was set-up.  Seeds and saplings were obtained from the nearby natural environment.  This was also done with faunal species, like corals and giant clams.

Coral fragments were collected so that no corals were destroyed or damaged when collecting stocks for the coral nursery.  The coral fragments were secured on platforms so that they could grow under optimal conditions.  When they reached a certain size, they were translocated to impoverished areas to enhance those sites.  This project aimed to enhance the biodiversity in less rich sites and also to broaden the distribution of the corals, to maximise survival rates of hard corals.

Coral nursery in Singapore Photo: National Parks Board of Singapore
Coral nursery in Singapore Photo: National Parks Board of Singapore

We also found that the giant clams needed some assistance for them to thrive.  Giant clams are naturally slow-growing so we experimented with ex situ breeding to facilitate its growth.  When they had reached a certain size, we released them to suitable habitats and monitored their establishment in the natural environment.

Costal area and human settlements

What are the most dominant features in human coastal settlements?  How can we do more to conserve our marine biodiversity?  Where are the areas that are least explored for marine biodiversity conservation?  Many of our coastal cities have hard infrastructures like seawalls, jetties, marinas, etc.  People do not normally associate these structures with biodiversity but they are most prevalent in our built-up environment.  If we want to improve our quality of life, we need to bring back the biodiversity that provides us with essential ecosystem services or populate our built-up environment with marine flora and fauna.  Moreover, marine biodiversity can do all of the following without additional energy input from us — nor would they release more carbon into the environment.  Firstly, marine fish, shrimps, etc. provide us with a long-term supply of proteins, if we harvest them on a sustainable basis.  Secondly, filter feeders can clean up the water.  Thirdly, marine plants can aerate the water, hence, maintaining the oxygen levels in water.  Fourthly, marine biodiversity increases the recreational and tourism values.  The list goes on and on.

We decided to work with multi-agencies, marinas, condominiums, etc., to populate our coastal infrastructures.  We are currently working with a team from the university to design tiles with different textures that can be attached to seawalls so that each texture would attract different kinds of marine organisms.

Sea fans on sea walls in Singapore. Photo: Karenne Tun
Sea fans on sea walls in Singapore. Photo: Karenne Tun

One of the marinas has reduced the cleaning of their hard structures and the result is the proliferation of soft corals and other marine organisms.  These marine organisms add colour and beauty to the marina besides carrying out several ecosystem services for free.

Marine organisms in Keppel Marina, Singapore.   Photo: Karenne Tun
Marine organisms in Keppel Marina, Singapore. Photo: Karenne Tun

These are some of the ways we have tried to conserve our marine biodiversity.  A coordinated approach to development and marine conservation like the integrated urban coastal management (IUCM) will ensure that utilization of resources is optimized.  To track whether these efforts are effective, it is crucial that quantitative monitoring systems are put in place.  The Singapore Index on Cities’ Biodiversity is an evaluation tool that could be applied for this purpose.  

There is so much to do.  The entire population has to be galvanized to implement marine biodiversity conservation efforts.  Everyone is a stakeholder.  Many of our conservation efforts are carried out with the help of volunteers.

CMBS volunteers. Photo: National Parks Board of Singapore
CMBS volunteers. Photo: National Parks Board of Singapore

It is increasingly evident that the marine environment is a treasure trove for innovative pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and industrial products.  City residents will stand most to gain from successful marine biodiversity conservation.  With the concentration of humans in coastal cities and the diverse expertise that they harbour, coastal cities can perform miracles for marine biodiversity conservation with imagination spiced with thinking out of the box.  More importantly, coastal cities must do it because they are the most vulnerable to adverse effects of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Lena Chan
Singapore

On The Nature of Cities 

 

Nature Needs Half

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

Nature Needs Half is a concept under consideration in the Capital Regional District (CRD)[End note 1]. Simply put, Nature Needs Half means saving fifty percent of an area’s lands and waters for nature. This concept recognizes the impact of humans upon the land, while also acknowledging that we need to share this planet with all other species.

ProtectHalfNature Needs Half is now being implemented across all jurisdictional scales, and in surprising and sometimes novel ways, in cities and countries around the world. The core concept of protecting half of an area for nature is being “fitted to place” by governments seeking to find workable solutions to preserving the natural world and providing for human needs.

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Hikers pause near a rock cairn in the Sea to Sea Regional Park Reserve. Photo: Mary Sanseverino

CRD Regional Parks, through its 2012-2021 Strategic Plan, has advanced the idea of Nature Needs Half as a foundational principal for regional sustainability. CRD Regional Planning is currently developing a Regional Sustainability Strategy (RSS), and the concept of Nature Needs Half is included as a key goal under the draft Natural Environment Strategic Policy Direction.  As the RSS process unfolds throughout 2014-2015, there will be ample opportunities for regional dialogue around the values, benefits, and challenges of adopting Nature Needs Half as a core principle of regional sustainability.

What is Nature Needs Half?

NatureNeedsHalfLogoNature Needs Half is a simple concept to understand—put most succinctly, it means saving half of the world’s lands and waters for the protection of nature.  Nature Needs Half was developed by the WILD Foundation of Boulder, Colorado [2].  The WILD Foundation is a progressive leader in global wilderness conservation, perhaps best known for successfully organizing the long-running World Wilderness Congress, the world’s most preeminent public conservation project and environmental forum.

The WILD Foundation also recently launched the WILD Cities Project, which it describes as “a new concept of urbanism where wild nature is highly valued and its conservation is a conscious part of human life in cities worldwide” [3]. Goals of the WILD Cities Project include identifying successful urban initiatives aligned with the principles of Nature Needs Half, formulating criteria for defining a WILD city, and developing strategies to communicate to the public the need for nature in our cities.

A notable early proponent of a Nature Needs Half approach is the famed Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, who in his book The Future of Life (2002) proclaimed “half the world for humanity, half for the rest of life, to make a planet both self-sustaining and pleasant” [4].  This statement emanates from the many years of research by conservation biologists who have been examining the question of how much land is needed to ensure the maintenance of biodiversity.

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Mountain lion in regal repose in the CRD. Photo: Eric Kilby

Although the prevailing belief has long centered on a 12% conservation target, many recent studies have shown that this target is too low to maintain diversity.  Many scientists now believe that the minimum amount of protected area necessary for a given area of land is generally between 25% and 75%.  Given this variability, most have settled on 50% as a workable percentage that can provide a viable balance between ecosystem services and economic development. This new understanding is pushing governments around the world to adopt new policies that will protect at least half of their land base for nature.

One of the key concepts underlying a Nature Needs Half approach is that of connectivity. Landscape connectivity is necessary to maintain the full range of life-supporting, ecological and evolutionary processes, the long term survival of species, and an area’s resilience in the face of environmental change [5]. Many conservation planning efforts have been initiated to determine how much and which lands should be targeted for conservation. A general consensus is that it depends on the characteristics of the area under consideration—its physical characteristics, its suite of species to be conserved, its past-land use decisions, and other factors. The overall goal, however, is to create enough connectivity that species can move in response to stressors including climate change, invasive species, and habitat fragmentation, degradation, and loss.

Conceptual Green Infrastructure Network
Conceptual Green Infrastructure Network [6]
Typically, parks and protected areas form the core of a connectivity matrix. These core “wild” areas are then connected by other types of landscapes and environmental features, such as working lands (forestry and agriculture), rural and suburban open space, and even urban forests and other types of urban “green” infrastructure. These connectivity matrixes help ensure the maintenance of biological diversity and provide enough flexibility within a landscape that they can typically be assembled from what already exists in an area.

This approach to Nature Needs Half will work well in the Capital Regional District (CRD).  The CRD contains a rich assemblage of ecosystems and species within its 245,000 hectares on Southern Vancouver Island. Fortunately, a significant portion of the CRD is still in a semi-wilderness condition (much of which is formally protected as parks), while considerable forestry, agricultural, rural and suburban open space networks exist, all of which can serve as the core of a connectivity matrix.

Proposed CRD Regional Parks and Trails System, showing connectivity corridors.
Proposed CRD Regional Parks and Trails System, showing connectivity corridors [7]
These core undeveloped areas can be interlaced with other more graduated forms of human-impacted landscapes, such that urban forests, riparian areas, remnant natural areas, and even green buildings and other types of urban ecological design features are brought into the matrix. The potential exists for a truly integrated connectivity matrix which incorporates wilderness, rural, suburban, and urban gradients. In this vision, the ability of the CRD to preserve half of the region for nature seems within the region’s collective grasp.

Why is the CRD considering Nature Needs Half?

The CRD is ideally positioned to consider a Nature Needs Half approach as a foundational principal for regional sustainability. The region is blessed with abundant natural landscapes and a complex geography and climate that support a diverse range of ecosystems, a number of which are globally rare or endangered. Fortunately, the region has already set aside significant areas for nature protection and it still contains an abundance of forestry lands, agricultural lands, and other types of open space that could contribute to a Nature Needs Half vision. The region is equally fortunate to have an effective governance structure, progressive municipalities and electoral areas, and a public that widely supports the goal of regional sustainability and effective stewardship of natural resources.

Coastline
Cabin Pond at East Sooke Regional Park. Photo: Mary Sanseverino

In spite of such strong support, the CRD is still faced with intense development pressures and associated negative impacts on the health of the region’s biodiversity and overall resiliency to environmental change. This fact underscores the critical importance of on-going, appropriate stewardship of the region’s lands and waters, and the need to develop a far-sighted approach to balancing the needs of “nature” (which also encompasses human needs) with that of economic growth and development.

There are a number of ways the CRD has already started to address this problem. CRD Regional Parks recently completed its Regional Parks Strategic Plan 2012-2021 [8]. A core concept of the strategic plan is Nature Needs Half. Regional Parks, through its strategic plan, recommended that Nature Needs Half be brought forward for discussion in preparing the Regional Sustainability Strategy (RSS).

CRD Regional Planning is leading the development of the RSS during 2014-2015 [9]. A key component of the RSS process is extensive public consultation designed to ensure a wide range of perspectives are considered during the strategy’s preparation and approval stages. The RSS will provide the framework for long-term regional sustainability by seeking to preserve and revitalize natural systems, foster social resilience and community well-being, and generate ongoing prosperity and affordability. Regional Planning supports Nature Needs Half as an important cross-cutting theme that can inform each of its key strategic areas.

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Stewart Mountain ramble, Thetis Lake Regional Park. Photo: Mary Sanseverino

There is clearly more work that needs to be done to understand what Nature Needs Half might mean if applied within the CRD. Although a significant focus of Nature Needs Half is on large landscape conservation, the CRD can also “fit it to place” by including urban, suburban, and rural elements that will directly benefit regional residents right where they live, thereby maximizing the value of such an approach. To this end, it is important to understand and define what “nature” and “half” might mean in a regional context.

What might constitute “Nature” within the CRD?

Lichen and moss in the Coastal Douglas fir zone. Photo: Bev Hall
Lichen and moss in the Coastal Douglas fir zone. Photo: Bev Hall

Within the CRD, it is entirely sensible to consider the full range of the region’s natural systems, functions, and elements in a Nature Needs Half approach. For instance, we would want to include those wilderness areas that still exist for their value as wildlife corridors, carbon sinks, and biodiversity strongholds (among other values), but we would also want to think about other types of landscapes that have similar or different values. In this sense, we need to think about landscapes modified by human use that still retain their relevance and value as “nature.” These landscapes will necessarily include working forests, agricultural lands, public and private open space, non-wilderness parks and protected areas, greenways, riparian zones, watersheds, wetlands, lakes, rivers, ponds, and the nearby marine environment, among others.

Green Infrastructure design across an urban-rural-wildlands continuum.
Green Infrastructure design across an urban-rural-wildlands continuum [10]
We should not leave out consideration of nature in our urban landscapes either. Remnant pieces of nature exist in our backyards, our streetscapes, our urban forests and streams, our urban paths and trails, and in our margins and neglected areas. As well, many newer developments are built with nature in mind and incorporate green building features such as living roofs, bio-swales, rain gardens, and natural filtration ponds into their designs. All of these elements can contribute to Nature Needs Half. They are at the core of a connectivity matrix that expands outwards in all directions, linking the city with the wilderness in a continuous whole. The benefits of such an approach are multi-fold, contributing greatly to regional sustainability.

If such a Nature Needs Half approach is to be successful, it is necessary to examine the other part of the equation—that of “half.” What does it mean to protect “half” of the region for nature.

LEFT: Looking out across the Sooke Hills to the west.  Photo: Heath Moffatt Photography. RIGHT: Young black bear eating new spring growth in the CRD.  Photo: iStock.
LEFT: Looking out across the Sooke Hills to the west. Photo: Heath Moffatt Photography. RIGHT: Young black bear eating new spring growth in the CRD. Photo: iStock.

What might constitute “Half” within the CRD? 

When thinking of what protecting “half” of the CRD for nature means, it is necessary to look at it from the perspective of governance, equity, and scale. From a governance perspective we recognize that our system is complex, with multiple layers of government involvement in the structuring and management of our daily affairs. One definition of governance that applies to the management of nature is from the IUCN Natural Resource Governance Working Group [11]:

GovernanceUnderstood in this way, governance, including how it shapes and is shaped by the political economy of local, provincial, and national decision-making, is a critical determinant of the effectiveness and equity outcomes of biodiversity conservation, and of the contribution that abundant nature makes to people’s well-being, empowerment and sustainable development.

When we think of protecting half of the region for nature from a governance perspective, we must acknowledge there are many stakeholders, including the federal and provincial governments, the regional district, municipalities and electoral areas, First Nations, and civil society. Each of these stakeholders is bound to the other by complex sets of rules and traditions that determine how power is exercised and how decision-makers are held accountable for their decisions.

Within this governance framework, we have a collective responsibility to steward our natural resources wisely. Many opportunities exist for collaborating on a comprehensive nature protection strategy involving all levels of government and in partnership with civil society.

In this sense, the question of equity arises. It would be impossible to mandate to the federal or provincial governments, the regional district, First Nations, municipalities, electoral areas, businesses, or private citizens that they must protect half of their land for nature.  How would this be done, and who would be responsible for it? What would be the impact on different stakeholders? How feasible would it be given current development patterns? How would private property rights be addressed?

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Grey beach peavine along the rugged Juan de Fuca Strait. Photo: Kyle Strauss

One obvious tactic is to embed Nature Needs Half within the RSS, which is a regionally representative approach to achieving equitable sustainability outcomes.  The RSS, which will be eventually adopted by each municipality and electoral area in the region and approved by the Province, will feature a set of strategic priorities that should lead the region to greater sustainability. In this sense, all share in the costs and benefits of achieving regional sustainability, and each stakeholder commits to making it work for the benefit of all.

Nature Needs Half within this scenario is achievable through the individual and combined efforts of RSS signatories. If this is true, then the scale at which it is achieved must be addressed. Scale in this context refers to what and where the “half” will come from. There are many possibilities. If a goal is to create a seamless nature connectivity matrix stretching from our core urban areas to the most remote and wild corners of the region, then we must consider all of our natural areas and features as potential contributors to the “half.”

How each level of government and civil society will contribute to the actualization of Nature Needs Half needs to be discussed during the development of the RSS, as well as afterwards if it is adopted as a core principle of regional sustainability. A fundamental tenet, however, is that each level of government, First Nations, businesses, civil society organizations, and private individuals each have a role to play in supporting the designation of lands or features for nature protection and a shared responsibility for achieving Nature Needs Half.

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Flying a kite along Sandcut Beach near Jordan River. Photo: Hello Hillary

Contributing to regional sustainability

One of the most important reasons to adopt a Nature Needs Half approach within the CRD is for its contribution to environmental sustainability. In particular, protecting nature means protecting the full suite of “nature’s services” or “ecosystem services.” These ecosystem services underpin our human economies and livelihoods.

Despite their critical importance, the capacity of ecosystems to provide essential services is being degraded at an alarming rate. In 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a four-year study of the state of the world’s ecosystems involving more than 1,300 experts from 95 countries, reported that over 60 percent of the earth’s ecosystem services were already degraded. This negative trend, they concluded, was set to continue at an accelerating pace over the next half century [12].

Jelly
Beautiful jellyfish in the cold Pacific Ocean waters. Photo: Deborah Kerr Designs

Climate change is exacerbating the degradation of ecosystems and the loss of ecosystem services [13]. Decisions concerning land acquisition and conservation strategies need to consider the potential impacts of climate change, and incorporate linkages and corridors to other natural areas for species migration. This approach suits a Nature Needs Half approach, which necessarily includes protection of priority areas and elements in an overall connectivity matrix [14].

The quote below highlights the value of protecting nature as a climate change strategy [15]:

Conservation of Intact ecosystemsAnother important aspect of nature’s services is its “natural capital” benefit—or human valuing of nature’s economic contributions.  Traditionally, natural capital services weren’t accounted for in the market economy, and so were often under-valued or treated as non-existent. However, this approach to natural capital is changing, as it is becoming clear that the services nature provides are extremely valuable in monetary terms” [16].

Suzuki quoteAccording to the David Suzuki Foundation, the establishment of greenbelts of protected forests, agricultural lands, wetlands, and other green spaces around cities like Toronto and Ottawa has helped to protect essential ecosystem services like water filtration and wildlife habitat [17]. The benefits provided by southern Ontario’s Greenbelt alone have been conservatively estimated at $2.6 billion annually.

The David Suzuki Foundation recently completed a landmark natural capital valuation study for the purpose of determining the non-market benefits provided by the natural capital within B.C.’s Lower Mainland (e.g. greater Vancouver metropolitan area) and its watersheds [18]. The report found that the top three benefit values provided by the study area’s ecosystem services were:

  1. Climate regulation resulting from carbon storage by forests, wetlands, grasslands, shrub-lands and agricultural soils;
  2. Water supply due to water filtration services by forests; and
  3. Flood protection and water regulation provided by forest land cover.

The total value for all natural capital benefits provided by the study area was estimated to be $5.4 billion per year, or about $3,880 per hectare. This translated to an estimated value of $2,462 per person, or $6,402 per household each year [19].

Chicago’s GO TO 2040 Regional Plan proposes a green infrastructure network that follows waterway corridors, expands existing preserves, and creates new preserves in the region.
Chicago’s GO TO 2040 Regional Plan proposes a green infrastructure network that follows waterway corridors, expands existing preserves, and creates new preserves in the region [20].
It seems clear that the economic benefits of protecting nature outweigh the values derived from conversion into other uses. It pays to invest in “green infrastructure” instead of “gray infrastructure”—or put another way, it is more cost effective to invest in forests and other natural landscapes than human-engineered solutions to maintain natural capital benefits [21]. Adopting a Nature Needs Half approach provides considerable economic benefits by protecting and restoring the CRD’s natural capital wealth.

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Migrating salmon in a clear, cold stream in the CRD. Photo: CRD Regional Parks

Supportive measures for a Nature Needs Half approach

A key consideration for governments and citizens is to understand what measures already exist to facilitate the protection and expansion of a green infrastructure network [22].  Fortunately, much work has been completed in this regard. For instance, the Green Bylaws Toolkit for Conserving Sensitive Ecosystems and Green Infrastructure advances policy goals, objectives, and criteria for protecting green infrastructure that resonates with a Nature Needs Half approach [23].

The Toolkit advances three broad goals:

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Pine grosbeak in an Arbutus tree. Photo: Mary Sanseverino
  1. Protect and maintain the integrity of sensitive ecosystems;
  2. Restore ecosystems when opportunities allow; and
  3. Ensure that green infrastructure plays a role in promoting fiscally responsible local government services and programs.

To achieve these goals, the Toolkit recommends pursuing seven objectives:

  1. Contain urban development within a compact area;
  2. Maintain environmentally sensitive lands outside urban containment boundaries as large lot parcels (20+ hectares), parks, or protected areas that are connected by greenways;
  3. Prevent degradation and fragmentation of sensitive ecosystems and encourage connections among ecosystems;
  4. Prevent development of subdivisions and individual lots on or near sensitive ecosystems;
  5. Maintain the integrity of the ecological systems of which sensitive ecosystems are a part;
  6. Restore degraded ecosystems;
  7. Ensure adequate assessment of the impacts of development and carry out mitigation measures.

The Toolkit then lists two criteria that affect the ability of local governments to implement these objectives:

—Simplicity of administrative systems; and

—Good definition of the costs and benefits of ecosystem protection.

The Toolkit identifies a number of measures available to local governments for protection of green infrastructure [24]. Generally, these measures fall into five categories: land use instruments, fiscal incentives, liability limitations, market incentives, and increased education/capacity building [25]. Together these measures provide a suite of strategies that can be utilized on behalf of nature conservation.

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Hikers enjoying a rest and the view in the Sooke Hills. Photo: Mary Sanseverino

Of course, there are many more exciting and innovative urban nature conservation strategies being implemented across North America and around the world.  Many of these have been written about in other Nature of Cities blogs, such as the Biophilic Cities Initiative, the Metropolitan Greenspaces Alliance, and the Green Seattle Partnership. All of these approaches are contributing to a growing network of global cities that are “fitting to place” accessible, healthy, and abundant nature in the midst of densely populated urban spaces.

Summary

Most of the world’s leading scientists and governments recognize that the escalating global ecological crisis demonstrates the insufficiency of our current conservation efforts and that we need to do more to stop this alarming trend. Fortunately, we possess good knowledge about the environment, especially about how much land and water we must protect to maintain the full range of biodiversity and protect human health. Research over the last 20 years or so indicates that we must set aside at least half of a given region for protection and we must work hard to interconnect core areas with other such areas to provide resiliency in the face of unprecedented environmental change [26]. 

Photo Phil Petersen (3)
Red-legged tree frog, native to Vancouver Island. Photo: Phil Petersen

Currently, approximately 19% of the CRD is protected as parks or restricted watershed, for a total of 47,826 hectares. While this percentage exceeds the current global protected areas standard (e.g. 12%), it falls far short of the 50% that conservation scientists believe is necessary to cope with emerging environmental and human health challenges. Fortunately, the CRD has adequate lands to protect half of our region for nature.  Within the CRD can be found urban green features, local to federal park and trail systems, open space, resource lands, and wilderness. The CRD can create a sustainable future based on a Nature Needs Half approach given enough public and political will.

15.Mountain biker enjoying Hartland Mountain Bike Park.  Photo: Jamie Cameron
Mountain biker enjoying Hartland Mountain Bike Park. Photo: Jamie Cameron
Cougar print in the mud.  Photo credit Nick Thompson
Cougar print in the mud. Photo: Nick Thompson

Although the CRD is committed to achieving regional sustainability, more work needs to be done to understand how to define and operationalize a Nature Needs Half approach for the region. Next steps in this regard could include:

—Ensuring that Nature Needs Half remains in the Regional Sustainability Strategy and is included in public dialogues about the region’s future;

—Holding focus sessions or other community engagement events where the topic of Nature Needs Half can be explored in more detail and the results analyzed and disseminated back out to politicians and the public;

—Interviewing others involved with a Nature Needs Half (or similar approach) to determine strategies, opportunities, challenges, and lessons learned, with applicability to the CRD.

—Developing a set of Nature Needs Half strategic priorities, with associated goals, targets, indicators, and milestones.

—Preparing a Nature Needs Half action plan and green infrastructure strategy.

The case is clear that infusing and protecting nature in and around our cities provides innumerable benefits for human health and well-being, as well as providing a lifeline for species and ecosystems that depend on our positive actions in this regard. We owe it to ourselves and to the incredible diversity of life on earth to act now to protect at least half the worlds’ lands and waters for nature. The CRD, in its own small way, can partially answer this larger call to action by adopting a Nature Needs Half approach for regional sustainability.

Lynn Wilson
Victoria, British Columbia

On The Nature of Cities

 

End Notes 

[1] Capital Regional District (CRD) is the regional government for 13 municipalities and three electoral areas on Southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. See the CRD website at: https://www.crd.bc.ca/about/what-is-crd.

[2] See The WILD Foundation at http://www.wild.org/.

[3] WILD Foundation, WILD Cities Project at: http://www.wild.org/main/world-wilderness-congress/wild10/.

[4] Wilson, E. O. (2003). The future of life. New York: Vintage Books.

[5] The Wild Foundation (2009).   Nature Needs Half information sheet. Accessed on 3/14/13 at http://natureneedshalf.org/why-nature-needs-half/.

[6] Conceptual Green Infrastructure Network from the document: “Refinement of the Chicago Wilderness Green Infrastructure Vision, Final Report June 2012”, accessed at:
http://www.cmap.illinois.gov/documents/10180/11696/GIV20_FinalReport_2012-06.pdf/dd437709-214c-45d6-a036-5d77244dcedb. The report defines the connectivity network as: “The building blocks of the network are “core areas” that contain well-functioning natural ecosystems that provide high quality habitat for native plants and animals. By contrast, “hubs” are aggregations of core areas as well as nearby lands that contribute significantly to ecosystem services like clean water, flood control, carbon sequestration, and recreation opportunities. Finally, “corridors” are relatively linear features linking cores and hubs together, providing essential connectivity for animal, plant, and human movement.”

[7] From CRD Regional Parks Strategic Plan 2012-2021 at: Regional Parks Strategic Plan at https://www.crd.bc.ca/docs/default-source/parks-pdf/regional-parks-strategic-plan-2012-21.pdf?sfvrsn=0.

[8] Regional Parks Strategic Plan 2012-2021, p. 16-17. See: http://www.crd.bc.ca/parks/planning/strategicplan.htm.

[9] See CRD Regional Growth Strategy at: CRD Regional Planning – Regional Sustainability Strategy at: https://www.crd.bc.ca/plan/planning-other-initiatives/regional-growth-strategy.

[10] Excerpted from “Refinement of the Chicago Wilderness Green Infrastructure Vision, Final Report June 2012”, (p. 7-8) at:
http://www.cmap.illinois.gov/documents/10180/11696/GIV20_FinalReport_2012-06.pdf/dd437709-214c-45d6-a036-5d77244dcedb.  Green infrastructure is defined in the report as: “The regional green infrastructure network provides multiple benefits. At its broadest, landscape‐ scale green infrastructure provides important ecosystem services like clean air and water, critical plant and animal species habitat, and wildlife migration corridors along with compatible working landscapes. At the regional scale, green space can help protect water quality and help ensure the availability of drinking water. Green infrastructure can also provide key recreational areas that link people to natural lands and facilitate the use of transportation modes other than automobiles to reach key community assets. At the site scale, green infrastructure enhances neighborhoods and downtowns through environmentally‐sensitive site design techniques, urban forestry, and storm-water management systems that reduce the environmental impact of urban settlements. All of these scales of activity can be linked together and can ensure sustainability in urban, suburban, and rural areas of a region.”

[11] IUCN (2013). Draft Concept (v. 10) for discussion: Building an IUCN Natural Resources Governance Framework.

[12] Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005). Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Current state and trends, Volume 1. R. Hassan, R. Scholes, and N. Ash (eds.), Washington DC: Island Press.

[13] Wilson, S. J. and Richard J. Hebda (2008). Mitigating and adapting to climate change through the conservation of nature. The Land Trust Alliance of British Columbia.

[14] Ibid. p. v.

[15] Ibid. p. viii.

[16] David Suzuki Foundation, Sara Wilson (2010). Natural capital in BC’s Lower Mainland: Valuing the benefits from nature. Prepared for the Pacific Parklands Foundation. Accessed at: http://www.davidsuzuki.org/publications/reports/2010/natural-capital-in-bcs-lower-mainland/.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid. p. 8-10. Data based on 2006 census data of 2.2 million people within the study area with an average of 2.6 people per household.

[20] See the Go To 2040 Plan at: http://www.cmap.illinois.gov/about/2040/livable-communities/open-space.

[21] World Resources Institute (2011). Forests and water: Green infrastructure can be less expensive than gray infrastructure. Accessed at: http://www.wri.org/stories/2011/02/protecting-forests-protect-water-us-south.

[22] “Measures” here refers to the range of incentives, markets, and practices that exist to protect green infrastructure.

[23] Green Bylaws Toolkit for Conserving Sensitive Ecosystems and Green Infrastructure. Available at: www.greenbylaws.ca.

[24] Ibid. pgs. 37-137.

[25] L. Yonavjak, C. Handon, J. Talberth, and T. Gartner (2011). Keeping forest as forest: Incentives for the U.S. South. Prepared for the World Resources Institute. Accessed at: www.wri.org/publications.

[26] Nature Needs Half at http://natureneedshalf.org/home/.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sweet by Nature: African Cities and the Natural World

Art, Science, Action: Green Cities Re-imagined

Spring in Brussels. Balmy weather, traffic jams, helicopters hovering in skies of pale, duck-egg blue. Politicians, policy-makers and lobbyists rub shoulders with the G4S security personnel tasked with their safety. The guards outnumber their charges, and by some margin. The hotels and train stations are full. Lufthansa is on strike. 

At the tail-end of the 4th EU-Africa Summit, April 2014, some forty-odd people have gathered to talk about — and to imagine — the African city of the future. It’s a bold move on the part of the organisers to bring together at least four distinct groups: academics; architects/planners; artists and politicians to swap ideas, share experiences and collectively imagine a better, brighter future for the continent’s beleaguered urban centres. In the organisers’ own words, ‘the objective of the meeting is to define priority interventions that need to occur in cities in order to contribute to a more sustainable,  inclusive and creative urban environment, based on cities’ architectural, cultural and spatial capital. How can cultural, architectural and spatial capital contribute to social cohesion and inclusiveness, and to economic prosperity in African cities?

tnoc.image.01Over several hours of intense discussion, a broad range of ideas and issues emerged, for the most part centred around those old ‘staples’: education, infrastructure, funding, policy. But, every now and then, a word or a sentence – a description of a park, an open green space, the village square, a desire? – emerged and although ‘ecology’ as a distinct category wasn’t a specific topic on the agenda, two things struck me again and again as I attempted to moderate the discussions: one, that the question of the nature of African cities is still very much up for grabs and two, possibly more interesting, that the culture, history and role of nature in African cities is hardly ever discussed. In and of, of and in. Two sides of the same, particular coin. 

Note: The ‘Sweet’ in the title refers to the West African colloquialism, ‘sweet, paa,’ meaning ‘deep’, ‘profound’, ‘meaningful’.

Root(s)

The word ‘root’ has multiple and myriad meanings. Amongst those that are of interest (or relevance) to me, are:

  1. (noun) the essential, fundamental or primary part or nature of something (your analysis strikes at the root of the problem);
  2. (noun) origin or derivation, especially as a source of growth, vitality or existence (plural) a person’s sense of belonging in a community, place, especially the one in which he/she was born, brought up;
  3. (noun) an ancestor or antecedent;
  4. (verb) to take root: to put forth a root, to establish and begin to grow;
  5. (verb) to take root: also to become embedded or effective;
  6. (adverb) entirely; completely; utterly; radical; complete.

In the sense of 2) and 3) above, origins and ancestors, the following short story perfectly encapsulates a now almost forgotten sense of the importance of nature in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, West Africa.

‘As a child, I knew how far I could stray outside our family compound by the trees. That tree, yes, that one  . . .  I don’t know how you call it. In our language, it’s called awiemfosamina. That tree, they plant it at the edges, the edges of properties. So, you see  . . .  when you go roaming as a child, when you see that tree, you know you are at the edge of something, maybe your family’s compound, maybe somebody else’s property, maybe the edge of the area. That tree is a signal, a sign. Yes, a sign.’
— 
© Lesley Lokko, PhD Dissertation, 2007, Out of Africa: Race, Space, Place

Its crown is umbrella-shaped and can reach heights of up to 45 metres. Both fresh leaves and fruits are reddish in colour, hence the name albizia ferruginea, referring to the Latin word for ‘iron’, or ‘rust-coloured’. The wood is moderately durable, resistant to fungi and termite attacks. It is suitable for building construction, carpentry and railroads, but also for toys, furniture and musical instruments. Its leaves can be eaten by goats. Parts of the tree are used to treat dysentery.

A tree that marks an edge. Amongst many other things. 

www.westafricanplants.senckenberg.de
www.westafricanplants.senckenberg.de

Awiemfosamina’s pods also be cracked open, boiled and applied to mud walls as a sealant, keeping the natural iron-coloured pigment intact. 

House Lokko, Accra, Ghana
House Lokko, Accra, Ghana

In our conversations in Brussels last week, we seldom mentioned the words ‘material’ or ‘matter’, as though the stuff of our cities matters less than its form. Yet the relationship in most tropical climes between the natural and the manmade (for want of better terms), is profound: heat and humidity combine to ensure a fecundity that is fierce, almost fearful. Inert matter — concrete, glass, metal, wood — must fight nature in order to survive, maintain, remain. Things rot, disintegrate, weather and decay at a rate that far exceeds anything more milder climes contend with. Nature’s vitality is evident everywhere. Yet we speak little of nature, even less about it. It seems to me that there’s a missed opportunity somewhere to think deeply and creatively about what nature means to us, and to translate those narratives into built/grown/planted/managed form. The program of a park (recreation, respite, respiration) might be one such example but I suspect (hope) there are others. In a context and culture(s) where the very term ‘nature’ and the word ‘natural’ might have radically (see 6 above) different meanings, the opportunity to come up with new programs, new forms, new landscapes of leisure and pleasure is perhaps more visionary than we’ve been prepared to accept.

Radi(c)al City 

Similarly, although speaking to and with a different audience (students rather than politicians) ‘ecology’ and ‘nature’ aren’t specific topics on the list at many schools of architecture — much less African schools of architecture — but in my present role as coordinator of final year (Masters-level) students at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, the question of nature has emerged in their theses topics in interesting and somewhat unexpected ways. I’ve only just started in my new job, and, as a way of quickly getting to know my new students and the ways in which they think/draw/read/explore their immediate built environment, I asked them to ‘name’ their city — Johannesburg. I was fully expecting terms such as, The ‘Disconnected’ City; The ‘Migrant’ City, The ‘Broken’ City, adjectives that have been in vogue in South African urban discourse(s) for many years. Somewhat to my surprise, however, they came back with other adjectives, new ways of describing the spaces and places they inhabit. The ‘Natural’ City; ‘Rehabilitated’ City; ‘Landscape’ City, ‘Greenway’ City, pointing to a fascination (and possibly new affinity) with nature that goes beyond the historical and colonial obsession with land as a way of binding oneself to inconveniently hostile, already-inhabited territories. Of the thirteen projects I’m currently guiding, four stand out, in different ways and for different reasons.

The Frontier City, by Tiffany Melles 

A barren ridge in the centre of Johannesburg. A cluster of people dressed in white sit on a rocky outcrop. A man stands, addressing his followers: women on the right and men on the left. Over time, his speaking ceases and the sitting people join together in song, their hands pressed together in a gesture of prayer. A solitary nun, dressed in her full habit, kneels, hands clasped tightly in prayer. Nearby, on the roof of an abandoned building, a line of Muslim men stand bowed over, facing Mecca, reciting the Quran. Clapping and singing can be heard from all around. Amongst the gatherings there are large puddles of wet earth and broken glass, marking areas where prayers have been released. There are numerous ‘frontiers’ — forgotten gaps — in Johannesburg’s urban fabric, empty ‘natural’ landscapes where people gather for different purposes. Some gatherings are religious, some social, some a combination. This dissertation will attempt to describe the narrative and spatial stories of a number of these ‘frontier’ sites, and develop an appropriate architectural response.

Tiffany’s main site — the Wilds — is a 16 hectare nature reserve, adjacent to Houghton, one of Johannesburg’s oldest suburbs. Her project, although in its early stages, attempts to marry the contradictions between religion, ritual, leisure and recreation to suggest an architecture that is neither entirely ‘natural’ nor entirely manmade.

Her drawings, which combine a number of different techniques: mapping, siting, coding, and land-marking, suggest a new relationship between program and site. In an area prized for its ‘wild’ nature, new forms of use and occupation have sprung up outside the city’s formal planning strictures. These ‘traditional’ forms of worship are not bounded and housed in the same way as other major religions: here there is no ‘church’, no altar, no mosque, no temple. The spiritual and natural worlds exist in the same dimension and space, where ritual and use establish the hierarchies of worship: preaching and prayer, hearing and listening, cleansing and purifying.

Dialogical Landscape & Timeline, drawings by Tiffany Melles © 2014
Dialogical Landscape & Timeline, drawings by Tiffany Melles © 2014

The Connected City, by Zoë Goodbrand

Zoë’s strapline, Reclaiming Johannesburg’s Natural Environment, speaks directly to the issues of ecology, nature and parklands that most of us are already familiar with. What is potentially interesting in her project is the juxtaposition of normative (read: Western) notions of parklands, the management of ‘nature’ by city municipalities for the enjoyment of city dwellers and the potential for ‘other’ cultural readings of nature, leisure and recreation that could influence and shape her chosen site and program. Her reading of the site sits within a traditional Eurocentric perspective:

public parks are utilised primarily for recreational use and to provide people with social locations that offer opportunities for them to meet with friends, observe other people and be seen. Crime, a history of spatial segregation and a lack of infrastructure have rendered the area under-utilised and abandoned. It is a sad fact that many Johannesburg residents’ experience of outdoor space and nature is often limited to that which exists in their backyards. People often travel to and from work without ever coming into contact with nature, placing a disproportionate importance on private gardens as a way of connecting people with their natural environment. One possible way to link the domestic ‘garden’ and its somewhat sanitized version of the ‘natural’ world with broader ecological themes, is through ‘linking spaces’, green linkages between home/park/work/local services and the ‘wilds’, of particular importance to suburban dwellers who, in themselves, exist in a twilight state between the ‘real’ urban and the rural.’

‘Humanity currently exists in a dysfunctional relationship with the natural world and auto-bound cities are both symptom and cause of this dysfunction.’

As Johannesburg’s suburban population becomes increasingly reliant on private motor vehicles as a mode of transportation, we enter deeper and deeper into this dysfunctional relationship. This is a result of the fact that middle-class, suburban Johannesburg was created on the assumption that every middle-class household would own a car, with blocks too large and facilities too separated to enable people to walk, replacing pedestrian movement with vehicular movement. In this scenario, it can be argued that the private vehicle is as a major source of social alienation, creating a city of disconnected strangers.

Zoë’s proposal sits at the intersection of these concerns: our growing disconnectedness from our natural environments; the dislocation of the suburb from both nature and the city and the risk of even greater social alienation.

SiteLines 1 & 2, drawings by Zoë Goodbrand © 2014
SiteLines 1 & 2, drawings by Zoë Goodbrand © 2014

Like Tiffany, her use of the techniques of mapping and coding allow her to grasp, digest and manage the vastness of her site, which stretches almost the length of the city. By identifying infrastructural elements (bridges, power lines, tunnels, roads, malls, leisure facilities) alongside ‘natural’ elements (plants, gardens, views), a conversation starts to emerge between the two worlds: instead of a strip shopping mall, she proposes a garden centre; a drive-in movie theatre that makes use of nature, rather than suppressing it. The speed at which one cycles or walks through a landscape profoundly alters one’s view of it: her careful analysis of surfaces — tarred, rough, smooth, paved, grassy — provides opportunities to stop, savour a view or a scent, take in the city from a distance, see something new/different/’other’.

The Forgotten City, by Gabi Coter

This thesis looks at open landscapes across Johannesburg that were left behind and forgotten within suburban areas of the city as a result of white flight, urban sprawl and the establishments of buffer zones between residential areas. This thesis aims to imbue such forgotten landscapes with dignified means of ‘memory’ and/or ‘remembering. Rietfontein Farm (in Johannesburg) sits like an urban island within the suburban areas of Edenvale, Linksfield and Rembrandtpark. This fifteen hectare site lies unused and forgotten, primarily because of the Sizwe Tropical Diseases Hospital situated in the centre. When the hospital was first opened in 1895, the open land around it was configured as a buffer zone between the ‘unhealthy’ grounds and surrounds of the hospital, and the neighbouring suburbs. Just outside the hospital grounds, a number of cemeteries were created to bury victims of smallpox, tuberculosis and bubonic plague. Although many of these graves are unmarked, it has been established that over 6,000 bodies lie buried within the site’s boundaries in unmarked and unnoticed graves. This site, which has adapted and reinvented itself many times over, can be read as a ‘third’ landscape, following Clements’ description of ‘landscapes having been formed primarily due to the rapid growth of cities and the effects of urban sprawl.’

Gabi’s drawings, which map and explore the site at a number of different scales, see nature as a healing force within the city-scape, not only for its restorative powers in terms of growth and re-growth, but for its ability to protect and prolong memory. Using the notion and programme of a clinic, it is her intention to rehabilitate this third forgotten landscape through sensitive landscape interventions and restore its ecological and cultural dignity.

Augmenting Dumps, drawings by Gabi Coter © 2014
Augmenting Dumps, drawings by Gabi Coter © 2014

Junkspace City, by Rachel Wilson

‘We no longer live life, we consume it.’

A consumer-driven approach to the economic ‘health’ of a society tends to focus solely on growth (GDP), employment and urbanisation. As a result, ‘softer’ measures of development such as water and natural landscape preservation tend to fall by the wayside. In Africa, this is particularly endemic where ‘progress’ and ‘development’ focus almost exclusively on ‘hard’ data and more nuanced and culturally-sensitive/appropriate responses to the environment are dismissed or under-played. This unbalanced approach to development has led to the destruction and scarring of many urban landscapes which teeter on the brink between potentially productive spaces (in all senses of the word) and perpetual abandonment. These marginalised and often unseemly landscapes are what I call ‘junkspaces’, and are the focus of this year’s investigation, a potential buffer-zone or no-man’s land between spaces of consumerism and extreme urbanisation and ecological preservation. 

Rachel’s dissertation explores the breakdown in society between extreme consumerism and the fragile eco-systems of Johannesburg, proposing an Institute of Political Ecology which mediates between the worlds of finance, development and politics, the ‘real’ world of policy and governance, and the ‘natural’ world of ecology, sustainability and landscapes. It’s a challenging, complex architectural brief with the potential to weave together systems, materials, programs and possibly even forms from a number of different spheres. Her ‘Endoxene’ drawings below are a hybrid transplant of Johannesburg into the rural landscapes of Kigali, Rwanda, showing the communication connections that bind diasporic communities together and playing on the notion of the nostalgia for the ‘homeland’ that is often experienced by those who have left home (back again to the notion of ‘roots’, see 1-4 at the beginning of this essay).

Ecological Chasm, drawing by Rachel Wilson © 2014
Ecological Chasm, drawing by Rachel Wilson © 2014
Endoxene 1-­4, drawings by Rache  Wilson © 2014
Endoxene 1-­4, drawings by Rache Wilson © 2014

Root and Rhizome(s)

7. to root for (verb) to encourage a team or contestant by cheering or applauding enthusiastically. To cheer, cheer on, shout for, applaud, clap, boost, support.

8. rhizome (noun) in botany and dendrology, a rhizome (from Ancient Greek: rhízōma ‘mass of roots’,from rhizóō ‘cause to strike root’)

Embedded (perhaps subconsciously) within these four student projects are complex ideas about ‘landscape’, ‘nature’ and ‘ecology’, particularly in South Africa where conflicting material interests in the ‘natural’ world — from ideas about how and what to farm (subsistence vs. industrial farming practices, for example) to the ‘spoils of nature’ — minerals — which have driven and dominated South Africa’s wealth for centuries — collide. Questions of ownership still dominate the discourse around ‘land’ and ‘landscapes’:  who ‘owns’ the land, on whose terms, in whose image, according to whose beliefs and practices? We are accustomed to the idea that culture, social practices and religion are the common fault lines in any given society: what these student projects demonstrate, albeit tentatively, is that ‘nature’ itself is every bit as rich, complex (and, yes, fraught) a belief system as anything and everything else.

The schism between the natural and the man-made, or between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (culture being what we do to and with nature), is site-specific and culture-specific, and not universal in any sense. In today’s global, multicultural and highly cosmopolitan urban environments, where radically different views about ‘nature’ often predominate, how do we explain, explore and exploit these differences in ways that hold meaning for us all? (see 7 above). The radical feminist Audre Lorde’s phrase, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ is pertinent: now, more than ever, in societies that are literally ‘made up’ of sometimes contradictory and opposing views, the ability to think outside our normative boxes, disciplines, ways of seeing and working, is not just visionary, it’s required. It’s sometimes said that culture is the sum total of the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves. For many Africans, whose spiritual, ritual and material connections to the ‘natural’ world run deep, the absence of a sustained, creative and critical discourse around ecology and nature in our exploding urban centres is a dangerous void, one that we will struggle to fill.

Origins. Ancestors. Roots. Rhizomes. 

To root for: to cheer, to cheer on, to support and applaud.

Lesley Lokko
Johannesburg

On The Nature of Cities