Two of the most debated and challenging concepts in urban development are sustainability and resilience. How are they related? Do they mean approximately the same thing or are they distinctly different and can misunderstandings lead to undesired outcomes?
In this essay I will try to clarify the concepts, discuss two common misinterpretations and reflect on the many difficulties that remain in application in urban development.
Can a city be sustainable?
Most people would answer that this is not only possible but also given rapid urbanization, necessary for the planet to become sustainable. But my immediate answer is NO and here is the first common misconception we need to deal with. Cities are centers of production and consumption and urban inhabitants reliant on resources and ecosystem services, from food, water and construction materials to waste assimilation, secured from locations around the world. Although cities can optimize their resource use, increase their efficiency, and minimize waste, they can never become fully self-sufficient. Therefore, individual cities cannot be considered “sustainable” without acknowledging and accounting for their teleconnections — that is, their long-distance dependence and impact on resources and populations in other regions around the world.
Sustainability is commonly misunderstood as being equal to self-sufficiency, but in a globalized world virtually nothing at a local scale is self-sufficient. To become meaningful, urban sustainability therefore has to address appropriate scales, which always would be larger than an individual city.
The classical definition of sustainable development (Brundtland Report on Sustainable Development) focuses on how to manage resources in a way that guarantees welfare and promotes equity of current and future generations, in general addressing the global scale. However, in the urban context, research and application of sustainability have so far been constrained to either single or narrowly defined issues (e.g., population, climate, energy, water) or rarely moved beyond city boundaries.
Clearly what constitutes urban sustainability needs rethinking and reformulation, taking urban teleconnections into account. We will come back to this at the end of the essay.
Can we build resilience in a single city?
Similarly, most people would answer yes to this question and that a resilient city would be highly desirable and necessary. But again, my answer is NO, at least when it comes to general resilience, and here we deal with the second common misconception.
Firstly, a narrow focus on a single city is often counterproductive and may even be destructive since building resilience in one city often may erode it somewhere else with multiple negative effects across the globe (this relates to the distinction between general and specified resilience explained below).
Secondly, from historical accounts we learn that while there are some cities that have actually failed and disappeared (e.g. Mayan cities), our modern era experience is that cities rarely if ever collapse and disappear. Rather, they may enter a spiral of decline, becoming non-competitive and losing their position in regional, national and even global systems of cities. However, through extensive financial and trading networks, cities have a high capacity to avoid abrupt change and collapse and applying the resilience concept at the local city scale is thus not particularly useful.
What is resilience?
Resilience (see Resilience Alliance) has a long history in engineering science but the most influential ecological interpretation was developed by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling in 1973. Resilience builds on two radical premises. The first is that humans and nature are strongly coupled and co-evolving, and should therefore be conceived of as one “social-ecological” system.
The second is that the long-held assumption that systems respond to change in a linear, predictable fashion is simply wrong. Complex systems are, according to resilience thinking, rarely static and linear, instead they are often in constant flux, highly unpredictable and self-organizing, with feedbacks across time and space. A key feature of complex adaptive systems is that they can settle into a number of different stability domains. A lake, for example, will stabilize in either an oxygen-rich, clear state or algae-dominated, murky one. A financial market can float on a housing bubble or settle into a basin of recession.
Historically, we have tended to view the transition between such states as gradual. But there is increasing evidence that many systems do not respond to change that way: The clear lake seems hardly affected by fertilizer runoff until a critical threshold is passed, at which point the water abruptly goes turbid. Resilience science focuses on these sorts of tipping points. It looks at slow variables (i.e. gradual stresses), such as climate change, as well as fast variables (i.e. chance events), such as storms, fires, even stock market crashes that can tip a system into another equilibrium state from which it is difficult, if not impossible, to recover.
Over the past decade, resilience science has expanded much beyond ecologists to include thinking among economists, political scientists, mathematicians, social scientists, and archaeologists. For a general overview see this video.
Resilience is now used widely in discussing urban development, but it is much more challenging than when applied to a lake, agricultural or a forest system. When most people think of urban resilience it is generally in the context of response to sudden impacts, such as a hazard or disaster recovery — for example Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and recently Sandy in New York City. How rapidly does the system recover and how much shock can it absorb before it transforms into something fundamentally different? This is often viewed as the essence of resilience thinking. However, the resilience concept goes far beyond recovery from single disturbances and it is here an important distinction is made between general resilience and specified resilience. General resilience refers to the resilience of a large-scale system to all kinds of shocks, including novel ones, specified resilience refers to the resilience “of what, to what” — that is, resilience of smaller scale-systems, a particular part of a system, related to a particular control variable, or to one or more identified kinds of shocks.
From an urban perspective, general resilience thus only makes sense on a much larger scale than individual cities (although specified resilience may be explored at a smaller scale). The concept of general resilience and scale lead us to another quite radical idea: change and transformation at the city level is necessary for maintaining resilience at the larger scale.
This may at first seem strongly counter-intuitive. Isn’t resilience about keeping systems as is and avoid change and transformations?
Transformation and resilience
To further explore this we need to put everything in a larger historical and global perspective, as shown below.
The last glacial cycle of 18O (an indicator of temperature) and selected events in human history. The Holocene is the last 10,000 years. From Rockström et al. 2009)
The relatively stable environment of the Holocene, the current interglacial period that began about 10,000 years ago, allowed agriculture and complex societies, including current urbanization to develop. This stable period is in contrast to the rather violent fluctuations in temperature in the preceding 90,000-year period. The stability induced humans, for the first time, to invest in agriculture and manage the environment rather than merely exploit it. Despite some natural environmental fluctuations over the past 10,000 years, complex feedback mechanisms involving the atmosphere, the terrestrial biosphere and the oceans have kept variation within the narrow range associated with the Holocene state. However, since the industrial revolution (the advent of the Anthropocene), humans are believed to have effectively begun pushing the planet outside the Holocene range of variability for many key Earth System processes (for full reference see here) including introduction of the concept of planetary boundaries). Urbanization represents one of the major processes contributing to this pushing pressure through, for example, green house gas emissions, massive land use change and increased resource consumption.
Maintaining resilience at the global scale — that is, avoiding that the planet passes a threshold and again enter into a new period of violent climate fluctuations — is therefore believed to require massive transformations at the level of cities. But what are these transformations, and what would trigger urban regions to employ them?
Coping vs. transformation
To explore this we will return to the basic principle in resilience thinking: a slow variable (like urbanization) may invisibly push the larger system closer and closer to a threshold (beyond which there would be radical change toward a new equilibrium) and that disturbances that previously could have been absorbed become the straws that break the camel’s back. However, urbanization does not just represent a slow variable. At the same time it is a process leading to higher intensity/frequency of disturbances through, for example, its impact on both global and regional climate change. Urbanization therefore represents a double-arrowed process and complex interaction between slow and fast variables. Conventional urban responses to disturbances such as coping and adaptive strategies may not only over time be insufficient at the city scale, they may also be counterproductive when it comes to maintaining resilience at the global scale.
A coping strategy is often used to describe the ability at the local scale and often at the level of individuals (such as having savings on a bank account), to deal effectively with a single disturbance, with the understanding that a crisis is rare and temporary and that the situation will quickly normalize when the disturbance recedes. Adapting to change is defined as an adjustment at somewhat larger scales in natural and human systems, in response to actual or expected disturbances when frequencies tend to increase (e.g. building higher and higher levees in response to increasing risks of flooding) (see the image below).
Transformation strategies are employed when coping and adaptation strategies are insufficient and outcomes are perceived to be highly undesirable, A transformation is thus defined as a response that differs from both coping and adaptation strategies in that the decisions made and actions taken change the identity of the system itself, create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social structures make the existing system untenable. It also and most importantly must address the causes of the increasing intensity/frequency of disturbance, which necessarily may not be the case with coping and adaptation. There are numerous examples of urban regions already engaged in developing both coping and adaptive strategies in response to, for example, sea level rise, demographic changes, and shortage of natural resources. However, when intensities and frequencies of disturbances increase, building larger dams or higher levees may no longer protect a city from flooding or sea level rise. Instead, a transformation to, say, a floating city, may be the only viable option.
Coping, adaptive, transformative strategies in relation to spatial scales and intensity/frequency of disturbances and anthropogenic impacts.
However, even if we would agree that a myriad of transformations at the local/regional scale is important for maintaining resilience at the global scale, current coping and adaptive strategies needs our attention since they may be counter-productive, lead to lock-in and prevent a transformation to be initiated. For example, this would include exploring the local-global synergies or trade-offs of different re-designing schemes of the supply and consumptions chains, evaluating different modes of re-designing urban morphology and transport and different modes of stewardships of ecosystem services within and outside city boundaries.
Resilience and sustainability — what is the difference?
So where does this take us when it comes to understanding urban resilience and sustainability?
First of all, for both concepts the local city scale is too narrow. Urban sustainability must include teleconnections and urban dependence and impacts on distal populations and ecosystems. Similarly, when building resilience at the global scale (i.e. general resilience), urban regions must take increased responsibility for implementing transformative solutions and, through collaboration across a global system of cities, provide a transformative framework to manage resource chains.
However, how do we then distinguish between the two concepts? Isn’t there still a substantial overlap? My view is that we may accept that the concepts are quite similar when addressing the global scale, but we may give them a distinctly different meaning when addressing other scales. At regional and local scales resilience could more be seen as an approach (non-normative process) to meet the challenges of sustainable development (normative goal). Treating resilience as non-normative at these scales is preferable since knowledge about the components of resilience could be used to either build or erode resilience depending on whether a transformation is desirable or not in a specific context.
I have above outlined some of the challenges with the two concepts, but there are many more. We will need a lively debate exploring even further the meaning of the concepts in an urban context and how cities may contribute to global sustainability and resilience through transformative actions redefining their role and become more of sources of ecosystem services rather than sinks and increasingly provide better stewardship of marine, terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems both inside and outside city boundaries.
It would be important to feed such a lively debate into the current efforts to develop a framework for the Sustainable Development Goals (for example, see here):
Can we agree that the city-scale is too narrow for both sustainability and resilience analyses and policies implementing them?
How should SDGs become relevant for urban development? How could scales be addressed in the SDGs? For example, how do we design scalable targets and indicators that link the local and the global scale?
How should we use the resilience concept in relation to urban development? Could and should resilience be used in both a normative and a non-normative sense depending on scale?
Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Mitchell Chester, Miami Urban waterfronts are ticking ocean acidification time bombs. Needed: Strategies to prevent bleeding from structures inundated by sea level rise.
P.K. Das, Mumbai Developing open, sustainable and resilient urban waterfronts is paramount. But increasing attempts to colonize these common assets for private and exclusive consumption is eroding larger public interests.
Ana Faggi, Buenos Aires The relationship between the Buenos Aires city and the estuary´s waterfront has been in the past very particular and conflicting. A common saying “Buenos Aires grew turning its back to the river” describes physically and metaphorically the historical relationship between city and riverside.
Andrew Grant, Bath To arrive at the era of Nature and Commerce, how do we break out of the current planning cycle to reflect a more exciting, enlightened, and creative outlook?
John Hartig, Detroit Since 2000, 53 soft shoreline engineering projects have been completed in the Detroit River watershed. All provide “teachable moments” for the value and benefits of urban habitat restoration and enhancement.
Roland Lewis, New York While we all must do more to reduce inequality, we must not cede important functions of government—including but not limited to providing usable open space and maintaining critical infrastructure—to private interests
Joe Lobko, Toronto Toronto’s waterfront and ravine spaces have become increasingly important within this rapidly growing city, critical to its livability.
Robert Morris-Nunn, Hobart It is very important that uses in the port area have a community dimension. In the pier, one complete floor level is a large local produce and product market, with cafes in addition to accessing the ferries. These uses will bring diverse activities to the area throughout the seasons.
Rob Pirani, New York To restore their ecology and reduce flood risk, treat waterfronts like a public utility by capturing benefits and avoided costs to finance improvements.
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Miami The other day, during a stroll along the Baywalk in downtown Miami, I saw my first manatee.
Andréa Redondo, Rio de Janeiro Radical actions may be needed to defend either ecology or people. In the first case is necessary to prevent predatory urban occupation, rescue invaded shorelines, and free protected áreas.
Bradley Rink, Cape Town Urban waterfronts serve as a point of contact with the ‘wilderness’ of the open sea, reconnecting cities to their marine ecologies, but also risk being neither ecologically sound nor socially inclusive.
Hita Unnikrishnan, Bangalore Inclusivity, ecology, development and historical contexts – exploring ways for effective management of urban waterfronts in Bengaluru city.
Jay Valgora, New York The urban waterfront of the East River in NYC will become the Central Park of the 21st century.
Mike Wells, Bath Regardless of type or commercial values of waterfront developments, the aquatic and fringing ecosystems and the services they provide must be protected, restored and enhanced.
Mitchell A. Chester, Esq. is a trial attorney licensed in the State of Florida. In practice for 37 years, he is focused on identifying and seeking solutions to emerging legal and financial issues created by sea level rise (SLR) and climate impacts.
We do not create ethical urban waterfronts. Instead, we produce coastal buildings to emanate toxicity. With each construction permit, local governments and private landowners are creating conditions that will further acidify our endangered oceans as sea level rise (SLR) advances to permanent inundation.
There is no greater long-term responsibility facing today’s urban waterfront planner than to formulate strategies to prevent disastrous bleeding from inundated structures in areas where the invading seas will overcome the built environment.
Utility connections, electronic components, underground storage tanks, paints, sealants, solvents, cleaners, adhesives, glues, electrical grids, sewer systems, septic tanks and drain fields need to be insulated so their chemistry does not cause environmental harm when covered by water.
With each new edifice, our generation is leaving a legacy of neglect. No reasonable society would further acidify the oceans, but that will happen as seas overwhelm coastal shores, allowing the escape of dangerous lead, mercury, formaldehyde, heavy metals, insulation fibers, PVC chemicals, perfluorinated compounds, fiberglass, wall foam, oils, lubricants, flame retardants, toxic electronic wastes and other threatening building materials.
In the absence of secure demolition, what we build on dry land now will poison the seas of tomorrow. Yet, we keep building. According to CraneSpotters.com, as of December 29, 2014, up to more than 300 new South Florida condominiums are being constructed or are on the planning board. While they are required to have elevated foundations, there are no standards to insure those structures are ready for inundation within the average 30 year mortgage span to 80 years, or in some areas, less time. According to RiskyBusiness.org, in Florida alone, “between $15 billion and $23 billion in current property will likely be inundated by 2050 from mean sea level rise…”
We are not ready.
Property owners are taking little, if any, personal responsibility for making sure their condominiums, office towers, government buildings and homes can sequester noxious substances when the time comes to abandon buildings and retreat from today’s threatened and vulnerable areas. To amplify the problem, older properties are poised to release, unchecked, asbestos and volatile organic compounds into ocean currents for unbounded distribution.
The mechanism of the built environment infecting our oceans is already a reality. According to the Guardian (December 28, 2014) “Almost 7,000 homes and buildings will be sacrificed to the rising seas around England and Wales over the next century…” The paper adds, “Over 800 of the properties will be lost to coastal erosion within the next 20 years”. In 2013, 1,400 homes fell into the ocean due to a ‘huge tidal surge’ which affected England’s east coast.
What measures can we take? One can envision a new industry of environmental inspectors and engineers to consult with stakeholders on how to adequately “seal” and prepare homes, offices, schools, hospitals and public infrastructure in the aftermath of hurricanes and advancing salt waters. Such experts are needed before construction begins, and once again when the building is no longer deemed habitable by public health authorities. Done right, such an industry will prompt the creation of thousands of jobs globally.
Governments need to ask not just what happens when the waters regularly intrude, but what occurs after human retreat becomes a reality, and take all reasonable measures to prevent toxins from seeping into the very same waters our heirs will depend upon for survival. In exchange for tax incentives, “abandonment certificates” should be required, based upon rigorous mandates. Existing pollution controls and laws need to be reviewed with SLR and tidal flooding in mind. Financial systems urgently need to help fund efforts to stop the flow of pollutants from our buildings. We must not assume that even LEED certified structures are ready for this challenge.
Legislatures need to focus on what the threat of non-carbon building emissions holds for the near future. Existing pollution control plans, regulations and laws need to be fortified by sound public policy requiring, as a condition precedent to property development, the built environment be made “ocean-safe,” to tough, state-of-the-art standards. The process of issuing demolition certificates must be more demanding. Intensified research of post-retreat acidification should immediately be funded.
Dangerous building materials and contaminants can be dealt with, but it is imperative that attention to this issue be given at the initial planning level…not just when properties are condemned in future years. Similarly, older structures must not be overlooked for their toxicity potential.
Some governments and owners have made a good start in understanding and appreciating the problem. The International Living Building Institute, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and even Google have identified “red list building materials” that should not be used in new construction. But such efforts are only for new construction or those undergoing renovation.
“Ocean Safe” buildings must be our legacy. The dangers of SLR go far beyond losing property and disrupting lives. Permitting irresponsible construction techniques and unorganized coastal retreat is not only myopic, it is a continuing crime against nature. The privilege of living in an urban waterfront in 2015 shoulders a burden: leave it ready for the populations of 2030 and beyond.
P.K. Das is popularly known as an Architect-Activist. With an extremely strong emphasis on participatory planning, he hopes to integrate architecture and democracy to bring about desired social changes in the country.
Developing open, sustainable and resilient urban waterfronts is paramount. Also, integration of waterfronts with cities’ hinterlands and their social and cultural fabric in order to overcome their segregation and exclusivity is important. Therefore, evolving an integrated ecological structure that would re-define urban landscapes is our key mission.
Integrating wetlands in Mumbai.
Being on the waterfronts and bathing in the sheer beauty and vast expanse of openness extending up to the horizon, in dense city landscapes, is truly liberating. But, increasing attempts to colonize these common assets for private and exclusive consumption is steadfastly eroding larger public interest and undermining ecological and environmental interests too—all this besides capturing the very experiences of this openness and natural beauty for few. Under such city conditions, the need for developing an intimate and intrinsic relationship between people, ecology and city building—broadly termed as ecology of cities—becomes enormously complicated. Also, it is hard to achieve this important relationship due to ruling socio-political interests that are governed by short-term financial interests of dominant groups.
Build more syndrome in Mumbai. Photo: David Maddox
Tragically, in most instances the assessment and measure of a city’s development and prosperity are based on the extent to which reproduction and turnover of capitals are achieved. While this may be necessary, it is deplorable to pursue the same in-spite of larger sections of people being marginalized from the benefits of development as well as the continuing destruction of finely balanced, interconnected ecological cycles. A balance between these two aspects—financial prosperity and economic growth; along with programs that rebuild, harness and promote interconnectivity of the vast environmental and ecological assets—is daunting, particularly for many of us who are demanding a paradigm shift in the imaginations of an integrated and inclusive ecology of cities.
A fine example of such an effort in the achievement of a new ecology of cities imagination is the ‘Rebuild by Design‘ competition and its resulting projects that have been launched for implementation of waterfronts barriers in certain cities in the US by the Obama government. Even though the process does not sufficiently suggest ways of integrating the waterfronts with the city’s inner areas and neighborhoods, plans for building with nature are indeed commendable. The fact that these ideas can be furthered as models for planning cities and defining urban development is particularly noteworthy. It opens new avenues of thinking about physical planning of cities and conceptions about our built and natural environments.
These US examples are distinctly different from the hugely popular Barcelona-like waterfronts that are being pursued in many cities. The Barcelona waterfronts are places of high consumption and business turnover. This is a successful model of capturing natural areas for furthering market interest. Shopping malls, restaurants, cinema halls, aquariums etc. dominate the waterfronts, including building into the waters by landfilling. A few promenades are provided for leisure and walks in the backyards of these enormous building structures. The waterfronts are not realized from within the buildings that are contained spaces for transactions.
Real estate development as engines of capital reproduction and financial turnover has dominated city waterfronts across the world. As a result, vast stretches of vantage waterfronts have been developed as high cost private enclaves leaving out smaller less attractive parts for public access, as concessional spaces. Along with such developments, natural coastal conditions have been substantially destroyed, thus severing the ecological life cycles, including production and reproduction of flora, fauna and other aquatic life that thrive along these edges. That these natural conditions too stand as effective barriers against the vagaries of winds and floods were ignored in such instances. To conserve natural assets and protect the coastal edges is challenging as we squabble to capture them in the present urban development endeavors that are ridden with a build-more syndrome.
It is therefore important to not only rebuild with nature along coastal edges, but also develop streams of natural corridors across neighborhoods and cities in order to re-establish the symbiotic relationship between nature, people and habitation. These streams of corridors consisting of watercourses, forests of trees, wetlands, mudflats and others would inevitably be rich sites of intense participation and social engagement, thus nurturing and enriching community life and networks. Waterfronts cannot be sustained as isolated or segregated edges from rest of the city. They have to be considered as a thread of a larger ecological structure interwoven with other natural conditions, along with addressing various human needs in the city.
Waterfronts must also be realized and developed as a part of public open spaces plans and firmly placed in public realm. Active engagement of public on the waterfronts will ensure public vigilance and its protection from abuse and misuse. This will not only ensure the democratization of the waterfronts and public spaces, but also lead to the achievement of a sustainable and resilient ecology of cities. Waterfronts development is an opportunity and means for achieving these objectives.
Streams of corridors consisting of watercourses, forests of trees, wetlands, mudflats and others would inevitably be rich sites of intense participation and social engagement, thus nurturing and enriching community life and networks. Waterfronts cannot be sustained as isolated or segregated edges from rest of the city. Credit: Master Plan prepared by P K Das & Associates for the town of Pimpri Chinchwad in Maharashtra, IndiaWaterfront networking in Mumbai. Waterfronts cannot be sustained as isolated or segregated edges from rest of the city. Credit: extract from Open Mumbai Plan prepared by P K Das & Associates for the city of Mumbai.
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.
Buenos Aires waterfront, where present management defeats ecology
Urban conglomerates like Buenos Aires and many neighbouring localities in the metropolitan area experience the reshaping of waterfronts as a catalyst for urban regeneration, which also is taking place in smaller Argentinean cities like Ushuaia, and some other inland riverine cities as Rosario, Paraná, and Neuquén.
The relationship between the Buenos Aires city and the estuary´s waterfront has been in the past very particular and conflicting. A common saying is “Buenos Aires grew turning its back to the river” which describes physically and metaphorically the historical relationship between city and riverside. The coast was developed into a harbour and a warehouse area for international maritime shipping and was predominantly inaccessible to the public. In 1918 a municipal resort gave direct access to the coast, and its beaches became very popular. But since 1960 the seaside´s appeal declined because swimming was forbidden due to water contamination. In the sixties, during the military government, the whole periphery of the shoreline was forbidden to the public.
Since the early 1980s, and especially with the country’s comeback of democratic life, the waterfront developed along two different paths. The renovation of the harbour docks followed a top-down process carried out by private-public enterprises. It was a successful and lucrative real-state transformation in which contemporary design and aesthetics had precedence. This was the origin of “Puerto Madero”, the youngest neighbourhood, most modern and expensive. Despite the fact that it is not affordable to live for the majority of the inhabitants the attractive public space is very used by all visitors.
Puerto Madero neighborhood. Photo: Ana Faggi
On the other hand, the ecological restructuring of the riverfront was the outcome of a bottom-up process that involved many actors with conflicting interests arguing over three decades. Thanks to the NGO “Fundación Ciudad“, which enabled the involvement of otherwise excluded social groups and had ample community support behind its initiatives, the ecological rehabilitation of the coastal strip acquired relevancy and begun to be discussed. In my previous TNOC essay “Buenos Aires Tries to Design for Biodiversity” I reported on policies at the metropolitan scale proposing to rehabilitate biocorridors along watercourses. Unfortunately a different idea prevails: of designing a landscape with a clean and tidy style that does not match with what is natural. Up to now, little has been done for an ecological rehabilitation that puts priority on the local flora and fauna, restoring the living environment to sustainable conditions over time.
In February 2014, I went along the waterfront together with some colleagues, members of the Fundación Ciudad and people of the city council who are responsible to maintain and clean this area. The objective was to exchange ideas about sustainable management (such as with native venation in the figure below).
Native riparian vegetation along Buenos Aires waterfront (February 2014). Photo: Ana Faggi
Unfortunately our recommendations to maintain natural areas were ignored by the council as you can see in in the image below—a photo taken at the same place just a week ago, in December 2014. A disproportionate cleaning effort goes to the management process rather than to maintain the riparian vegetation and its environmental benefits.
2015 will be the year of political change in Argentina, so a hot debate about candidate qualities already goes on. The current major of Buenos Aires gains more and more popularity through many infrastructure works during his administration. Recently, I heard on the radio an explanation of his high approval ratings: “most likely because he is an engineer, he carried out many works what was welcomed by many people”. But not without criticism: “his management has too much engineering but it lacks on humanity”.
Hearing this statement on the radio made me think about the removal of native scrublands along the waterfront. I wish that the New Year will bring Buenos Aires a better understanding of Nature !
Buenos Aires waterfront. Removal of native vegetation (December 2014). Photo: Ana Faggi
Andrew formed Grant Associates in 1997 to explore the emerging frontiers of landscape architecture within sustainable development. He has a fascination with creative ecology and the promotion of quality and innovation in landscape design. Each of his projects responds to the place, its inherent ecology and its people.
Urban Waterfronts are time machines—portals to other worlds past and present. On the one hand they are trading frontiers laced with nostalgia and countless human emotions and memories. On the other, they are a universal connection to our global environment and a litmus test of the health of the world. They have the potential to inspire a profound awareness of the connected world and as such they are important touchstones in urban planning.
We touch the waterfront—we touch the world
Given this pivotal link between city and planet we should be looking to mark developments in these locations with distinction and imagination. These are the places where human creative genius should be brought to bear in its most focused form. Urban Waterfronts must be beautiful, ecological and memorable.
Like it or not, commerce and the expectations of profit dictate the transformation of urban waterfronts. I suggest we can think of three ages of waterfront development reflecting the past, the present and the future.
1. The time of Industry and Commerce represents the past and tracks the explosion of waterfront developments on the back of global trade and shipping. Here the prime value was in the efficiency of storing and processing trading goods alongside the easiest moorings and best connected waterfronts. Interestingly, these industrial waterfronts typically demonstrate the value of practical multifunctionality in their planning and operation also represent an era of environmental degradation.
2. The time of Leisure and Commerce represents the present and implies the cleansing and opening up of former industrial waterfronts into desirable urban destinations. Here the value comes from the perceived added economic benefits of prime waterfront real estate. Multifunctional land use is more likely to be driven by the economics of commercial development rather than the optimised sustainable benefits of waterfront regeneration.
3. The time of Nature and Commerce is my anticipation of the future where waterfronts are transformed into resilient urban filter zones providing extensive habitats within and alongside high density beautiful developments. Here the value is in the diversity of function and the aesthetic, sensory and mitigating benefits of a healthy waterfront ecosystem. Multifunctionality is taken beyond simple economic returns or practical efficiencies into a whole different realm of social and ecological benefits. In addition to the enhanced real estate values are measurable economic benefits related to climate mitigation, biodiversity, resource management and the extraordinary forgotten value of immediate human contact with nature.
Gardens by the Bay, Singapore. Design credit: Grant Associates. Photo: Darren Chin
The way we treat these watery edge places reflects our contemporary values and throughout history these urban waterfronts have also marked human creativity and sense of adventure. They are unique in the urban environment and have the potential, perhaps more than any other space, to define the character and identity of cities.
The industrial period undoubtedly left a legacy of extraordinary development and environmental impact but what an exciting journey can be traced from the 17Th C in these waterfront locations. The infrastructure of global trade, exploration, innovation and the generation of the greatest cities in the world still resonates across the globe. Compare this to the current time of Leisure and Commerce that spawns extrusions of largely forgettable waterfront apartments, hotels, casinos, retail malls and offices all fed by chains of cafes, bars and restaurants. Will this period leave a similar legacy of distinguished human creativity and innovation?
Google ‘Waterfront Regeneration Projects’ (images) and you are overwhelmed by Masterplans and images portraying a green and happy future. Green corridors, waterfront bars and the occasional flight of seabirds populate the images in an almost universal display of the righteous nature of contemporary urban planning and design. But look carefully and it quickly becomes apparent that all we are looking at is a creeping globalisation using a banal and generic approach to the regeneration of these special places. Yes, they reflect a more public opening up of waterfronts and a reduction of environmental pollution but where are the surprises? Where are the creative waterfront landmarks of the 21st Century? Where are the unique responses to each geographical and ecological place? Where are the animals? Where is the wonder?
Similar research into Waterfront Conservation reveals entry after entry outlining the urgency and worthiness of a more ecologically sustainable approach to the restructuring of these post industrial environments but these rarely evoke any sense of the remarkable. Instead, they are bogged down with descriptions of mitigation, design guides, cultural and natural heritage and principles for regeneration. Worthy, important and necessary but, for me, Boring!
So how do we break out of this current planning cycle to reflect a more exciting, enlightened, and creative outlook? How do we move on to the time of Nature and Commerce? First and foremost I would place the words ‘imagination’ and ‘nature’ right at the heart of any visionary statement for waterfront regeneration. Four guiding themes could be:
— Dare to be different
— Celebrate the uniqueness of local ecology and habitats
— Deliver places with creativity, distinction and purpose that truly reflect our place in history
— Be guided by Imagination and Nature
But this begs the question: whose imagination? Who chooses and makes the decision to be bolder? What are the values that we want embodied in these future waterfront projects? In my opinion the vision and administrative process for demanding generous space for nature as well as permission to be imaginative should come from public authorities. If we are to create distinctive local waterfronts with a strong local identity we need more Governments and local authorities to have the confidence and vision to demand greater space for urban waterfront nature and to set the bar higher for imaginative and memorable designs.
In addition to setting the target we need to deliver the solutions. In my mind these more ambitious integrated objectives are dependent on a new type of collaboration in which the traditional hierarchy of professional disciplines and procurement systems are restructured. Different projects will require different team structures and relationships but each must place emphasis on creative and ecological leadership. For this reason landscape architecture is emerging as an important profession that can sit at the heart of waterfront regeneration projects. Sometimes leading, sometimes the creative and ecological conscience, sometimes providing specialist expertise in the specific design of elements.
Current projects around the world that illustrate the growing role of Landscape Architecture and the potential of distinctive, multifunctional and ecological landscapes include Barangaroo in Sydney. Here a major former industrial quarter is being redeveloped into a high value waterfront neighbourhood with extensive public space and regerated landscape. Peter Walker and PartnersBarangaoroo Point Park powerfully symbolises the transformation of this industrial headland into a piece of reimagined nature right at the heart of this waterfront city. In the UK the Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon will create a new waterfront for Swansea, a focus for water-based activities and a visitor destination in its own right. The masterplan, design coordination and public realm design for the project, by LDA Design, creates a ‘Maritime Park’ including new beaches, water sports, art and mariculture, between Swansea Bay’s beach to the west and Crymlyn Burrows natural dune system to the east.
At Grant Associates we have been fortunate to test these ideas on a number of important landscape projects. Gardens by the Bay in Singapore benefits from the overarching vision for Singapore as a ‘City in a Garden’ and an enlightened approach to integrated environmental infrastructure. Architecture, engineering, horticulture and ecology have merged as an integrated, living entity with its own unique and powerful 3D identity. This has allowed us to create a unique new waterfront Park that at one level has become an international symbol for the country and its ‘green’ agenda whilst offering a special and intimate encounter with plants and nature at the heart of this tropical metropolis.
Almost 20 years ago I, with Dr Mike Wells (also in this Roundtable), explored the seeds of this approach through the masterplan for Greenwich Peninsula in London and through the specific proposals for restructuring the river walls to allow the successful establishment of extensive intertidal habitats. This proved be an economically effective method of repairing the river wall, an ecologically beneficial intervention for the River Thames and a seasonally responsive spatial landscape that adds enormously to the visual setting of the waterfront.
Such multifunctional and inspiring waterfronts have to be our ambition. The time of Nature and Commerce has got to come—and quickly.
Dr. John Hartig is a Visiting Scholar at the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research at the University of Windsor where he is undertaking interdisciplinary research on the cleanup, restoration, and revitalization of the most polluted areas of the Great Lakes.
Creating an urban waterfront porch for people and wildlife
Situated at the heart of the Laurentian Great Lakes is the Detroit River. The Detroit River is not a traditional river as most people understand it, but a 51.5-km connecting river system through which the entire upper Great Lakes (i.e., lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron) flow to the lower Great Lakes (i.e., lakes Erie and Ontario). It provides 80% of the water inflow to Lake Erie.
Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario are the automobile capitals of the United States and Canada, respectively, and make up a binational metropolitan area that includes nearly six million people. Its highly industrialized and urban landscape is also considered part of the “rust belt”. This “rust belt” image is no longer fully accurate as the region is becoming a leader in restoring urban shoreline habitat, creating waterfront greenways, building the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, and celebrating North America’s only river system to receive both American and Canadian Heritage Rivers.
What was once considered a “hard” shoreline is now becoming “soft”. In the past, as commerce and industry expanded in the region, 49.9 of the 51.5 km of the U.S. mainland of the Detroit River shoreline were hardened with concrete or steel (hard shoreline engineering), providing no habitat for fish or wildlife. This shoreline hardening contributed to a 97% loss of coastal wetland habitats along the Detroit River.
Today, communities and businesses see the benefit of turning the focus towards the river and creating waterfront porches for both wildlife and people. One good example is General Motors in Downtown Detroit that changed the front door of its Global World Headquarters, called the Renaissance Center, from looking inland to facing the Detroit River. General Motors created a five-story glass atrium, called the Wintergarden, along the 5.5-mile Detroit RiverWalk that now attracts over three million annual visitors and showcases many examples of habitat restoration. Another good example is the brownfield cleanup of former industrial property in Trenton, Michigan that now serves as the gateway to the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, complete with a Gold LEED-certified visitor center. This represented the first time anywhere in the world that the ecological buffer of a “wetland of international importance’ (i.e, Humbug Marsh) had been expanded into a former industrial brownfield. Both of these examples showcase soft shoreline engineering that uses ecological principles and practices to reduce erosion and achieve stability and safety of shorelines, while enhancing habitat, improving aesthetics, enhancing urban quality of life, increasing waterfront property values, and even saving money when compared to installing concrete breakwaters or steel sheet piling.
In total, 53 soft shoreline engineering projects have been completed in the Detroit River watershed since 2000. All provide “teachable moments” for the value and benefits of urban habitat restoration and enhancement. This re-engineering of shorelines is critical for rehabilitating habitat for fish and wildlife, and for helping change the face of the Detroit-Windsor metropolitan area.
Key lessons learned include:
— Involve habitat experts up front in the design phase of waterfront planning
— Establish broad-based goals with quantitative targets to measure project success
— Ensure sound multidisciplinary technical support throughout the project
— Start with demonstration projects and attract many partners to leverage resources
— Treat habitat modification projects as experiments that promote learning, where hypotheses are developed and tested using scientific rigor
— Involve citizen scientists, volunteers, and universities in monitoring, and obtain commitments for post-project monitoring up front in project planning
— Measure economic, social, and environmental benefits, and communicate successes
— Promote education and outreach, including public events that showcase results and communicate benefits.
It has been stated that a rose that grows surrounded by concrete and steel is more remarkable than one that grows in a horticulturist’s garden. If that is the case, then the Detroit River’s soft shoreline engineering sites should be celebrated, valued, cherished, and emulated because of the many benefits. Much like the effort to recreate front porches on houses in cities to encourage a sense of community, soft engineered shorelines along waterfronts in urban areas can help recreate gathering places for both wildlife and people.
Elizabeth Park shoreline before (LEFT) and after restoration (RIGHT), using soft shoreline engineering techniques, Trenton, Michigan, USA. Photo credits: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
A lifetime New Yorker, Roland Lewis has worked in the field of community development since 1984, when he began as a program associate at the Trust for Public Land. In the spring of 2007, Roland took the helm of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to making the New York and New Jersey harbor and waterways accessible, healthy, and vibrant.
Humans have long had a symbiotic relationship with the water that surrounds us—for commerce, transportation and recreation. It started with the birth of western civilization along the Euphrates and the Nile and continues today in New York, Singapore, Rotterdam and hundreds of other vibrant cities. While oceans, lakes and rivers have been the nexus of commerce and culture, waterfront cities have had and always will have to confront the threat of coastal flooding and heavy storms.
New York Harbor
The Industrial Revolution brought massive change to our waterfronts, which became logical sites for efficient production and delivery of goods. But for some time, industrial facilities, and the resulting contaminants, made many waterfront areas inaccessible and unappealing. Now, as we look on the landscape of our postindustrial cities following a half-century of deindustrialization, we see massive change and opportunity, unlocking new potential for many waterfronts. How can we live with the water, instead of fight it, while also preserving the economic and social mix of waterfront uses?
Port cities are the front lines in the era of a warming planet, globalization and increasing inequality. Challenging conditions arising from climate change are inevitable—and we have to be ready. Here in New York, Superstorm Sandy proved a tough lesson. Whether you endured destructive flooding, or were stuck in gas lines for hours, or lived without power for weeks, we all learned our waterfront is a utility on which we depend. “Resiliency” has become a buzzword, but with rising sea levels, harsher storms and more floods, it must inform everything that is developed at the water’s edge. Just as we have begun to truly enjoy cleaner waterways, waterborne transportation, and beautiful new waterfront open spaces, we have to rethink edge design. The Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance’s (MWA) Waterfront Edge Design Guidelines (WEDG) program, a voluntary, incentive-based rating system launching this month, seeks to balance access, resiliency, and ecology. The program will be a set of best practices in waterfront design and a tool for public stakeholders as well as developers of parks, residential and commercial buildings, and maritime industrial uses.
The embattled working waterfront deserves particular attention. Ports and supporting maritime industries, such as tug and barge operations and ship repair, are important drivers of our regional economies. Our increasingly interconnected world relies now more than ever on shipping to deliver the goods and energy we consume: approximately 90% of all products travel over water. This has substantial environmental benefits as well, as goods shipped by water consume only a small fraction of the energy of those shipped by land or air. The port of New York and New Jersey supports over 280,000 jobs and $37 billion in economic activity. Indeed New York’s economic ascendancy is inextricably linked to the harbor and the growth of the shipping industry, and the working waterfront continues to be a source of good jobs and a critical part of a diversified economy.
Indeed the waterfront should be an asset and a resource for all, though its transformation threatens to bring irreversible change to coastal communities. With cleaner water, attractive parks and lovely esplanades, our waterfronts have become attractive places, and developers and the moneyed class for whom they build have taken notice. Traditional working class waterfront communities are being gentrified, threatening to fashion a “gold coast” by and for the wealthy. A row of massive condominiums at the water’s edge may provide short-term gains in tax revue, construction jobs or other amenities, but it is a Faustian bargain. While all of us must do more to dampen the larger societal forces exacerbating inequality, we must not cede important functions of government—including but not limited to providing usable open space and maintaining critical infrastructure—to private actors.
On the waterfront, the past is prologue. These cities built on waterborne commerce and under the threat of storms, still receive and send our goods and are vulnerable to violent weather. Intelligent design of our harbors to function as ports, to be resilient in the era of climate change and to provide equitable access and use for all is the critical task at hand.
Joe is an architect with a particular interest in urban design, adaptive reuse and the non-profit sector. In 2006, he joined DTAH as a partner and in the same year he received an urban leadership award from the Canadian Urban Institute and became a fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.
Toronto is a city and region that continues to experience the various impacts and pressures of substantial, sustained population growth. Toronto’s waterfront revitalization evolves in that regional context, delivering upon some aspects of its early promise to create of a series of great, connected public spaces across its breadth.
Stretching over an area of about 2000 acres (800 hectares), along the northwest shoreline of Lake Ontario, and including an inner and outer harbour adjacent to the exquisite jewel that is the Toronto Islands, this area has been under intense study, design, and redevelopment for a period of over four decades, though its many past transformations have been underway for a much longer period of time. Public access has improved substantially and environmental clean-up has been completed on many of the brownfield industrial sites now undergoing transformation.
Over the past decade this effort has been championed by Waterfront Toronto—the quasi-governmental agency formed by three levels of government, Federal, Provincial and Municipal—to conceive, manage and implement the process and shape of waterfront revitalization on their collective behalf.
Some themes come to the surface when reflecting on the statements and questions posed by TNOC for this forum, in the context of the Toronto Waterfront:
1. Importance of A Collective Vision. “Removing Barriers/Making Connections, Building a Network of Spectacular Waterfront Parks and Public Spaces, Promoting a Clean and Green Environment, Creating Dynamic and Diverse New Communities.” A key excerpt from the City of Toronto Official Plan, describing the essential aspects of Toronto’s waterfront vision – ambitious, broad, open to complexity, evolution and balance – a collective vision that while clear and strong in its essential aspects, aspires to have the “light touch – loose fit” capacity necessary to adjust to evolving circumstances.
2. Involvement and influence of committed community leadership. There has been a long history of community involvement in the revitalization of the city’s ravine/watershed systems that terminate at the waterfront, which has laid the groundwork for consistent community commitment and support for the evolving vision of waterfront revitalization, a critical element of its ongoing success and implementation.
3. Waterfronts include and are impacted by adjacent watersheds. Waterfronts can be part of a larger network of connected green spaces, and in the case of Toronto, this means ensuring better natural as well as physical infrastructure connectivity, particularly up into the distinct ravine systems that characterize so much of Toronto’s natural footprint. The re-naturalization of the Lower Don River is a good example in support of this effort.
4. Bureaucratic leadership and creativity. Waterfront Toronto has done an excellent job of facilitating public support for a vision and transforming existing procedures and processes traditionally resistant to change and innovation.
5. High percentage of public land ownership. The high proportion of public land ownership in the territory involved in Toronto’s revitalization has allowed the transformation to be controlled by contract, as well as policy and legislation, a major advantage in the typical private/public partnerships used to implement most of the new buildings and public spaces to be constructed.
6. Substantial upfront investment in public infrastructure including parks, natural systems, great public spaces and streets, flood protection, and utilities (including smart city technology), delivered before new buildings come along, as a means of generating good/better value from private investment.
7. An appreciation of history and the importance of multi-generational thinking. The implementation of these kinds of projects can unfold over decades, and relies upon the energy of multiple generations of champions and stewards, a critical aspect of successful, sustainable community development.
Toronto’s waterfront and inter-connected ravine and water spaces have become increasingly important within this rapidly growing city, providing a broad range of public space experiences and environments, critical to supporting livable cities.
Robert Morris-Nunn, director of Circa Morris Nunn, Architects, is regarded as one of Tasmania's most successful architects, and has practiced in Tasmania for almost 40 years, taking a special interest in the social impact of architecture and collaborative design processes.
Hobart is the second oldest port in Australia, and one of the largest natural river estuaries in the country. From a high point in the mid 20th century, when Tasmania was the ‘Apple Isle’ and most of its farm produce was exported direct to the UK, the port’s activities have progressively declined to the point where it is now only the point of departure of Australia’s Antarctic vessels, and visited every summer by cruise liners, who appreciate they can dock right next to the CBD and visit a small city tucked directly under the picturesque Mount Wellington.
Hobart’s port in its heyday.
Hobart as a capital city is very small, with a population of about 200,000 residents, and needless to say, an equally tiny and fragile economy. Things in Tasmania generally get preserved by neglect or lack of money. It is almost a virtue.
My own architectural practice has played a key role over the last 10 years in the waterfront’s revival, being responsible for the recycling of the two major mid 20thC waterfront warehouses into multifunctional civic buildings, a much acclaimed restoration/recycling of seven Georgian and Victorian warehouses into a distinctive hotel which integrates old and new; and most recently, the creation of a 80m long four story high, 5000 ton floating pier in the tradition of the now-vanished waterfront finger piers that were demolished 20 to 30 years ago when concrete cancer made their continued upkeep untenable.
My personal view regarding rejuvenation of a waterfront is that if the historic fabric can be preserved and put to an effective new use, this is by far the best possible outcome. Quite often the old buildings were simple vernacular structures, but they were generally built by maritime engineers to answer practical needs in a straightforward manner. Their recycling is both more economical than building from scratch, and with care, a far more environmentally sustainable new structure is created.
Where demolition has occurred (such as the removal of all but one of the old finger piers), I always try to reinstate new structures that are contemporary but which still allude to the buildings that formerly graced the area, particularly where these structures had a strong visual correlation with each other, as was the case with the old finger wharves.
The new Brooke St ferry, now anchored in its new home in Sullivans Cove, Hobart’s port.The new Brooke St ferry pontoon under construction on its own slipway, showing its internal diaphragms.
The new floating ferry pier is a case in point. By building a 4m deep floating concrete pontoon, considerable economies could be made over a traditional piled wharf in addition to creating a useful basement storey. More importantly, I feel that the overall building form (length / height / proportions) should reflect the scale and feel to the remainder of the urban waterfront fabric.
The cladding of the ferry pier is a lightweight polycarbonate ribs injected with insulating nanogel, creating a diaphanous skin, which visually compliments the significant environmentally sustainable engineering services within it—the pier floats on concrete and runs on water! The pier behaves like a boat, with the superstructure being kept as light as possible so that the structure’s centre of gravity is below the waterline. The structure also rises and falls with the tide, so it is anchored to the seabed with triangulated diagonal cables that change their angle of thrust with the changing tide heights.
As much as the form incorporates memories, it is also very important that the uses that the spaces within have a community dimension, if not ownership. In the case of the pier, one complete floor level is given over to a large local produce and product market, with two informal cafes in addition to an up-market bar. The boarding level can become a function space for up to 1500 people outside the times when it is used by passengers alighting from ferries.
These multifaceted uses will bring diverse activities and give vitality to the building / boat every day and night, throughout all seasons. We believe it will be a significant step in the transformation of the old port from an industrial area to an urban civic precinct. It marks the beginning of a new chapter in the life of Hobart’s port.
Robert Pirani is the program director for the New York-New Jersey Harbor & Estuary Program at the Hudson River Foundation. HEP is a collaboration of government, scientists and the civic sector that helps protect and restore the harbor’s waters and habitat.
Realizing the promise of urban waterfronts starts with understanding the shoreline as a public utility. As with other public utilities, such as electrical, transit or water services, a city’s waterfront is a critical infrastructure that provides for human settlement while (hopefully) sustaining the underlying ecosystem. Its complex nature and competing uses makes management difficult. Grappling with the politics of allocating this limited resource has been a staple of western governments since the public trust doctrine was expounded by Roman Emperor Justinian in the sixth century.
Hurricane Sandy not only eroded the shorelines of New York and New Jersey, but, as is generally true with disasters, also exposed the inadequacies of our current management system. Its wake left a sharp focus on strategies suited for this new era of climate change. This includes integrating uses and, as the Dutch say, living with water, to maximize the potential benefits of the waterfront. But stacking functions—expecting specific pieces of land to do many things like meshing ecological restoration and risk reduction—makes treating the waterfront as a public utility even more critical.
Let’s consider first the structure and many functions of urban waterfronts. Like any shoreline, these waterfronts are a permeable edge that mediates between water and land. There are interactions between upland and benthic ecologic communities. There are incredibly rich fluxes of nutrients and sediment brought by streams and tides. Unique and highly productive wetland communities adapted to changing hydrologic conditions. This ecology generates incredibly valuable services, from fish nurseries to sequestering “blue” carbon.
The transformative nature of the shoreline is also critical for human settlement. It is small wonder that cities grow up by the water. The urban waterfront is a place where commerce shifts modes of transport, especially important for heavy freight and global trade. For better or worse, water is a useful media for diluting human sewage and other waste products. People love the waterfront as a place to live and recreate. The sharp edge provides visual relief from dense urban fabric, and an unequaled sense of place.
But water seeks its own level. What is critical in the climate change era is that the waterfront is not a hard boundary, but a zone that shifts with time and topography. And whether it is due to the twice-daily tide, seasonal flooding and erosion, or the long(ish) now of sea level rise, the waterfront of today at 11am is not the waterfront of tomorrow. The dynamic aspect of the shoreline has always been a cornerstone of coastal zone management—generally in an effort to control that dynamism. Urban waterfronts owe their form to the bulkheads, piers, beaches, and other structures that bring a certain order (and of course economic value) to this shifting environment. But the uncertain risks posed by a changing climate have scrambled engineering, financial, social and political calculations.
Integrating all this functionality and variability at the project level is seen as one means of unscrambling these calculations and addressing this new ‘normal’. In particular, the promise of employing existing habitat and “nature-based features” as a means of reducing risks posed by coastal storms and sea level rise is tremendously exciting. Funded projects like Scape’s Living Breakwater proposal for the Rebuild by Design Competition or New York Rising’s proposal for Spring Creek offer innovative and integrated designs that can reshape our connections to the estuary while mitigating risks of storms and sea level rise. Not incidentally, the opportunity to leverage funding available from the Sandy Supplemental legislation and other sources offer the prospect of addressing long-standing conservation and restoration goals.
But there are many scientific, engineering and management challenges to integrating restoration and hazard mitigation. Our limited engineering experience, challenges in projecting co-benefits, and understandably cautious federal and state permitting system suggests an adaptive management approach. Such an approach must be built on better understanding of baseline conditions, on-going monitoring, and maintenance. One such effort has been led by the Hudson River Estuary Program and the New York City Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency and Department of City Planning. The Hudson River Foundation’s recent call for proposals will also help address these questions.
But making such best practices real also requires considerations of funding strategies that reinforce long term performance and asset management. Other public utilities, such as transportation, water, and energy, rely on financing models that capture the value they create or the costs they have avoided. By building our understanding and documenting the long term ecosystem services of living shorelines, these techniques can be employed for financing the restoration of our waterfronts in a more resilient and productive way.
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is an architect, urban designer and planner. She is co-author of Suburban Nation: the Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, and The New Civic Art, and has had a career-long affiliation with the Univ. of Miami School of Architecture.
The other day, during a stroll along the Baywalk in downtown Miami, I saw my first manatee. Considered endangered, the manatee is a large marine mammal endemic to the coastal tropics. My sister and I had just emerged from the porch of the new art museum, overlooking the waterfront rescued from industry, now a park.
Standing on the seawall, we were looking across the bay at Miami Beach, the destination of dreams, a skyline squiggle above the water’s surface. Closer, cruise ships lined up at the port like skyscrapers lying on their sides, prepared to visit the exotic Surrounding us were tall buildings assembled at the edge of the land, representing businesses and residents from throughout the hemisphere.
This scan of the waterscape and the land, the panorama before us, was interrupted by the motion at our feet. The large sea creature lumbered gracefully near the sea wall, puffing spray at surfacings, mindful of our presence, maintaining a pace toward her destination. We watched her slick thick body undulate through the shallow still clear water—imagining her world, and places and creatures far away – until the distance concealed her.
Andréa Albuquerque G. Redondo is an architect devoted to the study and analysis of building codes and urban laws especially related to Rio de Janeiro, and its consequences for the City development.
Rio de Janeiro was founded 450 ago, grew around Guanabara Bay and several hills, and spread into North and West directions towards inland. From the 19th Century on it headed South along the coast. Our ‘East’ is the sea. Natural and urban environment in Rio exist together.
The waterfront is heavily populated. In the northern part of the bay port and industrial activities once closed down created abandoned areas, as occurred in many cities. In the front shore neighborhoods, habitation, commerce and services sector are mixed, except at the front land, destined to be apartments, hotels and restaurants by the land-use policy.
Unfortunately water pollution is a problem. Cleaning the marvelous Bay is always postponed, beaches are polluted, lagoons and streams are silt. The absence of sanitation in some vicinities and inefficient controls even in official sections brings bad results from an ecological standpoint. Fortunately, Brazilian Law prohibits exclusive access to the shore, as beachfronts are federal property, except in military areas. It is said that beaches are considered the most democratic space in Rio!
Irregular constructions, or ‘favelas’, exist all over the city. The consolidated ones are popular neighborhoods. Housing policy in early 60’s and 70’s removed some from the acquisitive South area, and transferred residents to distant projects. Those at Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon were replaced by very high value buildings. In North and West regions favelas still go around lagoons, canals and streams.
Recover the degraded environment or urban land vs. social issues is a complex task. Sometimes radical actions are required to defend either (1) ecology or (2) people. In the first case is necessary to prevent predatory urban occupation—formal or not—“rescue” invaded shorelines, and free ecological protected areas, even if families must be transferred according to the 1990’s Housing Policy. Second, if removal of constructions is impossible due to its consolidation and extension, adequate planning may reduce harm and with ecological benefits for all.
In both conditions land value grows. Avoiding gentrification process caused by “market laws” is a challenge, especially in Rio where pressure from real estate business is strong and permanent. It’s a public sector duty (1) in areas where construction is proper, to stimulate multipurpose structure for habitation, commerce and services, provide public spaces; and (2) in protected areas search private sector support to sustain it or assume the necessary budget.
Successful stories depend on the way we look. At Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon, Rio’s post-card, there was a trade-off. For landscape, tourism, investors and new residents, it’s a success story. However, new projects create new places of poverty, with lack of infrastructure, to which poor people, losing their original homes, are moved. The transference model has been destructive and inappropriate.
The Port Region renovation is still unpredictable. Planning was conducted by financial interests and allows the construction of 30-50 floor towers. This area received huge and expensive infrastructure and has attracted only entrepreneurs and investors for commercial buildings construction. Without permanent residents it will be another lifeless place.
Protection for natural and urban environments must be appropriate and guide city planning whenever necessary for ecological purposes, independently of the land’s economic value, though balance is required.
Respect for environmental questions should be imposed by building codes and law enforcement. However, in the name of the 2016 Olympics, occupation has increased in free areas, flood-risky grounds and fragile hillsides, propelled by questionable new urban ratios for higher and bigger buildings and hotels, plus fiscal incentives. Pressure for real estate private enterprises along shorelines (and everywhere!) has had governmental support. Recent examples are a luxurious hotel and condo, and the polemical Olympic Golf Course built in Marapendi Reserve, both in protected areas, and worse, the course eliminates an ecological park, and suppressed potential avenues of dissent, despite lively defenders, urban planners and lawyers protests.
Green on the map is nature reserve, but the zoning code was changed to allow a golf course (and a huge real estate business, its real purpose) in a questionabe process. Light and dark green toghether make the Marapendi Protected Area around Marapendi Lagoon
200 years ago Rio turning back to the water; sea bathing was a medication. 100 years ago demolished historic hills gave place to densely occupied flat ground and provided landfill over waters; stone mountains were raw material for construction, pavement and wharfs. There were positive actions in past, too: in the Imperial 19th Century Tijuca Forest, devastated by coffee crops, was replanted; in the 20th Century the municipality prohibited stone extraction; Culture and Environment Preservation policies were reinforced. Avoiding regression is imperative.
Without its Nature Rio would not be an Historic Urban Landscape. Even in our difficult current situation, Rio de Janeiro is still the Wonderful City!
Bradley Rink is a human geographer focusing on mobilities, tourism and place-making. His interests lie in the relational aspects of people, objects and ideas in the urban environment.
The urban waterfront: quartering nature and the city
Cities are necessarily heterogeneous and multiple: they are sites where we encounter difference and where humanity and nature come crashing up against each other. Cities both embrace and abrade nature in the same turn. Urban waterfronts are no different in that they serve as the point of contact between the ‘wilderness’ of the open sea or river and the city that lines its shore. Waterfront developments have an opportunity to reconnect cities to their marine or riverine ecologies, but also run the risk of being neither ecologically sound nor socially inclusive. They may become ‘quartered’ urban spaces just like so many others that turn their backs to the cities where they are situated, or they may become the centrepiece of the city itself, engaged as a powerful tool to attract citizens and visitors to the aquatic urban edge.
An example of one such development is Cape Town’s Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. Since the late 1980s the former docklands district comprised of a jumble of warehouses, jetties and a power station has been transformed into what was promised to be an ‘African Riviera’ (Ferreira & Visser 2007), serving to elevate the status of the urban waterfront not simply for the city but for an entire continent. The V&A Waterfront is very much an urban quarter that presents the waters’ edge as a distinct cultural landscape: a spectacle that is steps away from the ambient urbanities that surround it, but discursively differentiated as a seaside entertainment world. In the V&A Waterfront we find a space that is the locus for the symbolic framing of culture, to use Bell & Jayne’s (2004) definition, a space that offers possibilities for identity production and consumption, and a space that enables commodification of the urban experience with little reference to its maritime origins other than the name and location itself.
In spite of this, the imaginary of the V&A Waterfront is one that acts to reconnect the city of Cape Town and its maritime past with a distinctly modern, consumer future. It is a place that makes a nod to the Cape Town’s connection to the sea while it also invites its patrons to indulge in the pleasures of upmarket shopping, dining and entertainment. If you have a yacht or if you arrive on a cruise liner, then your connection from sea to city is complete, but for everyone else, it is a mall just like so many other (Houssay-Holzschuch & Teppo 2009).
The V&A Waterfront has no doubt been a success in many ways: it has created new jobs; it continues to attract tourists and their spending; it serves as a site of mixing in spite of the exclusivity of its consumer-driven purpose. However, its success in connecting urban dwellers and nature has yet to be proven. The spectacle produced by developments of its kind is less about a connection between city and sea than it is about creating a shopper’s paradise.
This type of waterfront development is driven not by concerns over the relationship between city and sea as it is about the re-purposing of otherwise disused waterfront warehouses that proved to be a white elephant on Africa’s Riviera.
Victoria Basin, Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, Cape Town. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license
References:
Bell, David and Jayne, Mark. 2004. Conceptualizing the City of Quarters, In Bell, David and Jayne, Mark (eds) City of Quarters: Urban villages in the contemporary city. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1-12.
Ferreira, Sanette, & Gustav Visser. 2007. Creating an African Riviera: Revisiting the Impact of the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront Development in Cape Town. Urban Forum. 18 (3): 227-246.
Houssay-Holzschuch, Myriam, & Annika Teppo. 2009. A mall for all? Race and public space in post-apartheid Cape Town. Cultural Geographies. 16 (3): 351-379.
Dr. Hita Unnikrishnan is an Assistant Professor at The Institute for Global Sustainable Development, The University of Warwick. Hita’s research interests lie in the interface of urban ecology, systems thinking, resilience, urban environmental history, public health discourses, and urban political ecology as it relates to the evolution, governance, and management of common pool resources in cities of the global south.
Rethinking urban waterfronts in India—a perspective from Bengaluru
India is a rapidly urbanizing country with vibrant historical and cultural diversity spanning centuries. Given its formerly rural character, most of this relates to how people identify with their water resources—oceans, rivers, or lakes. Changes driven by rapid urbanization have meant that lakes and other water bodies have acquired different and often dynamic meanings over time.
One example is the South Indian city of Bengaluru (where I hail from), famous for being the software capital of the country. Also known as the Garden City, Bengaluru by this name, has a relatively unknown history dating back to at least 890 AD (when the first record of the word ‘Bengaluru’ appears). To overcome its natural propensity for drought, low lying areas were used to create large reservoirs (tanks) that supported the city for many a century. When the city started importing its water from the Cauvery, a river thousands of miles away, these tanks lost prominence and became vulnerable. Today known as lakes, they represent urban waterfronts that are both ecologically and socially important.
My work revolves around historical and contemporary dependencies of people on these waterbodies, set within changes in their governance and management. We explored the historical trajectory of a centrally placed lake—the Sampangi Lake, which eventually became a sports stadium in the heart of the city. Built around the time the city was founded in the second half of the sixteenth century, this lake was important both economically and culturally. In fact, this lake is one of the venues for the oldest festival in the city—the Karaga that reveres the sacredness of water. Sadly, today only a small rectangular tank built for this cultural purpose reminds the casual passer-by of this once majestic lake surrounded by horticultural farms and attendant hamlets.
Commercial and often exclusionary activities around a privatized lake in Bengaluru. Photo: Hita Unnikrishnan
Colonial Bengaluru was divided into two zones—the exclusively British Cantonment and the Pete managed by the Wodeyars of Mysuru. This lake, in the Pete, still provided water to the Cantonment until the Cauvery scheme of water supply became operational. There were many disputes at this time, all centred upon different uses of the lake and which use was considered more important. Uses such as water for horticulture warred with those of water supply to the cantonment. These were in further conflict with recreational needs of the population, as surroundings of the lake were fertile turf for a polo playing population. Into this melee were thrown in aesthetic representations—that of it being a beautiful landscape upon which to gaze from the window of a nearby bungalow without fear of inundation by its stormy waters. What eventually triumphed were those ideas of urban waterfronts that held most political leverage—those of aesthetics and recreation—ideas that resonate even today in the conversion of the lake into a state of the art sports stadium. The memory of a water body supporting other uses lives on only in memories of older residents who have switched professions following the lake’s decline.
The present day Sampangi Tank with the stadium overshadowing it. Photo: Hita Unnikrishnan
History repeats itself in contemporary conceptualizations of the lake. Today the lake is seen as a space that supports a great diversity of plants, avifauna and insects. It is perceived to be a lung space for urban middle and high income groups who live in gated communities close to the waterfront. It is also seen as an ideal location for recreational activities such as water sports, jogging or angling. It is a place where young lovers rest their heads on each other’s shoulders and enjoy the time they have together.
Cattle grazing around lakes in Bengaluru. Photo: Hita Unnikrishnan
What it is not perceived as is a water resource for urban agriculturists or a sacred space for communities. It is not seen as a space supporting a fisherman casting his net, a washerman beating the dirt out of clothes, a pastoralist grazing his cattle or cutting fodder. Yet, the lake is bustling with these activities, its waters mute witness to trials of the people accessing it.
Contemporary policies like privatization also prioritize recreation, aesthetics and real estate over other uses of lakes and exclude both ecology and other social needs. This creates a regime of exclusion, enforced through entry charges or aesthetics. Exclusion can also happen when only the ecology of the lake is prioritized. In such cases also, it is the traditional livelihood group who suffer the most. Oftentimes, people have to switch occupations and carve out a new lifestyle completely alien to all they have known. All of this only reduces the value of these resources in the eyes of a substantial population, who, while possessing little political leverage, represent a large number of lake dependents.
We therefore need to look into what the past can teach us about heterogeneities that characterize an urban waterfront. To think beyond commercial, aesthetic and recreational interests, for a lake that is all of these, yet indispensable to traditional and other livelihood groups. To look at how one can balance the social and the natural. A new way of thinking is what is needed—that of perceiving the lake as a social-ecological system,where the natural and the social balance each other and drive the system forward. Only then, can we think of waterfront development policies or practices that are both ecologically sound and socially equitable.
Mr. Valgora brings together an extraordinary range of disciplines at all scales: architecture, waterfront master planning, urban design, and interiors. He founded STUDIO V to create work that is connected to function, history and context.
NEW YORK’S EAST RIVER: A new Central Park for the 21st Century
“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”
“I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world . . . for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
To chase a romanticized perspective for the urban waterfront is to neglect the reality that the great green breast of Manhattan is gone. The ‘wild promise’ however, is not.
A vision for the new urban waterfront requires rhetorical ammunition as much as political will, the support of the community as much as allocation of money. A vision for the waterfront requires an integration of opposites to address the 21st century culture of the metropolis: center and edge, public space and private enterprise, green space and urban form, sustainability and development, the agora and the acropolis.
In the early 21st century two nearly simultaneous events occurred that set the stage for the urban waterfront: the heavily industrialized waterfronts of western cities fell into disuse through massive change in the global economy, and the tipping point occurred where the majority of people now live in urban areas. This simultaneous occurrence offers urban waterfronts a new possibility of the wild promise glimpsed by Fitzgerald.
New York City offers precedent and opportunity for a new rhetoric to reinvent the urban waterfront. Of the five boroughs that comprise New York City, four are islands and one is a peninsula, arrayed around one of the greatest natural harbors in the world. The urban waterfront has always provided transportation, economic vitality, natural limits to encourage urban density, and resources that evolved over time: food, commerce, industry, and recreation. The NYC waterfront comprises every condition: esplanades, nature preserves, wetlands, parks, marinas, industrial sites, beaches, ruins, and canals.
But New York has always been a laboratory for experimental design and urban density. A brief perusal of some of the radical experiments of New York’s urban past can point the way for a new rhetoric for the urban waterfront.
19th Century: Olmstead created a new center around which the dense urban city would grow. His experiment included artificial landscapes, overlapping systems of transportation, and progressive social integration.
19th CENTURY: CENTRAL PARK was a pioneering effort in large-scale creation of urban public space, the manufacturing of green area intended to mimic the original green breast of Manhattan and restore it to the heart of the urban condition. Olmsted created a new center around which the dense urban mass would grow. His was an experiment in artificial landscapes, carving centers against non-existent edges, overlapping systems of transportation, and radical social integration.
20th Century: New York’s West Side progressed from romanticized extension of the Hudson Valley to the center of industry to a paean to the automobile.
20th CENTURY: THE WEST SIDE began with Olmsted’s partially realized Riverside Park but hit its stride in the 20th century with Robert Moses’ parkway expansion (1930s) and the Hudson River Park (early 2000s). Progressing from its original romanticized extension of the Hudson River Valley to the adoption of industry, the abolition of the abattoirs, a paean to the automobile, and ending with a linear park linking piers, greenery, and bicycles the West Side exemplifies the progressive design ideologies of the 20th century, both successful and less so.
21st Century: Today, New York’s East River offers the potential to be the new center of New York. The East River is no longer an edge dividing the city but will provide a diverse network of public spaces, parks, sustainable communities and transportation infrastructure.
21st CENTURY: THE EAST RIVER has historically been the edge of New York City: the division between city and country, metropolis and suburb. This edge provided Fitzgerald’s point of view outside to overlook “the city”. Today, the East River offers a very different potential: to become the center. It will no longer be a moat or wall dividing boroughs. The riverfront can provide a diverse and mutable network of public spaces, parks, development sites, sustainable communities, new institutions, and transportation infrastructure.
The East River provides the ineluctable opportunity to create a new Central Park of the 21st century. Do we dare to build a new Central Park today? Where do we find space and resources? The future of New York City is not Manhattan. The future is Astoria, Long Island City, Greenpoint, DUMBO, Sunset Park, Gravesend, the shores of Staten Island and the waterways of the Bronx.
Olmsted allotted boundaries (defining Space) and Moses worked against them (developing Edges), but the 21stC embraces integration, combining edge and center, transparency and density, combining public space, buildings and water (a true Network). By transforming the edges on both sides of the river, re-defining open spaces, and designing a fluid infrastructure network with water taxis, bus rapid transit, light rail and connective open space we can create the next great center for New York and a model for urban waterfronts around the world: providing new mixed use neighborhoods, housing, parks, schools, and public institutions, while increasing resiliency, ecological, economic, and social goals.
The great historic plans of New York can serve as benchmarks for the creation of powerful public spaces, but also serve as a foundation to build a 21stC rhetoric for the design of the waterfront. So we can embrace the city from below the Queensboro Bridge, as much as we do from atop it.
Dr Mike Wells FCIEEM is a published ecological consultant ecologist, ecourbanist and green infrastructure specialist with a global outlook and portfolio of projects.
By abusing water edge environments through development and pollution we are in many ways killing and unbalancing ourselves. Our evolutionary ancestors came from the sea. We have gills as babies in the womb. Our blood plasma is isotonic with seawater. We are almost 60% water and need fresh clean water almost daily to survive. The now well-substantiated theory of biophilia holds that over the relatively short evolutionary history of Homo sapiens we have remained instinctively drawn to environments that provide what we need, especially at the interface between land and water where there is an abundance of life. When we abuse or degrade aquatic and marginal environments we are going against the grain of our deepest instincts in a way that damages our psychologically wellbeing and can threaten our lives.
Accordingly we should think less of there needing to be being tradeoffs between ecology on the one hand, and environment and social fabric on the other. We should instead think of designing for new synergies, with planning decisions based on new accounting methods that include the value of ecosystem services and the avoidance of long-term costs through increasing environmental resilience.
The great psychological wellbeing engendered by healthy aquatic fringe biotopes is just one example of the extremely important ecosystem services these habitats provide. The frequent destruction and degradation of the delicate intertidal and inshore sub-tidal communities of saltmarsh/mangrove, seagrass and coral reefs has meant huge harm to fish nurseries and coastal and sea fisheries. It has also increased our vulnerability to hurricanes, typhoons and tsunamis at a time of significant anthropogenic climate change and sea level rise.
The town of Tacloban in the Philippines was destroyed by super-typhoon Haiyan in 2013. The Comprehensive Rehabilitation and Recovery Plan published in October 2014 includes for the relocation of over 200,000 people away from the coast and restoration of coastal ecosystems as defences. In the more urban areas of Tacloban, however, faith appears still to be being placed (I believe unwisely) in ‘holding the line’ with new corniches and levies rather than in managed retreat and restoration of coastal habitats.
In the USA, New Orleans has been proudly rebuilding and restoring levies, but the key debate remains how to reverse the loss of coastal wetlands between sea and city which are capable when of absorbing much of the force of hurricanes. This entails catchment-scale management planning, removal of hard physical intrusions and walls around rivers and reconnecting rivers with their floodplains.
In Iskandar Malaysia along the straits of Johor the loss of mangrove fringe habitat and hinterland forest has been relentless. Instead, such coastal development could and should be tucked behind substantial mangrove fringes, leaving enough space for inland migration of fringe habitats under sea level rise.
In Penang I recently advised the Malaysian government on the factors holding back the development of the State economy. My conclusion was that top talent will increasingly choose to avoid places where the rivers, seas and beaches are poisoned and the environment is generally poorly prioritised. Reversing the damage is something I termed ‘The Penang Project’—an environmental restoration to allow Penang to claim first world ‘liveability’.
Greenwich Terraces that are a very good Seabass nursery. Photo: Mike Wells
No matter how formal and pre-developed a water-edge habitat is, there is always something that can and should be done to restore, respect and enhance the vital ecosystems that thrive, or once thrived, there. In the late 1990s, I led the ecological regeneration of the Greenwich Peninsula in London, UK. This work included incorporating a saltmarsh terrace into a new river wall on a ledge as little as 7m wide. This terrace has now become one of the most important Sea Bass nurseries in the southeast of England. The initiative was strongly driven by the UK Environment Agency who became a development partner. The UK government, I think unwisely, has now reduced funding to strong environmental agencies such as this and forced a disbanding of expertise that had taken decades to build up, based on the false premise that the environmental factors pose a barrier to economic development.
In summary, I maintain that there should never be a development near water where the ecological wellbeing of our water edge environments is not protected, restored and enhanced, no matter how high the commercial values that apply. Smart waterfront development invests in ecosystems and is not contingent upon their destruction. To do this we need to strengthen the government funded agencies that have the expertise to work with the private sector to deliver urban waterside green infrastructure and ecosystem services in every type of development project. We also need inclusive accounting of ecosystem services lost or restored in such projects to make decisions that will stand the test of time.
A review of Field Guide to Urban Wildlife: Common Animals of Cities & Suburbs How They Adapt & Thrive by Julie Feinstein. 2011. Stackpole Books. ISBN978-0-8117-0585-1. 453 pages. Buy the book.
While it may have set a Guiness record for longest subtitle, Julie Feinstein’s Field Guide to Urban Wildlife caused me to reminisce about a birding class I taught many years ago. It was an in-service teacher’s workshop for novice birders. Having worked in the field with beginning birders for several years, I had become all too familiar with the, “oh, that’s just a…”. Which meant, of course, that the individual had written the bird off with a shrug and a superficial knowledge of the bird’s field marks, habitat, behavior, and individuality.
“Field Guide to Urban Wildlife” is replete with Feinstein’s sense of wonder, which cannot fail to rub off on her readers.
For the class, I decided that we would not name any bird throughout the daylong workshop. Instead, each time we saw another member of that species, we would assign it the same number. We followed that rigorous protocol all day, even though it was, at times, excruciatingly difficult to resist naming the bird.
By day’s end, we had accumulated a list of 20 species, each entry containing detailed descriptions of field marks, habitat, and behavior. Never again would those teachers mistake a Spotted Towhee for a Robin based on a cursory look at the bird. And never again, I hoped, would they say, “Oh, that’s just a Robin”.
After reading Field Guide to Urban Wildlife, I cannot imagine Julie Feinstein ever saying, “Oh, that’s just a…”; to Feinstein, nothing is common. She makes that very clear from the outset in her introduction, writing, “Though urban animals live among us, sometimes even inside our homes, they largely go unnoticed. They are too commonplace. Yet there are moments, watching a fox in the backyard, discovering a centipede in the bathtub, or finding a bat asleep in the garage, when we wonder about them.”
This book is replete with her sense of wonder, which cannot fail to rub off on her readers, no matter how jaded they may be by the so-called “commonplace.”
The book will be equally appreciated by any “urban naturalist”, whether a rank amateur or seasoned professional, as Feinstein’s field observations and incredibly well-documented research reveal fascinating and illuminating factoids that are by turns humorous and horrifying. Her writing provides us with detailed life histories of everyday urban critters that are also replete with fun trivia, much of it gleaned from extensive literature searches. Meticulous research is Feinstein’s forte—unsurprising, given her professional position at the American Museum of Natural History and her own list of scientific publications.
One example of the obscure details common throughout the book is the revelation that opossums have a maximum land speed of 4 mph and sleep 18 to 20 hours daily, enjoying five hours of REM sleep in the process. She cites another researcher who discovered that taking two male mice and “anointing one of them with a third male’s urine resulted in the anointed mouse starting a fight with its former partner.” And, under an ultraviolet light, “mouse urine glows in the dark like psychedelic art.” We also learn that bathing your dog in tomato juice is not an effective remedy for the dog’s regrettable encounter with the neighborhood skunk. Fortunately, she follows that bit of information, having delved into Chemical Engineering News, with something that actually works to “de-skunk” your dog.
A young squirrel. Photo: Mike Houck
While we all are familiar with the generally friendly, but sometimes fraught, human/squirrel relationship—particularly between humans and the fox and Eastern gray squirrels, which are both the bane of every backyard bird feeder—few readers will know that Ronald Reagan routinely fed squirrels around the White House; indeed, the First Family featured squirrels in their 1984 Christmas cards. President Eisenhower, on the other hand, trapped and deported the squirrels to Maryland after they marred the presidential putting green with myriad holes. Feinstein goes on to describe squirreling counters with other presidents, including Carter, George H. W. Bush, and the Clinton clan, which, in “an era of appeasement”, gardeners provided with “peanut-filled feeders on the South lawn and Rose Garden to draw squirrels away from flower bulbs.” Interesting tidbits aside Feinstein also provides in-depth descriptions of common urban wildlife biology, ecology, and life histories. Such is the case with her descriptions of the fox and Eastern gray squirrels, including a detailed account of their interactions in North America and their invasion of England, where Eastern grays were introduced in the late 1800s.
A Turkey Vulture suns itself. “Field Guide to Urban Wildlife” details many of this species’ interesting adaptations. Photo: Mike Houck
Feinstein goes into great detail with one of the most common phenomenon that face parents accompanying their children to urban ponds—“ forced extrapair copulations”, or, to put it more bluntly, repeated gang rape of female mallards. While flummoxed parents may not be appreciably assuaged by the information, Feinstein provides detailed information as to the evolutionary strategy for this behavior. She has a great section on Turkey Vultures, including why they defecate on their legs, why they employe projectile vomiting as a defense strategy, why they lack feathers on their heads, that they play a role in the tourist trade at a Georgia state park, and that they have their very own fan club, The Turkey Vulture Society.
Her concluding chapters highlight insects and other arthropods, concluding with earthworms and slugs, subjects all too infrequently discussed in the context of urban wildlife. Among the more fascinating topics she explores are the grooming and mating behavior of centipedes; she even throws in a real groaner of a schoolyard joke on the topic. Given the recent spate of bedbug infestations across the U.S., her chapter on this most reviled pest will be of interest to her readers.
Feinstein’s writing style is user-friendly for the novice but also appealing to the specialist owing to her extensive citations of the scientific literature. The book is filled with high-quality photographs. Finally, she complements the book with her urban wildlife blog, www.urbanwildlifeguide.net, which she updates 4 to 5 times monthly, focusing on holidays such as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, as well as the changing of the seasons.
I would rate Field Guide to Urban Wildlife as a must-read for urban naturalists of every stripe. Mike Houck
Portland
Cities have been recognized as key drivers toward the successful governance of resources and as the front line in combating climate change. But there is a huge urban-rural inequality in carbon emissions in the making, particularly in rapidly urbanizing developing countries. Thus, the political and economic divide between the Global North and South that historically has shaped debates on climate change could soon be overshadowed by inequalities related to a potentially stronger disparity between rural and urban areas regarding carbon emissions.
Global North-South carbon inequality is reducing in the aggregate, but the urban-rural difference is increasing in rapidly urbanizing developing countries. Those inequalities can only be properly addressed nationally/locally.
Analyzing data from more than 200 countries over five decades shows some astounding results. Although carbon emissions are heavily correlated to its wealth (in terms of gross domestic product per capita), the data analyses suggest that a country’s level of urbanization correlates more with carbon emissions than its wealth. As countries urbanize, their cities’ contributions of carbon emissions and greenhouse gases start to become disproportionately high in comparison to their population and wealth.
Quito, Ecuador. Photo: José Puppim
The rural-urban divide is likely to precipitate into a more local yet complex governance to mediate carbon disparities between urban and rural areas. This will be particularly relevant to the developing world, which faces the triple challenge of rapid urbanization, social justice and environmental sustainability. As global emissions disparities move from North-South to rural-urban, there is a greater need to address these local and sub-national inequalities at a national level. Cities in urbanized middle-income countries emit comparable levels of carbon dioxide per capita to those in richer countries, while some rural areas in these low and middle-income countries have low or even negative carbon emissions per capita.
Historically, urbanization has been correlated with wealth creation and the massive consumption of fossil fuels that accompanied it. Some accounts indicate that more than 70 percent of global greenhouse gases are produced within urban areas, which consume 60 to 80 percent of the world’s energy. As the world makes an unprecedented rural-to-urban population shift, the 21st century poses a challenge in further addressing inequalities in access to resources and allocation of carbon emissions.
International climate governance recognizes the divide between “have” and “have not” countries in terms of carbon emissions. The Paris Agreement 2015 has shifted the onus of mitigating emissions back on voluntary contributions (through the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions) of respective nations. But focusing on inequalities in terms of carbon emissions from a rural-urban perspective further differentiates the have-nots and establishes that “rural” developing countries are the most disadvantaged. Thus, a country’s degree of urbanization, and not merely its economy, also determines its carbon emissions.
The rural constituencies in Africa are the most disadvantaged, with electrification rates reaching only 28 percent of the population. Electrification rates are the lowest in sub-Saharan Africa, at 19 percent. This has implications for designing a fair global regime for ending energy poverty and tackling climate change due to ethical, empirical and governance gaps related to urban-rural carbon dynamics.
Meanwhile, population growth for the remainder of this century is predicted to occur primarily in cities in low- and middle-income nations. Asia alone saw a surge of 1 billion urban dwellers from 1980 to 2010—more than the population of Western Europe and the United States combined—and the region is expected to add another billion by 2040. Thus, a radical and urgent transformation in the way we build our cities is needed to avoid disproportional increases in carbon emissions and disparities between rural and urban resource access and carbon emissions.
But there are new answers, and new momentum, around how to structure this transformation being discussed at the international level. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as the global urbanization strategy adopted late last year, known as the New Urban Agenda, offer opportunities to provide solutions leading to sustainable cities by making leaders accountable for the ecological impacts of their cities.
For example, the New Urban Agenda recognizes the unsustainable patterns of consumption and production in cities with impacts beyond urban areas. See for instance the agenda’s Paragraph 63: “Given cities’ demographic trends and their central role in the global economy, in the mitigation and adaptation efforts related to climate change, and in the use of resources and ecosystems,” it states in part, “the way they are planned, financed, developed, built, governed and managed has a direct impact on sustainability and resilience well beyond urban boundaries.”
It is clear that equal access to resources forms the bedrock of sustainable human settlements and future urbanization. However, this translates into immense barriers to changing national urbanization pathways, particularly for developing countries, which seem to be following the unsustainable examples of urbanization in rich countries. For example, some cities in China now emit more carbon dioxide per capita than many cities in developed countries.
Promoting cities solely as engines of economic growth creates stiffer competition among cities, which leads to more consumption, higher concentration of wealth and carbon emissions in urban areas. In turn, these dynamics increase inequities, particularly affecting the poorest and weakest in rural areas—those who have little voice and suffer from having fewer resources and opportunities. In order to decrease emissions and urban-rural inequalities, there is an urgent need to catalyze and scale up innovations that provide adequate housing, energy access, transportation and economic opportunities for the growing urban population in a sustainable manner.
The SDGs, New Urban Agenda and Paris Agreement on climate change together offer a chance to show the importance of sustainable urbanization in fighting inequalities within and beyond cities. Still, although changes made toward more-sustainable urbanization patterns would yield immense climate co-benefits to both urban and rural areas, the implementation of international agendas is far from catalyzing the necessary changes on the ground. For that, we need to strengthen institutions and capabilities at the local and sub-national levels so they can lead the urban transformation—one that positively impacts on cities and beyond, reducing the growing urban-rural divide in the highly urbanizing developing countries.
This article is based on a paper that was part of the United Nations University’s Habitat III series featuring research and commentary related to the U.N. Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development that took place in October 2016 in Quito, Ecuador. To read more on this topic, see the following publications:
Sethi, M. and Puppim de Oliveira, Jose A. (2015). From global ‘North-South’ to local ‘Urban-Rural’: A shifting paradigm in climate governance? Urban Climate, 14 (4) 529–543. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2015.09.009
To fully realise the advantages of increased urbanism, people will have to influence the decision-making process within their cities, to ensure that the value that is being created is not accentuating inequality but rather promoting inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities.
There is unanimous agreement that the 21st Century is the century of urbanism. In 2016, an estimated 54.5 percent of the world’s population lived in urban settlements. By 2030, urban areas are projected to house 60 percent of people globally and one in every three people will live in cities with at least half a million inhabitants.[i] The Human Development Report[ii] now describes urbanization as a new frontier of development because it is not a passive outcome of development, but a creator of value—the more than half of humanity living in cities generates more than 80 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP). Furthermore, according to UNHABITAT III[iii], cities today contribute 70 percent of the global GDP, while consuming over 60 percent of the global energy and producing over 70 percent of global waste and over 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Which is exactly why cities are where the battle for sustainable development will be won or lost, as they are the main place where GDP and waste are produced and energy is consumed.[iv]
The sustainable development framework recognises the importance of cities for sustainable development, where Goal 11 of the Sustainable Development Goals[v] is to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, with specific targets to be achieved by 2030:
Target 11.1 by 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services, and upgrade slums.
Target 11.2 by 2030, provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all, improving road safety, notably by expanding public transport, with special attention to the needs of those in vulnerable situations, women, children, persons with disabilities and older persons
Target 11.3 by 2030 enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacities for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries
Target 11.4 strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage
Target 11.5 By 2030, significantly reduce the number of deaths and the number of people affected and substantially decrease the direct economic losses relative to global gross domestic product caused by disasters, including water-related disasters, with a focus on protecting the poor and people in vulnerable situations
Target 11.6 by 2030, reduce the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, including by paying special attention to air quality, municipal and other waste management
Target 11.7 by 2030, provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces, particularly for women and children, older persons and persons with disabilities
The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction[vi] (SFDRR) also has goals, at the national and city level, to make cities more inclusive, safe, sustainable and resilient.
Notwithstanding the importance of the above frameworks, goals and targets within, these on their own will not effect change as their implementation remains optional, and in some instances runs against deeply engrained short term vested interests. Indeed, recent past experience in the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) have shown that implementation was partial. In order to be truly holistic, with a higher chance of successful implementation, these frameworks need to account for the following challenges and opportunities:
Global wealth has become far more concentrated among fewer people. Source: Human Development Report 2016, Human Development for Everyone, United Nations Development Programme.
Inequality in general is increasing, where global wealth has become far more concentrated. Around 2000, the wealthiest 1 percent of the population had 32 percent of global wealth. By 2010 it was 46 percent. The share of national wealth among the super-rich (the wealthiest 0.1 percent) in the United States increased from 12 percent in 1990 to 19 percent in 2008 (before the financial crisis) and to 22 percent in 2012 (critics pointed to inequality as one of the key causes of the crisis)[vii]. Within cities, in 2010, more than 827 million people were living in slum-like conditions[viii] and nearly 40 percent of the world’s future urban expansion may occur in slums[ix]. In spite of great progress in improving slums and preventing their formation—represented by a decrease from 39 percent to 30 percent of urban population living in slums in developing countries between 2000 and 2014–absolute numbers continue to grow and the slum challenge remains a critical factor for the persistence of poverty in the world[x]. Hence upgrading slums is of paramount importance to reduce poverty in all its forms (poverty, abject poverty and chronic poverty) and dimensions (access to water and sanitation, decent and safe housing, clean and affordable energy, health, education, livelihoods, employment, etc.), thereby also addressing inequality.
The issue of slums must also be addressed in order to reduce violent extremism, where according to the World Bank among the factors that lead people to leave the country and join radicalized groups is the lack of social and economic inclusion in their country of residence[xi]. According to the United Nations Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism[xii], there is a need to take a more comprehensive approach which encompasses not only ongoing, essential security-based counter-terrorism measures, but also systematic preventive measures which directly address the drivers of violent extremism namely: lack of socioeconomic opportunities, marginalization and discrimination, poor governance, violations of human rights and the rule of law, amongst others.
Institutional, physical, and natural factors also contribute to vulnerability within cities, in addition to the economic and social factors. Understanding how this complex vulnerability varies within the city, geographically and with various other parameters including gender, ability, income level, remains a challenge. While data exists on global disaster losses and their impact in terms of economic output (e.g. the Gross Domestic Product), little information exists on how these losses (a) vary within cities with various socio-economic parameters, (b) affect livelihoods, (c) are concentrated amongst the more vulnerable populations and communities[xiii]. This challenge (capturing the variation of vulnerability within cities) becomes more acute when we try to account for the effect of climate change on the severity and frequency of hazards, and the effect of sea level rise on coastal cities and livelihoods[xiv].
In many parts of the world, housing and landuse policies continue to be driven by short-term profit considerations and speculative investments in real-estate, while resisting meaningful environmental regulation and sustainable development considerations that can address.
To fully realise the advantages of increased urbanism, people will have to influence the decision-making process within their cities, to ensure that the value that is being created is not accentuating inequality but rather promoting inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities, partly through:
Carrying out a regular critical review of the indicators used to assess the “health” of the city. This is needed in order to ensure that state of the environment and the ability of the people to meet their socio economic needs are part of all assessments on the health of the city.
Underlining the notion that a city cannot do well if its environment, and the majority of its people are not doing well (as for example measured by different forms of pollution, access to common space, resilience to climate change, resilience against disaster losses, poverty, inequality, access to affordable and good quality health and education, etc).
Highlighting the notion that “trickle-down” urban, landuse and housing policies that focus almost exclusively on “entrepreneurial growth poles” do not work. Instead, investments should also be directed at poorer neighbourhoods, communities, livelihoods and associated infrastructure.
Highlighting the people’s Right to the City[xv]. For while International frameworks can provide evidence-based guidelines and recommendations, it remains the duty and privilege of city dwellers to call for a more inclusive and participatory urban decision-making processes.
[i] United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2016). The World’s Cities in 2016 – Data Booklet (ST/ESA/ SER.A/392).
[ii] Human Development Report 2016, Human Development for Everyone, United Nations Development Programme, 2016.
[iii] HABITAT III, United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, 2016.
[iv] Deputy Secretary-Remarks at the High-Level General Assembly Meeting on New Urban Agenda, UN-Habitat, 2016.
[v] Sustainable Development Goals – Seventeen Goals to Transform Our World, United Nations, 2016.
[vi] Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, UN, 2015.
[vii] Human Development Report 2016, Human Development for Everyone, United Nations Development Programme, 2016.
[viii] HABITAT III, United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, 2016.
[ix] Human Development Report 2016, Human Development for Everyone, United Nations Development Programme, 2016.
[x] Slum Almanac, 2015/2016, Tracking Improvement in the life of Slum Dwellers, EU, UN-HABITAT, Participatory Slum Upgrading Program, 2016.
[xi] Economic and Social Inclusion to, Prevent Violent Extremism, World Bank – MENA Economic Indicator, 2016.
[xii] Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism, United Nations, 2016.
[xiii] Global Assessment Report, United Nations, Geneva 2015.
[xiv] Global Platform, United Nations, Mexico, 2017.
[xv] The right to the city, H. Lefebvre, (1996), in Writings on cities, Kofman et al, Wiley-Blackwell, 1996.
There are significant direct and indirect impacts of gradual, progressive climate change on our cities and the environment. Societies (and scientists) must not ignore them in favor of attention-grabbing nature of extreme weather events.
After decades of warnings and predictions, the effects of climate change are beginning to manifest themselves around us. On 27 May 2018, Ellicott City, Maryland experienced its second 1000-yr flood in two years after 8 inches of rain fell on the town in just two hours. This flooding is becoming more common due to climate change and it is costly—the 2016 flood resulted tens of millions of dollars in cleanup costs and lost revenue, a state of emergency was called and two people lost their lives—and avoiding future floods of this magnitude may cost $85M. One national guardsman lost his life in the 2018 flood. Climate change is manifesting itself through an increased frequency of extreme events such as the Ellicott City floods, Hurricanes Harvey and Maria in 2017, and wildfires throughout the western USA.
Climate resilience is often framed as preparing and responding to extreme events. Because of the risks to human lives, economic and ecological stability, there has been a concerted focus on understanding and managing the risk from these extreme events. And rightly so—Harvey was the costliest storm on record—Maria was the third costliest, and left thousands dead in Puerto Rico.
Preservation Maryland. Wikimedia Commons
At the same time, climate change also manifests itself through gradual, progressive changes that also have an impact on our cities and environment. As an urban ecosystem ecologist, at University of Maryland College Park, we are studying the implementation of green infrastructure technologies such as rain gardens, bioswales, detention ponds, and urban forests for the mitigation of urban runoff and surface water pollution. When we simulated how current watershed implementation of stormwater green infrastructure (centralized detention ponds, and decentralized low-impact development approaches, such as, bioswales, infiltration trenches, and sand filters) may be resilient to predicted future changes in climate, we found that the recent climate record in Maryland had already started a shift towards the predicted increase in rain intensity. The baseline for our study’s present-day scenarios had shifted so much that the future scenarios were not as dramatic as we had expected (Giese et al. in review). So, while our cities and ecosystems have their resilience tested by extreme climate events, they are also constantly experiencing the impacts of gradual and progressive changes in climate, and the indirect effects this change has on ecosystems.
A grassed bioswale. Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/dep/
The extreme events that climate change brings can distract us (even scientists) from these persistent and progressive changes. But, we must not ignore the gradual, progressive shifts from climate change because they have a lot to tell us about the resilience of our cities, and also can generate feedback loops to help us combat climate change [or help promote the adoption of climate mitigation and adaptation].
To understand these gradual, progressive shifts from climate change, it is helpful to consider how ecologists think about change and disturbance. While the effects of extreme climate events are devastating and provide significant tests to the resilience of cities, extreme events are not the only ways that climate change will manifest itself and impact the resilience of cities. Climate change progresses by affecting both the climate means and extremes that ecosystems experience.
Ecology has distinguished the response of ecosystems to stress and disturbance events, and this distinction may be useful for managing the response of cities to climate change. Grime (1977) distinguishes between stress which, “consists of conditions that restrict production” and disturbance which “is associated with the partial or total destruction of the plant biomass”. Rykiel (1985) sought to distinguish causes and effects for ecological systems and defined a disturbance as a cause that results in an effect such as stress “a physiological or functional effect” or perturbations “the response of an ecological component or system” that is indicated by deviations of properties away from reference conditions.
Smith (2011) builds on this notion of cause and effect when specifically with regard to climate extremes, suggesting that ecologists distinguish between climate extremes and the extreme response that an ecological system may have to it. McPhillips et al., (2018) recently expand this further to consider extreme events, extreme impacts, and potential responses to these extremes, with a framework that provides space for integration of physical sciences, engineering, and management of a city’s response to extreme events.
When we apply these perspectives to the resilience of cities to climate change it is important to consider both the direct and indirect effects of climate change on cities (da Silva et al. 2012). Direct effects might be thought of as disturbances—flooding, sea level rise, increased storm strengths, prolonged drought. Indirect effects can be seen as stress responses—the effects on plant productivity and organismal physiology, impacts on infrastructure effectiveness, impacts on telecom networks, feedbacks to livelihoods and health.
Both kinds of change are important for understanding the resilience of cities to climate change. There is mounting evidence that green infrastructure bolsters the resilience of cities through the provision of ecosystem services, such as, mitigation of flooding, buffering storm surges, and providing shade during extreme heat. The resilience of these ecosystem services of green infrastructure is impacted by gradual, progressive shifts in climate and indirect ecosystem responses. Therefore, we need to better understand how climate change impacts urban ecosystems through stress and indirect effects. Distraction from these effects can have consequences for different types of players in cities. Scientists miss out on the ability to understand the potential weakening of ecological features that convey resilience. Importantly, there is then limited scientific understanding to guide practitioners and planners to deal with these effects.
Public attention to climate change is very responsive to extreme events—when tracking social media posts before, during, and after extreme weather events, for example—but this attention usually dissipates quickly after the event. Distraction from stress and indirect effects of climate change can lead to an unsustained and weakened approach to climate mitigation and adaptation. Ultimately, stress and indirect impacts may weaken the resilience of cities, putting them at greater risk when extreme events happen. From the perspective of resilience thinking, stress and indirect effects can also set cities up to cross thresholds into new states. The stress and indirect effects of climate change can be seen as slow variables that influence progressive changes in ecosystems over time, and as system characteristics change over time in response to climate change.
Species and ecosystems are already being impacted by the gradual shift in mean climate (see this overview from National Geographic). Species distributions have been observed for many species of plants and insects, and an indirect impact of climate on ecosystems. Some of the movement of species ranges is quite rapid. Importantly, pest and diseases have also shown range shifts, including malaria, mosquito vectors, and pest and pathogens of ornamental and commercial plants. Some of these climate effects on species are seen through changes in phenology—or the timing of events such as leaf-out, flowering, emergence from hibernation, reproduction, and leaf-fall.
As these gradual changes in mean climate progress, future climates will cause some cities to no longer be hospitable for some species of plants. This will impact the plant palates available for urban greening (Yang 2009). Because the urban forests of the future are being planted today, managers should already be considering the future climate windows of their cities for the trees that are planted now. An example of this is a revision of hardiness zone recommendations by the Arbor Day Foundation.
Credit: Arbor Day Foundation
Stress and indirect effects from climate change can impact the ecosystem services societies depend upon. For example, we investigated the climate resilience and adaptation of stormwater green infrastructure and asked how green infrastructure may be resilient to changes in climate and be able to convey climate adaptation strategies. We simulated 2 watersheds under 8 climate scenarios and found that green infrastructure will be able to buffer predicted changes in climate (Giese et al. in review). However, the models used for these purposes lack important climate change related feedbacks. In both modeling and empirical studies, transpiration is a critical driver of reductions in runoff in watersheds using green infrastructure. This imparts a benefit both hydrologically by reducing flows, but also can reduce sediment loading and improve water quality.
But we don’t yet have a good understanding of how plants will transpire in a future climate? What will the water balance look like in a future climate? What will it look like in 5 years? 10 years? 50? 100? If stormwater green infrastructure soils are designed to promote bioretention but the environment of the soil microbes are constantly changing, how will they retain nutrients in the watershed and protect surface waters? How will the response of green infrastructure to climate disturbance act as a feedback to set the system up to provide resilience for extreme events? Just as planning is beginning to account for these directional changes in climate mean trends—our research should as well. It should also explore the interaction and cross-scale TEMPORAL linkages between pulses and presses of climate change.
A soil-eye view from a rain garden. What will the response of soil microorganisms to persistent stress and indirect effects from climate change mean for urban resilience? Photo: Mitchell Pavao-ZuckermanGreen infrastructure and green space provide opportunities for observation and interpretation of local ecologies. Through time, these observations would reflect indirect, stress, and persistent climate change impacts. Could these observations develop a place-based ecology to combat shifting baselines and engage people to combat and adapt to climate change? Photo: Mitchell Pavao-Zuckerman
A dramatic shift in behaviors to address the emission of greenhouse gasses that drive climate change, as well as mitigation and adaptation approaches, is needed to reduce the risk of climate change impacts. However, there is a challenge—climate change may be too big a problem for most of us to perceive. Thomashow (2001) argues that people can’t perceive climate change but they can track local trends because people are best suited to both observe and understand the world directly around them. Thomashow calls for a place-based perceptual ecology, where people can “observe, witness, and interpret the ecological pattern and place where they live”.
Urban greenspace and green infrastructure is a place where urban residents interact with nature intimately—it is the place where most “observe, witness, and interpret” their local ecology. It may be a place where people can observe the gradual and progressive stresses that climate change has on ecosystems. Green infrastructure would be something in the local environment that people could watch and steward and notice changes. This could be a strong feedback for building climate awareness in that awareness of the climate system and climate change by urban dwellers is a slow variable that may contribute to the overall resilience of the global urban system (Elmqvist 2013).
There has been concern expressed about the shifting baseline of climate change—that the slow progressive increase in temperature and shifts in ecological structure and function will make people complacent. Could the use of green space and green infrastructure as an educational tool to build a place-based perceptual ecology help combat the shifting baseline and engage people in combating and adapting to climate change? This would be a significant feedback loop to promote the adoption of climate mitigation and adaptation practices.
Echoing Berbés-Blázquez et al. (2018)—who argue that “societies need spaces for radical thinking to confront not only the climate-change challenges of the future but also the present-day conditions that create, reinforce, and reproduce vulnerability”—societies need to recognize that the gradual, progressive direct and indirect impacts of climate change also create these conditions that shape vulnerabilities.
Berbés-Blázquez, M., Iwaniac, D., Grimm, N., McPhearson, T. https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2018/04/21/positive-visions-sustainable-resilient-equitable-cities/
da Silva, J., Kernaghan, S., Luque, A. 2012. A systems approach to meeting the challenges of urban climate change. Int J Urban Sust Dev 4:125-145
Elmqvist, T. 2013. https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2013/03/27/urban-sustainability-and-resilience-why-we-need-to-focus-on-scales/
Giese, E., Shirmohammadi, A., Rockler, A., Pavao-Zuckerman, M.A. (in review) Assessment of stormwater green infrastructure for climate change resilience at the watershed scale. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Grime, J.P. 1977. Evidence for the existence of three primary strategies in plants and its relevance to ecological and evolutionary theory. The American Naturalist. 111: 1169-1194.
Rykiel, EJ. 1985 Towards a definition of ecological disturbance, Aust. J Ecol 10:361-365
Smith, M.D., 2011, An ecological perspective on extreme climatic events: a synthetic definition and framework to guide future research, J Ecol, 99:656-663
Thomashow, M. 2001. Bringing the biosphere home. MIT Press.
Yang, J. 2009. Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on Urban Tree Species Selection: A Case Study in Philadelphia. J Forestry 107: 364-372.
“The theme running through this exposition — indeed, the basic premise on which the book is constructed — is that human beings exist wholly within nature as a legitimate part of natural order in every respect. To accept this unity seems to be difficult for ecologists, who assume –– as many do, in understandable anger and despair — that the human species is an interloper in the natural order of things. Neither is this unity easily accepted by economists, industrialists, politicians, and others who assume — as many do, taking understandable pride in human achievements — that reason, knowledge, and determination make it possible for human beings to circumvent and outdo the natural order”. Foreword, The Nature of Economies, Jane Jacobs
Jacobs then proceeds to describe how economic development follows a set of patterns that mimic the patterns of a natural ecology: differentiations emerging from generalities, which in turn produce more differentiations, and the process of co-development. The Nature of Economies followed on the heels of Jacobs’ previous books — beginning with the ever-classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), through two other economics volumes: The Economy of Cities(1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1985).
Although her first book (Death and Life…) seems to be the better known in the US, these subsequent ones lay out in provocative detail a way of seeing cities and their economies — and the people who inhabit and participate in them — as a totally integrated part of nature. Her book plays with this double meaning — describing for us the character (nature) of economies while at the same time binding human settlements to nature. I have understood the intent of The Nature of Cities blog to be the same: to provide narratives of how nature resides in the city, but also as a lens into our understanding the composition of the city as natural.
However, the demonization of cities, juxtaposed as it has been against an idealized rural or pastoral landscape, is such a hard meme to break, so often reinforced through popular culture. Television, movies, and literature generally depict the city as the embodiment of crime, trouble, evil, while promoting a sentimental and nostalgic view of small town or rural life. This, then, gets concretized in policy discussions at every level. Density is feared: leading to crime! Over crowding! Higher incidences of HIV transmission! Homelessness! I participated in a meeting last week in Geneva, hosted by several UN agencies and attended by civil society organizations drawn from the global north and south. As part of a larger preparation to review progress towards achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals (which expire in 2015), I found myself in lonely company advocating for the benefits of cities and the promise of urbanization to improve societal outcomes.
How entrenched our belief systems are: that cities need to by fixed, altered, rescued. (Even UN Habitat’s current campaign to link practitioners around the world doing innovative city building, of which MAS, my employer, is an international partner, chose “I am City Changer” reinforcing the notion that cities need changing …).
Once you start watching for it you spot a latent misanthropy in almost every domain. The community development work in North America and Europe over the last six decades has only reinforced this, rallying efforts to “re- store/mediate/vitalize cities”.
To what? Their more ‘natural’ state?
Image by Mary Rowe
Fortunately, the life sciences have indeed come to our rescue, over time out-jockeying the mechanistic, linear-ists, persuading us in many aspects of living to look at what is generative, organic, connected to the whole. Jane Jacobs observed city life as inter-connected with the natural and built environments, and her ideas have prompted a contemporary approach to urbanism that integrates uses and users, green architecture and design, local economies (even currencies!), adaptive reuses, and ecological infrastructures. These reflect Jacobs’ recognition that cities — when permitted to — evolve naturally, adding form and function as needed. Jacobs’ method was a simple scientific one: to observe the particular, and extract from it her observations about how cities actually work. She was allergic to ideology, knowing that the complexity of relationships and occurrences in cities most often would produce surprising results that no abstract theory (or its adherents) could predict (or control).
Cities are full of exception, occurrences of serendipity and delight, of innovation and thrift, where someone has tinkered or improvised or been resourceful or imaginative. Good public policy and programs enable the city to make this possible for people. But well intentioned (and some not so) policies inhibit this natural process of city development. Jacobs was notorious in her calling out of large-scale efforts to ‘improve’ the city, seeing them as arbitrary mechanisms to ‘control’ — when in fact what she saw was needed was support for the natural processes that were always occurring in cities, but too often stifled by a number of public and private forces.
Self-organization: the livability of the city
Jacobs observed in the city people’s desire, and capacity if enabled, to self-organize: a concept with which ecologists and technologists are most familiar.
[For an elegantly clear synopsis of Jacob’s ideas on self-organization and how they connect to other natural and manufactured manifestations of it, please read Stephen Johnson’s Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2001).]
As suggested above, the capacity for self-organization is a critical attribute of city life. If it’s compromised, so is the healthy functioning of the city. Self-organization occurs at every level of city life: within households, city blocks, neighborhoods, districts, the city and region. Walking groups, street vendors, business improvement groups, neighborhood watch initiatives, buying clubs, co-locations for the self-employed, street fairs, affinity groups of all kinds: the desire for city dwellers to make connections with others is what ensures a city is productive and vital: livable. Cities are not an artificial construct (at least the most successful ones aren’t). They are creatures of the living: created by people seeking to organize their lives in ways that sustain and nurture. The dynamism that self-organization delivers, is what we call livability.
Cities in fact are a living unit themselves, ebbing and flowing with the increasingly global tides of commerce and politics, ingenuity and will. Bees make their own hives and ants their own hills, created as part of the larger ecosystems in which they thrive. Surely cities are Homo sapiens’ greatest creation, similarly embedded in a larger web of connection to the assets and resources that surround them.
Systems of connection: an urban ecology
The webs of connection in a city are ‘hard’ and ‘soft’. They enable flows, of people, material, energy, waste. Some formalize, some remain ad-hoc. Every city has these, some are more challenged than others in making these channels of connection work effectively, These systems of capital are what fuel the city. In turn they interweave, or ‘nest’, forming an urban ecology.
Increasingly in the imaginative, innovative pockets of city-building there is a recognition that small, seemingly modest local initiatives aggregate up into a whole that makes a city not only more livable, but are also critical contributors to a city’s resilience. These are the two sides of the self-organization coin: a city’s capacity to meet the needs and aspirations of its dwellers (livability) and to productively adapt to diverse challenges and opportunities over time (resilient).
A resilient city has the capacity to swiftly adapt to change and capitalize on opportunity. Although more recently associated principally with climate change adaptation, resilience is a term with resonance across multiple domains (e.g. psychology, biology, engineering sciences, business continuity, community development). Inherent to urban resilience is an integrated, holistic understanding of the connectivity and interdependence of the physical, social, environmental and cultural assets and systems of a city.
The Stockholm-based Resilience Alliance has created this graphic (an instrumental version of my ‘systems of capital’ above) to illustrate these interconnections.
Any city needs resilience-building strategies that protect it — its neighborhoods, housing, institutions, commercial life, open spaces, cultural assets, and its systems that provide food, transport, health, and protection — from the widest range of risks and challenges.
System-wide investments are crucial, but they need to be underpinned by granular strategies that enable self-organization: where neighborhoods, sectors, institutions are empowered by city dwellers who foster resilience in their homes, workplaces, and places of worship, learning and leisure. Resilience is not a household word (yet), remaining for most an abstract concept confined to engineering schools, scientists, and psychologists.
On the other hand, the concept of urban livability — what a city provides its dwellers to make their lives safe, healthy and meaningful — is a term that resonates with most. Marrying the concepts may be a ‘no-brainer’ to some of us, but certainly decisions that dramatically affect our city life are still most often taken in isolation: public housing is sited where land is cheap but services are costly to deliver (and therefore inadequately delivered); zoning changes incentivize profitable development but crowds out the legion of smaller enterprises that make a neighborhood vital and diverse; public investments in open space, parks, and libraries are cut back, denying the multiple social, economic/environmental benefits these community amenities can potentially deliver to their neighborhoods and the city as a whole.
It may be now that a ‘resilience imperative’, ushered in by more recent severe weather events, will make more urgent the need for public and private investments that boost local resilience, and simultaneously, one would hope, livability.
A livable and resilient city
My city, New York, is arguably one of the world’s most livable ‘global cities’ — absorbing continuous population growth and providing opportunities for immigrants, an international center of knowledge and wealth creation and innovation, a cultural mecca of diversity provided formally through a wide array of institutions and informally on every corner, and with a mix of amenities and attributes that makes for many New Yorkers a daily routine that is productive and enjoyable.
But there are persistent challenges that inhibit this city: areas of concentrated poverty, limited housing choices, land use development pressures that threaten the existing vibrancy of their neighborhoods, and the chronic need for more investment in infrastructures of all kinds, made all the more prescient by the storm events from which we continue to recover. These challenges are common to cities of the size and intensity of New York. The plethora of livability indexes popularized through niche media (Monocle) or global accountancy firms (Mercer) and routinely rank ‘global’ cities like New York, London, Hong Kong and Mumbai very low down the list, providing little guidance or useful measures for improvement for cities as vast and complex as the world’s largest and most productive.
In fact, on-the-ground practitioners connect every day with the physical city: entrepreneurs, activists, designers and planners, artists- and know that city-building is not a zero-sum game. And civil society movements — originating in cities — make clear these win-win opportunities: ‘creative place-making’, ‘localism’, ‘shared streets’, ‘universal design’ are each about mobilizing local assets to generate livability and resilience benefits.
Our largest and most intense cities, whether in the northern or southern hemisphere, are facing increasing challenges placed on them by growing populations, resource demands, aging infrastructures, resource scarcity, and economic downturns or uncertainty. They are also home to remarkable social innovators, designers, entrepreneurs and artists, energized by city life and constantly improvising ways to make life in the city meaningful, just, and productive. These new approaches are most often hyper-local, starting modestly but generating results that could easily be scaled up to have greater impact.
We have much to learn about effective approaches to building city resilience and livability. Whereas New Yorkers may envy the spectacular adaptive reuse examples of London, Hong Kong looks to us for lessons in integrating historic preservation into its land use and economic development strategies. Similarly, what do the informal economies and public markets of Mumbai have to teach other city building practitioners about how cities can foster an entrepreneurial ecosystem? And what about the network of social innovation entrepreneurs tackling urban design challenges in Bandung and Rio?
Beginning in 2011 the organization for which I work, the Municipal Art Society of New York (MAS) — a century-old advocacy organization concerned with the relationship between the city’s built form assets and its people — began reaching out to urban innovators: artists, designers, planners, teachers, and entrepreneurs living in other global cities to share approaches, and discuss disruptive innovations that are making their cities more livable and resilient. This initiative is based on a theory of change that urban innovation is fostered locally and then scaled up, and continuously adapted to changing conditions, with the support of enabling public policy and investment.
Our most effective instruments of livability and resilience scale in both directions: for instance, community gardens and naturalized spaces could hold storm water, grow and distribute food, show art, mitigate urban heat island effect, host Tai Chi and/or a FEMA trailer, dispense flu shots, provide local respite places, show movies, offer wi-fi hot spots or charging stations, display locally created maps or evacuation instructions from the City, provide a pop up space for the branch library These approaches contribute to the livability andresilience of the city.
Connecting cities with cities: growing the urban ecology
The world’s global cities make possible the peer-to-peer trading that fuels the global economy, which is fundamentally urban, facilitating connection between entrepreneurs, researchers, investors and consumers. Nowhere is social media more robust than in the global cities of the world, and speaks to the appetite of urbanists to learn from each other. Aggregating those examples necessitates creating platforms to connect and nurture the global urban resilience ecosystem of practitioners.
Similarly, a network creates a platform for the exchange of practices to improve the livability and resilience outcomes of their cities, and in the aggregate, over half of the world’s population who live in the global city. It provides a unique learning and advocacy platform for the best in city-building practice, across sectors and disciplines, to spread the social innovations that potentially affect hundreds of millions of lives, and the natural ecosystems that support them. The value proposition of this initiative is that it is grounded in the practical: with an explicit commitment to link, across sectors and disciplines, with practitioners actively contributing to outcomes at the most local level.
An initial meeting of this Global Network was convened by the Municipal Art Society of New York and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, with founding participants who are engaged in resilience and livability initiatives from two dozen cities around the world. The common finding from this group was the need to develop a ‘new paradigm’ that embraced the physical and aspirational nature of cities — see the draft paradigm below — and was relevant to cities in both the northern and southern hemispheres. What has emerged is a pattern of understanding the city as a living system, providing its citizens with opportunities and access, prosperity and dignity, protection and choice, and systems of engagement and governance that maximize livability and resilience. With a common framework, this initiative is now cross-pollinating innovations between city builders, strengthening the connective tissue within cities and between them.
Our next step is to create a digital learning platform, where we can, as Jacobsean urbanists, observe in our own cities and others, how livability and resilience are being ‘home grown’ and connected up, to strengthen the ecosystem in which the nature of cities, of the world, resides.
Mary Rowe
New York City
The Livability+Resilience paradigm, created at the MAS-initiated and Rockefeller Foundation-supported Bellagio conference
The current system of zoning and planning is wrongly fixated on maintaining state instead of preserving good patterns, and changing this fixation will be the key to making growth beneficial to all civic stakeholders.
The most contentious issue in North American urbanism today is preservation. More than transportation, more than usage-zoning, more than health and safety, more than growth, which all had their day as the driving intent of urban planning, preservation is now the intent behind the most politically active movements in planning. Politically active is the important distinction, since unlike other areas, preservation does not grow out of a forward-thinking ideology, but is essentially reactionary, arising from local residents organizing and pressuring local elected powers to keep things close to their current state.
What passes as preservation today is not so much the enhancement of a valuable feature but a rejection of change.
Many reasons are typically given by political groups for why the restrictions are necessary, from protecting communities against gentrification, traffic, rising housing costs or falling housing costs, to protecting endangered local species or ecologies. Typically, the effect of those policies is always the same: rising housing costs as demographic pressure increases demand, while supply has been fixed at current levels. “Housing costs”, in this case, is a term of confusion: the building stock is not becoming more expensive to maintain, but the rent carried by the scarcity of habitable space is increasing. The residents feel richer from rising property values (despite living in the exact same houses, and deriving the same enjoyment from them), the local politicians are reelected, and everyone seems happy with the outcome, until someone forms the Rent Is Too Damn High Party.
It turns out that keeping things exactly the same is a form of economic exclusion that exploits demographic trends, namely, denying access to new households formed by the young and newcomers. A fixed housing supply means every new household has to take the home of an existing one, and households who wish to expand must take homes away from other households. It is unsustainable, unfair, and otherwise possible only because of a mismatch of scales between building code legislation (local) and demographic pressure (regional).
The solution of merging local urban governments into larger urban megacities, or taking their land use powers to a higher tier of government (as is the case, for instance, in Japan), has been used to settle the matter in now-booming construction markets such as Toronto, where more residential towers are under construction than in any other North American city except for Mexico City. It is a solution that is clear, simple, obvious, and wrong. It is wrong because it is politically unstable and requires constant force to maintain itself.
Rob Ford’s electoral support map shows the deep antagonism of citizens living in Toronto’s suburbs, versus its down town residents. — Torontoist
Toronto is the poster child for urban amalgamation in North America, having been redrawn by its provincial governing body to include over a million residents in sprawling suburbs such as Scarborough and Etobicoke that would easily constitute major cities on their own elsewhere. While such mergers may look like a success at the moment, the election and subsequent global infamy of Mayor Rob Ford shows that forced cohabitation in a political institution between suburbanites and world capital cities can have the opposite outcome than the one sought by amalgamation. Rob Ford was elected by mass support of the amalgamated suburbs. Current mayor John Tory, elected for his first term in 2014 but who received little support from the suburbs, will be judged by how suburbanites perceive their success in the political life of the city, instead of feeling as though they are solely a source of tax income. Should he fail, someone cleverer than Rob Ford (perhaps his brother Doug) will successfully harness the suburban electorate’s resentment to propel himself to power over Toronto’s newly ultra-dense central core, and this cycle of division will continue.
“These are very small, technical changes which actually don’t make any difference to who needs to come to council,” Mayor Naheed Nenshi told reporters Monday. “I’m frankly dumbfounded that there has been this much debate over them.” — Mayor of Calgary Naheed Nenshi fights councillors over accessory units in a suburban-dominated city
I personally feel this political cycle to be wasteful and unnecessary, and therefore propose a fractal view of urban incorporation and regulation, where cities are delimited by purpose and specialization. This would mean that local property owners would continue to wield the power to restrict new construction in their neighborhoods. I think they have the right to do so, that in fact it is the better outcome for them, although it may not yield the best possible outcome for everyone at the global scale.
To transform the outcome from a local optimum to a simultaneous global optimum, I will present an argument for a system of preservation that I hope will satisfy both the anxieties of property owners and the demographic pressures faced by cities. I argue that the current system of zoning and planning is wrongly fixated on maintaining the current state instead of preserving patterns, and that changing this fixation will be the key to making change and growth beneficial to all city residents.
Before such a claim can make sense, we need a framework to analyze preservation and show what makes it appealing and successful. We must step back in time to the first applications of preservation, when it was once synonymous with urban planning. We will then demonstrate its evolution into more layered systems of preservation — including systems designed as recently as twenty years ago — to show that the problem with the ruling building codes is their insistence on stopping change instead of allowing it. Preservation succeeds with change, not by working against it.
* * *
The tradition of “town planning”, until roughly the mid-19th century, meant preserving a system of spaces for movement that would not fail when a settlement grew into a populated city. There were fashions in this tradition, such as the Roman grid being rediscovered and reinvented as the baroque radial grid, some nationalistic styles such as the English crescent, and some ideological patterns such as the Manhattan grid, meant to maximize economic activity. What this kind of planning presumes is that open space for circulation is scarce, fragile, and completely fundamental to a city’s success, and by regulating what space may or may not be built upon, some large-scale success can be achieved. In contrast, an “unplanned” town may be a random settlement that increased in density until the natural paths became contested and protected from further encroachment — notable examples include the medieval cores of Rome, Paris, or London. These protected spaces eventually became named streets that lasted centuries, perhaps millennia, though their design has improved over time, acquiring pavements, sewers, lighting, subways, circulation signals, bike lanes, shared spaces, and so on. This phenomenon of preserved structures improving over time will be essential to the success of preservation as a method, as we will see next.
Sir Christopher Wren’s city plan for London never overcame the forces preserving the existing street grid, despite the building stock having been razed by the Great Fire. The street grid was nevertheless improved by widening.
“The idea is pretty simple. Take nine square blocks of city. (It doesn’t have to be nine, but that’s the ideal.) Rather than all traffic being permitted on all the streets between and among those blocks, cordon off a perimeter and keep through traffic, freight, and city buses on that. … In the interior, allow only local vehicles, traveling at very low speeds, under 10 mph. And make all the interior streets one-way loops (see the arrows on the green streets below), so none of them serve through streets.” — Barcelona’s 19th-century hygienist grid evolves to 21st-century mixed-use superblocks.
The growth of the Mandelbrot set fractal preserves the set through a sequence of successive iterations, leaving greater complexity at each step.
Mediterranean building codes assumed change was natural and constant and described how cities could change by implementing proscriptions on growth. The details of the rules relied strongly on context, making the system of preservation highly adaptive and, over time, increasing the natural complexity of the boundary between the city and the sea. In other words, the feedback loop introduced by the preservation of sea views and the construction of new windows onto those views gradually created a very deep fractal, so that gradually the natural beauty of this fractal overcame the beauty of the sea. This explains the popularity of sites such as Santorini, which, despite being located in the middle of nowhere (it is reached only by boat and accessed by riding a donkey up narrow stairs) and having no remarkable landmarks or attractions, is one of the most famous tourist destinations of the Mediterranean.
A view worth a donkey-ride? An increasing number of visitors think so. Image: Wikimedia
While a town where everyone painted their homes in pastel colors may suddenly discover that pastel houses are now part of the definition of the town, and may elect to preserve the practice by requiring new buildings to also be painted in pastel colors, there are conditions to this type of “historic” preservation that must be respected. Most significantly, historic landmarks are only effective within the historic context that produced them.
The Eiffel Tower, Las Vegas, Nevada. Image: Wikipedia
The Eiffel Tower is often used as a kind of logical defence for bad architecture; the claim is that it was rejected by Parisians when it was first built, but came to be loved later on. It follows that people grow to love old things simply through the impact of time; therefore, ugly things only need time to be loved. The absurdity of the claim is obvious when the Eiffel Tower is reproduced as an exact replica in a completely opposite context from its original place, in Las Vegas, Nevada, as the landmark attraction of a casino resort. We see that without the surrounding context of the Champ de Mars public garden and the Seine river, without the Parisian urban fabric framing it, without the historical importance of the tower as the centerpiece of a landmark universal exhibition, the Eiffel Tower framed by Las Vegas hotel blocks and Nevada desert is actually quite silly, although cutely ornate, in comparison. No one would feel any sadness if its demolition were announced today, because it ultimately means nothing in history. The Eiffel Tower of Paris, on the other hand, represents a golden age for France — it is the sole remaining structure of Paris’ universal exhibition, and has come to be the iconic logo of the city to the rest of the world. The Eiffel Tower no doubt played a major role in achieving Paris’ status as the most visited tourist destination of the entire world.
Despite its protected status, the Eiffel Tower continues to iterate on its purpose.
Iteration on preserved structures allows them to find new relevance in the present and in the future. Here, the Eiffel Tower announces France’s turn in the European Union presidency. Wikimedia
Since context plays such a critical role in successful historic preservation, sometimes a set of purely ephemeral structures can achieve historic value. This is the case of the Midtown historic district in New York, where unlike anywhere else in the world large, bright advertising billboards are now mandated by the building code. The original purpose of those billboards has been replaced by a sort of symbiotic relationship — a billboard-centered attraction, which draws visitors to it like Santorini or the Eiffel Tower attract visitors. The change in advertisements and billboard construction is rapid, but one expects to return in a decade and find the same Times Square. That is a highly iterative and adaptive preservation of the pattern.
We can infer from these successful applications of preservation that, while the features being preserved can be either naturally-occurring or man-made, they are observed and preserved from the environment instead of being designed and intended. They require an ecological perception that recognizes the relationships between things and also allows them to increase. In this way, new layers of patterns nested within the preserved patterns can appear, and can themselves benefit from preservation.
This condition for successful preservation, how far change and adaptation are possible within its framework, gives us a potent tool to analyze the planning codes of modern cities. Modern cities, including most of what’s called suburban sprawl, were created with preservation of their products already built-in, through zoning codes and building ordinances that defined a final or static purpose for land use. And even where the existing urban fabric had undergone a century of iteration, such as the boroughs of New York City, a planning operation of “downzoning” has sought to fix in place the current land uses.
It appears that much of what passes as preservation today is not so much the enhancement of a valuable feature that is the product of natural processes and growth, but a rejection of change. Everywhere we turn in local planning, not-in-my-backyard-ism is the dominant political force. Only when we recognize this as a common pathology across many different kinds of urban communities can we begin to inch towards a solution to many of the affordability and adaptation crises afflicting us.
The most important question that must be asked to find a solution through this pattern of rejection of change is: how can change be good at the local level? There is no doubt that increasing density of housing, jobs, commerce, recreation, and culture is good at the general global level, but it is at the local level that it is rejected, and the global level is nothing more than the aggregate of local politics.
Preservation has historically provided a part of the answer to that question by ensuring that the valuable parts of cities were not only kept throughout changes, but were even improved.
In the case of modern cities, constructed using automobile-centered, low-density, artificially-distant patterns of urban development, a question begs to be asked in the arguments of the preservationists—what about them, if anything, is even worth preserving? But a more important question would be, what is it about them that could improve through change instead of letting them decay or fall apart?
If the sole focus of a campaign to increase the housing supply in a city is to build more, anywhere, at any cost to the neighbors — a campaign justified out of a natural property right to build — then the neighbors will rightfully object to a threat towards a common pool resource of which they consider themselves the protectors. Such conflicts become power struggles over the city’s building codes and planning ordinances and, so far, the better-organized local homeowners have been winning decade after decade.
But what if we were to accept that it is also a natural right to prevent harmful change to a neighborhood? If we reframe the political debate so that it becomes about “what kind of change would improve this neighborhood?” then the neighbors are required to fire up their imaginations and look for potential answers.
* * *
A good deal of the answer has to come from architecture. For most of history, urban construction could be expected to be more attractive than the things it replaced, creating richer, more complex façades, and taking away the natural world in favor of something that at least took inspiration from nature. One could expect, when new construction began across the street, that the noise and dust of the construction site would soon be replaced by a work of art that would do wonders for property values in the immediate vicinity.
At some point within the last generation, architecture retreated to ideology instead of beautification, and the building industry took advantage of the situation to cheapen buildings to the point that, today, no amount of ideology can conceal the bare, off-the-shelf parts and lack of investment in most urban construction projects.
New construction condominium completed 2015, Montreal. Also seen everywhere else.
The logic of neighborly architecture is actually quite simple. If the patterns we use in new construction are symmetrical to the patterns in existing, surrounding constructions, the final pattern will connect all of them into a larger encompassing structure. Today, however, new buildings are largely designed with no integration of their context, even when designing an extension of a building. What matters is driving costs down (or up, in the case of high-profile starchitecure) at the expense of the costs imposed on the neighborhood through landscape destruction.
The street façade of London’s Royal Opera House was extended twice, once with symmetries of the column patterns in a new context, and a second time (on the left) with barely any symmetries at all beyond the bare materials.
Another part of the solution has to come not from the builders, but from the public space managers. Once an automobile-oriented mobility network is in place, it can only trend in the direction of more traffic. Those who purchased their homes in new suburbs, at the height of their marketability, inevitably see decline after decline in their enjoyment of automobiles, as farther-removed suburbs are built, putting more cars in the way of their destinations.
The opportunity exists to take advantage of the enormous amounts of space used to buffer buildings from streets to create a second overlapping network of walkable public spaces, one that would be managed for the purpose of inviting walking instead of just supporting it out of regulatory necessity. This would have the effect of psychically liberating people from their cars, as they would see the opportunity to pleasantly connect journeys on foot instead of having to struggle with traffic. Such an effort requires investment not only in road alterations, but in a new way of managing spending and organizing public works. The traffic engineers currently tasked with building roads for optimal traffic flow are the worst suited to this task. The people who run the parks departments are the best suited, being focused on delivering relief from stress. And another group — comprising those people who, today, plan shopping malls — knows a lot about how to make a space “strollable”. Just imagine what they could do if they were relieved of the burden of maximizing commercial rents.
If it could be shown that, yes, things can change for the better in our neighborhoods — that change can actually improve neighborhoods by producing more sophisticated architecture and more opportunities to move around — then the argument for static preservation would fall apart. A positive feedback loop, where change succeeds so well that it invites more change, may emerge. We are already seeing this in historic core cities such as New York, where controversial redesigns of public spaces under “pilot projects” over the last decade have radically reshaped the human experience of the street, starting from one intersection at a time and building momentum. Each of these projects was conservative in scope (contradicting the “make no small plans” motto of urban planning) and preserved most of the city’s mobility grid; yet, once completed and accepted as normal, these projects made the city less dependent on that grid and more willing to trade it in for more space. Such a pattern is also a model of preservation, where what is preserved gradually becomes superceded by something greater, ultimately making it less necessary and no longer in need of preservation.
* * *
The challenge of creating a future for modern cities is greater than anything urbanists have ever faced, simply because modern cities were designed to be final, under the expectation that the future had arrived and the city was perfected. Removing the physical substance of this planning vision is a gargantuan task that should probably be evaded as much as possible; removing the physical product of the system is not sufficient to really transform modern cities into adaptive, growing ecosystems — the planning and coding process must be transformed completely, starting by rejecting their radical principle of finality. (Much like the structure of London returned after the Great Fire, so would the modern city return following its destruction.)
This, after all, is the root cause of the problem. For most of our history, building and planning codes existed to manage the process of change, which made reforming and adapting the system natural. Reforming a system whose express intention is to keep things the same means almost nothing can be salvaged from the system’s procedures — which will always produce a system meant to keep things static, even if they are in a new, different state. We would gain nothing in adaptive capacity and complexity from such an effort.
If, instead, we accept that the current physical state of things is worth preserving, but is not the final state of urban growth, then the search for improvements and protections through change will slowly accrue momentum.
The architect and scientist Christopher Alexander describes the natural process of morphogenesis as changing states while preserving as much as possible of the existing structure of things, thus minimizing the energy expended to change. Preservation is the transposition of this principle to a coordination solution among many people. The shortfall in its application, I suspect, is a problem of missing language. We lack the words to describe what, where, when, and how to preserve in this way. For a city such as the modern suburban autotopia, the absence of change and the novelty of it means our language must start from scratch.
Several months ago, the City of New Orleans was awarded $141 million dollars from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (or HUD) to implement a wide-ranging green infrastructure project in the city’s Gentilly neighborhood. The main goal of this project, known as the “Gentilly Resilience District,” is fairly straightforward: slow down soil subsidence and take pressure off of the city’s complex drainage system by retaining groundwater and capturing stormwater on the landscape during rain events.
A project in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans aims to demonstrate how cities can adapt existing systems and utilize green infrastructures to deal with water challenges.
While limited in its spatial scope to one neighborhood, the project represents an ambitious move by local authorities to fundamentally upend long-held views on water management in the city. This essay describes the aims and scopes of the Gentilly project, and places the intervention in a longer historical context of the engineering strategies applied to the city’s peculiar deltaic geomorphology and ecology over the past century.
Announced in January 2016, the Gentilly Resilience District project aims to provide a concrete demonstration of how cities like New Orleans can adapt existing systems and utilize green infrastructures to deal with water challenges. The figure below shows the main interventions the project entails. Some of this work will “daylight” drainage canals that are presently sealed in concrete and buried in street medians. The idea here is transforming invisible gray infrastructure into green infrastructure with multiple public benefits: improving the quality of public green space, and giving the landscape the capacity to retain more surface and groundwater, while not exacerbating the flooding risk to neighbors.
New Orleans typically receives around 64 inches (162cm) of rain annually, and much of this volume arrives in the form of intense downpours that overwhelm the city’s drainage system, even with the marked improvements made since Katrina. The system can pump an inch of rain an hour in the first hour of a storm, and then a half an inch an hour afterwards. In other words, the system can handle three inches over a five-hour period. Often, localized downpours exceed this rate and water begins to collect.
This is where the other primary intervention of the project becomes relevant. Several large tracts of undeveloped land—a former sprawling convent that was destroyed in a fire after Katrina, and a remnant tract of bottomland forest near Dillard University—will capture and retain stormwater, storing it while neighborhoods and streets are pumped dry first. This video, produced for city agencies, provides a helpful illustration of how green infrastructure is being promoting as a “triple bottom line” solution to environmental problems in New Orleans.
Before elaborating on the Gentilly project further, let’s return to the urban geomorphology of New Orleans, and explore the development of the problems the project aims to address. It’s no secret that much of New Orleans was constructed on drained swampland. City engineers devised a comprehensive drainage system around the turn of the 20th century with two central aims. First, they pumped dry the freshwater forests in the city’s low-lying basins, which was incredibly effective in mitigating the spread of diseases including yellow fever, malaria, and cholera. Prior to this intervention, in the 1800s, thousands of residents, many of them recent arrivals from Ireland and other impoverished European nations, succumbed to yellow fever during the summer months. The city garnered a reputation as a “necropolis” that was to be avoided in warmer months.
Beyond the humanitarian and public health crises these outbreaks represented, they also had serious implications for the city’s core economic engine: international trade through the Port of New Orleans. On the one hand, the city’s centrality in the trade networks of the Caribbean and its need for laborers rendered it vulnerable to the arrival of pathogens and un-acclimated hosts aboard ships. During the worst outbreaks, however, quarantine orders and outright bans on ships visiting the city undermined economic activity. City engineers and public health officials, pressured by local economic elites, decided to simply install canals and pumping stations capable of draining the city’s entire urban footprint, limiting breeding ground for the yellow fever (Aedes aegypti) and malaria (genus Anopheles) mosquitos, and providing better elimination of sewage (cholera and dysentery threatened even native residents, who had acquired immunity to yellow fever). Between 1900 and 1920, deaths from yellow fever, malaria, and cholera plummeted, and life expectancy for New Orleans residents increased by over 20 years (NOS&WB, 1921). In a span of 20 years, diseases that previously paralyzed the city for several months out of the year were all but eliminated. This was a huge achievement that stabilized the city’s position in economic exchange networks and alleviated human suffering on an impressive scale.
Draining these swampy basins in the city had an additional effect: it opened up hundreds of square kilometers to urban development. Since the city’s founding in 1718, urbanization was largely limited to the natural levees along the Mississippi River’s banks, as well as a few narrow ridges (ancient river channels) that crisscrossed lands that were otherwise at or slightly above sea level. The city’s population (280,000 in 1900) was packed into dense urban neighborhoods along these ridges and riverbanks. Modern drainage (begun ca. 1900) de-coupled the city’s urban form from these constraints, and the newly drained basins (or polders) were subsequently developed, with medium to low-density residential housing as the dominant land use.
This draining and development process generated several problems, both immediate and in the longer term. The massive drainage pumps did more than just convey stormwater into local estuaries—the groundwater was actually removed as well, lowering the city’s water table substantially. The highly organic and peaty soils in these former swamplands were incredibly prone to subsidence, and sink they did, up to three meters or more in some places. Much of this subsidence occurred in the first few decades after the drainage system was implemented, posing challenges for the installation of roads, sewer lines, building foundations, and so forth. This underscores the essential paradox of hydraulic drainage in these organic deltaic soils: the more water that is removed from the soil, the more the land sinks, but the more the land sinks, the less drainage is assisted by gravity, and the more energy intensive and technically challenging removing that water then becomes.
This ecological reality was further complicated by a perverse incentive: as more people moved into these highly modified drained polders, residents demanded even more intensive drainage. This paradox involves trading one temporal pattern of ecological disturbance for another. Everyday rainstorms no longer led to major street flooding and standing water, but especially intense rainstorms could have dramatic effects on residents and infrastructure, as the bowl-like topography the drainage system helped to create filled with water. It could take days to fully drain against gravity.
The Gentilly neighborhood typifies this historical sequence and set of environmental, technological, and political factors. It is situated between a narrow ridgeline that bears its name (Gentilly Ridge) to the south, a deepwater navigation canal to the east (the Industrial Canal), and Lake Pontchartrain to the north (figure 1). Nearly every drop of rain that falls in the neighborhood must make its way into drainage culverts, through a series of massive pumping stations, and finally into Lake Pontchartrain. In some cases, stormwater must be mechanically elevated 2-3 meters before reaching the lake, which is more or less at sea level. By retaining more water on the landscape, planners in New Orleans are hoping that green infrastructure can be part of the answer in ensuring the city’s long-term sustainability in the face of rising seas and more intense storms.
Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hundreds of experts in the fields of water management, civil engineering, urban planning, and ecological design have helped develop proposals for re-thinking and adapting the city’s approach to water. Local architect David Waggoner has been at the forefront of this by convening collaborative planning processes that draw upon international best practices for dealing with urbanization in the context of river deltas. These insights were subsequently elaborated into the “urban water plan,” a vision for adapting the city’s water systems. Building upon these initiatives, the city of New Orleans was selected by the Rockefeller Foundation as one of its first “100 Resilient Cities” program. New Orleans was the first among these cities to develop its “Resilience Strategy,” a plan completed in 2015 that drew heavily upon the afore-mentioned work on water management. With the funding from HUD awarded for the Gentilly Resilience District in 2016, these post-Katrina planning initiatives are now finally on the cusp of being implemented at a neighborhood scale.
With funding for green infrastructure finally coming down the pipeline, how will the Gentilly project achieve its multiple goals of improving groundwater retention, mitigating flood risk, and improving community green spaces? Even though the project is limited to a single neighborhood, the initiative has multiple sites and interventions. Let’s focus one of the project’s signature sites. The Mirabeau Water garden is a 25-acre (.10km2) empty tract of land in the heart of the Gentilly neighborhood. Formerly, the site was home to a sprawling convent, which was gutted by a fire in 2006, a year after it was inundated by floodwaters following Katrina.
The property, now controlled by the city government, will be re-engineered as a catchment for stormwater and a public green space. Stormwater from nearby streets will be conveyed into wetland basins, or terraces, along a long swath of the property. This water is thus removed, at least temporarily, from the city’s drainage systems, adding capacity to the system during heavy rainfall events. Vegetative plantings are planned throughout the Mirabeau site to help filter the captured water, provide habitat for wildlife, and beautify the site for visitors (see figure 1).
Similar interventions are planned at a large remnant forest tract nearby, at an even larger scale. With assistance from local urban ecologists, ecological monitoring will be conducted on all the project’s sites, to track how alterations in the area’s hydrology impact plants, rodents, birds, and insects. In the subtropical and swampy environment of South Louisiana, environmental management is a critical aspect of urban public health. While green infrastructure interventions aim to mitigate flood risks and improve urban green space for city-dwellers, the prospect of a project that involves large basins of standing water give rise to concerns over nuisance species like mosquitos and rodents. This has become especially poignant in the summer of 2016, as Miami deals with a Zika outbreak in the heart of the city.
The Zika outbreak underscores a certain paradox with green infrastructure in New Orleans, and emphasizes the importance of careful monitoring and adaptive management of such projects. The city’s unified drainage system generated massive improvements in urban public health in the early 20th century. But the unintended effects of that same system are now threatening the very habitability of the city in the face of rising seas and intense storms. Open canals, bioswales, and constructed wetlands might prove effective in reducing subsidence and adding capacity to the city’s drainage system during storms. At the same time, these projects will, to some degree, replicate eco-hydrological conditions that prevailed in the city before 1900, though on a small scale. As such, the Gentilly project will have to wrangle with all of the ecological ramifications of these interventions, even the undesirable ones. City leaders understand this challenge, and are confident that New Orleans does not have to choose between a terra-formed and vulnerable bowl, and a mushy swampland full of disease vectors, such as mosquitos.
In subsequent posts, I hope to document the implementation of the Gentilly Resilience District project, exploring how the project reshapes water, ecosystems, and communities. If the project manages to achieve the suite of benefits it is aiming for, a strong argument could be made for implementing similar projects throughout New Orleans. The widespread implementation of these measures could help the entire city balance wet and dry conditions, and to be much better positioned to cope with the impacts of climate change.
Walk through any major city and you’ll see vacant land. These are the weed lots, garbage strewn undeveloped spaces, and high crime areas that most urban residents consider blights on the neighborhood. In some cases, neighbors have organized to transform these spaces into community amenities such as shared garden spaces, but all too often these lots persist as unrecognized opportunities for urban improvement. In densely populated cities with sometimes few opportunities for new park or green space development, small vacant lots could provide green relief, especially in low-income areas with reduced access to urban parkland. (You can read the academic paper on this research here.)
And yet, few cities are taking advantage of these underutilized spaces to improve urban biodiversity and provide additional ecosystem services. What’s even more surprising is the vast amount of urban land that is categorized as vacant. Take New York City for example: in this urban metropolis there are 29,782 parcels designated by the city tax code as vacant within the city boundaries, not counting vacant land in the surrounding suburbs and exurbs. This totals more than 7,300 acres of land that could be providing important social and ecological benefits for urban residents.
There are 29,782 publicly owned (red) and privately owned (orange) vacant lots in New York City. When combined they represent a sizable opportunity for urban improvement. NYC Parks are shown in green for reference. Image credit: Peleg Kremer (all rights reserved).Urban garden in Manhattan, New York City. Photo by David Maddox.
Here is what we know: Local and regional urban ecosystems provide important services that urban residents rely on for daily living. For example, ecosystems can supply clean water, produce food, absorb air pollution, mitigate urban heat, provide opportunity for recreation, decrease crime, and more. A recent publication from TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) details the list of ecosystem services that can be provided by urban ecosystems.
And yet, all cities do not have the same level of food production, clean water supply, or air pollution removal. Different levels of ecosystem services among cities are due to a myriad of reasons. However, research is beginning to make clear that to improve urban sustainability and resilience city planners and policymakers need to strategically develop and manage the ecological resources within the city to meet the needs of expanding urban populations.
Green infrastructure is being improved and expanded in New York City to improve the capacity of the city to absorb stormwater run-off, an important ecosystem service of green space in cities. Photo by New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.
To improve the quality and quantity of ecosystem services that cities can reliably depend on, and given the financial difficulties most cities are facing, we need to find the low cost investment/high rate of return urban spaces where urban biodiversity and ecosystem services can be improved. These have to be spaces where people can interact with people (a component of ecosystems) and where people can interact with other components of ecosystems (air, soil, water, plants, animals). It’s also important for us to better understand urban people-nature dynamics (also termed social-ecological dynamics), which are about how interacting social and ecological components of ecosystems change over space and time and, for me anyway, understanding what these changes mean for future urban sustainability and resilience.
Lots of vacant land
One of the results of rapid population shifts in cities is the abandonment of previously occupied land. You can see the effects of this in older cities just by walking around. It is nearly impossible not to find land that is vacant in a city, regardless of whether you are in New York, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, or Jerusalem. Vacant land typically results from human migration, deindustrialization, environmental disaster, decreased birth rates or contamination, and occurs at various concentrations in cities across the world. Though all cities have vacant land, some have more than others. In some cities the amount of vacancy is tremendous, such as in Detroit, Michigan (USA) where nearly one third of the city is vacant land.
So, why am I so captivated with these overlooked, unmanaged, vacant spaces in cities, especially considering that they are not the most pleasant places in which to conduct research? For one simple reason: vacant, underutilized land has the potential to provide cities with opportunity to create and develop new ecosystems that support biodiversity and increase the provisioning of vital ecosystem services for urban residents. Vacant land is ripe for transformation into more sustainable, resilient urban forms. I’m not the only one who is thinking along these lines. Urban ecologists have long recognized that the ecology in the city is not relegated to parks and protected natural areas, but exists everywhere: on rooftops, in sidewalk cracks, in backyards, in soils, rivers, and streams, in narrow green islands between streets, and also in vacant land areas.
[Interesting side note: Urban ecology as a discipline basically started with the study of plant communities on vacant land in European cities. Urban botanists in Berlin and other European cities studied the response of urban plants on “ruderal” bombed sites following World War II. These vacant sites, often consisting of rubble from destroyed buildings, provided warm, dry conditions for locally adapted plants to occupy.]
Researchers have noticed that vacant land in cities is created by a variety of urban processes, including deindustrialization, demographic and preference-based residential shifts, suburban expansion, and relocation of the work force. When my lab at The New School in New York City reviewed the literature, we noticed that the proportion of vacant lot area to total land area in large U.S. cities is relatively persistent, especially along the East Coast and Midwest of American cities, and remarkably, does not appear to be related to population growth.
Vacant lands constitute a large fraction of urban land area. In fact, vacant land in U.S. cities of more than 100,000 people varies between 19 and 25% of total land area — our research papers are in review in journals now — while for cities with populations greater than 250,000, vacant land makes up between 12.5 and 15% of total land area. The fact that the proportion of urban vacant land is fairly persistent in spite of population growth implies that vacant land may be a lasting phenomenon in urban areas, at least in the United States, and suggests that we need to be doing a lot more to manage these spaces to meet the current and future needs of urban nature and urban residents.
Vacant lots as opportunities
Another persistence is the way people tend to think about vacant lots: as areas associated with crime, abandonment, depressed real estate values, trash, overgrown weeds, pests, and general economic and/or social failure. Most people consider vacant lots to be negatively impacting community vitality.
I want to offer a challenging perspective, which is that we begin viewing vacant lots as opportunities for land use transformations that can contribute to community development. Vacant land in cities could provide important social and ecological benefits, including habitat for biodiversity, provisioning of ecosystem services, and new green space for residents in underserved neighborhoods of the city.
Given global urbanization trends compounded by the effects of climate change and other environmental pressures that are fast approaching or even exceeding planetary boundaries, one could argue that the primary dynamic that must be understood for increasing urban sustainability and resilience is the social-ecological relationships between humans and urban ecosystems.
Most humans are urban residents now. Which means, if you grow up in a city, your understanding of, and connection to, nature comes through interaction with urban nature. So, what is the state of our urban nature? Is it up to the task? Future decisions about how we steward our planet will likely be made by urbanites. What will their view of nature be? We don’t have answers to these questions yet, though the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity has recently launched a series of comprehensive publications to try to get a handle on the state of urban nature. However, many of us in the field of urban ecology and related disciplines would probably argue, first, that there is already amazing nature in cities, and second, that this nature is often overlooked, under-managed, misunderstood, abused, neglected, or wiped out for development. In any case, if we can agree that the current state of urban nature is not necessarily the ideal state for increasing the connectedness between people and ecosystems and for providing high quality urban living environments for human well-being, then where are the opportunities for making improvements?
Clearly, vacant land is an opportunity, and it’s time to seize it.
The benefits of vacant lot transformation
Here is a short list of the potential benefits that small investments to transform vacant land into more useful spaces could provide to cities:
Stormwater absorption
Air temperature regulation
Wind speed mitigation
Air purification (pollution absorption)
Carbon absorption
Flood control
Habitat for biodiversity (e.g. plants and pollinators)
Green corridors between urban natural areas
Recreation space
Community garden space
Social gathering space
Temporary art installation space
Crime reduction
Noise reduction
Neighborhood beautification
Increased adjacent property value
Sense of place
Environmental education opportunity
Sense of well-being
Green spaces for low-income neighborhoods
Residential and commercial building energy savings
However, the full ecological potential of the urban environment, especially in vacant land areas, is just beginning to be understood.
Some U.S. cities are beginning to get the idea. In Baltimore, Maryland, a city leading the way in urban ecological research by way of the long-term Baltimore Ecosystem Study, vacant land has been considered from the perspective of pockets for urban plant diversity. In Brooklyn, New York a non-profit group, 596acres.org, has mapped all the vacant lots in Brooklyn and is working with local neighborhood communities to turn these spaces into gardens; places not only for growing food, but also as social spaces for neighborhood residents. In Detroit, citizens, farmers, and entrepreneurs are turning vast amounts of vacant land into urban farms. And in Philadelphia, when researchers cleaned up and greened vacant lots, the crime rate fell.
At The New School in New York City, post-doctoral fellow Peleg Kremer and PhD candidate Zoé Hamstead have been working with me to map vacant lots to understand the social and ecological value of these spaces. Our goal has been to understand the combined value of urban vacant land in order to illuminate overlooked spaces in the city where policy and planning could simultaneously meet goals for biodiversity habitat, ecosystem services provisioning, and social justice. This work (currently in review for publication) shows that, at least for New York City, vacant lots are already providing a host of cultural, provisioning, and regulating ecosystem services.
For example, we were a bit surprised to find that most vacant lots are already relatively green. Trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants dominate the vacant lots we sampled. On the other hand, there were many vacant lots located in lower income areas where people lived with fewer parks and other green spaces, neighborhoods where existing vacant lots could be actively managed to provide new green infrastructure to meet community needs.
“Develop Differently”: If you have lemons, make lemonade
It’s interesting to look at just how many vacant lots cities have. Perhaps you should take a look at the tax code in your city to see how many spaces tax assessors identify as vacant?
In New York City, there are nearly 30,000 sites identified as vacant lots. Numbers like these demonstrate the vast potential for providing ecosystem services and new urban biodiversity habitats. But a significant requirement in making these services possible over the long term is to assure they are planning and management priorities, both at the city and neighborhood level.
Currently, there is very little management of urban vacant land. Since most vacant lots in New York are small (<500m2), they may not be easily developed into more traditional built infrastructure such as housing, retail, or other typical uses. Lots that are small in size or otherwise make development challenging present ideal opportunities to develop differently, by enhancing or preserving urban green infrastructure. Land that is topographically-challenging, for example, may be well suited as nature preserves, or oddly shaped lots may serve as greenways or small pocket parks with public access. Land near existing rail or other transportation corridors where other types of development are unlikely may serve as portions of greenways with pedestrian and bike access.
Google Earth Images of vacant lots in New York City shown here represent a range of contexts, from a high social need area (e.g. low-income, high population density) near a high ecological quality (highly green) vacant lot on the left (H-H) to a low social need area (e.g. high-income, low population density) near a low ecological quality (completely paved) vacant lot in L-L. Image Credit: Peleg Kremer.
It is common to find vacant lots in both low and high-density residential areas. Some may be small lots, located in the middle of rows of low-rise and low-density residential streets. Others, as in the example of a New York City community garden in the photo below, are part of higher density residential area. The lot on the far left in the image above representing tree cover within a residential context serves as an example of the importance of the location context and spatial distribution of vacant lots. In this case, the relatively high ecological quality (e.g. green) vacant lot is immediately adjacent to a low-income, high population density neighborhood. This lot is also next to a large public open space (not shown) and provides a connection between open space to the southeast and street trees to the northwest. Such connections are crucial in the maintenance and provisioning of ecosystem services, as well as the maintenance of biodiversity that supports ecosystem services in cities. Vacant lots could serve as corridors and connectors between fragmented urban green spaces, improving the ability for species to migrate between the built infrastructures of the city.
Vacant land can be transformed into community gardens, which provide multiple benefits for urban nature and urban residents. Photo by David Maddox.
The temporal perspective is also important to consider in addition to the spatial. For example, even if there is planned development for a particular vacant parcel, we should be considering the option of utilizing vacant lots — in the short, medium and long terms — as urban nature sites that provide and support ecosystem services. In a 2002 Planners Advisory Report of the American Planning Association (506/507 Old Cities/Green Cities: Communities Transform Unmanaged Land. J. Blaine Bonham, JR., Gerri Spilka, and Darl Rastorfer. March 2002. 123pp), the authors suggest that vacant land slated for eventual redevelopment should serve interim beneficial uses such as community gardens, wildlife gardens, public plantings and recreational areas so as to avoid the common blighting influence on the surrounding community. Community gardens, open spaces and other urban greening sites provide important cultural value in addition to ecological amenities such as food, air quality improvement and stormwater mitigation.
To develop differently, we need to plan and design urban spaces where ecological and cultural value can be intertwined. Importantly, as communities transform low quality landscapes into community gardens or other sites of community engagement, more resilient communities may emerge; communities that are better equipped to deal with future urban stresses. Community engagement that involves ecological resources may, in turn, perpetuate the development of ecosystem services and enhancement of community cultural amenities that continuously build both social and ecological resilience through a virtuous cycle. In this way, transformation of vacant land may provide an opportunity for enhancing the resilience of coupled social-ecological systems in urban areas.
There is still work to do to understand in detail how to best to use the cache of vacant land that cities have. Ecologists and social scientists could be very useful to planners, designers, and policymakers who are interested in transforming blighted urban spaces into social and ecological amenities. For example, differentiating vacant lot types according to how they are actually used, even if their use is temporary, can help planners identify target areas for improvement, as well as indicate possibilities for land transformation. Similarly, by assessing the size, location and shape characteristics of vacant lots, planners may be able to identify suitable spaces for various community purposes.
For instance, small, oddly-shaped lots along roadways with foot traffic may be best developed as pocket parks, while larger lots adjacent to residential buildings may be better suited for urban agriculture or neighborhood parks. Because most vacant lots are in residential areas, they can serve as spaces for community activities where people live, thus creating the potential to support neighborhood improvement and community engagement. Essentially, vacant lots could provide opportunity for developing social capacity at the same time that they provide new urban ecological infrastructure.
Frankly, vacant land has been overlooked for far too long. If cities were to invest in the social-ecological transformation of vacant land into more useful forms, they would be creating the potential to increase the overall sustainability and resilience of the city. Depending on the kinds of land transformations urban planners and designers dream up, vacant land could provide increased green space for urban gardening and recreation, habitat for biodiversity, opportunities for increasing water and air pollution absorption and many other regulating, provisioning, and cultural ecosystem services.
Community gardeners across the world have capitalized on the opportunities of urban vacant land for decades, and the rest of us should too.
Timon McPhearson
New York City
USA
For more information see:
McPhearson, Timon, Peleg Kremer, and Zoé Hamstead. “Mapping Ecosystem Services in New York City: Applying a Social-Ecological Approach in Urban Vacant Land.” Ecosystem Services (2013):11-26http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2013.06.005
Kremer, Peleg, Zoé Hamstead, andTimon McPhearson. “A Social-Ecological Assessment of Vacant Lots in New York City.” Landscape and Urban Planning (2013): 218-233 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2013.05.003
Coexistence between nature and urban is not a matter of experts but a matter directly related to the “civic values.” —De las Rivas
What is the shape and formal composition given by designers or people in general to nature in our cities? Is it beneficial for the landscape’s character or the identity of our urban environments? The many benefits of living nature for the welfare of citizens are well known. Benefits such as cleaning the air, mitigating extreme climate conditions, and providing shade, shelter and habitat for avifauna and microfauna are rightly highlighted at the outset of any conversation about the nature of cities.
It is time now to direct our eyes and efforts not just toward introducing, but also toward rediscovering nature in the city.
Without ignoring those fundamental aspects that support human life, we must also reflect on the intermingling of the appearance of and valuesembedded in the conformation or production of the urban landscape’s character: that is, the intangible benefits related to the messages citizens receive from the formal expressions of the whole environment and, particularly, of its natural components.
Landscape has been recognized, on one side, as a sort of palimpsest, built layer-by-layer through time. The question is whether those layers actually interweave or simply overlap and hide the previous ones, while, in the process, changing the local urban landscape’s character until there are no remnants of the original. Perhaps the increasing speed that, at present, characterizes the rise of each landscape attribute that can be considered a “layer” in this continuous evolving spiral is one of the causes that refuses proper and definitive fusion.
Original identity fades, changing faster than in typical ecological succession.
For example, as can be seen in the image below. The urban development of Bogotá has erased the original natural character of the plateau on which the city was established. Spread over an area of 1.587 square kilometers, the city is the 25th largest in the world. At 2,600 meters above sea level, the settlement began at the foot of the hills and devoured the immense wetland that existed there up to the sixteen century, when it became known to and was interfered with by the western world. Very little of the lentic water richness has been left intact. In this way, nature has been denied. The aqueous character and the thin and vertical shape of the vegetation that usually accompanies swamps, together with their related avifauna, have disappeared almost completely. Hence, the image could be of any city, anywhere. The settlement lost its native landscape identity, the root of its character.
No nature. Bogotá, Colombia, seen from the southwest. The city was developed on an ancient wetland, whose traces have almost completely disappeared. Photo: Gloria Aponte
On a different time scale, but as a tangible example, I can testify that more than twenty years ago, some decision makers, while traveling through the United States, fell in love with a particular tree species. “I will fashion that tree. You will remember me,” said one of them.
And actually, he got what he wanted: among many other roads, nearly seven kilometers of the Avenida 80 were planted with that species. This whim has influenced the experience, although unconsciously, of millions of people by making them think that autumn “seasonal” colors and sharp, palmate-shaped leaves are proper features for a place quite close to the equator. This new plant created a novel ecosystem that continues to deny opportunities and space for other autochthonous plant material more suited by shape, color, texture and habit to the original ecosystem and climatic zone. The vegetal associations of the mountains that gave a background to the town area forever changed.
Although trees or vegetation in general are the most obvious examples of nature in urban environments, nature is much more than that. The main structural natural feature that grants landscape character to a place is its topography. Topography is a broad determinant of space that, as the basic configurator or frame, defines the main view sheds and visual landscape impressions
Most Colombian cities are located on the Andes chain of mountains, where the structural natural relief is huge, even overwhelming. It cannot be avoided, although its flattening could be highly desired by planners and real estate developers to facilitate new occupations for the land or to make the land easier to use…or so proceeds the argument to convince potential clients. Planners and architects still do not manage to deal with the topographical conditions in an efficient manner, nor do they effectively deal with how to work with other professionals that could understand existing volumes and use their forms alongside the proposed ones.
Very little nature within the urban perimeter. Medellín, Colombia, seen from the northwest. The city climbs un the hill, leaving only the difficult relief unoccupied. Photo: Gloria Aponte
Respect the city`s underlying, transverse and surrounding nature
The City is a manmade product, and should produce a meaningful framework related to our living feelings, as part of the good quality of life that it is supposed to grant for its inhabitants. One of the deepest layers of our local culture is the belief of belonging to nature—our ancestors would never have said “the nature around us,” as it is commonly heard nowadays. They and the small groups of indigenous people still alive in the national territory refer to “the nature of which we are part.” They recognize that humanness is not just our connection to nature, but the conviction that we are part of nature, humans are nature, although many of our compatriots are determined to feel separated. The recent tools for planning cities reflect how, every day, our society has moved further from that traditional belief.
During the civic-academic revision of the recent Territory Ordering Plan for Medellín, I dared to propose that the first philosophical principle should be respect for the city’s underlying, transverse and surrounding nature. As simple as that. But this contribution, among other proposals in the same direction, was considered anecdotal and was left aside, even though its implications were not directly against development, competitiveness or innovation, which are the focus of the municipal or metropolitan development proposals for the near future.
In recent years, there has been a great concern for the so-called “urban-rural border,” particularly in this city. That strip of land is meant to stop urban growth beyond it, and markedly locates nature “out” (far from the city), and urban development “in,” though the city may be dotted with some manipulated vegetation that calms consciences and occasionally fulfills utilitarian needs.
Water flows across boundaries
One of the natural components that suffers in crossing the urban-rural border is running water. When natural water streams approach the urban area, they are usually intervened with and channelized; in this way, the water flow is forced up to unusual running speed, causing flooding, which is as harmful as the loss of dynamic. It means that, at first, streams lose their natural appearance to be dressed with rigid urban geometry, and later are completely buried in such a way that the urban environment loses the water’s natural manifestation, which would bring harmonious sounds, visual joy, dynamic and rhythm lessons. Citizens use the resource, but it comes separately from the symbiotic natural appearance, from the sensible, significant and symbolic message that water brings to human beings, who are deeply attached to it.
The puzzle of confronting urban and rural is not so simple. The answer is not a boundary between the two. From the landscape point of view, the border has to be conciliatory, joining and inclusive, without sharp edges. Articulation instead of limit, ecotone instead of frontier, are proposed from this perspective. Clearly, streams can be the threads used in such a sewing together.
Meanwhile, the “outside” part, currently called “rural,” is being colonized by different land uses—clearly of urban style, if not of urban political definition—such as condominiums, where the attitude of manipulating nature is fully embraced. In this way, like urban land, the land classified as rural also suffers from the replacement of “natural” nature by manipulated nature. The land is nominally “rural,” but its spirit is urban.
Geometricized nature to fulfill property demarcation purposes, on suburban land, near the Rionegro Airport. Photo: Gloria Aponte
Manipulated nature transmits a static feeling that has nothing to do with living nature.
The composition of its disposition, its characteristics, and its formal qualities have to be developed in such a way as to establish a dialogue with people, to give a message of welcoming, identification with places and orientation through them, all within the scale of city functionality.
Attending to the human scale is one of the keys to reestablishing the silenced dialogue between people and the other components of nature.
Exuberant vegetation, conditioning spaces to welcome to citizens. Outside Explora Park in Medellín. Photo: Gloria Aponte
Manipulation implies power, and human beings enjoy power. The joy of achieving our desires and seeing them materialized may be stronger than the feeling of belonging to nature and the attachment to local habitat. Manipulation just for the sake of self-satisfaction, fashion or to obtain cheaper materials is an irresponsible manner of civic or professional participation in city development. The image below shows how, unfortunately, this kind of manipulation is rapidly invading and proliferating in the residential areas of Medellín.
Manipulated nature. Loss of ecosystemic functions and emotional local significance. Laureles neighborhood. Photo: Gloria Aponte
Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, is at present quite well recognized internationally for many reasons. It has earned several acknowledgments, mainly based on its social resilience, demonstrated through the process of rebuilding social coexistence, improving security, promoting innovation and entrepreneurship, and many good quality urban projects developed under the flag of “social urbanism.” In a recent visit, Boaventura de Soussa Santos, during the VII CLACSO Conference, applauded the great transformations of this city but recommended that we leave aside the sense of triumph, and remember that it is not just with technology that problems can be solved. He drove his discourse towards social matters, but his comments can also be applied to nature.
While recognizing the efforts of the municipality towards so-called “urban silviculture,” a term that implies more forestry techniques than concepts and principles related to nature coexisting with city elements and intangible benefits in the urbanized scope, it is time now to direct our eyes and efforts not just toward introducing, but also toward rediscovering nature in the city. There is a need to work on an approach that starts from the significant value that nature holds and communicates this value to citizens through a message that leverages their emotions of identity and rootedness.
Nature to be rediscovered through the densely developed city. Photo: Gloria Aponte
As Paul Downton says in one of his inspiring TNOC contributions: The premises on which we build our cities and construct civilization, and the extent and means by which we include nature in our cities depends on what values we choose to adopt.
To recover vanishing values and respect for nature, especially vegetation, is not just a landscape architect’s whim or “style,” but a responsible contribution for surviving and urban life quality.
In this way, the proposal is to materialize values such as:
Feel part of nature. To understand that we are from the forest, from the earth, from the air itself, as the indigenous group Jaguares del Yuruparí (from the Vaupés Colombia) reminds us. Their knowledge of and consequent behavior in taking care of health are closely related to nature equilibrium and were recognized by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2011.
Respect nature. To recognize and understand the manifestations of the pre-existent nature, and interact with them instead of indiscriminately dominating them, has to be a mandatory guideline to start any new urban development on any scale in a particular allotment.
Be inspired by nature. Observation of nature has inspired many human inventions; those lessons are still there and for free in each local environment. Nature gives us lessons in resilience, rhythm, harmonious diversity and sound composition. We do not pretend to want to recover a state of purity or wildness, as it was centuries ago, but nonetheless landscapes to resemble the natural image that accompanied them in the past; to let that part of those layers permeate the strong new ones, and be incorporated into today’s urban life.
Be autochthonous. Use native vegetal material as much as possible. It is sound in the present climatic crisis, helping to moderate living conditions as well as to remember the original shape, image and formal composition required to preserve the character of our traditional landscape.
Concepts such as biophilia (the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms, as elucidated by E.O. Wilson), biomimicry (approaches to innovation that seek sustainable solutions to human challenges by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies. Biomimicry Institute 2015), and topophilia (the love of or emotional connections with place or physical environment,) can be inspirational, helping us to avoid falling into another kind of formalism. But we must understand the close relationship between function and natural form, enacting the message implied in the very presence of our own locally-rooted shapes, features and traces. We are as gods and have to get it right, says Stewart Brand in his call for responsibility in using the power of participation in co-building places where to live.
The urban will understand the natural, recomposing its reading of landscape. —De las Rivas.
Valores que subyacen al paisaje de las ciudades – los que SON y los que DEBERÍAN ser
La coexistencia ente la naturaleza y lo urbano, no es un asunto de expertos sino ununa cuestión directamente relacionada con “valores civiles” —De las Rivas.
Cuál es la apariencia y composición formal que los diseñadores y la gente en general le da a la naturaleza en nuestras ciudades? Conviene esta al carácter e identidad de nuestros ambientes urbanos?
Los beneficios de la naturaleza viva para el bienestar de los ciudadanos son bien conocidos. Beneficios tales como aire limpio; mitigación de condiciones climáticas extremas; provisión de sombra, abrigo y hábitat para avifauna y microfauna son resaltadas con toda la razón, para iniciar cualquier conversación acerca de la naturaleza en las ciudades.
Ahora es el momento de dirigir nuestros ojos y los esfuerzos no sólo hacia la introducción, sino también hacia el redescubrimiento de la naturaleza en la ciudad.
Sin pretender ignorar estos aspectos fundamentales que soportan la vida humana, es necesario reflexionar también sobre la entremezcla de la apariencia física de conjunto y los valores inmersos en la conformación o producción del carácter del paisaje urbano. Es decir, reflexionar sobre los beneficios intangibles que puede haber en los mensajes que los ciudadanos reciben de la expresión formal del ambiente total y, particularmente, de la de sus componentes naturales.
El paisaje ha sido reconocido como un palimpsesto, construido capa por capa a través del tiempo. La pregunta es si esas capas realmente se entretejen o simplemente se superponen y esconden a las anteriores, cambiando en el proceso el paisaje urbano local, hasta desaparecer totalmente los remanentes del carácter original. Quizá la creciente velocidad que actualmente caracteriza la aparición de cada nuevo atributo del paisaje, que puede ser considerado “capa” en esta continúa espiral evolutiva, es una de las causas que impide una fusión apropiada y definitiva.
La identidad original se desvanece, frente a cambios mucho más veloces que los de una sucesión ecológica natural.
Por ejemplo, como se observa en la Figura 1, el desarrollo urbano de Bogotá, ha borrado el carácter natural originario del altiplano en el que la ciudad se estableció y continúa creciente. Extendida sobre un área de 1.587 kilómetros cuadrados, la ciudad ocupa el lugar No. 25 entre las más grandes del mundo. A una altura de 2.600 msnm el asentamiento empezó al pié de la montaña y devoró el inmenso humedal que existía allí hasta el siglo XVI, cuando se conoció e inició la creciente intervención por parte de la civilización occidental. Muy poco de la riqueza del sistema léntico ha quedado intacto. Así, la naturaleza ha sido negada en el lugar. El carácter acuoso y las siluetas verticales y finas de la vegetación que usualmente acompaña a los pantanos, junto con su avifauna relacionada, han desaparecido casi completamente. Así, la imagen de la ciudad de hoy podría ser la de cualquier ciudad, en cualquier parte del mundo. El asentamiento perdió la identidad de su paisaje nativo, la raíz de su carácter.
Figura 1. Bogotá. No naturaleza. Bogotá, Colombia, visto desde el suroeste. La ciudad se desarrolló sobre un antiguo humedal, cuyas huellas han desaparecido casi por completo. Foto: Gloria Aponte
En una escala de tiempo diferente, pero como un ejemplo tangible, puedo testificar que más de 20 años atrás, algunos tomadores de decisiones, en un viaje por los Estados Unidos, se enamoraron de una especie arbórea particular: pondré de moda ese árbol, se acordarán de mí, dijo uno de ellos. Y realmente, logró lo que quería: entre muchas otras vías urbanas de la ciudad, cerca de 7 kmts de la Avenida 80 fueron plantados con ese árbol. Un capricho que ha influenciado la experiencia, así sea inconsciente, de millones de personas, haciéndoles creer que los colores del otoño y las hojas agudamente palmeadas, son rasgos propios de un lugar tan cercano al Ecuador como Bogotá. Esta nueva planta fomenta un nuevo ecosistema que continúa negando oportunidades y espacio a material vegetal autóctono, más apropiado en color, forma, textura y hábitat al ecosistema original, a la zona climática local. Las asociaciones vegetales de montaña que ofrecían un telón de fondo al área urbana cambiaron para siempre.
Aunque los árboles y la vegetación en general son los ejemplos más obvios de la naturaleza en ambientes urbanos, el medio natural es mucho más que eso. El principal rasgo natural estructural que garantiza el carácter del paisaje de un lugar es su relieve. Este es un fuerte determinante del espacio que, como configurador o marco básico, define las principales cuencas visuales y vistas paisajísticas.
La mayoría de las ciudades colombianas están localizadas en la cadena montañosa de los Andes, donde el relieve natural es imponente y a veces sobre cogedor. No puede ser evitado, así “aplanarlo” sea el mayor deseo de planificadores o promotores inmobiliarios, para facilitar la ocupación del suelo, hacerlo accesible y usar estos argumentos para convencer potenciales clientes. Planificadores y arquitectos aún no logran arreglárselas con las condiciones topográficas de manera eficiente, o trabajar con otros profesionales que puedan establecer un diálogo equilibrado de los volúmenes nuevos con los existentes.
Figura 2. Muy poco la naturaleza dentro del perímetro urbano. Medellín, Colombia, visto desde el noroeste. La ciudad sube por la colina de la ONU, dejando sólo el alivio difícil desocupada. Foto: Gloria Aponte
Respetar la naturaleza subyacente, envolvente y transversal a la ciudad
La ciudad es producción humana, sin embargo tiene que producir un marco significativo para la vida, y como parte de la calidad de la misma, atender la percepción e interpretación del hábitat por parte de los habitantes. En una de las profundas capas de nuestra cultura local, está el convencimiento de pertenecer a la naturaleza. Nuestros ancestros nunca habrán dicho: ” la naturaleza a nuestro alrededor”, tal como se oye decir con frecuencia actualmente; ellos y los reducidos grupos de indígenas sobrevivientes en el territorio nacional, se refieren a : ” la naturaleza de la cual hacemos parte”. Ellos reconocen que ser humano, no significa sólo tener un vínculo con la naturaleza, sino la convicción de ser parte de ella, los humanos SON naturaleza así muchos de nuestros compatriotas se empeñen en sentirse aparte.Las herramientas recientes para la planificación de las ciudades reflejan cómo nuestra sociedad está cada vez más lejos de aquella creencia.
Durante la revisión cívico-académica del reciente Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial para Medellín, me atreví a proponer que el primer principio filosófico en el documento debería ser: respeto por la naturaleza subyacente transversal y envolvente a la ciudad. Tan simple como eso. Pero esta contribución junto con otras en la misma dirección, fue considerada anecdótica y dejada de lado, aunque sus consecuencias no irían en detrimento del urbanismo, la competitividad o la innovación, focos de los propósitos del desarrollo municipal o metropolitano para el futuro cercano.
En años recientes ha habido gran interés hacia el “borde urbano-rural” particularmente en Medellín. Se supone que esa franja de tierra detendrá la ocupación urbana, y claramente deja la naturaleza por fuera (lejos de la ciudad), y el desarrollo urbano adentro, aunque salpicado con algo de vegetación manipulada para calmar conciencias y cumplir con necesidades utilitarias inmediatas.
El agua fluye a través de las fronteras
Uno de los componentes naturales que se ve más afectado al crux¡zar la frontera del borde urbano-rural, son las corrientes de agua. Cuando las quebradas se acercan l área urbana, generalmente son canalizadas, de esta manera el agua corriente es forzada a velocidades inusuales causando inundaciones al final, lo cual es tan peligroso como la pérdida total de la dinámica natural. Significa que las quebradas pierden su apariencia natural, vestidas al comienzo con una geometría urbana rígida, para luego ser completamente escondidas al enterrarlas de tal manera que el ambiente urbano pierde las manifestaciones que le son propias al agua natural y que podrían aportar sonidos armoniosos, disfrute visual, y lecciones de dinámica y ritmo. Los ciudadanos usan el recurso, pero este llega separadamente de la simbiótica apariencia natural, de lo sensible, y de los mensajes simbólicos y significantes que el agua trae a los seres humanos, quienes estamos profundamente atados a ella.
El rompecabezas de confrontar, o mejor articular lo urbano con lo rural, no es tan simple.
La respuesta no es una frontera entre los dos. Desde el punto de vista del paisaje, el borde tiene que ser conciliador, de unión, inclusivo, sin límites rígicdos. Articulación en lugar de límite, ecotono en lugar de frontera, es lo que se propone desde esta perspectiva Claramente las quebradas pueden ser los hilos que logren esa costura. http://www.intechopen.com/books/landscape-planning/landscape-planning-in-borders
En simultánea, la parte de afuera, comúnmente llamada “rural” está siendo colonizada por diferentes usos de la tierra, de estilo claramente urbano, aunque no necesariamente por decisión política, tales como condominios, donde la actitud de manipular la naturaleza es totalmente acogida. De esta manera, así como la tierra urbana, la tierra rural sufre del reemplazo de la naturaleza “natural” por una naturaleza manipulada. Esta tierra es nominalmente rural pero su espíritu es urbano.
Figura 3. Rionegro. Naturaleza geometrizadas para cumplir con los propósitos de delimitación de propiedad, en un terreno suburbano, cerca del aeropuerto de Rionegro. Foto: Gloria Aponte
La naturaleza manipulada trasmite un sentimiento de estatismo que nada tiene que ver con la naturaleza viva.
La composición o disposición, sus características y sus calidades formales, deben ser desarrolladas de tal manera que establezcan un diálogo significativo con la gente, dar un mensaje de bienvenida, de acogida, de identificación de los lugares y orientación a través de ellos, todo dentro de la escala de funcionalidad de la ciudad.
Atender a la escala humana es una de las claves para el restablecimiento del diálogo ahora silenciado entre la gente y los demás componentes de la naturaleza.
Figura 4. Exuberante vegetación, espacios de acondicionamiento para dar la bienvenida a los ciudadanos. Fuera Parque Explora en Medellín. Foto: Gloria Aponte
La manipulación implica poder, y los seres humanos disfrutamos el poder. El disfrute de lograr nuestros deseos y verlos materializados puede ser mas fuerte que el sentimiento de pertenencia a la naturaleza y el apego al hábitat local. La manipulación solo por el placer de la propia satisfacción, por moda o por usar materiales más baratos es una manera irresponsable de participación cívica o profesional en el desarrollo de la ciudad. La imagen en la figura 5 muestra cómo desafortunadamente este fenómeno rápidamente prolifera e invade las áreas residenciales de Medellín.
Figura 5. Naturaleza manipulada. La pérdida de las funciones ecosistémicas y significado local emocional. Barrio Laureles. Foto: Gloria Aponte
Medellín, la segunda ciudad colombiana, es en la actualidad internacionalmente reconocida por diversas razones. Ha recibido varios premios, principalmente por su resiliencia social, demostrada a través del proceso de reconstrucción de la coexistencia social, el mejoramiento de los niveles de seguridad, la promoción de la innovación y el emprenderismo, y muchos proyectos urbanos de destacada calidad, adelantados bajo la bandera del “urbanismo social”. En una visita reciente, durante la Conferencia VII CLACSO, Boaventura de Soussa Santos aplaudía las grandes transformaciones de la ciudad pero recomendaba moderar el sentimiento de triunfalismo y recordar que no es solo con base en tecnología que se solucionan los problemas. Orientaba su discurso a asuntos sociales, pero éste bien puede ser aplicado hacia la naturaleza también.
A la vez que se reconocen los esfuerzos municipales a través de la denominada “silvicultura urbana”, término que implica más técnicas forestales que conceptos y principios relacionados a la coexistencia de la naturaleza con los elementos de la ciudad y beneficios intangibles en el espectro urbano, es tiempo ahora de dirigir la mirada y los esfuerzos no solo hacia introducir vegetación en la ciudad sino también hacia el redescubrimiento de la naturaleza en la ciudad. Se requiere trabajar en una aproximación que empieza desde el valor significativo que la naturaleza conlleva y comunicar estos valores a los ciudadanos a través de un mensaje que promueve sus emociones de identidad y arraigo.
Figura 6. Naturaleza que se redescubrió a través de la ciudad densamente desarrollado. Foto: Gloria Aponte
Como afirma Paul Downton en una de sus inspiradoras contribuciones en TNOC: Las premisas sobre las cuales edificamos nuestras ciudades y construimos civilización, y la medida y y maneras como incluimos naturaleza en nuestras ciudades depende de cuáles valores escogemos adoptar.
Recobrar los valores en proceso de desaparición, con respecto a la naturaleza y particularmente la vegetación, no es simplemente un capricho de arquitecto paisajista ó un estilo, sino una contribución responsable para la supervivencia y la calidad de vida urbana. En este sentido la propuesta consiste en materializar valores tales como:
Sentirse parte de la naturaleza. Entender que: somos parte del bosque, de la tierra, del aire mismo, tal como nos lo recuerdan los Jaguares de Yuruparí (del Vaupés colombiano). Su conocimiento y consecuente comportamiento al cuidar la salud , en estrecha relación con el equilibrio de la naturaleza ha sido reconocido como Patrimonio Cultural Intangible de la Humanidad por UNESCO en 2011.
Respetar la naturaleza. Reconocer y entender las manifestaciones de la naturaleza pre-existente e interactuar con ella en lugar de dominarla indiscriminadamente, tiene que ser un lineamiento mandatorio para empezar cualquier nuevo desarrollo urbano en cualquier escala en un determinado predio.
Inspirarse en la naturaleza. La observación de la naturaleza ha inspirado numerosas invenciones humanas, esas lecciones están aún ahí, gratuitamente, en cada ambiente local. La naturaleza proporciona lecciones de resiliencia, ritmo, diversidad armónica y acertada composición. No se pretende volver a un estado prístino como fue hace mucho tiempo, pero sí asemejar la imagen que acompañó a la naturaleza de entonces. Permitir que aquellas capas permeen las nuevas y trasciendan a la vida urbana de hoy.
Ser autóctono. Usar material vegetal nativo tanto como sea posible. Es lo que corresponde hacer, en las condiciones actuales de crisis climática para ayudar a moderar las condiciones de vida así como recordar las formas, la imagen y la composición formal originales, para preservar el carácter de nuestro paisaje original
Conceptos como biofilia (la filiación emocional innata de los seres humanos con otros organismos vivos, tal como lo presenta E.O. Wilson), la biomímesis (aproximaciones a la innovación en busca de soluciones sustentables a retos actuales, emulando comprobadas estrategias y patrones de la naturaleza. Según el Biomimicry Institute 2015) y topofilia (el amor por, o conexiones emocionales con el lugar o el ambiente físico), son definitivamente inspiradores y nos ayudan a evitar la caída en el formalismo. Por supuesto habrá que entender la estrecha relación entre función y forma natural, promulgando el mensaje implícito en la presencia de formas, características y rasgos de raíz local. Somos como dioses, así que tenemos que hacerlo bien, dice Stewart Brand en su llamado al uso responsable del poder cuando participamos en la construcción de los lugares para vivir.
Lo urbano entenderá lo natural, recomponiendo su lectura del paisaje. —De las Rivas
Urban parks and green infrastructure are often touted for their benefits in providing for urban biodiversity. There have been several posts about this subject in this blog—by Tim Beatley, Thomas Elmqvist, Russell Galt, Bill Sherwonit, Bob Sallinger, and others—and it’s clear that a core of scientists, designers, planners, and community leaders are doing great work to support the presence of all kinds of non-human life in our urban spaces.
There are a lot of reasons that we should support urban biodiversity. On the utilitarian side, these organisms provide ecosystem services like photosynthesis, decomposition, control of pests, and the processing of air and water pollution. They also provide recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual value—many urban dwellers appreciate living with this menagerie of other creatures for their beauty and companionship. There’s also something to be said for the intrinsic rights of these living beings to exist in these places—especially considering they may long predate the arrival of humans and the construction of the cities.
In my work with various partners in New York City studying and managing forests, wetlands, grasslands, and green infrastructure, I work with people that largely take the value of this biodiversity as a given. Many of the projects we undertake include goals to foster biodiversity, though not always with a formal discussion of why. In the classes I teach, the students, most of whom are in environmental programs, generally don’t need to be convinced that the recovery of wild species in urban systems is a good thing. I suspect many of the readers of this blog also have a gut reaction that urban biodiversity is good.
But when I step outside my usual professional circles, I realize the much broader set of ideas, values, and opinions concerning our non-human neighbors.
Who would want to make a corridor for bees?
I have been working with several graduate students on projects studying which kinds of insects visit green roofs throughout New York City, and how different kinds of plant communities affect that visitation. One interesting idea is to study how these rooftop patches of vegetation might facilitate the movement of insects though the urban landscape. It is possible that green roofs may offer “stepping stones” of habitat that attract insects and functionally connect larger green spaces like parks. These roofs might thereby facilitate the movement of insects throughout a city and perhaps lead to higher site-level diversity, more stable populations, or greater levels of ecosystem services. Ecologists use the term “corridor” to reflect the idea that small patches of suitable habitat can serve to connect larger patches in an otherwise inhospitable landscape.
Bees visiting goldenrod flowers on a school green roof in the Bronx, New York City. Photo: Matt Palmer
I was recently in a committee meeting for an engineering student who suggested that his planned rooftop plant installations—primarily designed for cooling and stormwater management—would also have benefits as corridors for insects, especially bees. At the end of the presentation one of the other professors, an eminent engineer, seemed pleased with the ideas overall but was bewildered by the idea that attracting bees would be a good thing. When he heard “corridors for bees” he had a mental image of swarms of bees frequently passing by the roof and harassing the people who may be up there to enjoy the space. Once we explained more about what we might expect (there would be no river of bees, and those that did come would be busily attending the flowers), the fears were somewhat allayed.
But it took some convincing about why this would be a good thing.
In just about any terrestrial ecosystem, insects are going to be the largest slice of the biodiversity pie. As a group, they provide an incredible array of ecosystem services including pollinating flowers, consuming organic wastes, controlling pests, and as food for other animals like birds. However, a small number of the insects in a community may pose risks—transmitting disease, stinging or biting, damaging desirable vegetation—and these need to be addressed honestly in any discussion of the costs and benefits of designing or managing for insects. As Timon McPhearson discussed in his post on this blog, we need to measure and discuss both services and disservices if we want to make a fair presentation of how we should manage urban biodiversity.
Another concern is about the emotional response that many people have about insects—fear, disgust, and/or discomfort. There are a few charismatic insect groups that seem to enjoy broad support (butterflies, ladybugs, fireflies), but a lot of folks would sooner kill an insect than welcome it to share their space. We should make that case that managing for insects is in our best interests if we want high-functioning urban ecosystems. After all, as the eminent naturalist and scientist E.O. Wilson has said, they are “the little things who run the world”.
But we have a steep hill to climb to make that case with a lot of the public.
“Nuisance” wildlife
While public attitudes about insects may be generally negative, the situation with mammals and birds is somewhat more nuanced. While some of these animals draw widespread feelings of disgust or discomfort (like skunks or vultures) in ways similar to insects, many mammals and birds have very active groups of supporters. Wildlife viewing and feeding, particularly of birds, is a big business and—perhaps because of their appearances or behaviors—many birds and mammals are widely and highly valued. In urban areas, some of this appreciation may arise from an increased desire to connect with nature in landscapes that are highly developed.
Although this isn’t my area of expertise, I’m interested in what influences people’s attitudes towards nature. I suggested above that the absence of nature in cities may make the heart grow fonder, but of course it could be the opposite: urbanites may have fewer positive associations with nature because they are less familiar and comfortable with wildness. Alternatively, cities may attract people more oriented towards indoor pursuits, and they bring anti-nature biases with them. As I was doing some reading on the subject for this post I came across a paper that surveyed middle-school students in Texas and found that negative feelings towards nature were actually stronger in suburban and rural populations than in urban populations.
This paper, by Robert Bixler and Myron Floyd, also has one of the best titles I’ve seen in a while: “Nature is scary, disgusting, and uncomfortable”.
The widespread decline of wildlife populations through the 19th and 20th centuries led to the modern conservation movement including wildlife protection laws, the establishment of parks and protected areas, and the creation of numerous non-profit conservation organizations. This has led to some remarkable recoveries, as discussed in John Kostyak’s recent post on 40 years of conservation success. However, it’s also important to note that there are many conservation failures too – we are still experiencing a human-driven extinction crisis, and the crisis is most acute in the high-biodiversity parts of the world.
While most of this conservation activity has been focused on rural areas until recently, several of the successes have led to the recovery of wildlife populations which are now having an impact on cities. It’s worth noting, however, that some of the recovery of wildlife populations over the past 50 years can be attributed to landscape changes driven by urbanization and the recovery of secondary forest rather than explicit conservation policy. Regardless of the source, several North American wildlife populations are increasing to levels that some consider overabundant—which can lead to conflict.
Although it wasn’t dealing with cities, Jon Mooallem raises interesting issues about how values influence wildlife conflict in a recent piece in the New York Times Magazine that explores the killing of several endangered Hawaiian monk seals. This got me thinking about how people in cities interact with wildlife. There may be positive, neutral, or negative personal responses to wildlife encounters. Some of these responses will lead to action—be it community organization, engagement in the policy process, or direct interaction with wildlife or wildlife managers. I’ll use two examples of increasingly abundant wildlife in New York City to explore some of these issues
White-tailed Deer
Deer in the city. Photo: (c) indykb / www.fotosearch.com
The white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) is the largest herbivore in the New York City region and a source of significant conflict. Many people value the deer for their beauty, as a symbol of wild nature, or as a game species. However, those who live or work in areas with high deer density must contend with damage to landscape plantings and gardens, a high risk of vehicle collisions, and increased risk of tick-borne diseases like Lyme disease or babesiosis. Besides damage to horticulture and agriculture, high densities of deer can also negatively affect tree recruitment and growth in urban forests. Their consumption of understory vegetation in forests can destroy rare plant populations and impact the wildlife that depend on dense herbs and shrubs.
In woodlands outside the city, where the deer have been abundant for decades, small fenced areas that keep the deer out rapidly grow dense with tree saplings while the understory in deer-exposed areas stays sparse, often dominated by thorny exotic species like barberry (Berberis thunbergii) and wineberry (Rubus phoenicolasius). The deer themselves may not be seen often, but their effects on the landscape are dramatic.
The forest area on the right side of the photo is protected by a mesh fence and supports a dense stand of young trees. The area on the left is frequented by deer and supports a much lower density of trees with extensive cover of ferns and exotic shrubs. Photo credit: Bill Schuster, Black Rock Forest
In the suburban counties just outside New York City, deer populations are large enough that several towns are paying to reduce the deer population through contraception or culling programs to reduce risks of deer-car collisions, disease, and damage to vegetation. Many of these towns are densely settled and do not allow hunting for safety reasons, which takes away the least expensive control option. The decisions about how to manage the deer are fraught with disagreement—both about whether the population should be managed at all or, if the decision to reduce the herd has been made, how to balance cost, safety, effectiveness, and the welfare of the animals. The deer have passionate allies who object to their being harmed in any way. They also have vocal critics, often those who have suffered some health problems or property damage from close encounters with the deer.
There are no precise estimates of the deer population within New York City limits, but sightings are increasingly common throughout the city. There are established populations in the boroughs of Staten Island, the Bronx, and Queens, which all have large forested parks and borders with deer-rich suburban counties. Frequent sightings are made in northern Manhattan and, more recently, in Brooklyn, despite the dense development in those boroughs. New York City has invested significant public money in planting trees and other greening efforts. It remains to be seen how growing populations of deer will affect these programs. NYC hasn’t begun formally managing the deer herd, but discussion of various management options has already begun for Staten Island, which supports the largest deer population.
Coyotes
The large carnivores of eastern North America—gray wolves, black bears, mountain lions, and coyotes—were all considered threats to people and their livestock and were hunted, trapped, or poisoned out of existence along the east coast. While the populations of all four of these species are recovering within the United States, the coyote has been expanding into northeastern urban areas more rapidly than the others. The habitat needs of the wolf, bear, and mountain lion will probably prevent them from becoming truly urban in this region—though mountain lions and black bears are frequently found in and around urban area in the western states. Claims of mountain lion sightings in the northeast have been debated for decades and generally interpreted by wildlife agencies as mistaken identifications or escaped pets. Those sightings may carry more weight now that a mountain lion killed in a car collision in Connecticut in 2011 was confirmed to be a wild animal that had migrated from South Dakota.
But the coyotes seem to adapting to city life quite nicely.
The coyote, Canis latrans, is a medium-sized member of the dog family. Though the classic image of a coyote has them howling at the moon, coyotes in the east are quiet and secretive. They are nocturnal and generally avoid close contact with humans, so sightings are usually brief and many observers may mistakenly consider them to be stray domestic dogs. However, their food sources (small mammals, birds, fruit, and occasional garbage) are abundant in urban areas and, without interference from larger predators like wolves and mountain lions, they appear to be doing quite well.
The spread of coyotes into cities has caused increasing conflict with humans. Although attacks on people are very rare, coyotes can kill small pets and represent a threat to other valued types of urban wildlife, like birds. A recent analysis of human-coyote conflicts in the Denver metro area documented over 450 pet attacks, 26 incidents where coyotes exhibited aggressive behavior towards humans, and 13 human attacks over an eight-year period. The Denver area may be unusual in the frequency of these events, but similar kinds of interactions happen throughout the range of the coyote.
Two coyotes in a park in New York City, photographed by a motion-triggered stationary camera. Photo credit: Gotham Coyote Project
Coyote populations are present and likely growing throughout New York City. An ongoing study of coyotes using camera traps and scat samples has found them in several neighborhoods and has shown that they are successfully reproducing. When coyotes began appearing in Central Park and other Manhattan neighborhoods (including heavily developed Tribeca) between 1999 and 2010, the visits drew significant media attention and captured the imaginations of the urban populace. Several more sightings, including one on the Columbia University campus (passing less than 100 m from my office!) led to feature articles on the growing wildness of New York City. The light tone of many of these pieces, and the delight of many city-dwellers in having a experienced a (brief) connection with a wild predator suggested that this would be more of a point of pride than a point of conflict.
In addition to the pleasure at seeing wild animals, coyotes were appreciated for their presumed benefit in controlling problem wildlife such as rats, deer, and raccoons. However, in 2010, two attacks on children Westchester County (just north of NYC) resulted in changes of attitude such that fewer residents reported being pleased that coyotes lived in their area and more residents were concerned about possible risks. Although direct conflicts with coyotes within New York City haven’t happened (or, at least, haven’t been made public), it is reasonable to expect that enough pet attacks or aggressive encounters with people will start to affect attitudes. After all, large predators in settled landscapes have caused conflicts with humans throughout all of history.
New phases of old relationships
We have complicated relationships with wildlife. Some animals clearly benefit the human experience in a direct way (food from wild fish and game), while for others the benefit is less direct (feeling pride in a national icon like the bald eagle or enjoying birdsong on a spring day). Some animals pose clear risks (stinging insects) while in others the risks are less obvious (rodents spreading disease or herbivorous insects slowly weakening our shade trees).
The ability to distinguish nuances in these relationships is almost certainly connected to the intimacy of our relationships with the land. Farmers, fisherman, hunters, foragers, and others who spend much of their time outdoors have strong opinions about wildlife based on deep personal experience. City dwellers with limited exposure to wild nature don’t know what to expect from urban wildlife, so they are more open to cultural narratives and information from others in shaping their reactions. The urban existence is, relatively speaking, new for both humans and our urban wildlife.
This presents a real opportunity to those of us trying to foster nature in cities. As animals come back into our cities, either through natural recovery, carefully designed landscapes, or even purposeful introduction, we need to effectively tell their stories. This means that, in addition to storytelling of the type so beautifully described by Bob Sallinger in a post from last year, we need careful observation and study to know how the elements of urban systems interact. We tell stories with characters, but we also tell stories with images and with data.
Lucky for us, our cities are full of fascinating stories. We just need to work hard to understand them ourselves, and to find ways to share them with others.
Although there are some difficulties associated with growing trees and certain vegetation types on tall buildings, the success enjoyed by Hancock, Hundertwasser, and Boeri highlighted in this essay, shows that it is possible.
In 1883, a rooftop garden theatre opened in New York City. The idea was to escape the city summer heat, whilst enjoying some evening entertainment, without actually leaving NYC. A decade later, the New York Times announced that, “New York is fast becoming a city of roof gardens”. In 1935, the Welsh landscape architect Ralph Hancock, saw his Garden of the Nations open on the 11thfloor of the Rockefeller Centre in New York City. Two thousand trees and shrubs were lifted onto that roof. Hancock then repeated the feat with the smaller (6000 square metres) Derry and Toms Roof Garden, on a 7–storey department store in Kensington High Street in London (which was opened in 1938). It had a Tudor garden, a Spanish garden and a woodland garden complete with a pond. Although the gardens closed in 2018 when the tenant left, they will re-open in 2020. The gardens are subject to historic building protection and historic garden protection under the planning system. One hundred trees on the roof garden were given tree preservation orders in 1976. They are an important example of how forest trees can be established on a roof, some now more than 70 years old and growing in surprisingly shallow soil (about 500mm deep).
Kensington Roof garden
In the 1970s, the Austrian artist Hundertwasser began to promote the idea of forested roofs. He teamed up with the architect Krawina in 1979 determined to make his progressive ideas a reality, however he was disappointed by the architect’s initial insistence on level floors and straight lines (Hundertwasser liked neither level floors nor straight lines). By 1984 however, the Hundertwasser House was built, with undulating floors and 250 trees and bushes upon it. It has 53 apartments, 4 offices, 16 private terraces, 3 communal terraces and a café. Other vegetated buildings by Hundertwasser followed, including housing complexes, an incineration plant and finally, a toilet in New Zealand. His 12-storey Walspirale in Germany is topped by a beech, lime and maple forest. These projects are of special interest because the vegetation is often more akin to a lightly-managed natural forest than a conventional roof garden.
Hundertwasser House
Despite the success of some of these pioneering projects, the rise in popularity of lightweight green roofs in Europe and North America and the podium gardens of the high-rise cities of the Far East, the practice of establishing trees on taller buildings remains a curiosity and is still unusual. But that may be changing. The Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) of Milan, Italy is causing a stir in architectural circles and more and more property developers are asking if they can have trees on their buildings too. Bosco Verticale consists of two residential towers in the former industrial district of Porta Nuova, designed by Stefano Boeri with support from the horticulturalist Laura Gatti. One tower is 26 storeys high and the other 18, and between them they support more than 900 trees. The buildings were opened in 2014 and in 2015 and before long the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat selected the project as the overall Best Tall Building Worldwide.
What is remarkable about these buildings is that they are festooned with trees and shrubs. These are not buildings with conventional lightweight green roofs or green walls, but structures with substantial vegetation fully integrated into the building fabric. They have been designed with vegetation in mind from the beginning. Planting that was often said to be impossible or impractical a few years ago is now working. It is a delight for those fortunate enough to live in these leafy towers, with high-rise bird song and some extra relief from the summer heat, however it will be more important as a signpost to others, now free to imagine, plan, design and build other sylvan buildings. The real urban jungle is much more of a possibility.
The roof gardens of the late 19thand early 20thcentury were about entertainment and amusement, however the growing body of evidence that putting soil, vegetation and water on buildings provides so many benefits is now changing the way people think about the idea. A major problem with conventional buildings is that materials exposed to the sun, absorb heat and re-radiate it later. This is the main cause of the urban heat island effect, whereby the center of cities is several degrees hotter than the rural hinterland. Urban heat also exacerbates air pollution. Most people do not feel well during heatwaves and many vulnerable people, especially the young and very old, die. This problem is likely to get worse as carbon dioxide continues to build up atmosphere and the climate destabilises. More heatwaves and more severe heatwaves are predicted. Clothe buildings with soil and vegetation, and less heat is absorbed from the sun in the first place. Then, as moisture leaves , through the process of evapotranspiration, evaporative cooling occurs. This has a significant cooling effect on buildings. For example, external walls behind vegetation may be more than 10 degrees Centigrade cooler than adjacent unvegetated walls. This saves money that would otherwise be used to pay for air conditioning. In locations where people do not have access to electro-mechanical cooling, vegetation on buildings will save lives.
Rainwater intercepted by the growing medium of green roofs or rainwater harvested for irrigation does not go into the downspouts to flood streets or overwhelm drains. The Sponge City is the concept whereby water is held in the built environment. This reduces the likelihood of flooding and provides water for plants and evaporative cooling. Vegetating buildings, including tall buildings, has to be part of the whole for the Sponge City to work. Conventional open spaces are essential, however they aren’t enough on their own.
Nature-deficit disorder is not recognised by most medical professionals. It is the idea, promoted by Richard Louv, that a lack of contact with nature (which is now increasingly common with most people living in cities and staying indoors) causes stress and sadness. What is proven, however is that viewing vegetation reduces stress and lowers blood pressure (for example see this paper by Cox et al. in BioScience in 2017). Accessing nature and being immersed in nature in the style of forest bathing (Shinrin-Yoku) is preferable and ideal when available, however bringing vegetation, soil and water ever closer to where people live, on roofs, walls, balconies and indoors, will improve their mental health.
One of the issues which has bedevilled people trying to get vegetation on buildings is weight. This has driven some to develop and offer lightweight systems. Whilst this is sometimes useful, especially when retrofitting green roofs onto buildings that were not designed for that purpose, it has also meant that many green roofs, in particular, have growing media that are either absent, or that are so shallow that they do not support a very diverse community of plants, do not store very much rainwater and therefore provide relatively little evaporative cooling.
In my experience, once structural engineers understand that a roof or balcony needs to take the weight of a sufficient depth of growing medium to support the range of plants being proposed in a design, they are able and willing to do this. When the requirement for greening is considered at the early stages of design there are more options and the possibilities are much greater.
Another hurdle to be overcome when proposing building-integrated vegetation is that of maintenance. Who should be responsible, who should pay for maintenance and how much will it cost? It is important to note that all buildings require maintenance. Tall buildings are complicated and regular maintenance is always required in any case. Tall buildings have elevators and services which mean that maintenance charges for residential properties often exceed $70 per square meter per annum. The cost of maintaining vegetation will be modest in comparison. Charges for maintenance is usually passed on to leaseholders or tenants as a component of service changes. It is commonplace for communal ground-level landscapes to be created within commercial or residential developments. Apart from some extra provision and training to ensure safety, the maintenance of landscape on buildings is straightforward. Vegetation on buildings is often designed to be low-maintenance, which helps to keep down costs. There are costs, but as we have learnt, there are significant benefits.
It has been suggested that trees cannot grow on tall buildings. The reason usually cited is that the higher you go, the stronger the wind becomes. As friction with the ground is reduced and as the air thins with increasing altitude, wind speeds do increase. Wind at the ground floor of a typical multi-storey building around 100m tall, might be half the speed recorded aloft. Trees, however, grow naturally at high altitudes and can adapt to strong winds. On buildings, trees can be shielded by parapets and secured with anchors. The tree line (above which trees cannot survive) varies according to elevation and latitude and is largely determined by low temperatures and a lack of moisture. The tree line in central Europe is above 2000m and in the Rockies it is above 3000m, so tall buildings in most locations would not be above the natural tree line.
Although there are some difficulties associated with growing trees and certain vegetation types on tall buildings, the success enjoyed by Hancock, Hundertwasser and Boeri shows that it is possible. Although there are additional costs associated with both the initial planting and continuing maintenance, the many benefits, including improved comfort, better mental health and a boost in biodiversity, mean that the establishment of vegetation on tall buildings is here to stay.
Evidence from many cities around the world shows that urbanization is a widespread process that homogenises biota as ecological communities become more alike one another through the introduction and extinction of species. On account of this process, there is great concern about the conservation of local biodiversity, which may suffer a decline due to the coupled effects of accelerating the extinction of rare species, whether intentionally or not, and dispersing exotic species that have a high potential risk of invasiveness.
Changes in land use in beach resorts resulting from urbanization and activities associated with tourism are usually recognised as a principal driving force behind biodiversity change. Coastal urbanization is normally preceded by the stabilization of dunes with fast-growing plants, often exotics that strongly impact on local biodiversity. Domestic gardening, urban forestry and green area stewardship are other important sources that tend to increase the diversity and abundance of exotic species. In a number of cases some of these species grow spontaneously in remnant patches of vegetation and occasionally some of them can become invasive transforming composition and structure of natural communities.
Coastal urbanization in Villa Gesell, Argentina, south of Buenos Aires. Photo: A. Faggi
Recently we have studied the human impact on the vegetation of several beaches located along a strip of Argentina’s Atlantic coast, analysing temporal and spatial changes in the floristic composition of fore dune vegetation caused by urban development and human activities related to tourism.
We focused our study on the vegetation changes driven by the addition and/or loss of species to dunes derived from human activities and land use change along a strip of beach.
Grassy and wooded dunes in Mar de Ajó, near Villa Gesell. Photo: A. Faggi
The vegetation under study covers the dunes and comprises Panicum grassland and forests (see the photo to the right). Woodlands are mainly composed of exotic trees: Acacia melanoxylon, Pinus sylvestris and Tamarix gallica that were planted to stabilize the dunes (see photo below)). The typical plant community before massive tourism was open grassland composed of appromxiately 40 species, with relatively few alien plants.
The intensification of human activities in the second half of the last century brought with it the deliberate introduction of specific plants for sand dune stabilization, creating woods for amenity uses and domestic gardening. The population of sun-loving native dune species gradually decreased due to these actions which also facilitated the proliferation of weeds and other immigrant species.
Exotic afforestation to fix dunes near Quequèn, south of Buenos Aires. Photo: A. FaggiNative grassland on dunes in puerto Madryn, in Buenos Aires. Photo: A. Faggi
Plant species gains or losses from previous assemblages since the second half of the 20th century were connected very much to urbanization forces. The high similarity of the vegetation in areas located 10 km away from the urban centres and previous communities as recorded in 1940 suggests that the former has remained beyond the reach of human settlement. We found that the number of exotics increased substantially towards urban centres and that urban and suburban areas were important sources for the spread of introduced plant species.
Some plants were deliberately introduced for dune reclamation: the succulent Carpobrotus edulis and trees such as Acacia melanoxylon and Tamarix gallica. These new man-made canopies then facilitated the unintentional introduction of other plants by trapping windborne seeds (e.g., white poplar, Populus alba; annual rabbitsfoot grass. Polypogon monspeliensis; andHare’s Tail Grass, Lagurusovatus.
The planned replacement of the plant canopy from open grassland with a comparatively closed and tall tree canopy facilitated the recruitment of spontaneous alien trees. The resulting vertical structure of planted woodlands have an indirect positive effect on seed dispersal by increasing the population of perching birds which, for example, facilitates the dispersal of seeds of the Russian olive tree (Eleagnus angustifolia) and of vines, e.g. Passifloracoerulea (native) and Lonicera japonica (an exotic).
Our evidence showed that reduced light flux under a wooded canopy displaced most of the original shade intolerant native plants, e.g. Achryrocline satureoides, Margyricarpus pinnatus, Solidago chilensis, Oenothera mollissima andPanicum racemosum.
Tamarix gallica, vines and many mesic immigrant plants on remnant dunes in Monte Hermoso, south of Buenos Aires. Photo: A. Faggi
They were replaced by immigrant plants dispersed as a result of agricultural, gardening, and recreational activities. The influence of afforestation on changes in plant assemblages as shown by the presence of native plants like Salpichroa origanifolia, Passiflora coeruleaand Cestrum parqui, normally found in forest understories, could also be seen in the urban centers.
Some mesic immigrant native plants found in the urban core, supported our hypothesis that higher run-off and artificial irrigation increase soil moisture at the resort centres. Soil compaction by trampling was another factor that could be beneficial for mesic vegetation in dune habitats.
In city cores and adjacent areas, new man-made microhabitats encouraged non-native plants to displace most of the native assemblages during the urban growth process. Away from there vegetation composition was the same as past communities. The processes that modify the vegetation in the cities studied here are similar to those observed in other urban agglomerations.
As settlements sprawl along the coast the topography, the microclimate, the availability of water and nutrients, and the substrates where plants grow change. Additionally the effect on the vegetation of several uses and activities and the differential management of the urban green also influences the resulting vegetation.
Therefore the abundance of exotics, the replacement of native species, and the decrease of the plants characteristic of dunes are not only the result of gardening and afforestation, but of the effects caused by uses and activities outside the management of the green. Evidences show that urbanization increases the man made components, deepening the artificialization of the environment and generating mechanisms that alter the processes of dispersal and colonization of species. Since the vegetation in urban areas is perpetuated by gardening it is advisable to establish a more sustainable management, consuming less energy, water, fertilizers and pesticides to the time which allows to maintain the local identity using native species of ornamental attractiveness.
These results highlight the importance of giving due consideration to the conservation of native biodiversity when planning new resorts along the beach. For example, by leaving at least a 10 km of buffer zone of natural dunes free of impacts between neighbouring resorts long enough to guarantee the persistence of natural communities we can ensure local identity.
These results can be inspiring because as progress is made in the understanding of the processes involved in the urbanization it will be possible to improve both the urban design and municipal planinng in the framework of an integrated coastal management.
Ana Faggi
Buenos Aires
Naturalistic garden design. Pampa grass and the endemic herb Hyalis argentea combined with exotics like Carpobrotus chilensis and Buxus sempervirens, Las Grutas. Photo A. Faggi.
Having begun to appreciate the benefits of putting green infrastructure onto buildings, architects, engineers, horticulturalists, and others have developed techniques to make it real.
Most of the inhabitable regions of the Earth were originally covered by forests, grasslands, and wetlands. These carbon-grabbing, biodiverse, spongy landscapes have been largely replaced by agriculture and urban development, which is drier, belches carbon, is erosive of soils, and which has lost most of its wildlife. Indeed, biodiversity declines continue apace. Cities and buildings, in particular, are designed and maintained in ways where vegetation is omitted, removed, or simplified so that the benefits of having vegetation close by are limited or lost. Concrete, glass, and other impervious surfaces that shed water, kill migrating birds, and exacerbate the urban heat island effect have been the essence of architecture for decades now.
There is now a huge and growing body of evidence that green infrastructure or green-blue infrastructure (soil, vegetation, and water) that provides the setting for our cities, provides us with a range of benefits (also described as ecosystem services), including reduction in flooding, purification of air and water, summer shade and cooling, better health and wellbeing, places to relax and mingle, as well as food and habitat for wildlife.
Having begun to appreciate the benefits of putting green infrastructure onto buildings, architects, engineers, horticulturalists, and others have developed techniques to do this. The conventional building is a polyhedron, often a cuboid, which has horizontal and vertical surfaces to keep out the weather. Relatively lightweight coverings of vegetation can be placed onto the horizontal surfaces (extensive green roofs) and vertical surfaces (green walls). Where there is strength in the roof structure, more substantial gardens can be created on roofs of course, although roof gardens have a long history.
Roofs (flat and occasionally sloping roofs) have been successfully greened, led by pioneers in Germany who have produced relatively lightweight extensive green roof systems. The first guidance was published in Germany in 1982 as the extensive green roof market took hold. Although these systems play a useful role in reducing the runoff of rainfall, cooling the building beneath in summer, and providing some space for nature, there are often limitations. Planting can be low-diversity (for example, consider the pre-grown sedum mats that dominate the market) and shallow — growing media can dry out rapidly during dry periods. An improvement over sedum mats is an extensive green roof with an adequate depth of purpose-made substrate, planted or seeded with drought-tolerant wildflowers, an approach pioneered in Switzerland. This approach has inspired others: see, for example, the image which shows the biodiverse extensive green roof, designed by the Green Infrastructure Consultancy for the David Attenborough Building in Cambridge.
Biodiverse extensive green roof on David Attenborough Building, University of Cambridge by Green Infrastructure Consultancy
The vertical surfaces of our polyhedron can also be vegetated. The predominance of glass limits this, although there are ways of combining windows and vegetated trellises, which can provide summer shade with deciduous plants that can allow winter sun to stream towards grateful occupants. The traditional way of vegetating a wall is to grow climbing plants against it. This has worked well for centuries, however, people now tend to favour training plants against wire or mesh, so that plants are kept a few centimetres away from the wall itself. This also has the advantage of creating an insulating air gap that might provide space for nesting birds or roosting bats.
Vegetating walls with a wide range of plants, including many species that would ordinarily not occur on a wall, is now much easier with the range of irrigated plastic modules, fabric pockets, and metal cassettes available. These products contain compost, substrate, or in some cases stone wool. The range of species used is being expanded all the time and irrigation systems can be monitored and controlled remotely. The challenge with these installations is maintenance, which can require specialist equipment, technicians, and is costly in comparison with the maintenance required for green roofs, for example. Neglect or sudden failure of planting quickly becomes evident and will test the commitment of the owner if there are unexpected additional expenses associated with a need for re-planting.
Rubens at the Palace Hotel green wall by Green Infrastructure Consultancy. Image courtesy of Red Carnation Hotels
In recent years, then, it has been demonstrated that conventional buildings can be designed to have green roofs or green walls, or many existing buildings can be retrofitted with these features; however, what happens when the architect embraces the idea of vegetating the building before it is conceived? No longer are there the constraints of the requirement to install a relatively thin surface layer of vegetation, as is usual on the conventional building. Now, energised by the thought of new possibilities, the architect can maximise space for plants and can ensure that there will be structure that supports the desired vegetation, which might include larger plants, including trees. There can be more soil, which means, potentially, all of the rain that falls onto a building can be absorbed. More soil also means a wider range of planting and even more evaporative cooling. Buildings may even be in a position to sequester carbon as the vegetation and soil mature. Easy access for both the users of the building as well as maintenance staff can be planned into the design.
Hundertwasserhaus, Vienna
We can get an idea of what these more heavily vegetated buildings could look like by looking at the work of pioneers. Hundertwasser, for example, the Austrian artist and architect, promoted the planting of urban trees in the 1970s and began to put trees onto buildings in the 1980s, including a district heating plant (Spittelau, Vienna) and residential buildings (for example, the Waldspirale, Darmstadt). Knowing from the beginning that trees and shrubs are to be included on a building changes the building form and structure. There must be space for the growing trees and sufficient strength in the structure to take their weight.
Stefano Boeri and his team, including horticulturalist Laura Gatti, continue to embrace the possibilities presented with heavily-vegetated architecture. Boeri is said to have been inspired by the 1957 novel Il barone rampante, by Italo Calvino, about a boy who decides to spend his life living in a tree. Whatever the inspiration, the opening of the twin towers of Bosco Verticale in Milan in 2014 has changed our perception about what is possible with urban greening and in particular the greening of buildings. Boeri has been busy during the ensuing period, with similar projects in Cairo,Huanggang, and Tirana, amongst other places.
Bosco Verticale. Image courtesy of Laura Gatti
Critics of the Bosco Verticale have noted that the towers house private apartments and that greening on that scale would not be feasible for housing for rent. However, inspired by what has been achieved by Boeri and informed by the evidence of how biophilic design boosts wellbeing, other architects are now looking at what could be achieved for the everyman or woman. An example of this is the Biophilic Living project in Swansea, Wales, by architect Powell Dobsonand developer Hacer, which will include apartments operated by a housing association. This is an example of which I have had personal experience, having advised on how to create green roofs and green walls, however, I have read of dozens of similar proposals around the world where architects are becoming aware of the benefits of urban greening and how it can benefit both people and nature.
The biophilic design agenda is also bringing changes to the interior of buildings. Of course, there is nothing new in interior planting, however, there is a new enthusiasm for it. Decorative house plants have been enjoyed for centuries and were taken from the jungles of Asia and South America to be cultivated on an industrial scale decades ago. Now, people are increasingly aware of how interior planting can lift our mood, lower our blood pressure, and filter the air. Also, interior green walls and the availability of indoor trees is making people think about how interior spaces can be designed to show off planting and help it thrive. Interior green walls can be several storeys tall, bringing a lobby to life. Having trees indoors might require higher ceilings and a different approach to letting in natural light, though.
The interior green wall in the David Attenborough Building by Green Infrastructure Consultancy and ANS Global. Image courtesy of Nicholas Hare Architects
So, what does all this mean for the future of architecture? Climate change, bringing more summer heat, and more intense rainfall will ensure that the soil and vegetation on buildings will make more sense to more people. The opportunities to create accessible greenspace on buildings means that we will see more roof gardens and vegetated terraces. Roofs may no longer be a secret space leftover where mechanical and electrical equipment can be located without question. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning engineers will have to miniaturise their equipment and take account of the cooling and purification capabilities of plants.
We will see deeper soils on buildings with more trees and shrubs, however, there will still be a role for wall greening technologies and relatively lightweight low-maintenance green roofs, especially on upper levels of buildings (where these green roofs will be increasingly combined with photovoltaic panels – the so-called biosolar roofs).
As well as “open to the sky” greening, buildings will increasingly include “open to the air” greening, where planting is over-sailed by structure, meaning that it will require irrigation, and, in some cases, supplementary lighting, but will bring planting under and through buildings. This “open to the air” planting will appear to merge with interior planting in many situations.
Looking further into the future, it seems possible that parts of the structure of buildings will be alive. For example, trees can be trained to form frames and can be made to grow together through a process of inosculation. The Baubotanik team in Stuttgart, led by Ferdinand Ludwig, is already looking at this, envisioning building structures that are alive and which absorb carbon. As more and more suitable species are found, this concept is likely to gain momentum. Another area of research is looking at structural materials (usually concrete) that absorb water and therefore provide a suitable surface for vegetation to colonise naturally. An example of this approach is the poikilohydric living walls being developed by Marco Cruz at the Bartlett, UCL. I predict that these avenues are only a beginning and that more and more techniques will be developed to complement more conventional ways of integrating vegetation into buildings with living structures.
In terms of maintenance, robots and drones will make access to high and otherwise dangerous-to-access vegetation on buildings much cheaper. People are already inspecting buildings with drone-mounted cameras, and pole and rope-climbing robots have been around for a decade or more. But, of course, more people will be involved in looking after the more easily accessible greenery on the buildings of the future, including both professionals as well the people living and working in them, who will gain a lot from the experience, which can be relaxing and therapeutic.
I live in Stockholm, Sweden. I enjoy talking walks in the autumn, inhaling the scent from degrading debris, kicking around dead leaves, and gazing at the vivid colors. This fall, my baby daughter has often followed me on my walks. Her name is Viola, and she is 4 years old.
Without critical discussion at Habitat III, could Smart City policies further disconnect children from experiences of nature?
Viola and I often walk to the grocery store to buy stuff missing for dinner. Farther on our path is a playground. Viola frequently stops and play for a while. Sometimes, we take a prolonged route through a forest grove on the way back to our apartment. It is not far away. In the forest, she often discovers tiny animals and plants, and asks me trillions of questions. I try to answer her every time. Sometimes, I do it in a mindful way, sharing her enthusiasm in the moment. But too often, I answer in an absentminded way, my mind unconsciously wandering to reflect on the experiences of today’s work and many other things.
Viola
Viola found an acorn on our path the other day: “What is this?” she asks. I point my finger towards an oak tree and answer her: “This is the seed of such a tree over there”. While gazing at the crown of the oak, she says: “It is amazing that a small acorn can transform into such a big tree”. Her comment surprises me and causes a warm sensation of affection in me as we share this moment of awe. But I just nod in a kind of stiff, Swedish way.
I tell her a story about the “forgetful Jay” that collect acorns for winter and then buries them into the ground. I tell her that the bird forgets most of them, and that this is how oak trees around here regenerate into new, big oak trees. I also tell her that an oak can live for a thousand years, and that there probably are many acorns in the ground around here that could grow into new oaks. She looks at the acorn for a short while, puts it in her pocket, and then we continue our walk back home. I ponder the experience we just had together. Someday, I will tell her that the Jay also need forests of pine for its needs, and about how different habitats are connected to form part of an ecological memory of the urban landscape we live in. I will teach her about the beauty of “slowness” in ecosystem dynamics.
As we continue our walk back home, my mind unconsciously wanders on. How interested will Viola actually be in learning about ecological memory, as narratives of what constitutes “a good life” increasingly might be shared on social media?
All this makes me think of Habitat III.
Habitat III
45,000 people supported by the UN met in Quito to discuss urban sustainability during the Habitat III conference. What’s new since the last conference, 20 years ago? The “Smart City” concept has entered the scene as a promising paradigm for a transition towards urban sustainability (HABITAT III, p. 10).
From a birds-eye perspective, the Smart City concept could perhaps simply be described by the words: rapid, digital, reflecting “the wired-in city”! It is the Internet of Things in the City! It is about increasing efficiency, which is important in terms of metabolic flows and regarding governance systems, as people attempt to cut costs and to decrease local and global pollutants.
There are naturally many positive aspects to wired-in infrastructures, some of which have been discussed before on The Nature of Cities. In 2012, Philip Silva wrote about cities as “cyborgs”, or hybrids between ecosystems and artificial systems, and that smart city solutions can and should work to clean and support local ecosystems. That blog made a lot of sense to me. But there are also critical voices of the Smart City movement. For instance, Sumetee Gajjar and Harini Nagendra raised questions regarding whether Smart City policies in India will include thinking about good governance and about local democracy, and whether such policies will blur the role that urban ecosystem services play in people’s well-being: wise words from India. Hollands (2008) questions whether the Smart City concept is for big business or for urban citizens.
Were such issues discussed in Quito?
Nowhere in the HABITAT III document is there any critical thinking addressing that the Internet of Things inevitably also means ever more screen time for people in their daily routines. It is noteworthy to mention here that increased screen time is discussed as a force driving kids to spend less time outdoors. In a recent paper, Soga et al., (2016) highlight examples where children in Japan spend much less time in natural environments compared to only 10 years ago, and that 12 percent of English kids have not visited a natural environment in the 12 months prior to the study.
Could Smart City policies unintentionally serve to further disconnect children from experiences of nature, perhaps inducing grand processes of social amnesia? Social-ecological memory (Barthel et al., 2010) involves the linking of social memory and ecological memory. Social memory refers to the accumulated collective experiences and knowledge of social groups or cultures, whereas ecological memory pertains to the remnants of biodiversity and spatial connectivity that persist in an area in the wake of a disturbance, such as a fire, flood, or construction of a road. As the ecosystem recovers from disturbance, ecological memory influences its reorganization. With a high degree of memory retention, the reorganized state of the system is more likely to resemble its former (i.e., pre-disturbance) state, but with low memory retention, the result of reorganization may be a fundamentally different, alternative stable state. Social-ecological memory is the collective memory of management practices that sustain ecological memory (Andersson & Barthel 2016).
How is social-ecological memory retained and eroded, and what might be the consequences of each? Integral to the production and persistence of memory are memory carriers—repositories and structures by which experiences and processes are transported in space and time (Ibid.).
Memory carriers may be ecological (e.g., gene pools, seed banks, and tree groves) or social (e.g., oral traditions, social norms, and media); improved understanding of how ecological and social memory carriers interact is hypothesized to be useful for fostering social-ecological memory and imagining new (or, perhaps, remembering old) avenues for place-based, sustainable living in the midst of rapidly unfolding global change. Alternatively, the loss of social-ecological memory may not only erode capacities for management of local ecosystems, but may also induce a broad societal shift in a psychological connection with nature.
In psychological literature, a connectedness with nature may be defined as an individual’s affective and experiential connection to nature (Mayer & Frantz, 2004, p. 504). As such, it can be viewed as a deep-seated attitude that forms an important part of predicting pro-environmental behavior (Ives et al., 2016). Of late, this perspective has also caught interest in sustainability science. An upcoming research group in Germany has identified a connectedness with nature as a “deep leverage point” for sustainability transformation (Abson et al., 2016).
Concerns are being raised about drivers that challenge people’s direct, sensory experience of nature and threaten to trigger baseline changes in people’s psychological connections with nature (Hartig and Kahn 2016). This is especially pressing from a children’s point of view. A deep-seated psychological connection with nature is most easily acquired during childhood (Giusti, et al., 2014; Cheng and Monroe, 2012; Chawla & Cushing, 2007) and persists unchanged through adulthood (Kaiser et al., 2014). To quote Miller (2005), “[if] people no longer value nature or see it as relevant to their lives, will they be willing to invest in its protection?”
Nearly home now…
We continue our walk home, dusk approaching, and the northern sky turning pink, my thoughts wandering mindlessly…Will our walks make any difference? Will they help instill Viola with a sense of care for nature? How will Smart City policies interfere with Viola’s experiences in the near future?…How is it possible that the voice of Nick Drake holds such sensitivity and wisdom despite that he passed away in his twenties? Probably I am just getting old…
Viola runs ahead of me towards our front door. We are home. Viola has an acorn in her pocket.
Abson, D. J., Fischer, J., Leventon, J. et al. 2016. Leverage points for Sustainability Transformation. Ambio, doi:10.1007/s13280-016-0800-y
Andersson, E. and S. Barthel. 2016. Memory carriers and stewardship of metropolitan landscapes. Ecological Indicators 70:606-614.a
Barthel, S., Folke, C. and Colding, J. (2010). Social-Ecological Memory in Urban Gardens – Retaining the capacity for management of ecosystem services. Global Environmental Change, 20(2): 255-265
Chawla, L. & Cushing, D. 2007. Education for strategic behavior. Environmental Education Research, 13(4): 427-452.
Cheng, J. C. H. & Monroe, M. C. 2012. “Connection to Nature: Children’s Affective Attitude toward Nature.” Environment and Behavior 44(1): 31–49.
HABITAT III NEW URBAN AGENDA. 2016. Draft outcome document for adoption in Quito, October 2016
Ives, C., Giusti, M., Fischer, J., et al. 2016. Human-nature connections: a review of the empirical evidence. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability-Forthcoming
Kaiser, F. G., Brügger, A., Hartig, T., et al. 2014. Appreciation of nature and appreciation of environmental protection: How stable are these attitudes and which comes first? Revue européenne de psychologie appliquée, 64: 269–277.
Mayer, F. & Frantz, C. 2004. The connectedness to nature scale: A measure of individuals’ feeling in community with nature. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 24: 503-515.
Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Juan Carlos Arroyo, BogotáWhat survives in the act of resistance to a hospital closure is an ideal of human care, a concept of health and selfless humanitarianism that seems extinguished with the progress of economic models.
Katrine Claassens, Cape TownResilience is a word often understood in terms of strength; in the Anthropocene, however, we would do well to understand resilience in terms of fragility.
David Brooks, New YorkTo sincerely give consideration to the idea of resilience, in a culturally inclusive way, it is the notion of adaptability that floats to the top and becomes the road map to understanding.
Rebecca Chesney, Preston“Resilience” is not located in a place of simple, black and white contrasts, but a complicated tapestry intricately woven.
Emilio Fantin, BolognaResilience is a form of coexistence. It is a process, a form of living, a relation to nature.
Ganzeer, Los AngelesThe Egyptian cat’s ability to survive great changes is a testament to the animal’s resilience.
Lloyd Godman, MelbourneIn an environment of predicted rapid climate change due to high CO2 levels, Tillandsias, offer a bio-model for effective adaption.
Fran Ilich, New YorkToday, we find many aspects of indigenous cultures becoming resilient by escaping Hispanic-Latino control.
Todd Lanier Lester, São Paulo“Resilience” is just another hoo-ha word game that philanthrocapitalism baits do-gooders with, à la new grant competitions.
Frida Larios, WashingtonWhat could the consciousness of co-creation and co-evolution look like, feel like, sound like, smell like, and taste like in action?
Patrick Lydon, San Jose & SeoulThe roots of true resilience are in knowing our connectedness to nature, and then acting in the light of this knowledge.
Mary Mattingly, New YorkResilience is a temporary fix, and has often been a way to leave the larger questions unanswered and problems unaddressed.
E. J. McAdams, New YorkWhat happens if you exchange every variation of the word “system” with variations of the word “poem”?
Mary Miss, New YorkWe intend to provoke the visitors’ curiosity and send them out to the nearby waterways.
Edna Peres, JohannesburgResilience suggests a fundamental reevaluation of our value systems, our interaction with city decision-makers, and our relationships.
Caroline Robinson, AucklandWhat could the consciousness of co-creation and co-evolution look like, feel like, sound like, smell like, and taste like in action?
Finzi Saidi, PretoriaResilience suggests a fundamental reevaluation of our value systems, our interaction with city decision-makers, and our relationships.
David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director.
A challenge with both words, directed at us, and especially as they relate to specific ideas and actions, is this. While they exist so well in the realm of metaphor, they are more difficult in reality. The same can be said for “livability” and “justice”. “Sustainability”.
But let’s embrace thinking in a different way.
Let’s strike out in possibly new metaphorical directions.
In this roundtable, we invited 18 artists and designers of various types to respond—in words, images, or other works—to the word.
Animation Specialist and Master of Fine Arts of the National University of Colombia. Juan Carlos Arroyo is working on a master research project called "CRISIS PROCESSES AND RESISTANCE: The historical context with a focus on the images and humane care of the Hospital San Juan de Dios Bogotá 2002 - 2014 ".
Hospital San Juan de Dios. Bogotá, marzo 2016. Foto: Edwin Espinoza // Hospital San Juan de Dios. Bogotá, March 2016. Photo: Edwin Espinoza
El Hospital San Juan de Dios de la ciudad de Bogotá fue cerrado aproximadamente en el año 1999, más de 3.600 trabajadores perdieron sus puestos fuentes de ingreso. Algunos de ellos hoy en día persisten en la resistencia al cierre y desaparición del hospital más antiguo de Sudamérica.
La acción de diversos factores sociales, políticos, económicos y culturales llevó a este hospital a una situación recurrente de crisis y posterior cierre. Este es un caso entre muchos otros; desde la implementación de la Ley 100 de 1993 la salud pública en Colombia ha cambiado significativamente, no es la causa de todos los males, pero si resultó un detonante de síntomas a una crisis organizativa y financiera que venía de tiempo atrás.
Pero los hospitales abren y cierran, así como las personas se enferman y recuperan su salud. No es difícil encontrar constantes contradicciones y opiniones opuestas sobre el estado de la salud en Colombia, así, como sobre la propia salud humana. Si seguimos la pista a la crisis hospitalaria en Colombia a través de los medios de comunicación y los debates públicos, veremos que hospitales un día colapsan, y al cabo de años estos resurgen, entonces ¿por qué se persiste en la resistencia al cierre?
La imagen/síntoma de un hospital que se deteriora y cierra es una imagen poderosa. Ha motivado la realización de varios trabajos artísticos, la poética en ellos nos transmite a través de la imagen las reflexiones y preguntas abiertas sobre la importancia de un hospital como el lugar del cuidado humano.
Individuales como Estado de coma de María Elvira Escallón, las fotografía de Nicolas Van Hemelryck y también otras intervenciones colectivas como el evento TIMEBAG Bogotá 2015 intervención en el HSJD por parte de 9 artistas de nacionales, bajo la curaduría de Gabriel Mario Vélez. Algunos ejemplos:
En estado de coma Fotografía, 2004. María Elvira Escallón. Este proyecto está centrado en el espacio de la cama, único espacio privado al que puede acceder un paciente en un hospital public. // Coma state Photography, 2004. María Elvira Escallón. This project is focused on bed space, the only private space a patient has access to in a public hospital.Quiste. Instalación, 2005. Fredy Alzate. Una enorme esfera negra, hecha a partir de materiales reciclados y que impide el acceso a uno de los espacios del Edificio San Jorge: “Esta esfera es una especie de cáncer que se mantiene en el lugar, un poco la resonancia política de todo lo que ha pasado en este lugar.” // Cyst. Installation, 2005. Fredy Alzate. A huge black dial, made from recycled materials, prevents access to one of the spaces in the San Jorge building: “This area is a kind of cancer that stays in place, a small political resonance of all that has happened in this place.”Una de las resistencias. Instalación, 2005. Ana Karina Moreno. Homenaje y eco sobre la existencia de una de las luchas que han hecho posible que el San Juan de Dios se mantenga y en este momento desde las reflexiones y lo patrimonial se active en la sociedad. // One of the resistors. Installation, 2005. Ana Karina Moreno Homage to and echo of the existence of one of the struggles made possible by San Juan de Dios, and maintained by the reflections and equity active in society.Recorrido: siga esta es su casa. Fotografía, 2011. Nicolas Van Hemelryck. La situación de la Salud en el país se refleja en este Centro Hospitalario, que más que edificio fue la principal institución encargada de salvaguardar la vida de los colombianos. Hoy su ruina —habitada por seres obligados a ser fantasmas— es una advertencia para todos del resquebrajamiento que está viviendo el Estado, que no es otra cosa que la cara de la sociedad misma. // Travel: after this is your home Photography, 2011. Nicolas Van Hemelryck. The health situation in the country is reflected in this Hospital Center, which, more than a building, was the main institution responsible for safeguarding the lives of Colombians. Today a ruin, inhabited by ghosts, it is a warning to all the flaws of the state, which is nothing but the face of society itself.
Cuando un lugar de cuidado humano desaparece, cuando las personas que trabajaron allí salvando vida fueron ignorados, algo malo que ha ocurrido con nuestra sociedad, es como un erupción en la piel, algo que a simple vista parece no estar bien, pero, ¿qué es lo que pasa allí?, ¿los procesos de resistencia al cierre son manifestaciones de un cambio profundo en la concepción de la salud?
Lo que sobrevive en el acto de resistencia es un ideal de cuidado humano, una concepción de salud humanitaria y desinteresada que parece extinguirse con el avance de modelos económicos.
* * * * *
The San Juan de Dios Hospital of Bogota was closed around 1999, and more than 3,600 workers lost their jobs and sources of income. Today, some of them persist in their resistance to the closure and disappearance of South America’s oldest hospital.
When a place of human care disappears, the resistance to closure processes is a protest to a profound change in the conception of health.
Various social, political, economic, and cultural factors led the hospital into a recurring crisis and finally closure. This is one case among many. Since the implementation of Law 100 in 1993, public health in Colombia has changed significantly. The law is not the cause of the crisis, but it triggered the symptoms of the organizational and financial crisis that started long ago.
But hospitals open and close, and people get sick and recover their health. It is not hard to find constant contradictions and opposing views on the state of health in Colombia, as well as on human health itself. If we follow the trail leading to the hospital crisis in Colombia in the media and public debates, we see that hospitals collapse one day, and after years they resurface. Why, then, do we persist in resisting their closure?
Images of a hospital that is closed and deteriorating are powerful and have motivated the realization of several artworks. The poetic conveys the buildings through image reflections and raises questions about the importance of a hospital as the place of human care. Examples include Coma State(En estado de coma) by Maria Elvira Escallón, the photographs of Nicolas Van Hemelryck, and other collective interventions such as TIMEBAG Bogotá 2015 HSJD by nine national artists, curated by Gabriel Mario Velez. (For examples, see the photos in the Spanish version above.)
When a place of human care disappears, and when people who worked there saving lives are ignored, something bad has happened to our society, like a rash that at first glance does not seem right, even though it is there. The resistance to closure processes is a protest to a profound change in the conception of health.
What survives in these acts of resistance is an ideal of human care, a concept of health and selfless humanitarianism that seems extinguished with the progress of economic models.
Katrine Claassens' paintings reflect her interest in climate change, urban ecology, and internet memes. She also works as a science, policy and climate change communicator for universities, think tanks, and governments in South Africa and Canada.
“You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering” —Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Resilience is a word often understood in terms of strength—something is resilient because it is strong. In the Anthropocene, however, we would do well to understand resilience in terms of fragility as well. One of the more troubling arguments I have heard in relation to resilience is this: that nature will find a way to survive no matter what we subject Earth (or ourselves) to. For me the issue at hand is not just whether nature will survive the 6th extinction that we are currently living through, but rather whether we can afford to be so complacent about the increasingly diminished form it is taking. Be certain, there will be no clear ‘winners’ on our current ecological trajectory.
Is resilience itself endangered? We have yet to see whether this may be the case.
Here I present a series of paintings that bear witness to the novel ecologies of the Anthropocene. These paintings are dedicated to landscapes that embody the duality of vulnerability and strength inherent in resilience for both humans and the natural world. Three of these paintings, Edith Stephens I, II and III, address a damaged, watery realm on the outskirts of Cape Town, a place I find particularly pertinent to the topic of resilience.
Katrine Claassens. Edith Stephens, I-III (left to right). Oil on wood.
In the 1940s, Edith Stephens, a botanist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, found that the diverse flora and (small) fauna of the wetlands outside the city were under threat from ongoing habit loss and degradation due to urban and agricultural expansion. Her conservation efforts to preserve something of the wetlands eventually resulted in a nature reserve being established.
Now triangled between two busy roads and a densely populated informal settlement, the Edith Stephens Wetland Park is in an area where both humans and nature are subjected to severe stresses, trauma, and fragmentation. The park is a windswept place, heavy and damp with ecological and social unease: it is not only a vestige of threatened plants found nowhere else in the world, but also a contested open area adjacent to densely packed shacks, in an age when the wisdom of conservation is questioned.
Katrine Claassens, Ghost Swans, Oil on wood.Katrine Claassens, Their branches were interlaced. Their crowns were dense with spring leaves. They were like our love. (For Hitomaro), Oil on wood.Katrine Claassens, Small Island Nations, Oil on wood.Katrine Claassens, Self Portrait as Petunias, Oil on wood.
Edith Stephens’ nature reserve has been found to be one of the few homes to an exceedingly rare plant, Isoetes capensis, a small, fern-like ‘living fossil,’ which has remained almost unchanged for 200 million years. That it has survived since the Carboniferous era tells us that it must be incredibly resilient, but does this mean anything in the Anthropocene, where it is now finally facing extinction?
Is resilience itself endangered? We have yet to see whether this may be the case, but our high expectations of resilience from nature (and, indeed, people, too) may be dangerous.
David Brooks lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent projects and exhibitions include Pond House Pond, Mildred’s Lane Historical Society, Beach Lake, Pennsylvania (2012); Galerie fur Landschaftskunst, Hamburg (2012); Notes on Structure, American Contemporary, New York (2012).
To sincerely give consideration to the idea of resilience, in a culturally inclusive way, it is the notion of adaptability that floats to the top and becomes the road map to understanding. By adaptability, I don’t mean in evolutionary terms—through natural selection and sexual selection. Rather, I’m more concerned with an adaptability of consciousness—something more immediately within our control. I mean the ability for us to collectively use our evolutionarily gained faculties of reason, synthesized with the concerns of our hearts, synthesized with our creative intellects, and as expressed through our experiential acumen. They all work in unison.
To adopt and adapt a new understanding of our environments, we must conceive of our urban environments as detail, object, environment, landscape.
With that we’d formulate a much-needed alternative picture of the biosphere, our place within it, and our future cohabitation. “Resilience” connotes an antidote to the cultural and economic conditioning of global capitalism. That said, it must be done collectivity, which is momentarily politically and culturally impossible. Which is the real drag. So let me start with the individual as opposed to the collective.
Though it may sound a bit silly, and though I am on the mature side of my life span, I still look to my youth—which I spent skateboarding day in and day out—as a role model for this notion of adaptability. Let me explain: skateboarding has really shaped the way I see the urban environment because it’s a perfect amalgamation of urban planning, athleticism, and creative articulation. It’s an unconventional way of getting to know the built environment. Skateboarders move through the city in a similar manner as the Situationists International or the flâneur wandered their cities—sparking and reinvigorating wonder in the pedestrian elements of their conforming environments, like a wall, a bench, or a curb. In the end, it’s about constant adaptation. One must, in the fraction of a second, consider: “How can I use that curb now? How can I use that bench? I’m not going to sit on it, I’m going to slide it and grind it. How can I use that railing? What about the way that railing meets the curb and meets the bench?” There is an entire set of creative adaptations that ensue—which is a radically different way of seeing the urban environment. In skateboarding, you have to embody a fluidity and adapt to flux constantly, instantaneously.
What this example illustrates for me is that to embrace a true sense of resilience is to actually adapt to new understandings of what one’s environment is, and our place within it. But this is a very old story. We don’t have to look far or invent a new story. In fact, it is a story that dates back to biblical times. We have this example in the story of Jonah. When Jonah looked up, after the great storm at sea, he was enveloped within what seemed a coarse, wet cave. Being thrashed about in this cave, Jonah became an object contained in an environment. As the story is told in the Book of Jonah, that environment was actually an object, a whale—for which Jonah was merely a detail of the contents of its mouth (a detail from god). For Jonah, the whale was an environment. For the whale, Jonah was a detail of its mouth, an object. Here detail, object and environment are not only indistinguishable, but merely a matter of perspective. Therefore, the predicament that Jonah finds himself in is that of a detail, that of an object, and that of an environment; all three of which work together monolithically to form the symbolic gesture of divine will through varying relations to the physical and individual body of Jonah. In this narrative, the occupant’s body is the common denominator within fluctuating perspectives and therefore the physical, psychological, and symbolic liaison between consciousness and the collective palpable landscape.
To adopt and therefore adapt a new understanding of our environments, we must think of the whale in the entirety of its being, as a detail (a detail of ocean abyss), and as an object (an object in terms of its body containing mass and mobility), and as an environment (it was indeed an environment for the intrepid Jonah, trapped inside of the whaleʼs mouth), and as a landscape (Jonah could certainly perceive the mouth of the whale as an environment, but the entirety of the whaleʼs body was not in view of Jonahʼs singular perceptual capacity, and therefore existed as a larger landscape that he had to imagine). Once we are able to understand the whale as all of the above, we are able to employ a multitude of empathies toward it simultaneously:
The whale as a cog [a detail] in a larger system allows us to empathize with it just as we are citizens of a larger society—one of many denizens of a community.
The whale as a discrete organism [an object] allows us to empathize with it as another being—man-to-man, mammal-to-mammal, being-to-being.
The whale as an environment allows us to empathize with it as we might care for and tend to a garden of our domicile.
The whale as a landscape allows us to empathize with it the way we embrace an awe-inspiring vista or how we might explore the caves of an alpine terrain.
This is our moment of succinct adaptation, as manifested through consciousness and our resulting behavior. Within this, a true sense of resilience might be formed.
Rebecca Chesney is a visual artist whose work is concerned with the relationship between humans and nature and how we perceive, romanticize, and translate the landscape.
My work as a visual artist is concerned with the relationship between humans and nature: how we perceive, romanticize, and translate the landscape, and how politics, ownership, management, and commercial value all influence our surroundings.
If a balance is to be found where humans and wildlife coexist, we must acknowledge how each situation and circumstance demands a different solution.
I live in Preston in the U.K. and observing nature within the city has inevitably fed into my work and influenced my ideas. With the urban environment constantly changing, through periods of expansion and development, or recession, decline, and neglect I’ve become attracted to noting the resilience of some species.
Installation view of Unwanted, PAD Gallery Preston. Photo: Rebecca Chesney
In 2006, I conducted surveys in Preston to try and discover all the ‘weed’ species in the city (only species that were unplanned and not deliberately planted on landscaped areas were included in the count). I documented over 50 species in gaps in the pavement, gutters, rooftops, chimneys and on small plots of derelict land. The list includes native, archaeophyte, and neophyte species.
Some can be described as resilient, others as opportunistic invaders, but they’re all surviving in what is seen as an unnatural habitat. Thriving along damp walls and beside leaky drainpipes were some wonderful examples of native ferns: Black Spleenwort, Maidenhair Spleenwort, Wall-Rue, Hartstongue and Male Fern, for example.
Given that Preston is included in the Doomsday Book of 1086, the earliest surviving public record of the land held by William the Conqueror, it is intriguing to wonder if these species have been here since before that time, and how they have adapted to the challenges posed by an ever changing ‘habitat’.
Expanding the project further brought the publication, in 2012, of Natura in Minima Maxima: A Map of the Famous City of Preston, Proud Host to Plants of All Nations. I have continued to record plants in Preston; this hand drawn map reveals some of the 70 species documented since the project started in 2006.
Natura in Minima Maxima. Hand drawn map showing some of the weeds of Preston. Image: Rebecca Chesney
It was while on a Gasworks International Fellowship in Mumbai in 2013, where I was researching the relationship between humans and nature in and around the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, that I was confronted with a situation where both humans and nature are competing for the same space and where each is surviving because of their resilience in the face of continual pressure.
The park, 104km2 of native southern moist deciduous forest, is home to many rare species of plant and animals, including leopards. However, it is almost entirely surrounded by a massive urban population of approximately 20,000 people per km2 (it has been estimated that the population in Mumbai’s metropolitan area in 2013 was more than 20.5 million). During the 1990s, the High Court in Mumbai ruled that, because of the intense pressure on the ecology of the Park from the ever increasing population, all humans should be evicted from the Park. It was estimated that nearly 460,000 people lived in the Park by the mid-90s, but this number included both tribal villagers who had lived in the Park for generations and thousands of illegal encroachers living in self-made shanties.
Tribal village in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai, India. Photo: Rebecca Chesney
The problems and conflict triggered from this ruling still resonate today. The land is subject to environmental, political, commercial, and humanitarian issues involving the interests of local authorities, environmentalists, politicians, builders, and land mafia, as well as the thousands of people who still live within the Park boundary.
Relying on the Park for shelter, fuel, and food, the illegal encroachers are some of the poorest in society, with few or no rights, making them very vulnerable. And it’s the plentiful stray dogs associated with these human settlements that have become easy prey for leopards, constituting almost 70 percent of their diet. However, there have been attacks on people living in and around the Park boundary, causing terrible injuries and a number of deaths. Living under the threat of attack from leopards and the threat of eviction from their homes, these communities reveal a resilience and determination to remain. But the authorities in Mumbai are equally determined to protect the wildlife of the Park from the pressure of creeping development, knowing that this unique and incredible habitat could be lost forever if action is not taken.
Stray Dog of Mumbai (from a series of 18). Drawing on paper. Image: Rebecca Chesney
Living on the boundary of the Park during my stay in Mumbai taught me how complex the situation is—it is not a place of simple, black and white contrasts, but a complicated tapestry intricately woven. Bringing this incredible experience back to the city where I live has given me a new perspective from which to view my surroundings and to consider that, if a balance is to be found where humans and wildlife coexist, we must acknowledge how each situation and circumstance demands a different solution.
Emilio Fantin is an artist working in Italy on multidisciplinary research.
He teaches at the Politecnico, Architecture, University of Milan, and acts as coordinator of the “Osservatorio Public Art”.
The term resilience suggests a spirit of adaptation, the ability to solve problems, a rebound. As a strategy to improve a problem, resilience transforms the deteriorated situation by holding to it.
Resilience is a form of coexistence. It is a process, a form of living, a relation to nature.
To me, revolution suggests an image of utopia, pureness and sacrifice, the drive towards a new world. I see revolution as a primary color, red. It has an impetuous movement, like a red river that becomes a stormy sea. Revolution attacks and destroys the opponent. It dictates a new winner by a clear cut. This is a great strength and a great weakness.
“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
—Mao Tse-Tung
Resilience drives us to the realm of adaptation. It speaks of transformation and not destruction. I imagine that resilience has a shade of Terra di Siena (Sienna), a complementary color. I used to paint with it in order to give different nuances. Terra di Siena has a less solid quality than red because it is more adaptable. Resilience is the flow of the river that does not converge into a sea. It flows into different channels, gathering enough force to overcome obstacles.
Phonetically speaking, in the word revolution, the combination of “r” and “v” sounds sharp and hard. In the word resilience, the combination of “r” and “s” sounds sweet and fluid.
Resilience sounds sensual and maternal, while revolution sounds imperative and manly. Revolution evokes the orbital movement of planets, Father and Sky. Resilience echoes nature, Mother and Earth. In the 60s, we had the sexual revolution; nowadays we have a gender resilience. The metamorphosis of the bodies is an example of a resilient quality. Terms like trans, inter, intra, with, between, refer to a processuality. Resilience leaves the door always open, while revolution is categoric and it stops a cycle. The resilient attitude of changing and transforming is acting in the generative and reproductive functions, which are the essence of feminine.
Resilience is a form of coexistence. It is a process, a form of living, a relation to nature. It drives us toward a profound interest in ecology and politics. From a political perspective, it can be seen as an attitude to resist and to escape power abuse. It is a strategy to escape strong power, slipping through it without making another enemy and creating an equally strong opponent. Resilience fights the enemy by keeping it to the background, but cannot really destroy it. This is a great strength and a great weakness.
But is it possible to find solutions to the problems of the environment without questioning the values of capitalism? This perspective lets us hope for a better future, but exposes us to the danger of slipping into accepting neoliberal principles as given.
“Stop calling me resilient. I’m not resilient. Because every time you say, ‘Oh, they’re resilient,’ you can do something else to me.”
—Tracie Washington, New Orleans-based civil rights attorney, 2010
Resilience: evolution and growth habit in Tillandsias, a bio-model
In terms of plant evolution, Bromeliads, a family of plants from South America, first appeared relatively recently, about 70-50 million years ago.
Resilience in Tillandsias is evidenced by evolution, over millennia, into diverse species, and evolution of growth habit over short periods.
About the same time as our ancestral forebears, the early apes, evolved on the planet (15 – 30 million years ago), the massive Andes mountain range thrust upward from intense tectonic activity. In the geological upheaval, countless life forms became stranded by high, rocky peaks and deep valleys. Increasingly, each species was exposed to a “rapidly” changing climate. Mostly drier, colder, and hotter. Relatively quickly (over a few million years), species either became locally/permanently extinct or evolved.
More than any, Tillandsias, a genus of Bromeliads, diversified and about 1000 species evolved in an extremely short period. The success of their profound resilience was founded on adaptive evolution, through which they developed and refined a complex series of biological systems and growth habits that spawned a multitude of weird and eccentric plant forms that are often called air plants. One species, Tillandsiatectorum has been recorded growing in conditions of 75°C temperature change in a single day (-20°C to 55°C)
A range of Tillandsia species. Images: Lloyd Godman
Many evolved a xerophytic habit (needing little water), became epiphytic (growing on trees or other plants), or became saxicolous (attaching to rocks or sheer cliffs). While the roots became a means only of holding the plant firm, their trichome cells (special cells on the leaf) became more efficient and able to absorb all moisture and nutrients from the atmosphere. Some species have grown in areas where no rain has fallen for more than 20 years. As a climatic defence, these silver cells reflect about 93 percent of the radiation from the sun. Tillandsias dispensed with traditional photosynthetic methods and used a CAM cycle (a modification of typical photosynthesis) to biologically store energy from the sun, followed by growing at night, taking in CO2, and releasing oxygen in darkness, thereby reducing transpiration, which would dehydrate other plants grown in a similarly harsh climate.
Images: Lloyd Godman
Working with Tallandsias
Tillandsias are among the amazing Bromeliad plants that from 1996 have become a signature in my work as an ecological artist,(My early work with Bromeliads can be viewed in this book.)
Tillandsia SWARM
Images: Lloyd Godman
In one of my current Bromeliad Projects, Tillandsia SWARM, small mesh cages with selected species of Tillandsia have been placed on varied locations within Melbourne city, with no auxiliary watering system and left to their own biological devices.
Left: Eureka Tower Tillandsia sites. Right: (from left to right) Grant Harris, Lloyd Godman, and Stu Jones on top of Eureka—the plant cage is on the right. Images: Lloyd GodmanTillandsias after 22 months at level 92 Eureka Tower. Image: Lloyd Godman
CH2 Building
December 2015 saw plants installed at 4 sites on the CH2 building, where vertical garden systems have failed to establish. One SWARM site is mounted on the animated wooden sun screens, which rotate to control sunlight and heat entering the building.
Left: Tillandsias mounted on the animated façade of CH2. Right: Grant Harris installs a Tillandsia cage at the top of C2—note the dead foliage of a climbing plant on the mesh. Images: Lloyd Godman
Essendon Fields
In February 2016, we mounted Tillandsia cages at 5 sites at Essendon Fields, an aiport.
Left: Tillandsia cage mounted on the perimeter fence at Essendon Airport. Right: Tillandsia cage mounted on supermarket roof at Essendon. Images: Lloyd Godman
While there is not space to elaborate on the intricacies of the project, the process of installing these cages is a form of green tagging—this is not a sculptural work in the traditional sense of the word, but a conceptual social sculpture similar to Joseph Beuys 7,000 Oaks project at Documenta 7, where the plants occupy an ever greater space within the city. Other sites are in planning and the project can be viewed at: http://lloydgodman.net/suspend/swarm/index.html
While it might appear that the title, SWARM, refers to the expansion of Tilliandsia colonies throughout the city in the way bees swarm, it also relates to swarm intelligence and the way plants communicate through roots.
It poses a question: If these remarkable plants have disposed of their roots and rely on the trichome leaf cells, perhaps they also use their highly developed trichome cells to communicate via airwaves?
The plants on Eureka have now been installed for 22 months and have withstood record heat and dry spells, cold, salt laden winds over 200km per hour, and proved resilient to the severe climate of a high-rise building. Their success in such adverse conditions is underpinned by their adaptive growth habit.
In a nursery, the plants grow larger and greener, but in the extreme climate of Eureka, the plants produce more trichomes, becoming more silver in colour to reflect radiation and collect as much moisture as possible; the growth habit is more compact. The plants also produced many more pups or off-shoots (7-10 compared with 2-4 in a nursery) which acts as a biological insurance, creating a colony much quicker than in a milder climate. If one pup perishes, there are others to carry the plant forward. Compact growth and multiple pups are bio-strategies which help to create shifting shade patterns, protecting the colony from the adverse climate.
So, when exposed to harsh conditions, resilience in Tillandsias is evidenced by both evolution, over millennia, into diverse species, and growth habit over periods of just a few years. Changes in climate stimulate these changes within the plant’s evolutionary history, and the scale of time dictates the biological mechanism adopted. In an environment of predicted rapid climate change due to high CO2 levels, these remarkable plants, Tillandsias, offer a bio-model for effective adaption.
Airborne—rotating Tillandsia sulptures in Melbourne CBD with Eureka Tower in background. Work and Photos: Lloyd Godman
“The end of history” was but a sign their era began to approach The End
As a kid in Bordertown, I used to watch Western movies thinking they were like action movies set in a bygone era because they had horses and people with hats and deserts and, more particularly, Indians with long hair (even though it was just like my own hair), instead of soldiers with machine guns and cars.
Today, we find many aspects of indigenous cultures becoming resilient by escaping Hispanic-Latino control.
I used to think those stories had happened years ago and could be consigned to the realm of black and white. I struggled to make the connection to the fashionable indigenous clothing my beautiful mom wore. Or to the fact that I thought there was nothing as “elegant” as a Chiconcuac coat. I just thought we were hippies. And never really made the connection that farmworkers in Mexico were indigenous; I just thought they were “poor”. Now I understand many of them are, but cash-poor, as they have access to healthy organic food without the drag of market value. Thanks to NAFTA, the U.S.A. took control of the regional monopoly of corn, something that 500 years belonged to the Triple Alliance (Tenochtitlan-Texcoco-Tlacopan).
Mom and Dad explained to me the bad guys in Western films were actually the cowboys, who stole the land and resources of the Indians. I also noticed the stories of Lone Ranger and Zorro were set in two completely different moments (Zorro used a sword because guns weren’t common in his time). That helped me understand that the genocidal campaign against Indians lasted for a few centuries. Both were sort of like Robin Hood, and both were in the territory we now know as the U.S.A., but that territory, at a certain point, was stolen from the Indians by Spain. Following this logic, every time a Mexican ‘demands’ or becomes nostalgic for such land, he responds to nothing more than the Spanish colonial heritage, as opposed to the indigenous one.
Needless to say, I always identified with the Indians in the movies, even though Mexican school and television taught me Indians didn’t exist anymore: they belonged to another time. There were a few survivors, of course: a few Indian families begging for money in touristic streets and perhaps a few stubborn individuals who didn’t want to use medicines, go to school, etc. They were basically extinct. We were told that in 1492 Christopher Columbus had “discovered” America. Soon after, Spanish Conquistadores brought (their) civilization and diseases. A bloody war started, but the Indians lost. They had been glorious and heroic, but they died because they were supposed to be inferior. Official history would go as far as to point out that their polytheism was another proof of their primitive status. After the indigenous people lost, a new culture was born: closer to Spain, but mixed with indigenous features. That was the mantra. Some teachers would talk to us about ethnic cleansing, others would talk about the benefits of catechism. But nothing really managed to fully kill the mystery.
At 10 or 11 years old, I attended the lecture of an old sage who claimed to be the Last Mayan. I remember feeling very sad and asking myself and hearing others ask what could be done, how could he reproduce his kind and their wisdom? But of course, he was too old: he was The Last One. Not much could be done. Better that he tour the country while he still could to let people know whatever secrets remained before it was too late. This was a few years before the half-millennium anniversary of the invasion of the continent. People and intellectuals were getting restless. In 1992, Mexican social scientists managed to score a goal on Spanish social scientists who, perhaps to avoid riots, agreed to stop claiming the continent had been “discovered”—of course, people inhabiting the continent knew they existed and were in the continent. Instead, the official version of the 1492 event was re-conceptualized as a “meeting of two worlds.” Nothing more.
Those were the years when Francis Fukuyama claimed history had come to an end. And because of NAFTA, the people of Mexico were deluded, believing it was time for them to become citizens of the First World. The official date of entry would be January 1, 1994. But the transmission on New Year’s Day was interrupted by a small Liberation Army of Mayans, who existed, identified as Mayans, and didn’t speak the Spanish language, even though they inhabited Mexico. That was a big reality check. Since then, we have found out that more and more people speak languages and practice religions we were told were long-dead. Even a few decades ago, there were still events (miracles) that made the Nahuatl people renew their faith in their “natural” or original beliefs. The Catholic Church treated these events as emergencies: it would use any means to suppress such effects. Theology of Liberation has been praised for its so-called emancipatory and revolutionary qualities, but it could also be considered a last resource for keeping the customers converted to the oppressor’s religion.
Today, we find many aspects of indigenous cultures becoming resilient by escaping Hispanic-Latino control simply by having access to autonomous means of social organization (as in the case of the Zapatista-aligned Mayans, peoples, or groups working within the Convención Nacional Indígena) through which they teach their own versions of the invasion, conquest, and colonization of the continent; or by having access to groups that manage to secure regular access to liquid financial means (like the U.S. dollar) that allow them to circumvent colonial “hispanic” caste-based forms of social organization by creating translocal financial flows, as is the case of many indigenous migrants in the U.S., who first identify as part of an indigenous group and after that as Mexicans. And then again, you have de-Indianized mestizos and young adventurous people in search for themselves.
Isn’t it ironic that a lot of the people we think of as Latinos, actually think of Latinos as the persons that dispossessed them of their resources? The spirit of the land still walks among us, pedestrians of history. Long live Huehueteotl.
Todd Lester is an artist and cultural producer. He has worked in leadership, advocacy and strategic planning roles at Global Arts Corps, Reporters sans frontiers, and Astraea Lesbian Justice Foundation. He founded freeDimensional and Lanchonete.org—a new project focused on daily life in the center of São Paulo.
It is hard for me to speak to one coded buzzword—resilience—without evoking another: precarity (see this dense, yet compelling article, From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks). That it’s rooted, significantly, in Italian labor struggles might explain why it doesn’t spellcheck in English. While neither word originates in the art world, both ‘precarity’ and ‘resilience’ have entered its stratosphere significantly in the past decade. They feel like jargon when passing the lips, and therefore attain new levels of encryption for those of us who know how to deploy them in symposia and panel settings … etymologically, they “mean” something, yet often it’s hard to indict users for blurred, vague, or conflated issuance. The “word police” are on their trail, however, and this question(ing) may well be a preliminary hearing.
“Resilience” is just another hoo-ha word game that philanthrocapitalism baits do-gooders with à la new grant competitions.
I recently saw the programme of a university conference that included a Roundtable on Precarity. I thought to myself, what a sign of the neoliberal times … historicizing an acceptable version of ‘down and out’ as it climbs up the class ladder … as if the privilege of overworking hails from a different system than one that does not allow some to work with dignity (or that labor abuse in a gilded vocation is somehow more egregious than that experienced by workers writ large).
Cities fascinate me. They comprise communities, and my art is almost always in dialogue with various forms of community organizing. I often work in rather large cities like Cairo and São Paulo, where the word in question is beginning to be bandied about, as it has been in pan-Western locales for some years now. Here, I’m bringing up the usage of such English-language jargon in non-English-speaking locales … a related and also fraught ‘enterprise’. Working in these large—refugee, economic migrant, natural disaster / climate change migrant, exile, asylum-seeker -receiving—cities, I’ve come to believe that the size of a city is a form of control. For example the mega-city phenomenon is not occurring in the pan-Western territory. Our “resilient” cities cannot even be compared to those for which the global visa regime directs immense flows of human mobility to be “held” and processed with only a small fraction traveling onward to the cities of the “West”. Our cities (speaking as a U.S. citizen) are simply not challenged in the same way that those in formerly/currently colonized or clientele states are… full disclosure: I’m sitting in Cairo as I finish this piece.
So, really, “resilience” is just another hoo-ha word game that philanthrocapitalism baits do-gooders with à la new grant competitions, as Tom Slater points out in The resilience of neoliberal urbanism (OpenDemocracy, 28 January 2014). And in From Just Another Emperor? The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism, where Michael Edwards cautions that the phenomenon (described by Slater) “is flawed in both its proposed means and its promised ends [seeing] business methods as the answer to social problems, but [offering] little rigorous evidence or analysis to support this claim … Philanthrocapitalism is in danger of passing itself off as the whole solution, downgrading the costs and trade-offs of extending business and market principles into social transformation.” Slater (OpenDemocracy) suggests that “an entire cottage industry on ‘resilient cities’ has emerged at a time of global austerity (a needless and wicked political and corporate assault on the poor that needs to be captured as a crisis per se, rather than as a response to an economic crisis)… [and that the] insidious work of urban resilience lies in the obvious and, to its proponents, entirely logical policy suggestion that the word carries: urban dwellers of the world, brace yourselves for austerity [or environmental catastrophe] and everything will be fine in the end!”
And, by the way, I’m not excluding myself from the “do good” camp, but I do think it helps to interrogate the conditions under which we strive for social justice … and questioning such positivist narratives offers one access hatch to go deeper and reality-check if what we hope for/from (in using these words) attains depth and rigor in a struggle for equality that is definitely implied when resilience-speak and social justice collide (often in the very halls of those philanthropies). I imagine that some would even disagree that “resilience” is positivist, but we can save that for the comments section. A couple years ago, I was in a room full of grantmakers and philanthropists in which the question was asked: “How can we make sure that artists are as responsive to future natural disasters [as they were to Hurricane Sandy and the Calgary flooding]?” Art is as social as it has always been. Artists’ ideas are as vibrant as they have always been. However, to only pay attention to their societal function when the shit hits the fan is to miss the point. So, thank you for asking this question to a gaggle of artists … it means a lot.
Hey, folks, as an independent project maker, I retain the right to apply for “resilience”-themed funds for my art work—as my need to do so reflects the capitalist system I exist within—even if I also aspire for that work to ask difficult questions of what Andy Merrifield terms the “bourgeois appropriation” of Right to the City discourse. In fact, as a middle class, white male who cares deeply about the future of our cities, I believe it is my responsibility to question the role of dominant culture in perpetuating neoliberal myths (of opportunity) in the face of what Lefebvre termed “planetary metamorphosis” in his ultimate work, “Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis”, a short essay in which the old Marxist fully relinquished Right to the City-speak to the “enemies”. While it might seem like a tangent, I suggest a broad reading of Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination with the question of “resilience” in mind. Thanks for reading!
Frida Larios [b. San José, Costa Rica, 1974 (of Salvadoran parents)] has been leading learning since 2000, following her higher purpose of facilitating interpretative visual narrative applied to authored books, artworks, garments, workshops, and dialogues with children, youth, and designers, bridging the stories from Indigenous peoples and lands to contemporary reflection and appreciation, through her award-winning New Maya (Visual) Language coding methodology.
Our footsteps keep warm an ancient lineage of birth, life, death and rebirth. As artists, it is this deep memory that we seek to activate and regenerate.
“Resilience” can only ever be a state of being, the state of oneness within the laws of nature.
Human creativity is woven within life’s continual evolution. Air, water, light, earth, fungi, plants, trees, insects, animals: these are our ancestors, here long before we were. Essential to who we are now. This primordial progression of child, within mother, within child, within mother, over eons of time, sustains and revitalises our true human nature.
With hands and hearts, our human family have crafted expressions of this awareness, recorded in rock, clay, pigment, fibre, song, and dance, to nourish the connections over time, making the journey of our continuity tangible. There is no separation. Everything and every one of us is interconnected. This is the indigenous understanding, and this reality is indigenous to us all.
Wholeness. Images: Frida Larios and Caroline Robinson
In this understanding, “resilience” can only ever be a state of being, the state of oneness within the laws of nature. The gift is nestled in the remembering this infinite wholeness that we are. The scientific reality is our biology and the patterns of the universe are regenerative. We are darkness and light. Harmonising. Potent. Timeless.
When we see it this way, it frames disturbance and disruption as vital polarity in the battery of life. Like the volcano decimating a landscape, to regenerate fertility on the earth’s surface. Within the darkness, a seed potential is waiting for full expression.
Can we find our true power and strength deep within the chaos, danger, and vulnerability?
The paradox lies in the face of extreme complexity and challenge: we are being called to be receptive and sensitive to the whispers of life. In a whole living system reality, we are nature, and nature sees only fuel, opportunity, and potential. Everyone and everything is part of this epic transformational process. We are actually co-evolving.
What could the consciousness of co-creation and co-evolution look like, feel like, sound like, smell like, and taste like in action?
We are living research. We are practitioners. We are seeds. As such, the work we do carries the intention to discover and cultivate life’s simple regenerative principle. Our relationships and endeavours, personal and collective, large and small, become centres of research and practice that guide us back to the source for renewal.
So we ask:
Where do I feel the most alive, and connected to life’s potential? How am I keeping warm this ancient footprint of regeneration?
In this tenuous time of transition, at times awkward and intensely painful, perhaps the most pragmatic, yet sacred, action, is to focus human creativity on expressing, in myriad ways, the dignity of our wholeness.
Patrick M. Lydon is an American ecological writer and artist based in Korea whose seeks to re-connect cities and their inhabitants with nature. He writes The Possible City series, is co-founder of City as Nature (Daejeon). He is an Arts Editor here at The Nature of Cities.
This week, my partner and I are fortunate to be starting a 10-week tour of our film Final Straw: Food, Earth, Happiness in Japan, and the film itself is useful as a foundation in discussions relating to true resilience, not only in farming, but in mindset.
The roots of true resilience are in knowing our connectedness to nature, and then acting in the light of this knowledge.
Yesterday, while walking to a screening event in Kyoto, we saw an astounding tree in bloom: white and deep pink. We were in a bit of a rush and it was raining, but we stopped to admire this tree, its colors exploding out like fireworks against the dull gray of the backside of a Japanese market street. An elderly man caught on to our curiosity as we were doing this, and he stopped to explain how the tree was actually two different trees fused together. The three of us stood to admire it and it felt as if, for that moment, four diverse living things were all fused together; me, my partner, the old man, and the tree. Then we smiled and went on our ways.
More than a system of “doing” things, the roots of true resilience are in knowing our connectedness to nature, and then acting in the light of this knowledge.
Below are images of four recent artworks, each preceded by some prose on their relation to resilience. This is the simplest way I can think to approach this, a topic which might perhaps benefit from simplicity, story, and a lighting of the inner knowledge each of us has, which comes from our own intuition and understanding of our lives and relationships to this nature, which we are a part of.
For my part, these are a few ways in which art might help us see resilience.
–
Resilience is knowing
that you are part of an interconnected web
of life on this earth
and in this universe;
and acting out each task with knowledge
Title:Osakako MandalaMedium: found leaves and concrete Year: 2015 Location: Creative Art Space Osaka / Japan
–
Resilience is knowing
that endless growth
is the nature of the universe
not of anthropocentric economics;
and acting out each task with this knowledge
Title:Centre for Endless GrowthMedium: found natural materials and office furniture Year: 2014 Location: TENT Gallery, Edinburgh / Scotland
–
Resilience is knowing
that the people and land of yesterday
hold stories which are keys to the future
of people and land today;
and acting out each task with this knowledge
Resilience is knowing
that even if you live in a city
the reality is that you live in a universe
not in a city;
and acting out each task with this knowledge
Title: Film still from Final Straw: Food, Earth, HappinessMedium: feature-length documentary film Year: 2016 Filmed in: Japan, South Korea, United States
–
As I’m writing this, it’s Earth Day and I am reminded how, in so many ways, Earth is the mother of every being; her soil, her air, her water, and her endless string of unfathomable miracles provides us with everything we need to live and be happy in this life. The more ways we find to tell this story, through words, song, color, and movement, the more our minds and actions can become grounded in the reality of life on this Earth—as opposed to the other “realities” we too often find ourselves wrapped in.
If we can give roots to the “resilience” conversation somewhere around here, I’m sure we’ll be able to find the resilience that lies beyond a buzzword.
Mary Mattingly creates sculptural ecosystems in urban spaces. Mary Mattingly’s work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, International Center of Photography, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana, Storm King, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Palais de Tokyo.
On trauma, grief and resilience: a project at the Museum of Modern Art
How can art ask us to think deeply about resilience, and what we lose in order to be resilient subjects? Can art interrogate the value of experience? Which experiences are supposed to be remembered and which are supposed to be forgotten? How can we begin to imagine a nonviolent world when we are rarely allowed to grieve over its violence?
What new potentials might develop if resilience was less valued?
Objects can connect us through their histories and the powerful stories they carry with them. When we are able to change their form, it can be monumental. We can add our own voice and that can be healing.
In the fall of 2015, I proposed a project to the Museum of Modern Art’s education department. What would it mean to take an object with a violent history and cooperatively transform it? How could such a project work, and what shape would it finally take? Most of all, how can we begin to share our experiences and differences through an intergenerational, multiracial, and multinational conversation about pain, and love?
I hoped we could tell a story about changing national priorities—from a war- and consumption-centered nation to one that is eager to learn from its own violence and vulnerability.
Here’s how I proposed it: I would purchase a U.S. military trailer at government auction and the students would be the idea makers, the re-creators. They would architect the redesign, keep the budget, and be the project managers. I would facilitate, question, advise on, and ultimately champion their ideas.
A trailer that had been redelivered to the U.S. from Iraq was ours to work with. Seventeen high school students signed up to be part of the project. We began with a series of architectural charrettes where we decided on criteria that defined what was important to us. It was overwhelmingly practical: what we needed to say, what we had the budget for, our aesthetic positions, and most of all our concerns about safety. Even with all of us, this two-ton trailer was a force.
In the following weeks, we created drawings and maquettes. We started and then later abandoned a series of ideas. The things we didn’t end up doing:
We didn’t turn the military trailer into a park or a garden.
We didn’t turn the military trailer into a mobile kitchen.
We didn’t turn the military trailer into a giant printmaking press.
We didn’t use the tires for tire swings.
We didn’t completely deconstruct the trailer and rebuild it into a sphere.
We didn’t turn the military trailer into an art studio.
We didn’t turn the military trailer on its side and project films on the trailer bed.
We didn’t melt the military trailer down and mold the steel into a sword.
Instead we made it into a social space that’s near impossible to define. It was a small piece of each of those things; it came from different voices and took months of compromise and working together. It came from a process of learning how to use new tools and taking time to teach each other the tools we were already skilled in.
The project was not about resilience but about revaluing sadness. From there, it was about transforming an object into a symbol, and then into a space. We looked for a premade form to process some of those emotions collectively, but finally had to create a new one.
After all, I wondered, what new potentials might develop if resilience was less valued? Like the faith many have in market expansion, resilience is a temporary fix, and has often been a way to leave the larger questions unanswered and problems unaddressed.
E.J. McAdams is a poet and artist who lives with his wife and three children in Harlem, Ward’s Island Sewershed, Manhattan, Lower Hudson Watershed, New York, USA, earth.
What happens if you exchange every variation of the word “system” with variations of the word “poem”?
Reflective
Reflective poems are accepting of the inherent and ever-increasing uncertainty and change in today’s world. They have mechanisms to continuously evolve, and will modify standards or norms based on emerging evidence, rather than seeking permanent solutions based on the status quo. As a result, people and institutions examine and poetically learn from their past experiences, and leverage this learning to inform future decision-making.
Robust
Robust poems include well-conceived, constructed, and managed physical assets, so that they can withstand the impacts of hazard events without significant damage or loss of function. Robust design anticipates potential failures in poems, making provision to ensure failure is predictable, safe, and not disproportionate to the cause. Over-reliance on a single asset, cascading failure, and design thresholds that might lead to catastrophic collapse if exceeded are actively avoided
Redundant
Redundancy refers to spare capacity purposely created within poems so that they can accommodate disruption, extreme pressures, or surges in demand. It includes diversity: the presence of multiple ways to achieve a given need or fulfil a particular function. Examples include distributed infrastructure networks and resource reserves. Redundancies should be intentional, cost-effective, and prioritised at a city-wide scale, and should not be an externality of inefficient design.
Flexible
Flexibility implies that poems can change, evolve, and adapt in response to changing circumstances. This may favour decentralised and modular approaches to infrastructure or ecosystem management. Flexibility can be achieved through the introduction of new knowledge and technologies, as needed. It also means considering and incorporating indigenous or traditional knowledge and practices in new ways.
Resourceful
Resourcefulness implies that people and institutions are able to rapidly find different ways to achieve their goals or meet their needs during a shock or when under stress. This may include investing in capacity to anticipate future conditions, set priorities, and respond, for example, by mobilising and coordinating wider human, financial, and physical resources. Resourcefulness is instrumental to a city’s ability to restore functionality of critical poems, potentially under severely constrained conditions.
Inclusive
Inclusion emphasises the need for broad consultation and engagement of communities, including the most vulnerable groups. Addressing the shocks or stresses faced by one sector, location, or community in isolation of others is anathema to the notion of resilience. An inclusive approach contributes to a sense of shared ownership or a joint vision to build city resilience.
Integrated
Integration and alignment between city poems promotes consistency in decision-making and ensures that all investments are mutually supportive to a common outcome. Integration is evident within and between resilient poems, and across different scales of their operation. Exchange of information between poems enables them to function collectively and respond rapidly through shorter feedback loops throughout the city.
Procedure: Exchange every variation of the word “system” with variations of the word “poem”.
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od ton slamina
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eht swohs dna stup
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A reading through of the section Reflective from “Qualities of resilient systems” in City Resilience Framework using two texts: The Works: Anatomy of a City, by Kate Ascher, and Shaking the Pumpkin, edited by Jerome Rothenberg, with a reflection of the generated text.
Mary Miss has reshaped the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, landscape design, and installation art by articulating a vision of the public sphere where it is possible for an artist to address the issues of our time. She has developed the "City as Living Lab", a framework for making issues of sustainability tangible through collaboration and the arts.
In five modest neighborhoods in Indianapolis, a cluster of mirrors and red beams radiates out from a central point to nearby streams and waterways: these elements stake out a territory for observation.
We intend to provoke the visitors’ curiosity and send them out to the nearby waterways.
At the center, visitors can step up onto a pedestal to see their own image in a four foot diameter mirror placing them in the middle of the reflected landscape while casting them in the role of the statue / activator/ principal character. Single words and texts are reflected in the smaller mirrors that dot the site; some of the texts are poems, while others are prompts that encourage exploration. All are intended to provoke the visitors’ curiosity and send them out to the nearby waterways.
Whether following a red beam out to observe habitat at a stream’s edge, trying to walk at the same pace as the flow of the stream,or listening to music composed for each unique location, the goal is to engage citizens with a place-based experience of these waterways that support every aspect of their lives. The installations are like anchors—the starting points for explorations—and will be activated over the next year by walks and dialogues with scientists and artists, by performances and readings. The goal is to allow the people of Indianapolis to begin to imagine what they would like to see their streams, lakes, and rivers become in the future.
This collaborative project includes an artist, musicians, poets, dancers, and scientists.
This CALL (City as Living Laboratory) project was made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Edna Peres has a background in architecture, urbanism, writing, and academia. Her experience includes regenerative design, urban resilience thinking, transit-oriented design, sustainability, low/medium/high-end housing settlements, adaptive reuse, inner city development, as well as ecological urbanism.
Although there are notions that resilience is a new buzzword following on from sustainability, resilience is not a new thing. If we observe the exchanges between plants and animals, and their environments, we are witnessing resilience in action. This implies that resilience is not a passive thing, but rather an activity.
As designers, artists, and architects, the search for resilience embodies new ways of framing the problems affecting urban systems and then configuring solutions for these.
‘Nature’ designs resilience into its systems to persist beyond water shortages, fire, and inhospitable habitats. Humans are also actively applying resilience in their lives. The societal shifts we as a species have made over thousands of years are evidence of our capacity to persist by adapting ourselves, or the environment, to our needs. As individuals we bounce back and carry on living after disturbances shake up our lives, again demonstrating qualities of resilience. From whichever angle we look at it, resilience represents a creative drive to carry on. But the ‘carrying on’ strategy is not always the same and sometimes, in response to disturbances, adaptations or transformations are needed.
Our cities and buildings form an important part of an ongoing ecosystemic project. What we mean by this is that cities are actually a part of a ‘natural’ living system. The flows of life that occur in rural areas, also occur in urban areas. The difference is that we have trained designers of the built environment to perpetuate the separation of the natural and built landscapes, in order to promote the economic drive for growth. The potential to support their integration in a new understanding of economic potential is not nurtured in this model. This illustrates that architects have the ability to increase or decrease the potential for our cities to continually enable living systems to thrive within them. Our role in harnessing, rather than limiting, the potential of the city to thrive in a holistic and ecologically sustainable manner is then very important. Design interventions are required that, firstly, build the capital reserves (economic, social, cultural, spiritual, ecological, etc.) of a place, and, secondly, enhance the general resilience of the city. However, both of these goals deal only with the physical resilience of the built fabric.
What of the intangible aspects of resilience that guide our responses to, and views of, the world? Intangible aspects of resilience underpin thinking processes that inform the strategies with which we as designers view the world and use to respond to challenges. Perhaps the problem is not what we design, but how we design within the opportunities presented to us in the world. How do we design strategies for resilience that can allow for our cities to continue in a creative manner that is responsive to unknown challenges, to function within the limits of our planetary boundaries, and also to unlock our potential as humans to flourish?
As designers, artists, and architects, the search for resilience embodies new ways of framing the problems affecting urban systems and then configuring solutions for these. These new ways of seeing are based on broad levels of consciousness that enable rich, self-generating interventions that can have positive ripples on our urban futures. In other words, we need to change the way we think about the city in its entirety if we hope to see different results when employing the word resilience. Fundamentally, then, resilience suggests a reevaluation of our value systems, of the ways in which we interact with decision-makers in the city, and, lastly ,our relationships with each other on a day to day basis. In this way, resilience thinking can be meaningful.
Dr. Finzi Saidi joined the Department of Architecture in the faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at University of Johannesburg in 2008. His research interests include studies of open space in informal settlements and townships in South Africa, exploring innercity schools and urban open space, and innovative curriculum development.
Keijiro Suzuki is an interdisciplinary contemporary artist, a cultural connector, and an initiator of an alternative art space called the temporary space. He is also the founder of cagerow production.
This is a story for a vision of resilience. This is not real; however, it is based on reality that is happening in parts of the world.
-Beginning of Story-
My vision of resilience accommodates perspective shift and interdependency
Mr. Smith is an average guy who works an 8-to-5 job. He is a creative director for virtual reality (VR) immersive environment. He commutes by subway and takes the same route to get to work every day. At 7 p.m., he meets up with his friends and grabs a beer. By 10 p.m., he gets home and watches a TV show. He happens to watch a travel and documentary channel about a small island with sociopolitical issues.
—Mr. Smith turns on TV.
The reporter, Napaj, describes the island from his previous knowledge and reports what he sees to his viewers and adds some of his thoughts.
The small island is a part of an archipelago and is famous for its active volcanoes and the related earthquakes, as well as tsunamis. It is his first visit to the island and he gives such information as context for his viewers. The island has beautiful mountains, forest, and sea and the people harvest fruit and vegetables and also catch fish and animals for everyday life.
Photo: Keijiro Suzuki
Napaj drives a car and crosses a bridge to enter the island. As soon as he enters the island, he comes across a huge slogan saying “Empower and enrich our community by nuclear energy”. In the past, people on this island heavily depended on harvest by nature and developed a belief system worshipping the spirit of nature. He often stops by shrines and temples with beautiful representational ornaments. He continues driving the car and comes across another slogan saying, “Stop nuclear energy”. It seemed that the local residents must have put up such a slogan, but he doesn’t see anyone nearby.
He stops by a local restaurant for his lunch. He orders assorted slices of fresh fish. All the fishes are too rare and too expensive to have in major cities, and he shows off the variety of rare fishes and their freshness to the viewers. Even a local fisherman tells him that it is becoming more and more difficult to catch them, since the forest doesn’t hold raindrops in the soil because of the lumber industry and doesn’t drain good nutrients to the rivers and sea. And the local fishermen lose their jobs and become construction workers to make roads and public buildings by order from the local and the national governments.
Photo: Keijiro Suzuki
After he finishes reporting his lunch, Napaj notices a TV in the restaurant showing footage of a big earthquake and the following tsunami, as well as the explosion of the nuclear plant. He recalls that it has been five years since the incident and nothing has been resolved. He thinks of his son and daughter. What kind of living conditions and natural environment can be passed down to them? He couldn’t think of a concrete solution for them, but was dared to challenge the issues with ideas and actions through his travels and findings.
He continues to drive his car to the west and comes across another slogan saying, “Abolish nuclear weapons! A town for peace”. He has gotten to know that there must have been several groups who have different values and perspectives for survival in the town. He looks for a local resident and finds a young woman with her daughter. Both are looking toward the sea.
The reporter (Napaj) : Hello. How are you? I am Napaj, a TV reporter from overseas. You don’t mind if I asked you a couple of questions?
A local woman: Hello, nice meeting you. Yes. I don’t mind. But I am not sure if I could correctly answer your question. Don’t you mind?
The reporter: Not at all. So, would you tell me a little bit about all those slogans about the nuclear plant and so on?
Local woman: Ah, yes. These were put in at different periods. The first one was put up about 30 years ago. People on this island didn’t have much benefit from economical development back then and also couldn’t continue farming and fishing for their livelihoods since the soil and water were affected by pollution from somewhere.
The reporter: That’s really sad… So, the first slogan, “Empower and enrich our community by nuclear energy” was put up about 30 years ago.
Local woman: Yes. I was also as young as my daughter here—about five years old—back then. I thought it was natural to believe that it was good thing.
The reporter: Then, how about another one, “Stop nuclear energy”?
Local woman: Ah, that was put up almost at the same time. I mean, local residents didn’t like the idea of putting dangerous energy nearby. But half the residents thought it was necessary for the people on this island to survive, since the national government and the electricity company agreed to give financial support to the local government… even for research…
The reporter: Research?
Local woman: Yes, money for research before actually beginning the construction. Tons of money was poured into this town… not sure who received the benefit… but this state of equilibrium continued over 30 years, until now.
The reporter: Also, the other slogan? “Abolish nuclear weapons! A town for peace”?
Local woman: Yeah. It was put up some time in the past. Do you remember? This country is the only country that has suffered from nuclear bombs? But people never thought that nuclear energy was as dangerous as the nuclear bomb… such a pity, don’t you think?
The reporter: I see. I see the whole story behind them now. I feel very sorry but I am glad that the landscape and the beautiful oceans remain well. Wasn’t it a good thing for you?
Local woman: I think so. I would think so. I just can’t say yes or no… to be honest. Can you see the rock formation at the tip of the pier?
The reporter: Ah, yes, I can see rocks piling up on top of each other and I can also see something man-made on it, but it looks collapsed… What is it?
Local woman: It is a gate made of stone. I am glad that you are from other part of the world. We believe that it is a secret gate to communicate with spirit of nature. You know, I am a bit scared when I see it collapsed… Have you heard of Shinto?
Photo: Keijiro Suzuki
The reporter: I have heard of it but I don’t know what it is.
Local woman: Don’t worry. It is a bit too complicated to explain anyway. But don’t feel bad about it. Even we don’t know what it is exactly.
The reporter: O.K. I will study it later. And I really appreciate your time and your kindness.
Local woman: You are very welcome. Thank you very much for coming to this small island. I wish you continue a good travel and experience here. I want you to come back again, though!
The reporter: Yes, definitely. By the way, where else should I visit before going home?
Local woman: Maybe a hot spring? You know, this island is famous for its hot springs, I mean, famous for its volcanic activity, more precisely. Didn’t you pass by a hot spring public bath just right after crossing the bridge?
The reporter: A hot spring public bath? Do you recommend it?
Local woman: Yes, of course. It is our culture! It is also brand new. But only concern that you may have is… that this public bath was built by financial support from the national government and the electricity company,, though the hot spring water is great and refreshing. Please try it, if you have some time.
The reporter: Thank you very much for the info. Yeah, it means something… I will keep it in my mind.
—The TV program ends, and Mr. Smith turns off the TV.
Mr. Smith thought the TV program was very intriguing and thought provoking, in a way. He couldn’t easily say that it was good or bad … rather, he thought that people were living under such uncertainty, under a double-edged sword. At the same time, he was fascinated by the beautiful nature in the small island through the broadcasting and kept thinking about how he can adapt such beautiful footage into his VR immersive environment project, so that his customers can enjoy such beautiful scenes at home, even in cities, without visiting actual places…
When the TV program ended, it was almost midnight. He was ready for bed and he left the room. As he is about to leave the room, an emergency alert beeps out of his cell phone. And the display shows: “Emergency alert, Earthquake in Otomamuk.” 30 seconds later, his rooms shook and an electricity bill slipped off from piles of receipts that he collected to pay for his living next month.
-End of the Story-
In this story, there are so many ways to read and interpret, which I intended for my readers to do in order to evoke their own thoughts. I assume that lots of people may get confused about the situation. What I wanted to speak about is perspective shift and interdependency. I am not intending to express opposition to economical and technological development, but rather use of it and the related decision-making it prompts. This relates to ethical and philosophical ideas and values as a backbone for our survival.
Technological advancement has dramatically changed our lives and environment. When I saw an actual case about the repurposing of a research budget from a nuclear plant project to a hot spring facility in an actual town in Japan, I was so impressed and thought it is about resilience of the local citizens. This type of decision was made upon democratic agreements between individuals, corporations, and government. I have never seen such shift of decision. So, what I would like to say my vision of resilience is this type of shift, perspective change.
In Japan, we experience lots of devastating natural disasters and most of the time we can’t change, but must accept, the situation. We learn from our experience, success, and failure. So, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, tremendously impacted our perspectives towards nuclear energy and nuclear power plants more than the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995, especially because of the nuclear plant explosion and after effects, which are considered to have been triggered by decision-makers’ misleading.
I am wondering how much technological advancement changes our perspective towards mobility and experiences. In the story above, my illustration about a creative director for VR immersive environment was my implication about perspective shift. Do we still need to travel to a place when we can virtually visit and experience through actual footage? In a way, this might be an effective solution to reduce human impact on nature, environment, and the earth, which I can also think of as a vision for resilience. However, in reality, we are more and more eager to travel and to physically experience such places.
Then, I ask myself about how we can reach ideal lives and maintain sound conditions for us to survive and to be content, as well as being sound for the whole ecosystem … We are all inseparable and interdependent.
P.S. Currently, we are experiencing another big earthquake in Kumamoto, which occurred on April 14, 2016.
In the story, there is a name called “Otomamuk”, which refers to the current earthquake in Kumamoto, Japan.
Ganzeer is the pseudonym of an Egyptian artist who has been operating mainly between graphic design and contemporary art since 2007. He refers to his practice as Concept Pop.
Green lush fields, gazelles, and lions are some of the depictions of the Egyptian wildlife you might find inscribed onto the walls of ancient tombs and temples. You might also find hippos, elephants, and crocodiles, and a wide variety of birds and owls. Living things that once roamed Egypt that, today, are nowhere to be found in the vast majority of the country.
The Egyptian cat’s ability to survive great changes in climate and civilization that have consumed the land is a testament to the animal’s resilience.
One animal you still find in great abundance, however, is the cat. Cats, in Egypt, are everywhere. You find them populating the cities and big urban centers as well as remote towns far from the Nile valley. While the status of the cat today may be a far cry from what it was a few thousand years ago, its ability to survive the great changes in climate and civilization that have consumed the land over millennia, to me, is a testament to the animal’s resilience.
There are lessons to be learned from the Egyptian cat. That climate change is real, by virtue of it having wiped out all of the cat’s much larger relatives. That the ability to survive has very little to do with one’s “status” in the animal kingdom. It has very little to do with how big, tough, or fearful you may think you are.
Climate change is real. Its warning signs came a long time ago in the form of places like Egypt. Telling us that, at the end of the day, civilizational dominance and the lust for empire are actually rather pointless. But we have not learned, and we seem determined to make the entire planet go the way of Ancient Egypt.
Some of us, however, have learned from the Egyptian cat. Those of us who have chosen to live off the grid, unaffected by the woes of societal hierarchy and capital. Essentially, the world’s homeless population. They are probably the ones resilient enough to deal with the doom of the impending apocalypse.
Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Jose Alaniz, LongbranchNo less than Superman in “Superman for Earth” was not up to the task of solving the environmental crisis: a NIMBY protest objecting to the siting of a landfill; a new housing development in Smallville consuming farmland; or Lois expressing morality about having children in an overpopulated world. “There are no easy answers,” he concludes.
Steven Barnes, Los AngelesGraphic fiction is a sub-set of fiction and as such can handle any genre from romance to horror to philosophy. The question of HOW to do it correctly is certainly important and there is only one rule, one similar to that in cinema and television: Show, don’t tell.
Emmalee Barnett, SpringfieldThere are so many different ways to use pictures and written words to paint an enjoyable, informative story. They combine the best parts of a novel and an illustration, if you ask me.
Rebecca Bratspies, New YorkThe Environmental Justice Chronicles succeeded far beyond our wildest dreams. We proved that comics can convey sophisticated legal/environmental information, while still being fun to read.
Deianira D’Antoni, CataniaIn comics, a confidential relationship is established between the protagonist and the reader, a dialogue that stimulates creativity and prompts the reader to develop critical thinking, to reflect and open up to new and different perspectives.
Cecilia de Santis, CiampinoA challenge is for the scientist to face: deconstructing our ego. It is unlikely that readers will engage if the story makes them feel silly. So, how can we shape our communication with empathy?
Marta Delas, BarcelonaReading a comic sounds more fun than reading an article or a textbook. Fun is a powerful tool. So is beauty. And emotional engagement. We can use all of these tools in a comic, creating stories full of knowledge.
Darren Fisher, MödlingOne of the things I love about comics is how simple they can be, and how low the bar is to entry is. More people telling their stories in this medium can only help to promote visual storytelling as a way to understand and talk about the great challenges we face in meaningful and impactful ways.
Ivan Gajos, ManchesterIn order to engage ordinary people and inspire the next generation we need to go beyond traditional communication methods and embrace more creative storytelling. Comics have a superpower that makes them especially useful when communicating social and environmental challenges.
David Haley, Walney IslandIt’s time for diverse superheroes to story our planet into many futures beyond modernity’s monoculture, be they from Gotham City, Kolkata, or our own home towns.
John Hyatt, LiverpoolI love the medium and the more well-made comics that can inform and emotionally move us rather than preach and that carry a positive, planet-friendly, life-affirming message the better!
Charles Johnson, SeattleAlthough the work of black cartoonists in the 20th century was generally confined to the black press because of segregation, talented creators such as Ollie Harrington and Morrie Turner graphically demonstrated the ugliness of racism and the humanity of black Americans.
Eva Kunzová, BratislavaUsing comics to bridge the communities is an amazing way to inform and inspire new people. But they need to stay honest with themselves.
Lucie Lederhendler, BrandonIt’s appropriate to imagine myself with a superpower here: shooting out of my eyes something like lasers, but instead of heat and energy, simple movement forward in time to keep watch, marshal behaviour, or hold a seat. The spaces between panels in a comic create openings like that, for each mind to participate as itself, in a co-created world.
Patrick M. Lydon, DaejeonStories matter. Our democracy, our money, our relationships with nature, all of these are at their most basic level, stories. A culture that inherently inflicts wounds upon itself and its environment then, is doing so precisely because of its stories. The potential of NBS Comics is in its understanding, that we should do all that we can to tell better stories, together, not only as a human family, but as a part of nature.
Joe Magee, StroudThrough the process of sitting down with him and visualising his methods in the field using drawings and then photo-collages, I captured visually the solutions he was employing.
Lux Meteora, MadridComics are quite a good way to share environmental and socially accurate information, packed in small colorful bites. They are able to depict imagery, illustrate points and give a rounding point of view on issues that are sometimes seen as very complex and unsolvable.
Heeyoung Park, StrasbourgI don’t think environmental comics need to involve concrete solutions to our problems in order for them to be effective. Can NBS Comics embrace works that do not necessarily include nature-based solutions but have underlying environmental themes and are highly compelling?
Mike Rosen, PortlandEnvironmental and social justice aims do not have to be solely represented in nonfiction comics. Plenty of fictional comics, even including those with superheroes, can and have advanced this work. These are fun, informative, and motivational too.
Mark Russell, PortlandComics combine the best of the visual and text-based worlds, allowing people to read at their own rate, to stop and digest impactful moments as they occur, but also being a visual medium that can quickly convey information in a clear and immediate manner.
Clifford Thompson, BrooklynIn thinking about how to make the comics movement more popular (and it is, of course, immensely popular already), we might consider the following areas of content and aesthetics: Simplicity. Bold color. Human vulnerability. Serious and timely issues.
Chris Uttley, StroudA comic can help people to visualise and hear about environmental problems and their solutions, in ways that cut through cultural expectations and norms to inform and entertain.
Charlie la Greca Velasco, MilanIn my own experience of creating Environmental Comics for CUNY and the United Nations, I have been fortunate to witness the profound impact these comics can have on our society. However, it has been a process that has taken time and a focused commitment to the project over the course of a decade.
Shannon Wheeler, PortlandCartoons don’t do much. But comics changed me. It was MAD Magazine’s anti-establishment cartoons that inspired me to write and draw cartoons myself. The hatred for the lies from all directions steered me in better directions. I like to think that reading comics made me a better person.
Midori Yajima, CiampinoWe live in a time when too many people see scientists as distant figures, giving advice from the top of their ivory tower. Engaging with stories can break that wall, and bring the discussion even beyond, by making it accessible, relatable, and maybe even more participatory. Still, it is right within the message that challenges hide.
David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director.
This is a (very rough) estimate of the number of comics (of all kinds) read in the world at least monthly. 37% of people in the USA read comics at least monthly. 46% of South Koreans read comics at least weekly. 50% of teenagers in France read Manga. The global market for comics in 2019 was estimated at almost $US17 billion and is expected to grow. You get the idea.
(**Calculated by me from statistics on rates of comics readership by country multiplied by the total populations of North America, Europe, Japan, and South Korea. This leaves out India, which has a strong comic interest but little data on readership rates.)
In other words, a lot of people read comics. This presents a great opportunity for scientists, practitioners, and activists in the environment and social practice to share, in collaboration with comic artists, important stories to more people. If they can tell good stories.
Around the world, we continue to struggle with pervasive and insidious challenges with racism, inequity, and environmental degradation. We need to talk and communicate more, certainly. And we need to do so in new ways that reach new people and in modes that reach them where they are, in forms that are attractive to them. As scientists and activists, we need to learn how to become better storytellers. Or at least hang out with better storytellers.
This is the inspiration for this roundtable. Can we tell better and more engaging stories about our environmental and social challenges? Can we widen the circle of people who read such stories and take action? Can we use them for education and engagement? Can they create good and entertaining and useful stories?
Yes, we can.
Although the comics landscape is dominated by superheroes doing classic superhero things, there is a growing movement of comics that have environmental and social justice aims. The Nature of Cities has launched a comic series called NBSComics—Nature to Save the World, a collaboration funded by NetworkNature and the European Commission on nature-based solutions for environmental challenges. Rewriting Extinction (with almost 2M readers on webtoon) is a remarkable series of comics with a community of over 300 artists, scientists, and storytellers. Le Monde Sans Fin (World Without End), by artist Christophe Blain and scientist Jean-Marc Jancovici, is a best-selling graphic novel exploring energy and climate change. As José Alaniz discusses in this round table, even Superman, in Superman for Earth, struggled against ecological degradation. There are an increasing number of examples.
The pacing and format of comics allows people to contemplate and think between panels. And they can do so at a human-scale and in entertaining ways, engaging not just the heads of readers, but their hearts.
In social justice, likewise, there is an important history of comics that address racism, sexism, poverty, and environmental justice in ways that are frank, compelling, informative, and even entertaining. Charles Johnson in this roundtable discusses some of the history of this work. Remarkable examples include Candorville by Darrin Bell (the first black cartoonist to win a Pulitzer Prize) and the EJ (Environmental Justice) Chronicles, by Rebecca Bratspies and Charlie LaGreca (in this roundtable, and the banner image of at the top of this page).
But we need more.
Comics offer a unique and effective platform for addressing social and environmental challenges through storytelling. The combination of visuals and narratives in comics provides a dynamic and engaging medium to convey complex issues in a compelling manner. The visual nature of comics allows for the vivid representation of social and environmental challenges. Artists can depict the consequences of pollution, deforestation, or social inequality, bringing these issues to life and creating a lasting impact on readers. Their pacing allows people to contemplate and think between panels (unlike movies, which drive relentlessly forward).
And they can do so at a human-scale and in entertaining ways, engaging not just the heads of readers, but their hearts. They can capture the emotions and experiences of individuals affected by these challenges, fostering empathy and understanding.
Comics have the power to reach diverse audiences, including those who may not typically engage — or want to engage — with other forms of communication.
Comics are stories, typically including text, with pictures. It has always struck me that description — text + pictures = story — suggests ways for scientists, practitioners, and artists to collaborate. Scientists tend to be text-driven, too. What is a scientific journal article if not a story (text) with pictures (graphs)? Comics artists use tools with which scientists are at least vaguely familiar. That’s a a start for collaboration. Indeed, research suggests that people are less and less connected to scientific knowledge (Spiegel et al 2013). We need an additional path to science communication.
In other words, comics are big and full of potential to engage a lot of people with important stories of our shared challenges in social justice and the environment.
Let’s do more of it. But how? Read on.
References
Amy N. Spiegel, Julia McQuillan, Peter Halpin, Camillia Matuk, and Judy Diamond. 2013. Engaging Teenagers with Science Through Comics. Res Sci Educ. 43(6): 10.1007/s11165-013-9358-x.
José Alaniz, professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, has published three monographs, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (University Press of Mississippi, 2010); Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (UPM, 2014); and Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia (OSU Press, 2022).
No less than Superman in “Superman for Earth” was not up to the task of solving the environmental crisis: a NIMBY protest objecting to the siting of a landfill; a new housing development in Smallville consuming farmland; or Lois expressing morality about having children in an overpopulated world. “There are no easy answers,” he concludes.
An auspicious attempt to redefine the superhero within the context of the Anthropocene’s complex systemic challenges (in the end showing up the genre’s in-built disadvantages for such a task) came in the guise of Roger Stern and Kerry Gammill’s Superman For Earth (1991).
This in-continuity DC one-shot shows the Man of Steel confronting the world’s pollution, deforestation, and mass extinction with super-powers. When they come up woefully short, the liberal bromides and late-capitalist “fixes” ring even more hollow. Still, the graphic novella effectively parlays a reader’s familiarity with the Superman mythos for an informative, fact-filled evocation of late-20th-century environmentalist angst.
The story opens with a discomfited Lois Lane telling fiancé Clark Kent about her research to prepare for an upcoming international ecology symposium which she will cover as a journalist: “… Acid rain, toxic waste, the greenhouse effect, species extinction […] we’ve done some terrible things to this world …” (n.p.). Superman notices some of these effects while flying about; we learn that Metropolis’ skies and Hob’s river have become noticeably dirtier since Perry White’s childhood and Superman’s arrival—instances of solastalgia.
As he often does, Kal-El takes it upon himself to lend a hand. But the hero’s every attempt to address this crisis only reveals how multi-faceted and fathomless it really is. In addition, Superman’s efforts are all reactive: the FBI and EPA ask him to help foil a toxic oil ring, so he does; White complains about the polluted river, so Supes goes to sweep up garbage out of it; while doing that, he notices a leaking sewage pipe and seals it up; he spots illegal logging in the Amazon, so he stops it. “I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time on any one task before,” he sighs.
The problem is too big even for the Man of Tomorrow, who discovers that modern ways of life in the US lie at the root of the country’s environmental woes. For example, a scientific analysis shows that the partially-cleaned river carries innumerable chemical pollutants (it’s not just a matter of sunken old tires and shopping carts), while even a paper recycling facility leaks deadly dioxin. “I can assure you,” its director tells our hero, “our plant meets federal standards.”
Appalled as he is by the ubiquitous presence of that dangerous substance, even in milk cartons and diapers, Superman flies again and again into a wall of neoliberal business-as-usual. Frustrated, he grouses: “Mills in Sweden are already using a safer oxygen-bleaching process in their paper production. But American mills have been slower to change. Instead, they’ve argued that the dioxin levels are too low to be a health hazard.”
A scene in the Amazonian rainforest introduces still more complexity. It opens with a panoramic shot of dark-skinned loggers chainsawing and burning the trees as terrified animals flee. They are criminally clearing the land for a “great ranch”—presumably to pasture cattle for beef. Superman stops their operation cold; the federal authorities arrive to take the perpetrators into custody. Our hero lectures them (in Portuguese) with familiar platitudes about the rainforests as a “priceless resource” for their role in the planet’s climate and so on. But the logger foreman spits at his feet, saying, “Yankee pig! You level your own forests, and then preach to us to leave ours uncut! Do you expect us to starve to protect your world?”
As Lois responds when she hears of the incident: “The United States talks big about bettering the environment, but we set a wretched example, don’t we? We’re the most conspicuous consumers.”
The story continues in this vein, with Superman repeatedly shown as not up to the task of solving this crisis, whether at a NIMBY protest objecting to the siting of a landfill; a new housing development in Smallville which is consuming farmland (“Where are all the people coming from?” Ma Kent worries); or Lois expressing doubts about having children once she and Clark marry, referencing debates about the ethics of childbirth in the Anthropocene (he answers that his alien genes may make that issue moot). “It’s such a complicated problem,” he concludes. “There are no easy answers. I’m afraid that what is needed is a major change in the way we live—maybe even the way we think!”
He’s certainly right about that, but Superman’s failures here of course owe as much to the market’s approach to the genre as to any extratextual global state of affairs. In a deeply-rooted convention, mainstream superheroes do not forcibly impose their will on society as a whole, even for its own good (as they perceive it)—if they do, they’ve become villains like Watchmen’s Adrian Veidt. So the hero must uphold a sort of generic Prime Directive, lest Superman For Earth turn into a very different dystopian story, disrupting regular series continuity, damaging the hero’s “good guy” brand, etc.
So, in this novella, Superman is stuck, in ways that productively challenge and critique the genre along with the US way of life. Stern and Gammill’s choice of the first, most iconic, “gold standard” superhero (as opposed to, say, Batman or Green Lantern) reflects their commitment to that task of deconstruction.
Steven Barnes is the NY Times bestselling, award winning author and screenwriter of over thirty novels, as well as episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, ANDROMEDA, HORROR NOIRE and the Emmy Award winning "A Stitch In Time" episode of THE OUTER LIMITS. He is also a martial artist and creator of the "Lifewriting" approach to fiction, and the "Firedance" system of self improvement (www.firedancetaichi.com). He lives in Southern California with his wife Tananarive and son Jason.
Graphic fiction is a sub-set of fiction and as such can handle any genre from romance to horror to philosophy. The question of HOW to do it correctly is certainly important and there is only one rule, one similar to that in cinema and television: Show, don’t tell.
There seem to be two questions here:
Is it valid to address real-world concerns in fiction? And
Is graphic fiction fiction?
The answer to the first is that I know of no broadly held social concern that has not been addressed in fiction. My own area of greatest interest, Science Fiction, has been described as a literature that attempts to address one of three questions:
What if?
If Only….
If this goes on…
All three of these are looking at an idea that does not exist, and then connecting to society and human psychology as we understand it (“what if a time machine existed?”) or takes a current trend or problem and extrapolates it into the future and across the horizon (“what if populations continue to increase?”). While classic era SF rarely dove deep into social concerns, the New Wave of the 60’s experimented with both language and thematics, becoming more inclusive and open-hearted.
The success of this approach even in a genre “of ideas” suggests that yes, fiction can handle anything humans imagine or experience, anything they love or fear.
The second question: “is graphic fiction fiction?” would seem to obviously be answered by “yes.” You cannot even ask the question without assuming “graphic fiction” is a sub-set of “fiction.” It is a medium, and can handle any genre from romance to horror to philosophy. The question of HOW to do it correctly is certainly important. I would say there is only one rule, one similar to that in cinema and television:
Emmalee is a writer and editor with a B.S. in Literature from Missouri State University and currently resides in Spokane, MO. She is currently the editor of TNOC's essays and fiction projects. She is also the Co-director for NBS Comics and the managing editor for SPROUT: An eco-urban poetry journal.
There are so many different ways to use pictures and written words to paint an enjoyable, informative story. They combine the best parts of a novel and an illustration if you ask me.
I would say yes.
I have been an avid comic reader for several years and have written a few simple comic stories with a couple of different artists as well. There’s something about telling a story alongside pictures that just helps convey the storyteller’s worldview in the most spectacular ways. Other than video, no other narrative style can convey exactly the mental image and emotions the author wishes to plant into the minds of their readers as graphic narratives can.
I personally love how diverse graphic narratives can be in the way of artistry as well as storytelling. There are so many different ways to use pictures and written words to paint an enjoyable, informative story. They combine the best parts of a novel and an illustration if you ask me. Comics are also becoming the new medium of expression amongst the younger generations. Several existing websites, creators, and media are centering themselves around the growing market and uniqueness of graphic narratives such as Webtoons, Tapas, and TNOC’s latest series NBS Comics.
As far as using comics to advance our solutions to social and environmental challenges, I would say comics are the best way to broach those difficult subjects. Comics are a very easy-to-understand approach as far as explaining complicated topics (such as Nature-based Solutions) are concerned. They make the jargon and the graphs and the data more approachable for younger readers as well as older, unknowledgeable readers. The ‘what-if’ genre is always very a compelling way to theorize what would happen to our planet if we don’t do anything, but I believe real-life examples also have a very impactful nudge towards understanding greener solutions. With graphic narratives, we can help those that don’t know exactly how the world will look if we run out of clean water, if the ocean waters rise, if the crops fail, or if the animals go extinct. We can make these broad topics of “climate change” and “extinction” more accessible and break them down into doable solutions for the general public.
Rebecca Bratspies is a Professor at CUNY School of Law, where she is the founding director of the Center for Urban Environmental Reform. A scholar of environmental justice, and human rights, Rebecca has written scores of scholarly works including 4 books. Her most recent book is Naming Gotham: The Villains, Rogues, and Heroes Behind New York Place Names. With Charlie LaGreca-Velasco, Bratspies is co-creator of The Environmental Justice Chronicles: an award-winning series of comic books bringing environmental literacy to a new generation of environmental leaders. The ABA honored her with its 2021 Commitment to Diversity and Justice Award.
The Environmental Justice Chronicles succeeded far beyond our wildest dreams. We proved that comics can convey sophisticated legal/environmental information, while still being fun to read.
Comics are powerful advocacy
A decade ago, artist Charlie LaGreca-Velasco and I began the Environmental Justice Chronicles—a series of graphic novels set in Forestville, a fictional town that could be any place struggling with environmental injustice. Our goal: to build a new generation of environmental leaders focused on urban environmental justice.
The Environmental Justice Chronicles succeeded far beyond our wildest dreams. We proved that comics can convey sophisticated legal/environmental information, while still being fun to read. The books have been read in schools around the country, featured at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum, and made into a short video (in collaboration with Mt. Sinai.)
The series began with a pun. LULU, the story’s villain, is an environmental acronym standing for “Locally-Undesirable Land Use.” LULUs are landfills, chemical factories, powerplants and other facilities that impose environmental and health risks on the surrounding community. LULUs are disproportionately sited in Black and brown communities. Naming our villain LULU intentionally evoked this unequal experience.
In Mayah’s Lot, readers learn alongside Mayah as she organizes her neighborhood to thwart Green Solution’s scheme to site a toxic waste facility in her already overburdened community. With her leadership, the abandoned lot instead becomes a park, providing the community some desperately needed greenspace. The book stands alone as a story, but also provides valuable environmental justice lessons. It introduces readers to street science, basic administrative procedures, and effective community organizing.
Bina’s Plant revisits Forestville, this time telling a fictionalized version of a real environmental justice victory—the shuttering of the Poletti Power plant, one of the dirtiest power plants in the country. This book introduces more technical skills—how to intervene in a permitting decision and explores the relationship between legal advocacy, negotiation, and community mobilization.
Troop’s Run has our heroes entering Forestville’s electoral politics, running on a climate justice platform and facing off against fossil fuel special interests. The park they created in Book 1 becomes a rallying point for their climate advocacy.
Our latest collaboration, The Earth Defenders raises awareness about the plight of environmental defenders around the world. The chapters span the globe, depicting brave environmental activists and the dangers they face as they invoke their human right to a healthy environment and defend their forests, water, land, and air. All these stories are drawn from real life. We work closely with the environmental defenders to make sure our comics are appropriate and respectful. Our mission is to amplify their stories rather than invent our own.
The Keepers tells the story of Kenya’s Sengwer People, forest dwellers being evicted from their traditional territory so their lands can become conservation lands.
Song of the Sunderbans depicts the grassroots resistance to Bangladesh’s decision to build an enormous coal-fired power plant in the Sunderbans—the largest intact mangrove forest in Asia.
The Prey Lang Patrollers, describes how Cambodia’s indigenous Kuy people have organized themselves into forest patrols to combat illegal logging in the Prey Lang forest. (coming soon). The fourth story (under development) is set in Colombia and tell of Afro-Colombian women being displaced in the name of “development.”
Our goal: to raise awareness about the dangers Environmental Defenders face, and to make sure that protecting environmental rights is on the agenda of every international conference discussing human rights or environmental protection.
Deianira is an architect and illustrator specialising in communication and visual arts.
She pursues the idea that the architect is not only a designer of buildings but an “organizer of thoughts and a social innovator”, who should be able to steer the common consciousness, raising awareness and inspiring it through his communication skills. Motivated by this sense of responsibility, she deepened her knowledge with a master's degree in Milan on sustainability issues and an advanced training course in communication and marketing for architecture in Bologna.
In comics, a confidential relationship is established between the protagonist and the reader, a dialogue that stimulates creativity and prompts the reader to develop critical thinking, to reflect and open up to new and different perspectives.
When we talk about environmental and social challenges whose impacts are influenced by and affect an entire community, triggering virtuous behaviors at the small scale would allow for small, diffuse contributions with large, global impact. But how can we trigger positive and lasting change in the behavior and actions of a society saturated with media noise and information overcrowding?
The scientific and technical communities can play an important role, providing the proper tools for society (including lay public) to understand issues, read through massive amounts of data, and sift through effective solutions to undertake. A common awareness can be therefore promoted through the transfer of appropriate knowledge that can also initiate a process of raising awareness of social and environmental issues. The medium and language by which we decide to disseminate them must be well-screened to implement effective communication at multiple levels.
It is clear, however, that communicating complex issues to the general public is no small matter. In fact, the risk is to create a disparity in the dissemination of knowledge. But how can we find a linguistic code to subvert this disparity and open a dialogue with society as a whole?
Comics make it possible to systematize technical and specialized language with storytelling to make the topics covered accessible to a wide audience. But comics are not only a communication tool; in fact, in recent years several researchers have tested and analyzed their potential in the educational field. Comics fall into the category of multimodal messages because they combine verbal and visual stimuli. Multimedia messages increase arousal, focus attention, and enhance learning (Rosegard and Wilson, 2013, p. 7).
Since storytelling allows messages to be conveyed in an evocative manner, through metaphors, analogies, and symbolism in a continuous succession of meanings and signifiers, comics require the reader to make an effort to interpretation, invite them to participate, and make the communication process interactive. This is due to the fact that comics have wider margins than a text and thus leave room for interpretations arising from personal experiences and related to themes not directly expressed.
Comics creator Scott McCloud talks about this: between panels, the reader must take a position to “fill in” the progression of gaps between panels. In comics, a confidential relationship is established between the protagonist and the reader, a dialogue that stimulates creativity and prompts the reader to develop critical thinking, to reflect, and open up to new and different perspectives.
For years I have been seeking a synergy between the spheres of art and communication and the spheres of strategic planning and sustainability, with the aim of raising awareness of the issues of climate change, ecological transition, and spatial justice. This synergy would emphasize the need for a shared commitment to contributing to an environmentally and socially sustainable future. Comics is not the only method to achieve this goal, but it presents an interesting opportunity. It makes it possible to combine the “top-down” approach of the cartoonist who, starting from complex information, simplifies it by distributing it along the narration to allow the reader to orient himself; to the “bottom-up” approach of the reader who, starting from his own perception and basic knowledge, gradually immerses himself, through images and narration, in the complexity of the theme.
We could define comics as a democratic communication tool that can speak to the totality of the community, always being understandable even to less experienced readers and different age groups. The emotional drive comics is capable of generating, leveraging in the curiosity, allows to engage, inspire, and translate into the action of many, eventually triggering real change.
Besides… I’ve already tested it… a Talking Fox can explain, better than I could in words, to my little cousin, what we are capable of doing by committing all together to the environment and society!
References
Communicating Research through Comics: Transportation and Land Development | National Institute for Transportation and Communities (no date). Available at: https://nitc.trec.pdx.edu/news/communicating-research-through-comics-transportation-and-land-development.
Wylie, C.D. and Neeley, K.A. (2016) Learning Out Loud (LOL): How Comics Can Develop the Communication and Critical Thinking Abilities of Engineering Students. Available at: https://doi.org/10.18260/p.25542.
Marta Delas is a Spanish architect, illustrator, and videomaker.
Concerned about urban planning and identity, her artwork engages with local projects and initiatives, giving support to neighbourhood networks. She has been involved in many community building art projects in Madrid, Vienna, Sao Paulo and now Barcelona.
Her flashy coloured and fluid shaped language harbours a vindictive spirit, dressed with her experimental rallying cries whenever there is a chance. Together with comics and animations she is now building her own musical universe.
Reading a comic sounds more fun than reading an article or a textbook. Fun is a powerful tool. So is beauty. And emotional engagement. We can use all of these tools in a comic, creating stories full of knowledge.
If we are going to “save the world”, we have to think of new ways to communicate and engage wider audiences with knowledge. Why are there many researchers passionately working on finding solutions and better practices in order to face the challenges we have ahead as a society, while our policies are not taking this knowledge into account? There is an immense gap between knowledge and the public and there are not enough resources being used to solve this problem. It is key, for our democracies to work, that decision-making is guided by knowledge. So, it is urgent for us to think of effective ways to inform and give access to it.
Reading a comic sounds more fun than reading an article or a textbook. Fun is a powerful tool. So is beauty. And emotional engagement. We can use all of these tools in a comic, creating stories full of knowledge. Text and image combined are able to introduce a great complexity, allowing us to engage an audience with a character’s story at the same time as introducing other layers of information. The target audience can determine how we tackle a subject but it is important never to lose sight of the entertaining side of a comic. For these stories to reach a bigger number of people, they need to be able to be read for leisure. We know there is a wide audience for stories, Netflix series pop up constantly in our daily conversations. But watching a series is something we do for recreation, not necessarily to become informed.
We also need to acknowledge, even if we are analogical paper lovers, that nowadays communication is ruled by screens. Comic books need to continue to exist (please!) but it is fundamental that comics can be brought into a screen, and many already have. This makes them even a more powerful tool, being able to fit into mainstream platforms such as, for example, Instagram. Many comic writers have adapted their format to this platform, creating short comic trips with 10 images, the maximum number the platform allows to be published at the same time. This strategy is important: condensing information to what the public is used to. Communication has become quicker; attention spans have shrunk in the past years, and stories need to catch the reader’s attention rapidly, in order to ensure it doesn’t get “scrolled on”.
The same way comics are a fantastic way to educate and engage, it is crucial that we explore other forms of communication too, that can help us raise awareness on important topics. Videos can be very useful in order to be shared in other popular social media platforms such as TikTok and Youtube. TikTok has over 1 billion monthly users worldwide, for example. It is essential that we recognize the potential of these platforms for educational purposes in order to get knowledge out of research institutions’ walls. There is a lot at stake.
Dr. Darren Fisher makes comic-based explainers and illustrations, turning complex ideas and subjective experiences into visual communication with a twist. Some recent projects include book Illustrations emphasising the importance of workplace health and safety through a series of gritty and graphic depictions of disability, told straight from lived experience; and an animated story-reel informing about an EU-funded scientific project to provide the knowledge base needed to make the political goal of conserving 30% of Europe's nature by 2030 reality. More recently Dr. Fisher created an animated comic shown at 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). He currently resides in Austria and volunteer as a drawing demonstrator and facilitator with SOS Kinderdorf, an independent, non-governmental organization that provides humanitarian assistance to children in need.
One of the things I love about comics is how simple they can be, and how low the bar is to entry is. More people telling their stories in this medium can only help to promote visual storytelling as a way to understand and talk about the great challenges we face in meaningful and impactful ways.
I feel like nowadays it’s not enough to just produce comics and put them online. You need to integrate with other media and embrace social media. This means creating reels for Instagram, motion comics for YouTube, discussing on Twitter, and continuing the conversations on podcasts and livestreams. Anything to promote the message further.
Comics can also embrace a transmedia approach, where you also need to access other media to get the full picture. Unless you’re one of the big publishers and producing comics with established mainstream characters, it’s going to be difficult to make an impact, regardless of the quality of your product. So, you need to think about all the different angles of promotion that are possible. We also might think about how the images from these comics and the storylines can be promoted at related events, for example protest rallies, or included as part of relevant NGOs such as Greenpeace in their actions. Joining forces with like-minded initiatives to broaden the reach of comic-based visual storytelling is a win-win scenario. They get to lean into a bank of campaign-ready images, and we get to expand the reach of comic-based visual storytelling.
As for the stories themselves, you want to hear from as many different people as possible and be ready to publish outside your comfort zone or personal preference. Incorporate as many different styles as possible and be willing to take risks. Of course, you might offend someone by publishing unconventional comics outside the mainstream. But that’s okay, it’s all part of making an impact. You want a huge diversity of vectors to approach the issues from, across genre and voice. Stories should be told from deeply personal first-person perspectives and high-level narratives that give the lie of the land regarding the complexities of biodiversity and conservation, and everything in between. I think variety will help to give a lot more opportunities for resonating with a wide base of people, connecting on the frequency that works best be it emotional or cerebral, and invigorating some kind of meaningful response. We know comics can do this uniquely, provided people take the time to engage. So first you need to cut through the noise, pop up often enough on a multitude of different channels, and have enough choice of offerings that you increase the chances of connecting with people.
That only touches on the surface of curation and distribution. The practice of making is itself incredibly valuable as a way to better understand the world and ourselves. Running drawing and comics workshops where people work with artists to learn how to tell their own story of connection to nature, and how to share that story online, would be a powerful companion piece to your efforts. This would say loudly and clearly that comics are a democratised medium. One of the things I love about comics is how simple they can be, and how low the bar is to entry is. You put one picture next to another, add some text, maybe some symbols, and you’ve good some kind of a story starting to form. Everyone can tell their story in this way, basically any type of story they want, on any sort of subject matter. There’s no limit to budgets; anything you want to show is possible, provided you have the time. More people telling their stories in this medium, and more frequency of seeing comics language in a variety of contexts, can only help in the aim of promoting visual storytelling as a way to understand and talk about the great challenges we face in meaningful and impactful ways.
Ivan is a highly respected art director, photographer and film maker who has worked for a number of international design agencies in both the UK and Australia. His expertise encompasses a variety of contemporary and classic styles, though he is perhaps best known for his clean and functional approach to graphic design.
In order to engage ordinary people and inspire the next generation we need to go beyond traditional communication methods and embrace more creative storytelling. Comics have a superpower that makes them especially useful when communicating social and environmental challenges.
In a sector often characterised by overwhelming complexity, a constant barrage of information and public misinformation, effectively communicating social and environmental challenges has never been more important. Enter comics—a remarkable medium that can tackle complex themes, challenge preconceived ideas and engage readers with mature storytelling and thought-provoking narratives.
In order to engage ordinary people and inspire the next generation we need to go beyond traditional communication methods and embrace more creative storytelling. Comics have a superpower that makes them especially useful when communicating social and environmental challenges: comics can convey complex concepts in accessible and engaging ways. When used well, comics can educate, inspire, and trigger journeys of discovery without compromising scientific integrity.
Comic artists have a number of tools at their disposal to convey complex concepts whilst maintaining the delicate balance between accuracy and clarity. Through concise dialogue, vivid imagery and visual metaphors, comics have the power to illuminate the most complex scientific concepts, transforming impenetrable jargon into a compelling and comprehensible story.
Comics can present multiple narratives on a single page—whether they be different timelines or concurrent events unfolding in parallel. While movies can achieve this with jump cuts, comics excel at conveying complex narrative ideas in a simple and more powerful manner. A single page, read panel by panel or viewed as a whole, can convey information, emotions, and ideas simultaneously through the interplay of visuals and text.
In the comic “Watchmen” by Alan Moore the story unfolds through a series of interconnected flashbacks, present-day events, and various character perspectives. This allows for a complex exploration of characters and their backstories encouraging the reader to piece together information to uncover the story. This mastery of visual storytelling sets comics apart from other media forms.
Unlike movies, comics can be read at a reader’s own pace. A reader can effortlessly rewind, pause or fast-forward in order to fully grasp a new concept or revisit a section that requires deeper understanding. By manipulating panel size, layout, and employing visual techniques such as transitions, artists can control the pacing and rhythm of the narrative. This level of control is unparalleled in other media forms, where timing is dictated by factors such as screen time and the experience is often more linear.
Comics also often invite readers to actively engage their imagination by leaving certain details open to interpretation. The limited visual information in each panel encourages readers to fill in the gaps and imagine the spaces between panels or the moments preceding and following depicted scenes.
The comic “Maus” by Art Spiegelman tells the story of the Holocaust, with Jews portrayed as mice and Nazis as cats. Spiegelman uses a minimalist art style and utilises visual metaphors, symbolism, and ambiguous imagery throughout the comic. By leaving certain details open to interpretation, “Maus” encourages readers to engage actively with the comic and draw their own conclusions. This interactive engagement fosters a deeper connection between the reader and the comic, immersing them in the story and allowing for a more personal and meaningful experience.
As the world becomes increasingly fast-paced and inundated with bite-sized information and clickbait articles, comics stand apart as an approachable medium for conveying complex ideas, inspiring readers and engaging wildly diverse audiences. By embracing the transformative power of comics, we can make our work more accessible and engaging, and connect with readers on a deeper level, inspiring emotions, and creating art that is cherished.
David makes art with ecology, to inquire and learn. He researches, publishes, and works internationally with ecosystems and their inhabitants, using images, poetic texts, walking and sculptural installations to generate dialogues that question climate change, species extinction, urban development, the nature of water transdisciplinarity and ecopedagogy for ‘capable futures’.
It’s time for diverse superheroes to story our planet into many futures beyond modernity’s monoculture, be they from Gotham City, Kolkata, or our own home towns.
Storying Our World
In 1985, in a crowded Kolkata spice market, a man cleared a space by chanting and then sat on the floor. From a large cotton sack, he pulled some scrolls. He continued to chant and the gathered crowd waited in anticipation while he decided which scroll to use. Eventually, he pulled a thread to release a scroll. He rocked up onto his haunches and chanted loudly as he unravelled the scroll, pointing to a hand-painted image. People in the audience (now six or eight deep) interacted as subsequent images were revealed. The sequence of images told the story of a man and his family having problems with people in his village, as the rains persisted to fall. Eventually, the man, his family, and his livestock were on top of a hill, while others drowned. The final frame of the story saw a helicopter fly in to save the man, his family and animals. This was a latter day rendering of Noah, with the ark transformed into a helicopter. Bengal is no stranger to flooding, but in 1985 few people knew about the climate emergency. They did know that deforestation in the foothills of the Himalayas was not a good thing and that floods were becoming more frequent and more devastating. Through his Bengali folk-style comic, this Phart storyteller/artist was effectively prophesying what the Rio Earth Summit made public in 1992.
Phart storyteller. Photo: David Haley 1985
As far as we know, people have storied (made and told stories) their world in words and pictures since Paleolithic times, over 47,000 years ago. The making and telling of stories, as one integral act is an important process to understanding the dynamic processes of neurological development and “fundamental culture” (Machado de Oliveria 2021, Morin 2006). This is how our belief systems are formed.
We may speculate that, orally, “In the beginning there was the Word…” and graphic pictures certainly predated written text, possibly accompanied by some forms of performance to celebrate the natural world, rights of passage and great events (Boal 2008). Then things changed irrevocably about 5,000 years ago with the Fertile Crescent / Cradle of Civilization, when people changed their agricultural and trading practices, became sedentary and invented cities. They also started to develop picture sequences that became text and by 3400 BC were being collected in city-state libraries, like that at Uruk in Sumaria.
We can then fast-track through Alexandria, Ancient Greece, Rome, China, the European Middle Ages and the invention of the mechanical printing press to comics of Europe, America and Japan of the 20th Century.
The important thing throughout this history was the story; a sequence of moments or incidents that in a linear or circular fashion make some sort of sense to tell us something. The combination of pictures and text, evokes two of our senses simultaneously. The form, the making and the telling, provide the means of creating and communicating that emerge as another thing. As the English artist, David Hockney repeated as a mantra in his film, A Day On The Grand Canal With The Emperor Of China, surface is illusion but so is depth: “The way we depict space determines what we do with it” (Hockney 1998). And comics generate their own space, or multiple spaces within each medium they appear. And as we know, “the most moral act of all is the creation of space for life to move onwards” (Pirsig 1993).
Not childish, but childlike, these multi-dimensional, multi-perspectival worldviews allow dreams to pass through what society and formal education teach us to believe is reality. They expand the possibilities of our ontological existence to experience pre-modernity understandings of being in the world. In this sense, they make way for the possibilities of humour, serious comedy, lampooning and the paradoxical insights of Trickster (Hyde 2008).
It’s time for diverse superheroes to story our planet into many futures beyond modernity’s monoculture, be they from Gotham City, Kolkata, or our own home towns.
References
Boal, Augusto. (2008) Theatre of the Oppressed (Get Political). Pluto Press, Sidmouth, England
Hockney, David (1998) dir. Haas, Phillip. Day on the Grand Canal With the Emperor of China. Milestone Films. https://milestonefilms.com/products/day-on-the-grand-canal-with-the-emperor-of-chinga (Accessed 30 January 2023)
Hyde, Lewis (2008), Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture, Edinburgh: Canongate Books.
Machado de Oliveira, Vanessa (2021) Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. North Atlantic Books, Berkley, California
Morin, Edgar. (2006) Restricted Complexity, General Complexity. http://cogprints.org/5217/1/Morin.pdf (Retrieved 27.02.18) p. 10.
Pirsig, Robert. M. (1993) Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals. Black Swan, London p.407
John Hyatt is a painter, digital artist, video artist, photographer, designer, musician, printmaker, author and sculptor.
As an artist, Hyatt has exhibited in Australia, Brazil, China, India, Ireland, Portugal, Japan, the UK and the USA. He has a long and varied career and involvement in cultural practices, pedagogy, industry, urban regeneration, and communities. A transdisciplinary theorist, he is a polymath with an interest in arts and sciences.
I love the medium and the more well-made comics that can inform and emotionally move us rather than preach and that carry a positive, planet-friendly, life-affirming message the better!
Deception of the Ignorant
It was the comics’ author/artist, Will Eisner, creator of “The Spirit”, who was first to exploit the pedagogical potential of comics. Back in the 1950s, he drew comic books for the US Army on how to mend and maintain jeeps. They were easy to use and understand motor-pool graphic training manuals for the average American squaddie to follow and learn from. Of course, it helped that Eisner was a genius (and I never use the term lightly). However, a training manual is not a comic. The art approaches the diagrammatic, the words are instructional. It does not have a depth of interaction between story and art that gives the medium its power. Words created the whole of literature and mark-making underlies all visual art. In comics, there is the mixture of both and that can be potentially greater than the sum of the parts. I maintain that to be truly effective the medium must move you emotionally and that is not easy. Craig Thompson’s “Blankets” comes to mind.
Comic book art is a craft but one that can be mastered without massive investment in kit. A pencil and paper with a dip pen and brush can produce something as wonderful as Chester Brown’s “Yummy Fur”. The craft of comics is one of economy and depth and, like it or not, entertainment. Alan Moore’s “Swamp Thing” delivered a powerful message on ecology but within the complexity of a good plot and a subversion of the monster genre. Moore and Dave Gibbons’ epic, “Watchmen”, intended to bring the vigilante meta-story arc (running through comics since Eisner’s vigilante “Spirit”) to a close. Yet, for every progressive and positive message, today, there is an endless stream of the dark and the violent. Frank Miller’s right-wing, libertarian visions of “Dark Knight” Batman and the rancid DC follow-up perversions of the “Watchmen” cast of characters, have led to a sewer of mainstream comics that sit comfortably within the conspiracy-theory led, polarised and paranoid society that the US, to an uncomfortable extent, has become today.
Psychiatrist, Frederic Wertham, published Seduction of the Innocent in 1954, in which he alleged that certain comics were corrupting the children of America and making them delinquent. There were, it must be said, some wonderfully disturbing comics coming from EC at that time and Wertham was not without some justification. His intervention led to the Comics’ Code, a self-regulation by the industry. But those days are well-gone. Self-regulation has been side-stepped by re-categorising comic books with an inflated sense of self-importance as “graphic novels”. As mainstream comics move increasingly in search of the ultra-violent, the vigilante, and the shocking and, at prices beyond the child’s pocket sell to the adult audience that grew up with the medium, a pervasive sad, heavy, and drab gas of ideological warfare pervades the landscape. In my mind, I transpose the innocent, squaddie, comic book consumer of Eisner from a 1950s black & white Sgt. Bilko-type environment into the Proud Boys ultra-right vigilante fraternity of today: still reading comics and still absorbing but in a world that has passed through Watergate, the Iran/Contra scandal, Clinton’s impeachment, and resulted in Trump’s January 6th, 2021, US Capitol attack. Not so much “Seduction of the Innocent” but, more like, “Deception of the Ignorant”.
I am not one for Wertham style censorship, but I love the medium and the more well-made comics that can inform and emotionally move us rather than preach and that carry a positive, planet-friendly, life-affirming message the better!
Dr. Charles Johnson, University of Washington (Seattle) professor emeritus and the author of 27 books, is a novelist, philosopher, essayist, literary scholar, short-story writer, cartoonist and illustrator, an author of children’s literature, and a screen-and-teleplay writer. A MacArthur fellow, Dr. Johnson’s most recent publications include The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling; and All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End: The Cartoons of Charles Johnson.
Although the work of black cartoonists in the 20th century was generally confined to the black press because of segregation, talented creators such as Ollie Harrington and Morrie Turner graphically demonstrated the ugliness of racism and the humanity of black Americans.
We think in pictures. For that reason, an image transcends language barriers and, as the old saying goes, is literally worth a thousand words. As humans, we’ve expressed ourselves in writing for perhaps 6,000 years. But visual creative expression in drawings and paintings reaches back 45,000 years to the image of a pig with warts and bristles drawn on a cave wall on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, and even farther back 73,000 years to crosshatch lines on a rock found recently in a South African cave.
Everywhere we look, we are surrounded by visual images. So it has been all our lives, and even more so today when literacy is in decline. The creators of those images, whether they are painters, illustrators, editorial cartoonists or comic strip creators, have always been my heroes. Despite the fact that I’m best known as a literary writer, theirs is the first creative tribe I’ve belonged to, professionally, since I was seventeen. Early in my first career I learned that comic artists have to develop a thick skin because the work we do most often is aimed at shaking up the status quo and, like all good art, having an impact on a viewer’s thoughts and perceptions. Here’s an example of what I mean:
In the 1860s and 1870s, “Boss” Tweed in New York City wielded such power through patronage, kickbacks, and spurious public works projects that he and the “Tweed Ring” managed to steal $45 million from NYC. Political cartoonist Thomas Nast is credited with helping to bring down Tweed, who was convicted of corruption in 1873, through savage cartoons—140 in all—he drew for Harper’s Weekly. Nast, also known for creating the elephant and donkey symbols for the Republican and Democratic parties as well as the classic image of Santa Claus, so infuriated “Boss” Tweed that he once swore, “Let’s stop those damned pictures. I don’t care so much what the papers write about me—my constituents can’t read—but damn it, they can see pictures.”
Tweed’s cronies threatened Nast, who left NYC for his own safety. The editorial staff of the satirical French publication Charlie Hedbo was not so lucky. A satirical cartoon of the prophet Muhammad, first published in 2006 in a Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten, then in Charlie Hedbo, led to protests by offended Muslims. In January 2015, two brothers who cited their allegiance to al-Qaeda attacked the Paris newspaper and killed twelve people. Even today the editors require police protection.
These are cautionary tales for comic artists, who in the Western world live by the credo that there are no sacred cows in politics, religion, culture, or anywhere else. But all cartooning need not be—and usually isn’t—a frontal attack on corruption or dogma. Through imaginative images we can show the consequences of climate change and racial injustice in ways that nothing else—not photographs, films, or language—can do as powerfully or memorably.
Although the work of black cartoonists in the 20th century was generally confined to the black press because of segregation, talented creators such as Ollie Harrington (often called the dean of black editorial cartoonists), and Morrie Turner (the first syndicated black cartoonist in the ‘60s), graphically demonstrated the ugliness of racism and the humanity of black Americans. Today that work in comics is being realized every single day in syndicated strips like “Candorville” by Darrin Bell, the first black cartoonist to receive a Pulitzer Prize for his insightful humor about racial mores, and by many others working as illustrators. Bryan Christopher Moss, who illustrated a graphic novel I co-authored last year with sci-fi writer and Afrofuturist Steven Barnes, titled The Eightfold Path, and Cliff Thompson who wrote and illustrated Big Man and the Little Men come immediately to mind. These artists demonstrated that comics are and have always been a uniquely effective medium for education, certainly for propaganda during World War II, and during the era of the Civil Rights Movement.
Bratislava-based illustrator and comic artist Eva Kunzová creates little stories about nature and people. Eva has illustrated books, created art for nature guides, and had her illustrations featured in magazines. In 2022 she took part in CreatureConserve's Mentorship program, where she created a stand-alone experimental comics zine about the Vjosa river, one of the last wild rivers in Europe.
Using comics to bridge the communities is an amazing way to inform and inspire new people. But they need to stay honest with themselves.
There is still a bit of an underground punkish feel to comics addressing environmental or social issues. This is great, it allows authors to experiment and mold the medium into a shape that best tells the story with all its emotions. Whenever I visit zinefest, and have an opportunity not only to see all the amazing work but also to speak with passionate creators, it is quite a strong motivational kick not only for me but for other visitors as well. That is what I believe is at the core of the medium, this combination of passion, creation, and inviting community.
In my experience with social media, stories and informative content especially in the form of comics are quite popular. Perhaps contradictory to the common opinion that technology and the internet make people indifferent and detached from the real world, I find the opposite to be true. While tabling on zinefests or just meeting friends of friends, I often find that many of them are interested in nature and environmental issues, despite their primary interests being in completely different fields. These kinds of meetings or connections are hard to replicate in the internet world. On one hand, it’s easier to reach a bigger like-minded audience from across the world, but very hard to reach people living in different internet-algorithm bubbles. But that does not mean that they are not interested in environmental issues.
Using comics to bridge the communities is an amazing way to inform and inspire new people. But they need to stay honest with themselves. Trying to trick readers into reading environmental comics or trying to hide messages out of a belief that this is the only way to reach people, can be damaging to the story but also to the audience. Many people are interested in these topics even if they are not part of their main interests.
Lucie Lederhendler has been the curator of the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, a community-engaged, contemporary public art gallery, since 2021. Her research is concerned with the ecosystems of mythologies and the mythologies of ecology. She is a lecturer in art history at Brandon University.
It’s appropriate to imagine myself with a superpower here: shooting out of my eyes something like lasers, but instead of heat and energy, simple movement forward in time to keep watch, marshal behaviour, or hold a seat. The spaces between panels in a comic create openings like that, for each mind to participate as itself, in a co-created world.
It is obvious to me that if a message is important, it should be delivered using as many modes of communication as possible, and that the number of different modes of communication is infinite, as they overlap in gradient measure, grow and subside into the past and into the future, and adapt to endlessly changing circumstances. Communicating the climate crisis is crucial messaging, so let’s throw the whole arsenal at it.
Comics are interesting because they integrate written language, visual signifiers, and time-based modes. Even more interesting is the overwhelming use of the medium to hold stories that are speculative: humour, time travel, space travel, superpowers. Why should this be? I’m reminded of a recent roundtable about Indigenous comics, hosted by the Dunlop Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Specifically, I’m thinking about an insight offered by artist Shaun Beyale, who notes that even though comics provide a lot to the reader—writing, dialogue, images—the reader has to participate by filling in the space between the panels. I think this answers the question, because when we fill in blanks we speculate: what could be here, what would make this this story I’m in more exciting, more tragic, more like my experience of the world?
Storytelling about the future needs those blanks so that folks can occupy them, project their at-risk identities into to the future and hold them there. As Audrey Hudson writes about her community, “if Black people do not think/mark ourselves into the future, then we will get wiped out of thought”. The spaces are spaces of possibility, and they have the capacity to hold a multitude of projections.
Another thing I’m thinking about is an article summarizing the work on imagination by Mary Cheves West Perky in the early 20th-century. In one experiment, she asked participants to look at a blank wall and imagine the image of something from a certain category (“fruit” is the first example). After a while, Perky would project an extremely dim image from the same category onto the wall. Participants not only accepted the real-life photons as their own figments, but even adjusted their mind’s eye to accommodate the new image without having any awareness that they were doing so.
I love this example that allows me to take blank space out of the realm of metaphor and knock my knuckles against a wall. Not being a comic book character myself, I can’t materialize the things I imagine, but there is no doubt that there is a tight relationship between imagination and reality—not the least that something must be thought of before it can be done.
There are many fights to be fought in opposition to climate change, and many tactics to use. Holding future space, I think, is one of the most valuable, not just against despair, but against the nullification of things. It’s appropriate to imagine myself with a superpower here: shooting out of my eyes something like lasers, but instead of heat and energy, simple movement forward in time to keep watch, marshal behaviour, or hold a seat. The spaces between panels in a comic create openings like that, for each mind to participate as itself, in a co-created world.
Patrick M. Lydon is an American ecological writer and artist based in Korea whose seeks to re-connect cities and their inhabitants with nature. He writes The Possible City series, is co-founder of City as Nature (Daejeon). He is an Arts Editor here at The Nature of Cities.
Stories matter. Our democracy, our money, our relationships with nature, all of these are at their most basic level, stories. A culture that inherently inflicts wounds upon itself and its environment then, is doing so precisely because of its stories. The potential of NBS Comics is in its understanding, that we should do all that we can to tell better stories, together, not only as a human family, but as a part of nature.
If one wants to shift the way the world works, what they need first, is a good story.
Stories are so powerful, everything about our cultures and the ways that we live, are built upon them. Narratives shape our very reality, and without stories to make sense of this Earth and Universe and our place here, we would suddenly find it immensely difficult to function as individuals, let alone as a society.
Forget that meager Cartesian label of humans as thinking beings then, we might do better to call ourselves storytelling beings.
But how wide does this powerful realm of story actually reach?
Our democracy, for example, is not merely a system of governance. It is a powerful story that articulates ideals of equality, participation, and representation. The belief in this story is what enables democratic processes and institutions to function.
Similarly, money functions as a symbolic system of exchange and value, but its worth is derived from the story that a piece of paper or a digital record is valuable. Without a shared belief in this story, there is no value in money.
Just as well, our individual and cultural relationships with nature are stories too; these stories position ourselves, our cities, and our industries in relation to the rest of this nature. A culture that inherently inflicts wounds upon itself and its environment then, is doing so precisely because of its stories, and more specifically, the position in which these stories place humans — above, below, or within — the context of nature.
But there are other stories that we might not be so familiar with; stories like those of NBS that tell us, yes, we are living beings who have important roles within a living world that includes far more than just humans. The fact that these stories exist, and that they have successfully informed ecologically sound ways of being, means that the stories we tell matter far more than we usually give them credit for.
Two frames from “The Possible City” series, depicting stories set in Osaka, Japan / CC BY-SA, Patrick M. Lydon
A few years ago I began an illustrated series called The Possible City. The series is an ongoing exploration based on these kinds of ideas. Stories matter. Many of our current cultural stories obviously inform habits that are not very beneficial to people and the environment. We need more compelling stories that resonate with the world that we think is possible.
But the matter of how we go about it is important, too.
The power of the NBS Comics project is that it it understands this: if stories are the foundations of our cultures, we should do all that we can to tell better stories, together. We should tell better stories that combine creative insights with both traditional and scientific knowledge, better stories about the world we should live in, not the one we currently inhabit. Like a FRIEC, we should also write, draw, paint, sing, perform and share these better stories, of what our human family might become if we take our proper seat at the table with the rest of nature, and listen. Most of all, we must do it, as the good Dr. David Maddox often says, across disciplines and ways of knowing. We need more projects that explore such radical transdisciplinarity, not only within human species, but all species.
NBS is too beautiful a concept to sit alone in the realm of data and statistics. It deserves a narrative revolution, one that can propel it from being a collection of definitions, to a completely new way of seeing and being.
Joe Magee is an award-winning artist, illustrator, and film maker.
He has been a regular contributor of images to a range of international publications such as Libération, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Time Magazine, New York Times and Newsweek - having upwards of two thousand images published.
Through the process of sitting down with him and visualising his methods in the field using drawings and then photo-collages, I captured visually the solutions he was employing.
Comics can really help advance solutions for social and environmental challenges. When I began to illustrate my comic, The Sound of a River (which explores nature-based ways to prevent flooding in towns) in collaboration with flood management scientist Chris Uttley, I didn’t fully understand the work that Chris was doing. Through the process of sitting down with him and visualising his methods in the field using drawings and then photo-collages, I captured visually the solutions he was employing. Weaving these images and techniques into an engaging story about a young girl whose house floods meant that the whole concept, including the potential causes of, and solutions to, urban flooding could be delivered to readers in an almost subliminal way. All sorts of small details were incorporated into the images to give a richness around the subject.
My teenage daughter read the comic in about 5 minutes and I felt that she had understood the concept in a way that, maybe, just by reading some text about it might have been too dry, boring, and hard to comprehend. The images will have stayed in her head to help establish her awareness of the subject.
Lux Meteora (Madrid, 1990) is a visual artist and illustrator interested in the natural world and its kinships. She works with traditional and digital media, developing sequential images that grow into visual storytelling. She is deeply interested in the relationships between species, which she explores through images in poetic, science-rooted pieces.
Comics are quite a good way to share environmental and socially accurate information, packed in small colorful bites. They are able to depict imagery, illustrate points and give a rounding point of view on issues that are sometimes seen as very complex and unsolvable.
Hi, I am Lux. I’m a comic creator, a painter and illustrator, and I live with fear. I, along with many, sit on my chair everyday and face the looming reality of climate change. I see its effects in erratic weather events, prolonged summers, and an extended fire season. I get to draw, research and write about it, and am quite aware that this is the privileged side of things. I also study botany and illustrate other matters, but environmental issues sit under an “urgent” note on top of the table. Developing a Nature-based Solution comic makes me feel that I am adding something good to the conversation, that I am providing accurate information that perhaps the reader didn’t know before. I felt second-hand impact from wildfires and wanted to know more about why they happen and what we can do to mitigate them. This research and its result being out there is something that makes me feel purposeful, in a different way than producing a work of fiction.
Everything, really, has a social and environmental impact. The commerce where we choose to spend our money, the companies we work for, the selection of produce on our baskets, these are all purposefully defining who we want to be, and our consumption has derived, hidden impacts. Reading a good book, a good comic, matters. The content and the purpose matter. Do I want to be a consumer of fast fashion, fast food, fast superhero comics? Are those popular because they are good, or because they are easy to read? Environmentally conscious comics can also be easy to read, can also be visually intricate, and easy on the eyes. That is the goal, and we have the tools for it.
Fanzine culture makes it possible to create a thing and put it out in the world, sharing it without the need to go through editorial bureaucracy. That has aided with creation, and broadened the horizons of artmaking. Digital comics are even more accessible than printed ones, especially those including translations, availing anyone to read them on any device.
As the written word is more and more intertwined with images, as we are constantly subjected to audiovisual overwhelm, text alone provides a weaker impression than text combined with visual media. This does not have to be a sad realization, but a field of possibility.
Comics are quite a good way to share environmental and socially accurate information, packed in small colorful bites. They are able to depict imagery, illustrate points and give a rounding point of view on issues that are sometimes seen as very complex and unsolvable.
People involved in policy making are not necessarily aware of all the derived aspects of those regulations. Visual storytelling is a tool that provides a different vision, one that can perhaps bring another dimension to the effects of our environmental and social management. Our social and environmental challenges are the biggest thing we face, as a society and as a cluster of generations. I believe in throwing everything we have into that fire, including, of course, our visual stories.
As a visual artist, I am interested in exploring universal and abstract concepts such as rebirth, freedom, dreaming among many others. Drawing inspirations from deep within, I make art with the hope that my work will serve as a door to a deeper reflection and emotional connection to our true selves and the world we live in.
I don’t think environmental comics need to involve concrete solutions to our problems in order for them to be effective. Can NBS Comics embrace works that do not necessarily include nature-based solutions but have underlying environmental themes and are highly compelling?
There are different paths that can lead to solving today’s environmental and social challenges, and comics and graphic narratives are definitely an entry point that can attract many people who enjoy visual storytelling. They can be factual or scientific, serving the purpose of educating and informing people, but today, I would like to highlight the visual narratives that have the power to connect us back to nature through emotions and imagination.
You may already be familiar with the works of Miyazaki or Tolkien, so here’s a lesser-known series by Daisuke Igarashi called “Children of the Sea”. In this story, a girl meets two boys who are said to have been raised by dugongs and have supernatural aquatic abilities. She too has a gift of her own—just like every one of us—but it’s the boys, whose names mean sky and sea, who connect her back to the waters and open her eyes to all of its wonders and hidden messages of the universe. “I think the universe is a lot like people.” “At that time, we were part of the sea itself, the universe itself.” These words remind us of the connection that’s been lost to many of us living in a modern society, but it’s the story and art that give life to these messages.
Now, that doesn’t sound like we would learn much about practical solutions to our problems, but an imaginary world like this can really pull us in, touch our emotions and push us to go beyond logical reasoning. That’s where its powers lie. I believe many would be inspired to take action if we could engage more of our emotions and intuition and actually feel that we are part of a bigger world and what that really means. Just like any close relationship, we need both our mind and heart to connect back to nature and rebuild one that’s healthier.
This is why I don’t think environmental comics need to involve concrete solutions to our problems in order for them to be effective. We need different kinds of narratives to engage all people and bridge the gap between humans and nature. So, my question is: Can NBS Comics embrace works that do not necessarily include nature-based solutions but have underlying environmental themes and are highly compelling? If the definition of NBS needs to stay specific for practical reasons, could the two work side by side, and if so, in what form?
This also leads to a more general question: How can we apply both our mind and heart to our current problems and what does that look like?
Michael Rosen’s passion for comics began when he was 11, waned at 14, and reignited at 29. Michael edited the graphic novel Oil and Water, written by Steve Duin, drawn by Shannon Wheeler (Fantagraphics Books). He co-edited three comics on COVID by Shannon Wheeler and produced by NW Disability Support for the Oregon Health Authority (over 300,000 copies distributed). He has a PhD in Environmental Science and Engineering and 30 years of management experience with local and state government programs in natural resources. He is board chair for the NW Museum of Cartoon Arts. He resides in Portland, Oregon with his wife Terri.
Environmental and social justice aims do not have to be solely represented in nonfiction comics. Plenty of fictional comics, even including those with superheroes, can and have advanced this work. These are fun, informative, and motivational too.
I do believe comics can help us advance solutions to our social and environmental challenges. I see these types of books more and more in local comics shops, bookstores, and libraries. They include graphic novels on climate change, mental and physical health, government reform, the state of our democracy, racial history, and LGBTQ issues. They are prominently displayed and readily available. As such, I see the market for them are growing.
Comics are an effective tool for education and engagement. During the pandemic, through a grant from the Oregon Health Authority (Oregon’s state health agency), I worked with the cartoonist and writer Shannon Wheeler and the nonprofit Northwest Disability Support to create Covid educational comics. Over 300,000 comics, in English and Spanish, were distributed throughout Oregon. Nonprofits, medical service providers, and schools used these comics to educate children and adults on preventing Covid, the vaccine, and boosters. Three comics were produced and covered emerging issues as they arose. The comics were engaging and informative. The medium helped explain complex issues simply. And readers were drawn in by the humor and vibrant, colorful art. We also emphasized diversity in the way we represented characters. They were different ages, colors, and abilities. The overall approach was an alternative to dense and complex text. The people that read these comics were better informed and took actions to protect their health and the health of others.
Generally, I think visual storytelling has the advantage of engaging all levels of readers and especially helps younger audiences whose comprehension is improved with visual representation of the subject matter.
One way to grow this movement is by investing in these endeavors through grants. Public service messages that are complex can be simplified and the audience for the message expanded by visual storytelling. Whenever the opportunity arises, I encourage government agencies to invest in this approach to messaging. I’ve also encouraged environmental nonprofits to consider telling the story of the important work they do through comics and to approach government agencies, like the Oregon Health Authority, to fund this work.
Finally, environmental and social justice aims do not have to be solely represented in nonfiction comics. Plenty of fictional comics, even including those with superheroes, can and have advanced this work. Growing up, many of the traditional comics I read dealt with complex issues such as, drug use, social change, and environmental protection. These were fun, informative, and motivational.
Mark Russell is an author and a GLAAD, Eisner, and Ringo award-winning writer of comic books. His titles include The Flintstones, Superman: Space Age, Second Coming, and Not All Robots, among many others.
Comics combine the best of the visual and text-based worlds, allowing people to read at their own rate, to stop and digest impactful moments as they occur, but also being a visual medium that can quickly convey information in a clear and immediate manner.
Yes, not only can comics help in advancing solutions to social and environmental challenges, they are uniquely qualified to do so.
Comics are an ideal medium for educating and inspiring activism for several reasons, which I will go into here, but the first and foremost being that as a medium that is both visual and textual, it works in much the same way the human brain does. In other visual media, like movies and television, the viewer is a passive observer, absorbing the information at the pace the director intended and with little time for digestion of what is being presented. The result being that, while accessible and easy to consume, much of the impact fails to take hold in the mind of the viewer because they are always having to focus on new incoming information. Printed media, like journalism and novels, lends itself well to pause and thoughtful analysis of what is being said, but it’s a good deal more laborious to consume and is not as accessible to a wide audience. Comics, on the other hand, combine the best of both worlds, allowing people to read at their own rate, to stop and digest impactful moments as they occur, but also being a visual medium that can convey information in a clear and immediate manner. This is why the 9/11 Commission printed their findings in graphic novel form. It was much easier to convey the engineering and architectural conclusions with drawings and images. And it was more accessible to a wider audience that didn’t have backgrounds in engineering and science.
And accessibility is perhaps the most important factor in any effort to educate people who are not a captive audience. It is a truism in media that if people can choose to be doing something else, they probably will. So in order to get people to willingly spend their limited time and attention on what you have to say, it helps to present it in a format they can quickly absorb and which has some immediate payoff, the way a good splash page or a panel with a high image-to-word ratio does. While this may be a gross simplification, in many cases, comics are to literature what a ten minute YouTube video is to a two-hour documentary. While the documentary might be amazing, people are generally more willing to take a chance on the ten minute video. Especially when it comes to younger audiences.
And this brings me to the third reason why I think comics are ideally suited to this mission. Their readership skews younger than other printed media. In any sort of social or political advocacy, I think it’s important to reach people while they’re still young, before identities and worldviews harden into stone. While our understanding of the world is molten and we are still sensitive to the pain of the world, this is when we need to learn about the impact we have on it. This is when we need most to feel like we are not merely passive observers, but active contributors to the future. And one of the reasons comics were created, and in particular why superhero comics were created, was to allow children, if only for a short time, to not feel like children. But to feel like they are the most powerful people in the world. And to think about what they would do to fix the world if, someday, they had the power.
Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues (2019), which Time magazine called one of the “most anticipated” books of the season, and the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men (2022), which he wrote and illustrated. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Best American Essays, The Times Literary Supplement, Commonweal, and The Threepenny Review, among other places. Thompson teaches creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College and the Bennington Writing Seminars. A painter, he is a member of Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City. He was born and raised in Washington, DC, attended Oberlin College, and lives with his wife in Brooklyn, where they raised their two kids.
In thinking about how to make the comics movement more popular (and it is, of course, immensely popular already), we might consider the following areas of content and aesthetics: Simplicity. Bold color. Human vulnerability. Serious and timely issues.
“You’re never alone,” a friend once said to me. What she meant was that when you hold an opinion, you can be sure that others hold it to. The question “How can we grow this comics movement and make it both effective and popular?” reminded me of my friend’s comment. That is to say, in thinking about what might attract large numbers of people to comics and graphic novels, a good place to start may be one’s own experience.
Mine began more than fifty years ago, when, as a boy of about seven, I picked up books of Peanuts cartoons, by Charles M. Schulz. A few years later I became a devotee of Marvel superhero comics. The simple forms of Peanuts made a lasting impression on my imagination, as did the bold colors I found in Stan Lee’s 1974 book Origins of Marvel Comics. What the two shared was an appreciation of human vulnerability; Marvel’s costumed heroes were the first who, for all their powers, exhibited the kind of emotional frailty you and I do, and of course Charlie Brown, the hero of Peanuts, was a kind of screen onto which readers could project their own insecurities. In terms of their visual appeal, the combination of Peanuts’ simple forms and Marvel’s colors informed my sensibility when it came to appreciating art, and I think others share this sensibility, if not its origin: those qualities are key components of work by the Impressionists and the Fauves.
Meanwhile, Art Spiegelman was at work on his game-changing work Maus, which demonstrated to the world that comics were a viable means of tackling serious real-world issues.
And so, in thinking about how to make the comics movement more popular (and it is, of course, immensely popular already), we might consider the following areas of content and aesthetics: Simplicity. Bold color. Human vulnerability. Serious and timely issues.
More, I think, needs to be said about simplicity. Schulz understood the power of suggestive simplicity: his characters do not look like flesh-and-blood children, but they allow us to imagine such children. Spiegelman understands it too. By contrast, at least for my own tastes—and one is never alone—many graphic novels, visually speaking, are too good, meaning that their illustrations have reached a level of (often computer-enhanced) sophistication and perfection that borders on the generic and, therefore, the boring. They do not engage the reader, at least this reader, because they ask nothing of one’s imagination, instead delivering everything right to one’s door, as it were. The Impressionists and the Fauvists understood the power of visual suggestion; photography was ending the need for technical perfection in painting, and artists were called upon to do something else, something that would make the viewer an active participant in creating visual impact rather than merely an awed onlooker. As someone once put it: Simplify, simplify.
Chris Uttley has been working for the protection and conservation of marine and freshwater habitats since his youth, working as both a practical ecologist and advising on conservation policy for aquatic ecosystems. For the last 9 years, Chris has worked at the cutting edge of nature-based solutions for climate adaptation and reducing flood risk, leading the Stroud valleys natural flood management project.
A comic can help people to visualise and hear about environmental problems and their solutions, in ways that cut through cultural expectations and norms to inform and entertain.
In summary, the answer is yes. Environmental problems are often complex and multi-faceted and don’t fit neatly into a good vs bad or straightforward paradigms. Even professionals sometimes struggle to articulate the problems in ways that everyone can understand. It can be even harder to visualise how we need things to change. That’s where storytelling and creative art can play a role and a comic is a great way of combining good art and good storytelling.
During the production of our comic, Joe Magee and I came up with the basic story very quickly, and I articulated what might be wrong with an engineered river, but explaining to Joe what the issues were and how to illustrate these, and how we want things to change was difficult and challenging. When I showed Joe photos of what a “Good” river looks like, he explained that he thought that was just “flooding” and not a healthy, well-functioning river occupying its natural floodplain. It shows that we are so used to existing in damaged and degraded ecosystems that when we are shown what “good” looks like, we think it looks wrong or a mistake, and damaged looks normal.
A comic can help people to visualise and hear about environmental problems and their solutions, in ways that cut through cultural expectations and norms to inform and entertain.
Charlie LaGreca Velasco has worked professionally in the comics industry for 20+years and began at DC Comics, where he emerged as one of the last generation of artists to grace the legendary bullpen before its closure. As a writer and cartoonist, he has created original comics for such companies, from Disney and Nickelodeon to the United Nations. Charlie's dedication to fostering literacy in socio-economically challenged schools shines through his founding of Pop Culture Classroom, an NGO that harnesses the power of comic books to promote literacy.
In my own experience of creating Environmental Comics for CUNY and the United Nations, I have been fortunate to witness the profound impact these comics can have on our society. However, it has been a process that has taken time and a focused commitment to the project over the course of a decade.
The following statements are made by a derelict cartoonist with no formal schooling whatsoever, other than thousands of wasted hours devouring, reading, and drawing comics.
Comics have enjoyed a small little remarkable run spanning 129 years and are still thriving today. They have firmly embedded themselves in the collective consciousness of various cultures worldwide, evolving into revered institutions, renowned national and global brands, and beloved franchises. Over the hundred plus years of existence they have explored almost every topics, genres, and artistic style—from traditional hand-painted works to digital masterpieces and even today incorporating AI—the power of comics shines through. They offer a universal accessibility and exemplify how this medium can captivate audiences in any genre or style, remaining perpetually relevant as a reflection of the times and places they emerge from.
Comics also possess the ability to weave engaging narratives that resonate deeply with our present-day realities, cultures, crises, and more. These timely stories serve an essential purpose, offering a much-needed platform for those seeking reflections of their own experiences and diverse broad themes that they can relate to. In this way, comics provide a sequential form of literary therapy, facilitating introspection, education, connection, joy, self-expression, and catharsis.
The potential for comics to broaden their audience and inspire readers to take action is undeniable, although I feel, it requires a long-term approach. It is important to acknowledge that achieving immediate success is not a realistic expectation. In today’s expansive landscape of media and art forms, to make a lasting impact often requires time and persistence, unless one has substantial resources available for extensive promotion and exposure.
Drawing from my own experience of creating Environmental Comics for CUNY and the United Nations [see image in the Bratspies contribution in this roundtable], I have been fortunate to witness the profound impact these comics can have on our society. However, it has been a process that has taken time and a focused continued commitment to the project and theme over the course of a decade. Their influence extends from individual readers, who are moved on a personal level, to entire communities or classrooms utilizing them as a tool to surmount environmental challenges and conflicts.
This artistry…the unique blend of words and pictures will only continue to shape and influence modern culture for years to come, and hopefully have a large impact on social and environmental change.
Shannon Wheeler, multiple Eisner Award winner, creator of Too Much Coffee Man, and contributor to various publications including the New Yorker, MAD Magazine, and The Onion. He lives on a volcano in Portland, OR with cats, chickens, and bees. He is easy to find, follow and like on various social media platforms. His website is tmcm.com. His many books are equally easy to find and purchase. Wheeler is currently working on a graphic novel project about his father’s commune.
Cartoons don’t do much. But comics changed me. It was MAD Magazine’s anti-establishment cartoons that inspired me to write and draw cartoons myself. The hatred for the lies from all directions steered me in better directions. I like to think that reading comics made me a better person.
Can comics change the world? No.
A cartoon about global warming is not going to solve our environmental crisis. Another cartoon about mass shootings is not going to change someone’s mind about the need for gun regulations. Cartoons don’t do much.
But comics changed me. At a very young age MAD Magazine taught me that advertising was not to be trusted. I learned from their cartoons, if someone told you that they could solve your problems by selling you something, they were trying to sell you something. It was their anti-establishment cartoons that inspired me to write and draw cartoons myself. The hatred for the lies that came from salesmen, politicians, and corporate shills steered me from a becoming one of those people myself. I like to think that reading comics made me a better person.
I drew a graphic novel about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill highlighting the profound effects of an environmental disaster on everyday people. I also turned the Mueller Report into a graphic novel as a way to make the information accessible and to counteract the political spin that dominated the public discourse. Did my work change anyone’s mind? I doubt it.
But with any luck my work touched a couple people, fostered some empathy, and educated a soul or two. If I helped someone from losing their soul to the ruthless economic machinery of our modern world in the same way I was helped, I’d call that a win.
Midori Yajima is an illustrator and early career researcher in the natural sciences. Midori is visiting researcher at Trinity College Dublin and specialises in ecology and plant ecology, using traditional and mixed media for sciart and personal projects.
We live in a time when too many people see scientists as distant figures, giving advice from the top of their ivory tower. Engaging with stories can break that wall, and bring the discussion even beyond, by making it accessible, relatable, and maybe even more participatory. Still, it is right within the message that challenges hide.
Visual storytelling can definitely be a powerful tool for communication. It is able to harness complex themes in an engaging way, it sticks to the memory, or can even trigger emotional responses, rooting the understanding of something beyond the usual means used for science communication. We live in a historical time when even though more and more energy is spent in communication, too many people still see scientists as distant figures, giving advice from the top of their ivory tower. Engaging with stories can break that wall, and bring the discussion even beyond, by making it accessible, relatable, and maybe even more participatory. By opening a theme to a diverse audience, the potential of planting seeds of change just escalates, from simply sparking reflection to scaling up ideas and solutions to a greater scale, as big as the audience it reaches. If few informed (and determined) people can make a difference in a community, what could happen if the pool of people gets bigger? Bringing the discussion outside the usual set of people, means also bringing diversity to the ideas that can be generated, if the message is well delivered.
Still, it is right within the message that challenges hide. It would be important to find a narrative that does not hyper simplify concepts. Presenting a silver bullet explanation is great for delivering a message, but what happens when facts diverge from that? Especially as with social-ecological dynamics, where reality is multifaceted. After all, the mistrust that has been rising towards scientists shouldn’t all be blamed on the public.
Another challenge closely related is for the scientist to face: deconstructing our ego. It is unlikely that readers will engage if the story makes them feel silly. How to shape our communication with empathy? Of course this code switching is not easy at all for someone who dedicates so much time into a completely different dimension. But it is a direction worth exploring.
Last but not least is how to build the visual storytelling itself. Even though comics are great, there is a far greater constellation of visual means that is there available to use. No means is naturally best tailored, but the discussion often revolves around building linear stories, while sometimes this constraints complexity. Even a single image, or an abstract piece can inspire as much, depending on the audience, synthesising and still portraying a concept, just through a different lens, stimulating a different part of our brain.
So it is a matter of balance: understanding, completeness, depth in a continuous research for engaging with others in a meaningful way.
Cecilia de Sanctis is an illustrator and early career researcher in the natural sciences. She specialises in biodiversity conservation and monitoring and is a professional illustrator, her work featuring in NGOs, international organisation such as IUCN, and science communication projects.
Global warming and misuse of water resources are increasingly leaving dry riverbeds in their wake. Now designers are looking for ways to safely create vital public spaces out of these open spaces while also preserving their historic hydrologic function.
In most arid regions of the world cities are growing and rivers are running dry. While rapid urbanisation has left little room for creating new public open spaces, could urban riverbeds that remain dry for an extended period of time provide potentials for new types of public parks?
Dryland settlements were historically established along flowing rivers (e.g. Mesopotamia (Tigris and Euphrates), and Egypt (Nile)), where freshwater bodies sustained the communities for centuries. But this is changing. With global warming, population growth and human-induced changes to water resources, the number of drying urban rivers has increased. Currently, drylands, including arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid regions, occupy 41.3 percent of the globe’s land area and support more than 2.1 billion of the world’s population.
It is unsettling to know that a number of permanently flowing rivers around the world including the Indus (Pakistan), Ganges (India), Amu Darya (Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), Murray (Australia), Colorado (United States of America), Tagus (Spain) and Nile (Egypt) are now discharging very little, or no water to the sea for months during the year. Most of these rivers passing through old settlements and ancient cities, used to be the lifeline of the citizens.
A representative example of a drying urban river is the Zayandeh Roud in Isfahan, Iran. Literally meaning the “life-giving river”, Zayandeh Roud was one of the largest rivers in central Iran and a major source of water for the country. Many have memories sitting next to the flowing water, watching the glimmering lights reflecting from the Khajoo Bridge on the water surface, or picnicking in green parklands adjacent to the water edge in the midst of the city. Since the early 2010s, the lower segment of the river basin has dried out due to reduced rainfall, mismanagement and overuse of groundwater and surface water resources.
Zayandeh Roud has turned into a scar on the face of the city. Visitors can now walk and play inside the fractured dry riverbed. Some even have picnics next to the remaining waterholes where spontaneous vegetation grows, resembling oases in a desert.
Figure 1: Residents in Isfahan playing volleyball in the dry riverbed of Zayandeh Roud. Photo: Courtesy of Ako Salemi/Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting.
The absence of water has created a different aesthetics; a landscape that reminds us of our drying climate. Meanwhile, it has also provided new and unique recreational opportunities; a meeting place for the inhabitants. The spasmodic flow of water has created a place of isolation and re-connection; when water flows, it re-connects the isolated living ecosystems adjacent to the riversides, and when dry it connects the inhabitants to the isolated riverbed. The river has become a contested space between natural flows and human activities.
Learning from arid Middle East
A closer look at some other arid cities in the Middle East shows that dry riverbeds were informally used as social spaces in the past. Wadis (the Arabic word for river valleys in drylands), acted as oases suitable for settlements and natural drainage systems for seasonal floods. They provided underground water resources, connector routes, sources of food, and shaded areas for nearby inhabitants.
Socially, the wadis had important cultural functions. In Muscat, Oman, for example, before the growth of the city as an expanding metropolis, the wadis and the riparian vegetation provided the nearby inhabitants a refuge from the hot summer weather. They were used as gathering spaces for families, tribes and villagers, by creating a microclimate of fresh and moist air with cooling effects of land-sea circulation.
Nowadays, dry riverbeds in urban areas are often composed of waste, gravel and dust, used as car parks and roads, and perceived as dumping grounds. They are over-engineered with altered morphologies, locked in concrete, or buried underground for fear of flooding and exposing the citizens to pollution accumulated over years of neglect. This has resulted in the deterioration of their natural ecology, and their disconnection from the urban context.
Figure 2: Wadi Al Kabir’s current conditions in Muscat, composed of gravel and dust. The void space is used for car parking. Photo: Sareh Moosavi
However, there seem to be changes in the making.
Our research shows that the role of wadis in the Middle East is shifting from junkyards to public parks, with a number of projects emerging to restore their natural and cultural values and reconnect them to urban life.
A new type of public open space in drylands?
An investigation into a number of wadi projects in the Middle East reveals that these void spaces can be transformed into public parks that provide new outlooks and forms of recreation.
The restoration of Wadi Hanifah in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, provides an example of recognising the opportunities for creating recreational uses along and inside the undeveloped riverbed when dry, while restoring ecological processes through revegetation and naturalisation. Designed by Canadian Landscape Architects, Moriyama and Teshima Planners, and UK based engineers from Buro Happold, the new walking trails and picnic areas proposed along and inside the dry segment of the wadi has created a new type of public open space; a large linear thin park previously unknown to the citizens.
Figure 3: Wadi Hanifah, Riyadh: Semi-enclosed picnic facilities to provide a level of privacy for Saudi families. Photo: Courtesy of Arriyadh Development Authority
Similarly, a number of wadi park projects have been commissioned in Muscat, Oman, where international designers were asked to create safe access to the wadi beds, and provide walking promenades, green spaces, playgrounds, and sport fields for users to reconnect them with these underutilized spaces.
Figure 4: Women often use the walking paths on the upper banks of the new Wadi Azeiba Park in Muscat, Oman. Photo: Sareh Moosavi
Wadi Azeiba, designed by Atelier Jacqueline Osty & Associés, is the first completed wadi park project in Muscat. Field observations showed that the newly created park has successfully encouraged many nearby residents, particularly women, to walk more and interact with their neighbours, while their kids play in the open areas.
Figure 5: Vegetation and walking paths in the upper and lower parts of the Wadi Azeiba Park. Photo: Sareh Moosavi
The wadi park acts as a hybrid space, which can be flooded when it rains, and transformed into a public park when it’s dry. However, questions of safety persist in the use of these dry riverbeds, which are at risk of flash flooding and turning into giant flood drains.
In the design of the Wadi Adai pedestrian bridge in Muscat, the Norwegian landscape designers, Snøhetta, took a creative approach to tackle safety issues. The descending ramp designed in the middle of the new pedestrian bridge, enables access to the dry wadi bed, while providing an option for quick evacuation from the wadi bed in times of sudden flash flooding, minimising the risks to users. With minimal design interventions and keeping the wadi bed free from building development, the designers aimed to retain the wadi’s hydrological function.
Figure 6: Snøhetta’s proposal for the pedestrian bridge and wadi park in Wadi Adai, Muscat. Photo: Courtesy of Snøhetta
Looking forward
Can these projects provide a model for the transformation of other drying urban rivers into spaces of public use? Can these models be replicated in other cities? And what are the long-term impacts of this transformation on the rivers’ ecosystem, the local ecology and public life? These are important questions that require longitudinal studies of the ecological and social impacts of these new spaces. A data-driven design approach is required to ensure the solutions are responsive to the specific hydro-ecological and cultural characteristics of the context. This needs a multidisciplinary approach to design, where designers work closely with engineers, hydrologists and ecologists, as well as the local communities to understand how these transformations can achieve best performative outcomes.
Nevertheless, it is clear that with the advent of global warming and the number of urban rivers drying up, it is time we think about how to turn these scars into living spaces.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank Dr Margaret Grose and Dr Jillian Walliss at the University of Melbourne for their support, help and guidance during this research.
There is virtually no graffiti in Iran. But there are many and varied nature-themed murals, on walls and fences of schools, buildings, homes and construction sites.
We walked approximately 1,500 kilometers in Iran, and something was noticeably missing: Graffiti. Scribbled names or tags, spray painted symbols, and thought-provoking political commentary were absent in cities, towns and villages from Sarakhs on the Turkmenistan border to Astara on the Azerbaijan border to the sprawling capital of Tehran to the desert gems of Esfahan, Shiraz and Yazd.
The author’s route through Iran. Solid lines on foot; dotted lines by public bus.
Instead, nature-based murals and geometric patterns appeared on walls and fences of schools, buildings, homes and construction sites. In small communities along major roads, advertisements and phone numbers were painted on concrete walls, an ideal way to catch the eyes of those driving by.
At home in Barcelona and out traveling in the world, I keep a deliberate eye out for graffiti. While I may not understand the written messages because of language barriers, the visuals give me a small window into what’s on the minds of some locals and what issues carry weight. For me, good graffiti, those paintings with a targeted point of view, is an old-school social media tool that creates awareness in a community.
Graffiti also can be a tool to express alternative ideas or offer new perspectives to mainstream thinking. Surprised about the absence of graffiti in a country of 80+ million people and undergoing noticeable political and social change after 38 years of imposed religious-based law and order, I asked about it.
Some people I spoke with informally brushed off the lack of graffiti, saying graffiti makes cities ugly. Others said graffiti was not part of their culture. And a few said, half-joking and half-seriously, that the government wouldn’t allow graffiti, and especially not anything that would have a political slant.
While graffiti is missing from the walls, murals are popular. Many cities and individual property owners have embraced murals as a way to take a plain, boring eyesore and add color and beauty to the urban landscape. Murals, locals told me, are more closely linked to traditional Persian expressions or art; historically, murals were commonly painted in palaces and tea houses.
This historical link is evident in neighborhood strolls around the country.We saw murals of all sizes and varieties in many of the cities we passed through, and, in Tehran, we found many examples in a short stretch around Vali Asr square. Here are some of them.
Jenn Baljko
Bangkok to Barcelona on foot
All photos by Jenn Baljko.
In rural areas, walls are billboards advertising local businesses.
We first noticed the murals on the main street leaving Mashhad.
Bojnourd’s downtown area featured geometric shapes.
Along the way, we found a range of different motifs.
And in Tehran, we didn’t have to walk far to find these paintings.
Other areas had a wide range of themes and styles, from surreal and psychedelic, to cartoon and trompe l’oeil.
Standing on the seawall, we were looking across the bay at Miami Beach, the destination of dreams, a skyline squiggle above the water’s surface. Closer, cruise ships lined up at the port like skyscrapers lying on their sides, prepared to visit the exotic Surrounding us were tall buildings assembled at the edge of the land, representing businesses and residents from throughout the hemisphere.
Successful stories depend on the way we look. At Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon, Rio’s post-card, there was a trade-off. For landscape, tourism, investors and new residents, it’s a success story. However, new projects create new places of poverty, with lack of infrastructure, to which poor people, losing their original homes, are moved. The transference model has been destructive and inappropriate.
As suggested above, the capacity for self-organization is a critical attribute of city life. If it’s compromised, so is the healthy functioning of the city. Self-organization occurs at every level of city life: within households, city blocks, neighborhoods, districts, the city and region. Walking groups, street vendors, business improvement groups, neighborhood watch initiatives, buying clubs, co-locations for the self-employed, street fairs, affinity groups of all kinds: the desire for city dwellers to make connections with others is what ensures a city is productive and vital: livable. Cities are not an artificial construct (at least the most successful ones aren’t). They are creatures of the living: created by people seeking to organize their lives in ways that sustain and nurture. The dynamism that self-organization delivers, is what we call livability.
New Orleans typically receives around 64 inches (162cm) of rain annually, and much of this volume arrives in the form of intense downpours that overwhelm the city’s drainage system, even with the marked improvements made since Katrina. The system can pump an inch of rain an hour in the first hour of a storm, and then a half an inch an hour afterwards. In other words, the system can handle three inches over a five-hour period. Often, localized downpours exceed this rate and water begins to collect.
Needless to say, I always identified with the Indians in the movies, even though Mexican school and television taught me Indians didn’t exist anymore: they belonged to another time. There were a few survivors, of course: a few Indian families begging for money in touristic streets and perhaps a few stubborn individuals who didn’t want to use medicines, go to school, etc. They were basically extinct. We were told that in 1492 Christopher Columbus had “discovered” America. Soon after, Spanish Conquistadores brought (their) civilization and diseases. A bloody war started, but the Indians lost. They had been glorious and heroic, but they died because they were supposed to be inferior. Official history would go as far as to point out that their polytheism was another proof of their primitive status. After the indigenous people lost, a new culture was born: closer to Spain, but mixed with indigenous features. That was the mantra. Some teachers would talk to us about ethnic cleansing, others would talk about the benefits of catechism. But nothing really managed to fully kill the mystery.
At 10 or 11 years old, I attended the lecture of an old sage who claimed to be the Last Mayan. I remember feeling very sad and asking myself and hearing others ask what could be done, how could he reproduce his kind and their wisdom? But of course, he was too old: he was The Last One. Not much could be done. Better that he tour the country while he still could to let people know whatever secrets remained before it was too late. This was a few years before the half-millennium anniversary of the invasion of the continent. People and intellectuals were getting restless. In 1992, Mexican social scientists managed to score a goal on Spanish social scientists who, perhaps to avoid riots, agreed to stop claiming the continent had been “discovered”—of course, people inhabiting the continent knew they existed and were in the continent. Instead, the official version of the 1492 event was re-conceptualized as a “meeting of two worlds.” Nothing more.
Those were the years when Francis Fukuyama claimed history had come to an end. And because of NAFTA, the people of Mexico were deluded, believing it was time for them to become citizens of the First World. The official date of entry would be January 1, 1994. But the transmission on New Year’s Day was interrupted by a small Liberation Army of Mayans, who existed, identified as Mayans, and didn’t speak the Spanish language, even though they inhabited Mexico. That was a big reality check. Since then, we have found out that more and more people speak languages and practice religions we were told were long-dead. Even a few decades ago, there were still events (miracles) that made the Nahuatl people renew their faith in their “natural” or original beliefs. The Catholic Church treated these events as emergencies: it would use any means to suppress such effects. Theology of Liberation has been praised for its so-called emancipatory and revolutionary qualities, but it could also be considered a last resource for keeping the customers converted to the oppressor’s religion.
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