It is crucial that the topic of biodiversity in the context of the built landscape is considered holistically and not only in individual aspects. Cross-thematic and cross-disciplinary cooperation is of central importance for communication and promotion.
Project study within the framework of the Swiss Biodiversity Strategy Action Plan
Increasing building density is putting pressure on green spaces and thus on the living conditions for flora, fauna, and humans. However, the sixth IPPC report and the COVID-19 pandemic clearly show green spaces that enable recreation and the experience of nature in the immediate surroundings are central to both our well-being and biodiversity. To achieve the goal in despite of, or especially, because of the densification stipulated in the Spatial Planning Act (RPG1)[i], new and additional ways are needed for high-quality open and green spaces within sustainable urban and settlement development. As a supplement to parks and gardens, the greening of buildings (facades and roofs) and measures that enable the settlement of wildlife play an important role. They make an important contribution to compensating for diminishing green spaces, providing habitats for flora and fauna, contributing to a better microclimate, having a positive influence on our quality of life and health, and, at the same time, strengthening the attractiveness of the cityscape.
Switzerland is well known for more than two decades for its extensive flat green roofs as ecological compensation surfaces. These surfaces have the purpose of promoting urban biodiversity, using local substrate mixtures and local seeds/plants to reduce the local footprint, and provide rare dry habitats for rare species and other species (generalists and specialists). However, even though there is already a long tradition of greening buildings, especially roofs, as well as legal requirements and conditions imposed by some cities and municipalities, it is not the actual case that all flat roofs in Switzerland are greened. Why is that? And why are there not more such areas? This study investigated this question and others.
On behalf of the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN), the Urban Landscape Institute of the Department of Architecture, Design and Civil Engineering, in collaboration with the Environment and Natural Resource Sciences Institute of the Department Life Sciences and Facility Management, has produced a study that compiles the existing knowledge, researches and evaluates it based on good practice examples of buildings in Switzerland, and concretely researches and vividly documents their development processes.
In the process, the following topics were scrutinized: Description of the various available technical solutions, but also the potential and the associated challenges and their ecological impact, as well as the associated care and maintenance requirements. Furthermore, the valid regulations and legal bases on the level of public authorities and in the private sector are shown. The whole final report will be deepened with expert interviews on individual key topics or good practice examples and is intended to highlight the gaps regarding the application in planning and implementation even more.
In close cooperation with communication experts, guidelines for action will be developed that will make it easier for cantonal and municipal administrations as well as actors in the private planning and construction sector to better exploit the potential of buildings for the promotion of biodiversity and landscape quality and to communicate between the individual disciplines as well as between the professional world and the population.
Results
During the preparation of the study, it became apparent that in addition to anchoring biodiversity at the legislative level and in education, the planning and implementation process as well as communication play an important role. Communication is central in two ways: it is a success factor in the process and the vehicle for communicating and promoting biodiversity on the building. Within the process, it ensures the functioning of interdisciplinary cooperation and creates acceptance and identification thanks to participation and information. The focus of communication in communicating and promoting the topic is to raise awareness among the relevant groups of actors of the relevance, the options, the opportunities ― and the attractiveness ― of biodiversity-promoting measures in densely populated areas. In particular, planners and decision-makers should be shown, by means of good examples and “ambassadors”, that biodiversity-promoting measures can be exciting design elements and create attractive buildings and open spaces. It is crucial that the topic of biodiversity in the context of the built landscape is considered holistically and not only in individual aspects. Cross-thematic and cross-disciplinary cooperation is therefore also of central importance for the communication and promotion of the topic.
Eco-Green Building Soubeyran Geneva Photo: Alix Jornot
Outlook
The next step should be to develop concrete steps and measures based on the findings and proposed recommendations for action ― and in coordination with the results of the other, thematically related studies: So that biodiversity in densely populated areas can be established as a basic prerequisite for the sustainable further development of our living space.
Anke Domschky is a landscape architect and urban planner at the Urban Landscape Institute of the Department of Architecture, Design and Civil Engineering in Zurich (Zurich University of Applied Sciences).
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Séverine Evéquoz and Claudia Moll of the FOEN for commissioning the study and for their trust. A big thank you goes to Sarah Jüstrich and Stefanie Wiesinger, the project partners Andrea Schafroth and Monique Rijks (s2r.gmbh), Ewa Renaud and Alix Jornot (HEPIA, University of Applied Sciences in Geneva) as well as the numerous experts.
The Spatial Planning Act (RPG) is a Swiss federal law that regulates spatial development in Switzerland. It was enacted on the basis of Art. 75 of the Federal Constitution and aims to ensure the economical use of land. In particular, the natural foundations are to be protected and residential settlements and the spatial conditions for the economy are to be created and maintained. In the referendum of 3 March 2013, voters approved a revision of the Spatial Planning Act with 62.9% in favour, as an indirect counter-proposal to the withdrawn federal popular initiative “Space for People and Nature (Landscape Initiative)”[i]
Are eco-urbanism and urban resilience still relevant? Yes, perhaps now more relevant than ever before. However, their potential needs to be understood from a new perspective.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated existing problems in global supply chains of two fundamental commodities, namely energy and food, which in turn are leading to soaring inflation. In response, several countries are abandoning their commitments made at the COP26 conference to reduce carbon emissions and instead going back to coal and other forms of polluting energy. The global situation is further exacerbated by the increasingly frequent threats by Russia to use tactical nuclear weapons as an attempt to change the course of its failing invasion of Ukraine. This current situation is superimposed upon an social and political environment that already had all the enabling conditions for the rise of populist right-wing governments across Europe and the Americas, including globalisation, rising inequality, and declining social mobility ― all of which increases climate change skepticism and the belief in the inevitable clash of civilisations.
Against such a background it is legitimate to ask are eco urbanism and urban resilience still relevant? This article will argue that they are perhaps now more relevant than ever before. However, their potential needs to be understood from a new perspective.
Clash of Civilisations or a forward drive of modernity and prosperity on a planet for all?
The theory of the Clash of Civilisations rose to fame with the publication of Huntington’s book with the same title. In it, civilisation may be described by a series of relationships and trade-offs. Civilisation can be defined by different relationships between (1) Humans, Religious Institutions, and their respective god(s); (2) the Individual and the Group; (3) the Citizen and the State; (4) Man and Woman; and (5) Parents and Children. It is further refined and delineated through different views on the trade-offs between (1) Rights and Responsibilities; (2) Liberty and Authority; and (3) Equality and Hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries of development. For example, western civilizations share the common experience of European history, feudalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. However, particularly in the Era of the Anthropocene, the above traditional definition needs to include the relationship between man and nature, and the trade-offs between the economic growth of human societies and the protection of natural resources and ecosystems. Failing to address these additional relationships and trade-offs may lead to a case of excessive pressures on planetary boundaries that made human settlements and specialization of labour possible in the age of the Holocene.
The theory of the Clash of Civilisations argues that the collapse of communism in the USSR, and the failure of ideas of nationalism and socialism in the Middle East, leads to a wider cultural rift as people in Russia go back to Russianization and people in the Middle East go back towards Islam. Therefore, it is argued that the most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another. To what extent is this valid today, and what are the chances of increased efforts for eco-urbanism and urban resilience against such a background? Before answering this question, it is useful to see how proponents of this theory responded from a cultural and social science critique perspective.
Said contested the notion that civilizations are monolithic and homogeneous and the unchanging character of the duality between “us” and “them” ― a notion that is prevalent in the establishments of developed first-world countries as well as developing countries. While recognising that differences do exist between Islam, Confucianism, Hindu, Japanese, Slavic, Orthodox, Latin American, and African civilizations; he refused the notion that their differences will inevitably lead to conflict. First, statements about what ‘our’ culture is, what civilization is, or ought to be, necessarily involves a contest over the definition; hence it is more accurate to say we are living in an era of the clash of definitions. To emphasize the differences between cultures is completely to ignore the literally unending debate about defining the culture within civilisations ― particularly important as these debates completely undermine any idea of a fixed identity and hence relationships between fixed identities.
Second, cultures are not the same. There is an official culture, a culture of priests, academics, and the state; that speaks in the name of the whole and provides definitions of patriotism, loyalty, boundaries, and belonging. However, there are also dissenting or alternative, unorthodox, heterodox, strands that contain many antiauthoritarian themes in them that are in competition with the official culture. This “counter-culture”, consists of an ensemble of practices associated with various kinds of outsiders, the poor, immigrants, artistic Bohemians, workers, rebels, and artists.
Third, tradition can be invented, and the idea of a culture and civilization being something that’s stable and fixed is completely disproved by this notion of how traditions can be invented, manufactured for the occasion so the traditions are abstractions that can quite easily be created, destroyed, manipulated, and so on. Fourth, too much focus on the clash of cultures obliterates something else: the fact of a great and often silent exchange and dialogue between them. Indeed, the weakest part of the clash of cultures and civilizations thesis is the rigid separation assumed between them despite the overwhelming evidence that today’s world is, in fact, a world of mixtures, of migrations and of crossings over, of boundaries traversed. There are no insulated cultures or civilizations. Any attempt made to separate them into watertight compartments does damage to their variety, their diversity, their sheer complexity of elements, and their radical hybridity. The more insistent we are on the separation of cultures, the more inaccurate we are about ourselves and about others. The notion of an exclusionary civilization is an impossible one.
The more integrative but more difficult path is to try to see cultures and civilisations as making one vast hole, whose exact contours are impossible for any person to grasp, but whose certain existence can intuit, feel, and study. Such an approach will allow for a new global consciousness that sees the dangers we face from the standpoint of the whole human race including a) climate change, b) threat to biodiversity, c) rising inequality, and d) the emergence of virulent local, national, ethnic, and religious sentiment.
How do eco-urbanism and urban resilience fit in? In every way!
Focusing on the shared experiences and interactions between cultures on how to improve urban resilience and protect eco-diversity, can help the broader objective of enabling a global consciousness that focuses on the dangers we face as a human race.
The relationship between humans, religious institutions, and the associated god(s) varies across countries and religions and is rather complex. Across 800 regions of the World, research shows that people are more religious when living in regions that are more frequently razed by natural disasters. This is in line with psychological theory stressing that religious people tend to cope with adverse life events by seeking comfort in their religion or searching for a reason for the event; for instance, the event was an act of God. It is generally agreed that religious institutions can play a vital role in relief operations and funding in the immediate aftermath of disasters, while also proving to be the space for long-term healing. However, their other role in sometimes promoting disasters as an act of god often benefits authorities, particularly in third-world countries that are characterized by a more religious and less educated population and where religious authorities are under some form of control or influence of the authorities. By portraying disasters as an act of god, which was the rule rather than the exception before the Enlightenment, the discussion shifts away from an examination of the man-made decisions that led to certain development choices which resulted in an unfair and unequal distribution of exposure, vulnerability, risk and losses among different population groups. Sharing and learning from the successful experiences of scrutinizing development choices that lead to disproportionate exposure, risk, vulnerability, and losses would help reduce future disaster losses. It would also help raise awareness of how religion is often maliciously used by authoritarian regimes and greedy investors. This increased awareness, when acted upon in a communal manner, can have a ripple effect on putting an end to the malicious use of religion at large in the long term.
The relationship between the Individual and the Group ― and later on in human development, the relationship between the Citizen and the State ― varies across countries and throughout history. It is affected by trade-offs between liberty and authority, hierarchy and equality, and rights and responsibilities. When the above trade-offs are biased towards elite-captured, despotic, and undemocratic societies; we see marginalized groups being more exposed, more vulnerable, more at risk, and subject to disproportionate disaster losses as a result of decisions taken by the elites. In these circumstances, the process of the use of natural resources (mineral, land, sea, and human) disproportionately benefits the elite, while risks and losses are disproportionately concentrated amongst vulnerable groups (including class, ethnic, sectarian, and cast-vulnerable groups). As a result, social mobility declines, inequality, and marginalization increase, thereby creating the socio-economic conditions for the rise of extremism in all its forms (across the political and religious spectrum). Sharing and learning from the successful experiences of the regulatory role of the state in protecting individuals and groups from the risks associated with the actions of other individuals and groups, would help reduce disaster losses while also reducing inequality and marginalisation. It would also help raise awareness on how the populist “politics-of-fear” is often used by authoritarian regimes who are themselves perpetuating the socio-economic conditions of inequality and declining social mobility.
The relationship between parents and children differs across civilizations and affects and is impacted by DRR practices in several ways. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory views child development as a complex system of relationships affected by multiple levels of the surrounding environment, from immediate settings of family and school to broad cultural values, laws, and customs. From a DRR context, a culture affects this relationship depending on the degree to which it considers it its duty to pursue policies that (i) will create opportunities for social mobility so children of poorer backgrounds can better their life chances; and (ii) will protect the elderly and provide them with care in case they lack the financial means themselves to do so. Countries that strive to have financial, economic, and social policies that contribute to social mobility have to pay extra attention to ensure that disaster losses do not detrimentally affect social mobility. Furthermore, they need to do so most effectively through the adoption of preventative measures before a disaster strikes. In these countries, parents do support their children; however, the state also provides the conditions for social mobility. Similarly, while children support their parents the state ensures that DRR policies are not ageist.
Image created by Fadi Hamdan
On the other hand, countries characterized by elite capture, while often adopting populist policies, do not invest in long-term policies that can lead to social mobility. In fact, these countries promote and rely on a rentier culture leading to cronyism, where protection against a disaster is a gift from the authorities rather than a citizen’s right. Such countries prefer handing out compensation after a disaster, albeit in a biased manner, rather than invest in more cost-effective and sustainable preventative measures, albeit less politically appealing within a rentier culture. This leads to a culture where, even if parents support their children, social mobility is more difficult, and chronic poverty becomes more prevalent. Lack of social mobility increases the fragility of states, decreases state legitimacy, and increases the drivers of violent extremism.
A way forward for effecting change
The above discussion showed the potential of sharing DRR best practices across cultures and civilizations, while also highlighting their potential impact on reducing violent extremism and promoting multicultural understanding and cooperation. However, effecting change requires Agency to Operationalize Values formed by education, long-life learning, and shared experiences (including on best DRR practices). Furthermore, effecting change requires promoting the notion of Solidarity, in addition to the more traditional top-down concept of protection by the state and bottom-up approach of empowerment.
The notion of Solidarity can be best promoted and built upon by adopting a political economy lens that focuses on the following aspects of the problem under consideration:
Understand the dynamics of the Decision-Making Process: Develop an understanding of the existing dynamics that create certain winners and losers arising from the existing use of resources (human and natural in land, sea, and air), in particular through understanding the vertical and horizontal distribution of benefits, exposure, vulnerabilities, risks and losses arising from the development choices. In doing so, recognise and develop an understanding of governance and decision-making mechanisms encompassing a broad set of political institutions both formal and informal. While doing so, pay special attention to those represented in the decision-making forum, and the main gatekeepers of such forums that allow or prevent certain development choices from being discussed.
Multi-Faceted Role of Advocacy and Awareness Raising: Address the multifaceted role of advocacy, education, and awareness-raising campaigns targeting various stakeholders and national partners, including i) promoting an understanding of roles and responsibilities between the citizen and the state; ii) the interconnectedness of problems; iii) the relationship between rentier states, cronyism, sectarian politics and disproportionate public sector employment; iv) development, employment opportunities and basic services as rights in productive states vs. the favouritism adopted in distributing them in rentier states; and v) need to supplement technical budget solutions with political lobbying and advocacy based on political economy analysis.
Identify Leaders and Build Coalitions: Provide support for local actors to carry out political economy analysis to enhance their understanding and lobbying along the above lines. In addition, identify potential national and local partners from civil society and local development leaders, including the private sector. Employ a definition of leadership as a political process involving the skills of mobilizing people and resources in pursuit of a set of shared and negotiated goals. Support the formation of coalitions for change with leaders and stakeholders as defined above.
While the above may seem like a daunting task, perhaps now more than ever the future of humanity depends on its successful achievement.
The impact of urbanization needs to be kept in perspective compared with the much greater threat to biodiversity coming from our unsustainable global food system. If we were to dismantle major urban centers and spread their populations over the surrounding countryside, far more pastoral paradise would be consumed and carbon footprint per capita would rise dramatically.
The Year 2007 marked the arrival of the Urban Millennium when most of the world’s population became urban for the first time in human history (UNDESA, 2009). The proportion is now at least 55% and the global urban population is predicted to increase by 2.5 billion over the next 30 years (UNDESA, 2019). In North America, South America, and the Caribbean, 80 % of the population reside in urban settlements, while in Europe the proportion is 73% (EU Joint Research Center, 2019).
I recall how many environmentalists reacted with foreboding to this turning point (or tipping-point, as they saw it), as it served to highlight the relentless march of the concrete jungle into rural “paradise”, to paraphrase Joni Mitchel’s lament (Big Yellow Taxi, 1970). Certainly, in many developed nations, the belief that urban growth is the primary driver behind the loss of nature is commonly held by many journalists who echo or stoke the fears of the general public.
Such fears have been heightened by rural campaign bodies such as the Council for the Protection of Rural England, which has set out a particularly J.G. Ballard-inspired dystopian vision for England – “It’s 2035, and the countryside is all but over… there is no longer any distinction between town and country. Town does not end, countryside does not begin” (Kingsnorth, 2005). A similar ominous prediction for England’s green and pleasant land was expressed 30 years earlier by celebrated English poet, Phillip Larkin, in his poem Going, Going – “as the bleak high-risers come … more houses, more parking allowed … Despite all the land left free. For the first time I feel somehow that it isn’t going to last … And that will be England gone”. In academia, too, there seems to be a consensus that urban growth is a very major cause of biodiversity loss (McDonald, et al., 2018), if not the primary driver (McKinney, 2002; Catalano et al., 2021).
While urbanization certainly has had many very negative impacts on the natural world, is the hostility that environmentalists and the wider public hold for it justified, or is there a much more important factor driving biodiversity loss? As to the first part of the question, a skepticism about the scale of impact has been simmering for many years before being emphatically reemphasized relatively recently by the likes of David Owen and Edward Glaeser in their books Green Metropolis (2011) and Triumph of the City (2012) respectively. Both authors take the contrary viewpoint and contend that well-organized compact urban agglomerations benefitting from economies of scale have much lower environmental footprints than alternative lower-density arrangements of human populations of similar size. Flagship cities for these authors include New York, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Owen does concede, however, that “thinking of crowded cities as environmental role models requires a certain willing suspension of disbelief because most of us have been accustomed to viewing urban centers as ecological calamities”.
As to the second part of the question, while it is repeatedly asserted that Joni Mitchel was heaping the blame squarely on urban expansion for the loss of paradise, an oft-forgotten line of her song also implicates another culprit – “hey farmer, farmer put away that DDT now. Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees”; lyrics inspired by Rachel Carson’s 1962 tour de force, Silent Spring. Indeed, I contend here that it is “our global food system [and not urbanization, which] is the primary driver of biodiversity loss” (Benton et al., 2021).
Debating in a numerical vacuum
Discussions as to whether we are approaching a point where town does not end and countryside does not begin often take place in a numerical vacuum. According to Our World in Data, only 1% of the earth’s land area is built up urban, including cities, towns, villages, roads, and other human infrastructure (Ritchie & Roser, 2019). The figure is 2% in the US (World Economic Forum, 2020), while in the UK, which is a particularly densely populated nation, the figure is 7-8% (Office for National Statistics, 2019). Urban areas also include parks, gardens, golf courses, and many other forms of greenspace, so the actual footprint of concrete and asphalt may be smaller depending on how these numbers were calculated; in the UK ‘natural land cover’ accounts for 31% of urban areas.
Compact-city living
According to McDonald, et al. (2018), urban growth resulted in the loss of 190,000 km2 of natural habitat between 1992-2000 (16% of all natural habitat lost over this period) and threatens an additional 290,000 km2 by 2030. These findings are concerning, but such studies sometimes fail to fully consider the ecological and other environmental benefits of urbanization or consider what the environmental implications would have been had the new urbanites remained in the countryside.
While carbon footprint per unit area is higher in urban than rural areas, this is because there are many more people per unit area. In developed nations, at least, the carbon footprint per capita is lower in urban centers than in rural areas or sprawling suburbs (Owen, 2011; Glaeser, 2012). Residents of urban centers are less inclined to drive because services are readily accessible by foot or public transport. Policies are also in place to constrain car use in cities, e.g., restricted and costly parking charges; limited space to ease congestion through road capacity expansion; and the introduction of congestion charges (e.g., London). Because heat consumption is correlated with floor area and the ratio of wall area to floor area, rural and suburban housing, which is typically larger and detached, also uses more energy than in urban centers where apartments and terraced housing are the norms.
If we were to dismantle major urban centers and spread their populations over the surrounding countryside, far more pastoral paradise would be consumed and carbon footprint per capita would rise dramatically. Moreover, exacerbating climate change would cause additional biodiversity loss (IPCC, 2022).
Are the indirect impacts of urbanization exaggerated?
McDonald, et al. (2018) argue that the external land area needed to provide food, water, and materials to cities should also be taken into account when assessing their environmental footprint. However, in isolation, such analysis is misleading. The populations of urban centers would still need to eat and consume water if they were to be teleported into rural areas, and in developed countries, at least, their footprints would be much higher. This is because there are enormous economies of scale to be derived from supplying food and water to large concentrations of people compared with similar populations widely dispersed across the landscape (Owen, 2011; Monbiot, 2022).
While the need to minimize food miles and the concept of locavorism is music to the ears of many environmentalists, various other factors need to be considered when assessing environmental footprint, including how the food is grown and how it reaches its destination. Because food items are transported in bulk to cities, often with a range of other products, food miles per unit can often be much smaller for produce transported long distances than for the same food item that has been purchased in a local farmer’s market.
Moreover, focusing on food production where growing conditions are most optimal, maximizes production and reduces carbon output per unit. Monbiot (2022) is particularly uncompromising on this point – “given the distribution of the world’s population and the regions suitable for farming, the abandonment of long-distance trade would be a recipe for mass starvation”.
Is vertical farming the solution?
To circumvent the limitations of locavorism, some champion indoor and vertical farming systems (VFS) in cities, i.e., growing crops in vertically stacked layers using soil-less techniques such as hydroponics. However, the economic viability of VFS is currently uncertain, as start-up infrastructure costs are high and the process is labor and energy intensive. VFS, therefore, faces stiff competition from traditional horizontal farms in the countryside that have lower infrastructure and land costs, as well as free sunshine (Owen, 2011; Delden et al., 2021; Moghimi, 2021; Monbiot, 2022). Nevertheless, there still appears to be momentum behind VFS that is attracting investment and so increased efficiencies are anticipated from improved automation. Whether these will be sufficient to establish a profitable sector able to make a reasonably significant contribution to food supplies remains far from clear.
Urbanization in low-income countries
Contrary to the trends in developing nations, urbanization in low-income countries may initially increase emissions per capita, as the newly arrived consume more electricity and transport than their rural counterparts (Li & Lin, 2015; Connolly et al., 2022). While attempts have been made to inhibit urbanization in low-income countries these have largely been ineffective, and arguably, undesirable (Tacoli, 2015; Macdonald, 2016). All developed nations originally transitioned from agrarian to urbanized societies and low-income countries are now going through the same process. Those living comfortable lives in high-income nations should remind themselves that most people migrating to cities in low-income countries are not leaving behind some rural utopia but rather are desperately poor and are seeking a better standard of living for themselves and their families (Pearce, 2010; Glaeser, 2012). Moreover, as low-income countries transition to middle and high-income countries, the per capita environmental footprints of urban residents are likely to fall below those of their rural compatriots.
Owen (2011) suggests that the antipathy so many environmentalists have towards urbanization has a somewhat Malthusian undercurrent. Some commentators seem to imagine that rural-urban migrants would vanish into the ether if only the process could be stopped. However, a growing world population and accompanying urban growth are inevitable. The world population is approaching 8 billion and is projected to peak at approximately 10.4 billion people during the 2080s (UNDESA, 2022).
Contrary to any Malthusian fears, urbanization is and will continue to be an important and environmentally beneficial process in the demographic transition, slowing overall population growth. This is because fertility rates are lower in cities than in rural areas. Women socialized in cities are likely to be better educated, more involved in economic activities outside the household, have improved access to family planning services, are less culturally constrained, and opt to marry at a later age, and for all these reasons and more, choose to have smaller families than those in neighboring rural areas (Lerch, 2019). Therefore, achieving gender equity (in part driven by urbanization) is critical for, inter alia, meeting sustainability goals.
Density done well
Given the inevitability of urban growth, we must act to minimize and offset associated biodiversity losses, seeking biodiversity net gain wherever possible, particularly if biodiversity hotspots are disproportionately threatened by the process (McDonald, et al., 2018). The integration of biodiverse green space into the urban realm also brings multiple ecosystem services (Grant, 2012), including positive (biophilic) effects on our psychological well-being, delivering a dose of ‘Vitamin N’ or ‘Nature’s Fix’, to borrow the biophilic terminology of Richard Louv (2017) and Florence Williams (2017) respectively. This entails squaring the circle when it comes to maximizing the environmental benefits of compact-city living, while at the same time providing adequate urban greenspace (Garland, 2016). In this respect, the application of Jane Jacobs’ (1961) “density done well” philosophy will be critical. Urban green spaces must be designed to be multifunctional, working hard to integrate biodiversity and other services where space is at a premium (Photos 1-3). Density done well, of course, also means getting more out of built infrastructure, i.e., improving sanitation, housing, public transport, etc., and avoiding sprawling slums and shanty towns in developing countries.
Photo 1. “Gardens by the Bay … the face of Singapore’s futuristic melding of city and nature” (Wood et al., 2021); Singapore is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Photo: Lincoln GarlandPhoto 2. Richly vegetated monorail pier and road curb, Sentosa Island, Singapore; despite being very densely populated, in 1967 Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had a vision to turn Singapore into a Garden city with abundant greenery. Photo: Lincoln GarlandPhoto 3. Density done well – New York’s High Line, an elevated linear greenway created on a former railroad spur. Photo: Steven Severinghaus
The real culprit behind biodiversity loss
Over the last 50 years, the conversion of natural ecosystems for crop production and pasture has been far and away the primary cause of biodiversity loss (Benton et al., 2021). Cropping and livestock production occupies approximately 50% of the planet’s habitable land. Once natural habitats have been removed to establish agricultural systems there are often limited opportunities for wildlife to coexist due to heavy reliance on agrochemicals, and because of monocultural and deep tilling practices. Our food system is also an important driver of climate change.
While we must develop the capacity to feed at least 10 billion people well before the end of the century, this can be achieved while also significantly increasing the coverage of protected areas for the benefit of wildlife and the provision of ecosystem services. Various credible approaches have been proposed, although the most effective mechanism for reducing pressure on ecosystems would be a transition towards plant-based diets, as substantially less land is required per calorie produced in contrast with diets including a significant meat and dairy component (Poore & Nemecek, 2018; Benton et al., 2021; Ritchie, 2021; Monbiot, 2022). The IPCC (2019) also asserts that a significant shift to plant-based diets would provide a major opportunity for mitigating and adapting to climate change. Additional benefits would include improved dietary health and a decrease in the likelihood of pandemics. However, despite clear evidence governments remain reluctant to advocate such a transition (Islam, 2021).
Shifting baseline syndrome
Putting aside global issues and returning to first-world problems and the fears of the UK’s general public, I often struggle to fathom why disproportionate blame is put on urbanization rather than farming in explaining the impoverishment of the nation’s biodiversity. Note that the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world due to agricultural land use patterns (Davis, 2020). Many people seem assured that all is well simply from the superficial greenness of the UK’s countryside, even though very little significant wildlife can be found across large parts (Packham & McCubbin, 2020; Monbiot, 2022). They see what is there (greenery) rather than what is missing. Each generation, therefore, redefines what it thinks of as natural and so there is an ongoing reduction of standards and acceptance of degraded natural ecosystems caused by unsustainable agricultural practices; the phenomenon known as shifting baseline syndrome. According to Tree (2018), the British have “pre-baseline amnesia, we forget that there was once more, much much more”.
The myth of the UK’s green and pleasant land has been perpetuated by the absolute conviction of large landowners and the National Farmers Union who have had more influence with the Government and have been more adept at spinning themselves as custodians of the countryside than conservation bodies (Macdonald, 2018; Packham & McCubbin, 2020).
As a consequence of intensive agricultural practices, some studies are now finding enhanced biodiversity in towns and cities contrasted with the neighboring countryside, ranging from increased bee species-richness in the UK (Baldock et al., 2015) to Leopards in Mumbai (Braczkowski et al., 2018).
Conclusions
Ongoing urban growth certainly poses many challenges to the environment and every effort should be made to minimize and offset losses, and wherever possible integrate biodiversity into the urban realm, not only to benefit nature itself, but also to provide ecosystem services, including biophilic benefits. However, the impact of urbanization needs to be kept in perspective compared with the much greater threat to biodiversity coming from our unsustainable global food system.
It should also be recognized that urban coverage is only 1% of the land area while accounting for 55% of the global population. Therefore, an urbanized world, particularly one that seeks opportunities for densification and minimizes sprawl, frees space for other uses including protected areas for wildlife. However, whether we allow more space for nature outside of our cities will mostly depend on whether we choose to adopt more sustainable approaches to food production.
Thank you to Dr. Mike Wells and Gary Grant for their kind feedback on the article.
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We know a lot more about how urbanization generally affects spider communities outdoors. Interestingly, in a meta-analysis of lots of arthropod studies across urbanization gradients, spiders were the only taxa that were not clearly and negatively affected by urbanization.
Spiders are among my favorite urban neighbors. They’re flashy, charismatic, and they’re everywhere. Spiders also evoke a range of emotions and thoughts from their human cohabitants. If you see one in your house do you squish it? Do you capture it gently and relocate it? Do you run away screaming? Do you get excited and acquainted with one another?
One week in 2020 I was making coffee early in the morning and noticed a small little spider on the wall of the kitchen next to me. I thought it was pretty cool looking but didn’t think much of it and went on with my day. The next morning, I came down, and there it was again! I watched in interest as it hopped around and stared at me. And then the next morning it was back. That’s when I took a photo and later discovered through iNaturalist that it was Adanson’s house jumper (Hasarius adansoni). It stayed around for a few more days, watching me make coffee. And then it disappeared.
Adanson’s house jumper (Hasarius adansoni) took residence in the author’s kitchen (Lamma Island, Hong Kong)
Interestingly, today a paper came out showing that spiders exhibit patterns of REM sleep… spiders dream! I now wonder if my companion had a particularly rough week of sleepless nights and joined me early after sunrise also badly wanting some caffeine.
This week I’ve enjoyed a rather large huntsman spider in the shower. When I turned the water on the spider ran around and I figured it was a goner. But I should not have underestimated the spider. It too stuck around for a few days… and my wife was not happy about it, nor the fact that I refused to move it.
A huntsman’s spider (Heteropoda venatoria) in the author’s bathtub (Lamma Island, Hong Kong)… and two contrasting opinions about this development. [the author also failed to take out the trash that morning]While I’m not afraid of spiders now, I was scared to death of black widows as a kid growing up in Los Angeles. Seriously, it was like rattlesnakes, sharks, and black widow spiders. While black widow spider bites can be painful and problematic they are very very rarely fatal – between 2000 and 2008 there were over 23,000 reported bites in the US with 33.5% reporting “moderate effects”, 1.4% “major effects” and no deaths. So, my fear was certainly not justified [probably don’t need to be afraid of sharks either but that’s another story]. Not surprisingly, depictions of spiders in the media are part of the problem in generating such fear.
Indoor diversity of urban spiders
There are a number of fun studies that have examined the question of indoor spider diversity in more detail. Entomologists “raided” 50 homes in North Carolina in 2012 and collected all the arthropods they could. Spiders made up about 20% of the arthropod fauna in the homes on average and they found all sorts of spider types including funnel weavers, ghost spiders (scary), orb weavers, sac spiders, ground spiders, dwarf spiders, wolf spiders, wall spiders, goblin spiders, cellar spiders, jumping spiders, spitting spiders, cobweb spiders, and crab spiders.
Other than entertaining (or frightening) their human cohabitants, what are the spiders doing? While drinking my coffee and watching my friendly H. adansoni I liked to thank them for keeping mosquito populations low. But do they actually do this? Researchers have tested this in salticid spiders (related to H. adansoni in fact) in arenas with mosquitoes and found that spiders can consume between 2 to 9 mosquitoes a day! Female spiders also fed on a greater number than males.
In truth, there is a lot we don’t know about spiders and biodiversity in our homes. But there is increasing interest in indoor biodiversity and ecosystem function relationships. I’m willing to bet that spiders are key to a lot of indoor food webs.
Urbanization impacts on spider diversity
We know a lot more about how urbanization generally affects spider communities outdoors. Interestingly, in a meta-analysis of lots of arthropod studies across urbanization gradients, spiders were the only taxa that were not clearly and negatively affected by urbanization. This is likely a consequence of habitat- and species-specific responses in spiders that lead to either negative or positive effects on spider diversity.
For example, in Córdoba, Argentina, researchers found that spider diversity was lower in urban sites relative to both suburban and exurban (non-urban) sites. On the other hand, for ground-dwelling spiders in Hungary, diversity tends to be higher in urban areas relative to rural and suburban sites. In Sydney, spider diversity was highest in remnant habitat patches but gardens were also quite high in diversity. So, patterns of spider diversity across urban gradients are rather complex.
Has urbanization caused any extinctions of spiders? This question is surprisingly difficult to answer for most arthropods. After all, if a species isn’t in a city how do you know whether it has become extinct or was simply never there? For one case, scientists have found evidence that the trapdoor spider Apomastus has become extirpated in parts of the Los Angeles basin, leading to reduced genetic diversity.
Despite the uncertainties and questions regarding urbanization effects on spiders, experts agree that urbanization is among the greatest threats to spider conservation along with agriculture, climate change, and pollution.
Behavior of urban spiders
Porchy (Nephila pilipes) was a golden orb weaver spider that lived on my porch in 2017. She grew to be quite large, about the size of an orange from foot tip to foot tip. For months my wife and I watched daily as she would munch on flies, moths, and other creatures that would come into her web. Sometimes I would forget about her presence and ruin her web in the morning. No matter, she would rebuild it quite quickly and soon get back to work. N. pilipes are particularly feared in Hong Kong by morning runners and hikers as their webs are frequently run into and the image of an orange-sized spider close-by is not comforting to some. But they’re mostly harmless. [They will catch the occasional bat or bird though!]
Anecdotally, it sure appeared that Porchy was leveraging our strong porch light to catch insects attracted to the bulb. The web was often positioned to exploit the light (or so it seemed) and she had good success during her time on the porch. And indeed, there are studies showing that spiders are attracted to light on buildings. But the story is not as simple as it might seem…
Minnie Yuen was an undergraduate in my lab in 2016 whose passion for golden orb weaver spiders led her to conduct an experiment. She went to several sites in Hong Kong, found spiders, and then did an experiment where she set up a light at several webs and compared to unlit webs. She then put up video cameras at the webs to see how effective they were in catching insect prey/moths. We were expecting to find that the spiders next to lights would catch more prey. And then, we found the opposite! Fewer prey were intercepted in the spiders’ webs… but there were roughly equal numbers of moths that approached the web. We suspect that the light may have given moths an opportunity to detect the webs and avoid capture.
Porchy (Nephila pilipes) lived on the author’s porch in 2017 and remains his favorite spider cohabitant in recent memory.
The closely related Nephila plumipes in Sydney can also thrive in urban areas. Spiders in urban areas with greater impervious area persist longer than other spiders, perhaps due to localized warming increasing survival. The species is well adapted to the urban environment and seems to be one of the “winners” of such landscape change.
In Belgium, orb weaver spiders exhibit intriguing changes in their webs with increasing urbanization. While prey capture rates are similar between high, medium, and low levels of urbanization, the architecture of the webs change significantly. Urban webs tend to be situated higher and are less inclined.
Fuzzy friends! Obviously…
Both inside your urban, suburban or rural home, you are likely to find some very cool spiders. Like us, they are going through their day trying their best to bring home the bacon. They sleep and dream. They’re just trying to make it in this big crazy world. The least we could do is not make it harder for them and fear their presence. But we should go well beyond the simple act of empathy for our fellow urban cohabitants. More attention and effort should be paid to conserving these important and unique animals. For all the Porchys out there, I hope we can create hospitable landscapes where humanity and spiderdom live together harmoniously.
In Russia, few home gardeners use native species and they are not available in nurseries. In creating Recollections of the Meadow, we hoped to test-run the approach where native plant species would be used to build a flower bed, and we intended to share the resulting algorithm with everyone willing to follow suit.
Last year in spring, we came up with an idea of creating a flower garden that would only feature native plant species. Why is that both difficult and important? And what conclusions can we draw after a full year of watching the flower garden grow and seeing how both community and specialists respond to it?
Plants and pollinators have been evolving together for millions of years and depend on each other. For example, Moscow is home to the red bartsia bee (Melitta tricincta) which only visits red bartsia. And the small tortoiseshell caterpillar feeds almost exclusively on common nettle, a stinging plant considered a weed.
But the share of indigenous plants in the cities has been decreasing across Europe, and that has been dragging along insect and even bird biodiversity. Over the last 150 years and by the end of the 20th century, the share of indigenous species in European flora decreased from 88% to 68% (Kent, 1975). The majority of the deleted species, 27%, belonged to meadow communities. Meanwhile, the share of alien species has been on the increase. Popular in landscape gardening, they “escape” their cultured environments and invade local communities displacing wild species. Lupin (Lupinus polyphyllus) and Canadian goldenrod (Solidago canadensis) have already made it among Russia’s top 100 most dangerous invasives occupying huge territories of natural ecosystems, while 7 species of Moscow’s native and very common bellflower have already been listed as threatened (Red List).
One can speculate about the need to promote “proper” landscape gardening and use only native plant species that can support pollinators. Let’s actually do it. What would we have to face? Last year in spring, our “Architects of the Meadow” team which consists of landscape architects and biologists took the chance to recreate a meadow with wild grasses in an ordinary Moscow yard, so that it could both compete with other flower gardens in beauty and stand out significantly in terms of how it “benefits” wildlife. We wanted to make a point that, in Russia, native species were undeservedly forgotten and raise this awareness among both professionals and local residents.
A month ago, our “Recollections of the Meadow” was awarded a prize by Moscow Urban Forum, Russia’s main architectural forum—the flower garden was put up for voting by an independent jury, and the winner was determined by Moscow residents in a month-long voting session at the main city website. But the road to victory and attention was bumpy.
Photo by Michael ScheglovPhoto by Michael ScheglovPhoto by Michael Scheglov
No planting material in plant nurseries
Before starting the work, we made a list of 46 plant species that we would like to grow in our flower bed and divided them into 5 groups—to be planted in blocks, to form the core of the flower garden, to create a structure, to support the middle layer, and early bloomers to decorate the flower bed in early spring. This way, our garden would turn out diverse and as attractive as possible in every season of the year. Eventually, plant nurseries could only provide a third of the list, which meant 14 plant species. But we decided to go ahead with what we managed to find while asking local residents to bring those species from our list that grew on their own on their countryside plots. They are still common in the countryside, whereas in the cities, trimmed lawn prevalence has already made them a rare find.
Native plants are not easily found for sale in Russia. Landscape nurseries hardly ever grow them as there is no customer demand, while consumers do not want to pay for something that is perceived as a weed, is mown off, and grows for free. As a result, even landscape gardening specialists—landscape architects—have little knowledge of the local flora, the names of those plants, and their bloom potential. So, it turns out there is no one—neither a customer nor a contractor—to initiate planting a native flower in a flower bed.
Professionals surprised by plant “character traits” in a flower bed
Working with native species was a professional challenge for landscape architects who were responsible for drafting the flower garden concept. The way plants would behave in a flower bed could mostly be imagined in theory only — knowing how they bloom and grow in the wild is one thing and having them in a closed area of a flower bed is quite another. Eventually, we were in for both pleasant and unpleasant surprises. For example, field bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis) grew so big that it even tipped some of the other plants to the side by twining around them. On the other hand, common mullein (Verbascum thapsus) was so grateful for fertilized soil that, instead of being predictably noticeable, it grew incredibly gigantic and could not but be a real pleasure for the eye.
Constant need to educate local residents
From the very beginning, we decided to build the flower bed in a community where locals would support the idea and be ready to tend the flower garden on their own. As this is a volunteer project for us and many team members live far from where the flower bed was built, we knew we would not be able to either water it every day while the plants take root or ensure other types of regular care. Eventually, we did right by relying on the community. More than 50 people helped us plant the flower bed (which is no less than 200 square meters big!), more than 100 people participated in the crowdfunding efforts to finance its creation, and the garden was regularly watered throughout the hot summer. We started a chat that was joined by the most active gardeners. It seemed that everyone was on the same page exchanging photos of the blooming plants while in the chat and pie recipes while around the flower bed. But then winter was over, spring was late, and it became clear that not many residents understand and, most importantly, accept the natural concept of their yard’s central flower garden. Plant nurseries did not have early bloomers in stock, so our mini garden did not have them either, and after the snow melted, it was first russet, and then bright yellow dandelion heads started covering it—either their seeds had been brought by the wind or their roots had been left intact. And Moscow residents associate dandelions with the most aggressive weeds—that is, if you are fond of even lawns.
So, despite our belief that this yellow-colored meadow was pretty, discussions started sprawling across community chats suggesting the flower bed needed other flowers as the existing ones were not decent enough. We understood that a one-off educational session on the mini garden’s natural concept was not enough and that regular educational activities had to be included in such projects. When offered an explanation of why this very type of flower garden has been created and what its benefits and advantages are, former critics embraced the idea. And knowing the exact months when the plants in the flower bed are going to blossom—and that they simply need some time—makes other opponents come to terms with it too.
As a result, discussions about the lack of decorative value in our flower garden had subsided by early June when many garden’s plants reappeared and began blossoming in all their natural glory. July, in its turn, would be a downright fabulous time to endlessly enjoy the garden’s colors.
Photo by Michael Scheglov
When creating Recollections of the Meadow, we hoped to test-run the approach where native plant species would be used to build a flower bed, and we intended to share the resulting algorithm with everyone willing to follow suit—featuring places where flowers can be found and ways to plant them to get a beautiful and useful result. But we have to admit it turned out we still haven’t a ready and simple scheme for doing this, even though a lot of Moscow residents who care about nature would like to implement a similar project in their yards. One cannot foresee what choice plant nurseries will be able to offer (especially given the low demand for native species) and what the soil or lighting of the plot will be like, meaning that each similar project will be individual and labor-intensive—and consequently, poorly scalable. On the bright side, people’s eagerness is scalable, judging by the interest our project sparked in social and mass media, by the feedback from people seeking advice or help, and eventually, by the prize we received. And that means one day the plants native to the city will be able to return there as “residents” in their own right.
Make the stories of your landscapes louder. Narrate them. Spread their seeds. Write about what you see around you, about the beauty and pain that emerges in these varied contexts. Pay attention to the places and spaces that are of value to your loved ones, and notice all that is there. Remember, remember, remember.
It’s July. With the windows down, drive to the corner of Hudson Street and Netherwood Avenue. Pull into the driveway lined with Marigolds and with Morning Glories climbing the mailbox. You might miss the street sign, which is regularly hidden behind Sunflowers 10 feet high, but you can’t miss the strawberry patch nipping at their feet. Park the car and step outside. A warm breeze will caress your skin and tenderly play the percussion of wooden wind chimes. You will feel something special about this place, and the birds will confirm it; you’ll find dozens of them singing at the bird baths, waiting patiently for the bird feeder, made from plastic soda bottles, to be refilled with seeds. Say hello to them.
Photo: Ashley Jankowski
Gramps will come through the screen door in cracked bare feet and a sunhat. You can take your shoes off, too, if you’d like to feel the sweet grass on your ankles and the thick mud between your toes. He’ll hand you a Tupperware bowl with your name Sharpie-scribbled on the lid before wandering around the side of the house. Follow him.
He’ll lead you just around the corner to a blueberry bush. As you step closer, you’ll smell sugar and earth, a scent that conceals the stench of the trash cans and recycling bins overflowing against the house’s exterior. Gramps will gesture to your Tupperware and tell you that the birds will get to the blueberries first if you don’t hurry. Careful now; look out for critters as you gently pull a berry from a branch. Look closely. Each blueberry is a rounded, blue-purple shade of perfect and just about the size of a marble. Squeeze one between your thumb and your pointer finger and notice how little force is required for it to fall apart. Pop it into your mouth; feel the fruit drenching your tongue in tart juice instead of the expected sweet. A few steps further and you’ll find a pocket of sky-high beanstalks, heavy with foot-long beans that are more often purple than green. Munch on one and tug at another to add to your loot. Start thinking about creative ways to prepare them. Once Gramps knows you like them, he’ll bring you jumbo Ziploc bags of them all summer long. In your peripheral vision, you’ll catch the sight of a dilapidated statue of the Holy Mary standing lopsided next to a prayer bench covered half with soft moss, half with peeling paint. Be sure to thank the hands that prepared this food; this is how Nana used to conclude grace before every family dinner.
Continue into the backyard. To your left, find the tiny, concrete patio adorned with wooden picnic furniture painted terracotta red. You won’t be able to see the years of barbeque nights, rounds of Hearts, Scattergories, and Easter egg dyeing held around the sticky table-clothed table. The table is now covered with old prescription bottles that once held Gramps’s Alzheimer’s medication and Nana’s Parkinson’s pills. They are now filled with seeds and layered with new labels of wrinkled duct tape.
Photo: Ashley Jankowski
To your right, find Gramps’s three piles of compost – separated by jagged metal sheets and chunks of broken doors and fences – which he meticulously spins thrice annually. Here lies the secret behind his fertile soil. Watch as he scatters a handful of pumpkin seed-laden compost onto his yard; he will accidentally grow a sweeping pumpkin patch by fall.
Gramps is resourceful and imaginative. He finds new life for everything. Adjacent to the compost is Gramp’s shed, overflowing with odds and ends, crates, wires, tubs, twigs, tires, and tubes, all of which Gramps has saved to tend to his yard. Bags of human hair, collected from the local barber shop, rest against the shed, waiting to be poured out around the garden to deter the deer. Hanging on the outer wall of the shed are three wooden hooks labeled Kyle, Ashley, and Chelsea: places for his three grandchildren, now grown, to hang their little coats, grab a shovel, and learn alongside him.
Watch your head! Two taut clotheslines spread from Gramp’s shed to a tired post. He is hang drying his jeans, his underwear, and his single-use medical masks. During the 30 years of his marriage, Gramps was not allowed to touch the laundry, as Nana feared that he might tragically mix colors or disrupt her meticulous schedule. Sometimes, you pass by, see the lines, and forget she’s gone. But she’s dead, and he’s learned to tend to his own clothes in necessitated mimicry. Gramp’s wrinkled fingers pinch wooden clothespins one by one.
Continue on. Against the house, beauty and pain intersect; Gramp’s thorny pink roses and deep green ivies wrap higher and higher about his trellis each year. The once-was are made tangible in their old growth. As you greet the thick rows of carrots and jungle of tomatoes running the length of the backyard, notice an intermittent array of lime green tennis balls bobbing upon the poles delineating the contours of the garden. These are round relics of the fateful summer evening when my brother, playing hide and seek in the garden, pounded his knee into a rusty metal stake. After watching his grandson get eight stitches and a tetanus shot, Gramps decided to kid-proof his yard.
The back corner of the lot is where the old wooden swing lies. Look, don’t touch. The slats of the seat are battered and unsittable; the arms and its chains have pulled away from the wooden frame, leaving the entire structure laying sideways. It is broken. To a passerby like yourself, it might just look like a pile of junk. But Nana loved it.
Just beyond this swing and along the sidewalk, a cardboard sign balances on the curb. Read aloud the handwritten message: FREE! PLEASE TAKE! In this spot, Gramps gives away hundreds of seedlings – sunflowers, peppers, tomatoes, rose of Sharon – each summer to lucky friends, neighbors, and strangers. He once gave away one of Nana’s cherished diamond rings at this spot, which my family, to our heartbreak, only found out about later. Whatever it is that he gives away, it is here that Gramps shares the abundant melody of his garden and of his life, and invites everyone to sing along.
Welcome to Gramps’ garden.
The truth is, I love this messy, memoried landscape more than any place in the world.
. . .
I remember the time when Gramps’s garden received a citation from the city. He brought the letter over to our house, confused.
“I think it has something to do with my yard,” Gramps said, exasperated.
Over the past several years, the city has come to his doorstep several times with demands about his garden. Once, they asked that he trim back his prized sunflowers to improve traffic visibility; in another instance, they alerted him that they would be asserting eminent domain and carving into his property by 5 feet to install a sidewalk. To Gramps, this letter was just another nuisance in a long history of what he considers to be municipal clashes.
My mother spent hours on the phone with the city, trying to understand what, exactly, about her 80-year-old father’s yard seemed to be the problem this time. Their answer was simple: “Poor yard maintenance; exterior debris”. Gramps was to rectify the perceived failings within his responsibilities as a homeowner or head to court.
Poor yard maintenance? The great majority of Gramps’s time is spent tending to his yard. In fact, when the snowstorms and frigid temperatures typical of New Jersey winters keep Gramps out of his garden, he is overcome with restlessness and depression. During these cold months, my family and I relentlessly strategize to keep Gramps’s mind busy and to fixate his outlook on the April and May mornings to come. His Christmas list is usually quite simple: new sandals, new seeds, for spring. We know the pride he takes in his garden. Why does it have to look ‘good’ for everyone to know the ‘good’?
Without much of a choice, we spent the next month trying to align Gramps’s yard with what the city believed was more aesthetically pleasing. We organized the tools, bins, and crates surrounding his shed, and against Gramps’s protests, tossed out any of the particularly flimsy ones; we tried to work with Gramps to create a new system for storing seeds and seedlings; with heavy hearts, we helped him dispose of the deteriorated wooden swing. Through all of this, Gramps looked physically uneasy, as if we were rooting through his private belongings and erasing the memories upon which he relied.
That’s because we were.
Despite his progressing Alzheimer’s, Gramps spends hours out in his garden daily; his yard grounds him in a loving routine of care and growth, almost as if it were a radical denial of all that he has lost. Like sticky notes with appointment reminders stuck onto the refrigerator, Gramps’s garden is riddled with his own familiar cues to care. Feeling the temperature on his skin and dipping his fingers into the damp springtime soil, Gramps knows when it is time to plant his seedlings. A quick look and waft above the compost, and Gramps knows when it is time to add more brown or more green. Based on how the flowers hang their blossomed heads, Gramps knows when it is time to give them a drink. The birds singing; the makeshift labeling systems; even the laundry hanging out to dry: it all reminds Gramps of his responsibility to his yard and to himself. And all of these broken-down statues, swings, and metal sheets? They remind Gramps that he has lived and loved.
“If the inspector would just talk to me, he would come to the conclusion that there is not one single thing in my garden that I do not use,” Gramps said. “Not one!”
“I know, Dad,” my mother said. “They’re just noting what they see from the street, they don’t really understand.”
. . .
I often wonder why the city could not grasp this landscape of memory. Importantly, landscapes, even as small as a private yard, are tools of communication, and “above all other information, people seek information about each other when they experience a landscape” (Nassauer 1995). Gramps’s garden was obviously a poor communicator, but what was it saying to others, if anything at all?
Numerous scholars have pointed out that the ecological benefits of landscapes are often obscured from sight or eliminated entirely due to the neat and orderly aesthetic expectations of human viewers (Nassauer 1995; Eaton 1997; Hill 2007; Gobster et. al 2007). At the neighborhood scale, the community perceptions of what care and aesthetic quality shouldlook like dominate hyperlocal landscape features and change. The white picket fence, the freshly trimmed green grassed yard: these outdated ideals of the American Dream promote the idea that we can show that “we are good citizens by the way we care for the landscape to make it look neat or picturesque, safe or inviting” or by using the landscape “to express power or wealth” (Nassauer 1995). With values of neatness and orderliness on a pedestal, a yard’s inherent disorderliness is often associated with poor stewardship and lack of neighborly-ness, regardless of its true ecological health (167). Even if some people may be open to improving the ecological quality of their yard for moral reasons, most people would not do so “at the expense of the proper appearance of their landscapes” (162). Gramps may be an outlier in this by prioritizing the ecological function of his yard over anything else. But as Nassauer (1995) writes, even “if personal preferences for an unconventional landscape structure exist, they tend to be subsumed by the power of convention”, or in other words, the power of a municipal citation (232). Ecologically, socially, and physically beneficial landscapes that lack aesthetically pleasing features are often, as a result, undervalued, ignored, or worse: totally destroyed.
And it is not just the disorderliness of the landscape that is the problem, but our false perception or assumption of it. If it is unclear how a less-than-pristine landscape is being intentionally used or enjoyed, it can easily be mistaken or misinterpreted for “neglected land” (Nassauer 1995). As Nassauer points out, “perception of human intention may be the difference between a nature preserve and a dumping ground, or the difference between a wetland and a slough” (162). While aesthetic experiences — positive and negative — are happening immediately at the surface, “so many imperceivable things are happening in the background” (Eaton 1997). For this reason, Saito (2002) suggests that “we need to develop public capacity to see value in what, at the surface, appears to be aesthetically negative” (259). To Saito’s mind, this involves communicating ecological importance through “comprehensible and pleasing design vocabulary to appeal to our current aesthetic experience and sensibility”. Nassauer (1995) agrees and asserts that one way this may be done is by placing familiar “cues to human care” that indicate human intention and biological worth in otherwise novel or messy landscapes (163-5).
But how do we provide cues to the rather intimate, often illegible, unreliable, and completely invisible: someone else’s memory and memories?
Picturesque American ideals and Western knowledge systems — and therefore, western governance systems that operate within places like Gramps’s city— rely on evidence, either visual or scientific, and therefore fail to recognize the intangible and interpretative benefits of ecosystems (Fish et. al, 2016). Gobster et. al (2007) offer that “it is difficult for people to understand, care about, and act purposefully upon phenomena that occur at scales beyond our own direct experience,” (960). The “perceptible realm” — fundamentally, what people can see and interact with in landscapes — “is the scale at which humans intentionally change landscapes, and these changes affect environmental processes” (960). When I ask myself why I love Gramps’s garden, I am flooded with memories of learning to tend to the land with a loving guide, dirt under my nails, and worms way beneath my feet. The municipal inspector, I remind myself, never pulled thick carrots from the ground in Gramps’s garden; never mourned the loss of Gramps’s pepper plant seedlings after an unusual April cold front; and was never handed a surprise bouquet of freshly cut sunflowers from Gramps on a Saturday morning.
Gramps’s garden is a living extension of his memories and ours — the good ones and the bad ones; like memory, the value of his garden is not about making things pristine. It is about embracing, not fighting, change and loss. It is about passing on learned experience. It is about relationships with each other and with the land. It is about the wholeness of life. I don’t think this is about uncritical nostalgia; this is about refusing to accept that landscapes are silent and memoryless slates. This singular example of a municipal citation falls into a greater social and political phenomenon of uprooting memory from place and force-feeding memoryless aesthetic expectations and solutions onto landscapes. It poses significant threats to many of the physical, mental, and sociocultural benefits that they have the potential to provide. In particular, the sociocultural benefits provided by landscapes are crucial to our understanding of people’s identities, histories, values, and how people shape and change landscapes as a result (Nassauer 1995, Fish et. al 2016).
So, what do we do about it?
“Changing the way people design and manage” [and perhaps, condemn] “landscapes will require change in the way people read social characteristics into landscapes,” Nassauer (1995) writes, and I agree. I would assert that maybe this change will also require accessing people’s capacity to keep, share, and read memory. This isn’t a new idea. Theorists of the aesthetics of nature often ponder how “our appreciative experiences [are] in fact affected by our upbringing, our profession. our culture, our beliefs,” (Carlson and Bearleant, 2014). Environmental philosopher Thomas Heyd also offers what is considered to be a postmodernist approach to nature appreciation:
“That is, if aesthetic appreciation depends on our capacity to take note of a thing, to make a thing the object of our sensory attention and of our imaginative play, then stories … may be of great value because, in contrast to scientific classification, which, due to its abstractness, draws us away from the present thing, such stories, because of their concreteness, draw us into the object, site, or event,” (Heyd 2001).
This is something he holds true for “cases of both artistic and non-artistic stories, as well as ones that are communicated by verbal and non-verbal means,” (Heyd 2001; Carlson and Bearleant 2014). Examples of these include the Indigenous tradition of translating knowledge about relationships with non-humans through storytelling, and the intention communicated by cultural resources like a particular arrangement of rocks or flowers, or as Dr. Robin Kimmerer points out, the weaving of Sweetgrass. It includes reading the detailed signage, tombstones, and murals that capture the rich history of a place, or it could be as simple as noting a carefully placed glass lawn ornament. It includes sharing a good laugh with good company over good food and wine. It includes wondering about the lives of the birds in your yard. “If stories enrich our capacities to aesthetically appreciate the natural environment (pure or modified),” Heyd writes, “then they are relevant” (Heyd 2001).
I wonder if we might continue this intellectual investigation by making conscious efforts to let the landscape talk.
I think back to Gramps’s exasperated comment towards the city: “If the inspector would just talk to me, he would come to the conclusion that there is not one single thing in my garden that I do not use. Not one!”
Maybe he’s right.
Just think of how we transmit memories to our friends, colleagues, and loved ones: storytelling. The only way to make intangible memory perceptible in landscapes, therefore, is to make a practice of listening to landscapes. There are rich, beautiful, painful histories embedded in the scenery –whatever the scenery may be–and we need to begin asking to hear about them while we still can. Perhaps before making a decision about a landscape’s worth and a landscape’s future, talk to the people who steward land. Ask what these spaces remind them of. Get their stories. Hear their ‘whys’. In our race against the clock to fight climate change, protect biodiversity, and ensure ecological prosperity, our impatience will be our demise. What I’d like to say to the city is simple: Slow down, and hear what Gramps’s landscape has to say.
And if the city won’t listen? Well, let the city be damned.
Make the stories of your landscapes louder. Narrate them. Spread their seeds. Write about what you see around you, about the beauty and pain that emerges in these varied contexts. Pay attention to the places and spaces that are of value to your loved ones, and notice all that is there. Find the qualities and personalities of your loved ones in a landscape: perhaps in the hurriedness of a red Cardinal in the tree outside your window, in the ever-patient hope of a four-leaf clover in the grass; in the resilience of a dandelion poking through the sidewalk cracks. Collect fallen leaves and rocks found on your path on a really good day, or maybe just take a picture. Revisit the landscapes that changed your life, and bring a friend. In your garden, plant the flowers your mother loved, or buy a bouquet of them at the bodega, or sketch them in your journal. Thank the hands that prepared your food. Remember, remember, remember.
Gramps’s brain is deteriorating. His own memory won’t last forever. My family won’t have his green thumb. We won’t know the totality of his complex systems of knowledge and care, and this garden landscape, left unstewarded, will inevitably change. Maybe because I know Gramps’s memory is slipping away, I feel the responsibility of preserving and perceiving his story in landscapes I steward to ensure access to this melody for myself, my children, and my grandchildren.
This is already quite true of my childhood yard. My mother, Gramps’s eldest daughter, spends her springtime Saturday mornings like Gramps does: listening to the wind chimes in her garden beds, tending to the thirst and weeding needs of our Hyacinths, Tiger Lilies, and Black-eyed Susans. Using the tips gathered from Gramps across the years, she meticulously curates a collection of symbiotic flowering plants in large pots and places them around the yard to acquire the perfect balance of sunshine and shade. Our blueberry bush, hand-planted by Gramps a decade ago, offers a small harvest each July; during late summer nights under the stars, I’ve snuck old friends and new love interests back to steal a few. Gramps’s transplanted sunflower seedlings are now growing strong in our front garden for the second year in a row after I learned to take the hair from my hairbrush and put them at the base of the stems to prevent any snacking rabbits and deer. We’ve got a small composter, and we do our best to remember to save our egg shells and vegetable scraps to add to the bin; last Summer, Gramps used old plywood to create three separate piles – just like his – although we’re still learning to master the turning schedule. And perhaps most importantly, we have a back patio with a table large enough for our family, where we gather regularly for summer meals, Gramps included.
Gramps’s wisdom grows wild in our yard, and it will keep growing back stronger and louder with every season.
Carlson and Berleant, A. (2004). Introduction: The aesthetics of nature. In The aesthetics of natural environments. Peterborough, Ont., Broadview Press. 11-42.
Gobster, P., J. Nassauer, T. Daniel and G. Fry (2007). “The shared landscape: what does aesthetics have to do with ecology?” Landscape Ecology 22(7): 959 – 972.
Eaton, M. M. (1997). The beauty that requires health. Placing Nature: Culture in Landscape Ecology. J. I. Nassauer. Washington, D. C., Island Press: 85-107
Fish, R., A. Church and M. Winter (2016). “Conceptualising cultural ecosystem services: A novel framework for research and critical engagement.” Ecosystem Services 21: 208-217
Hill, K. (2007). Urban ecological design and urban ecology: As assessment of the state of current knowledge and a suggested research agenda. Cities of the Future. V. Novotny and P. Brown. London: 251-260
Nassauer, J. I. (1995). “Culture and changing landscape structure.” Landscape Ecology 10(4): 229-237.
Joan Iverson Nassauer, FCELA, FASLA, is a Professor in the School for Environment & Sustainability at the University of Michigan. She investigates ecological design and planning to support everyday aesthetic experiences, well-being, and the cultural sustainability of ecosystem services.
As millions and billions are being spent on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) innovation investments, my thoughts are swimming toward not letting our weakest drown in the coming floods.
While the award-winning movie Parasite (2019) by Bong Joon-ho was iconic in many ways, a terrifying scene haunts me more often than others. The scene is one where the one of the central families of the movie, the Kims, rush back to their semi-basement apartment only to discover it is flooded with sewer water. The director then engraves into our minds the still frame of Ki-jung, the daughter of the Kim family, sitting on the lid of the toilet while smoking a cigarette to stop the sewage from backflowing into their apartment. What bothers me most is that this seemingly ridiculous scene is likely going to be the reality for thousands come 2030.
In the past few months, while diving into our work on climate risk issues in Malaysia, we found some uncomfortable data points that could turn the fiction of Parasite into reality. Greater Klang Valley, the city we do most work in, is slated to be impacted by sea level rise. By 2030, the models by Climate Central Organisation show that areas as far as 30 km inland from the coast will be at risk of annual floods (Figure 1).
Figure 1. 2030 Scenario of Annual Floods in Klang Valley, Climate Central Organisation (1)
Greater Klang Valley is a city formed along the Klang River. As sea level rises in the next 8 years, the areas that will be flooded also happen to be the locations that house the oldest neighbourhoods and population, as they are often also built closest to the river. More devastatingly, our data shows that the floods will disproportionately impact the lower income groups in their relatively affordable homes (Figure 2). Our conservative count shows a minimum of 8,000 families to be affected by sea level rise in Klang alone. While we worry about the elderly population in these locations, we also lose sleep over the young middle class who might be burdened with a 30-year mortgage on top of rising inflation. Are the floods going to send them spiraling into debt and poverty?
Figure 2. Distribution of home prices in areas within and outside of the 2030 annual flood zones. Date by Urbanmetry
How real are these models?
When presented with a less than ideal outcome, stakeholders often argue the veracity of the model. After all, weather forecasting is only accurate up to 5 days forward, 90% of the time. The confusion comes from the fact that these annual flood models don’t predict rainfall, the wind, or the temperature. It predicts how high the sea levels will rise and depending on where you are, will you be above or underwater.
While we debate the veracity of these models, if and when it would flood our neighbourhoods, keep in mind that most scientists believe that our sea level rise models underestimate the flooding problem we face. In the Climate Central models, only the low elevation areas would be at risk, albeit with the rising tides from the river. The model does not take into account the problem of rising groundwater. In a fascinating article “The Creeping Menace: Rising Groundwater”, Kendra Piere-Louis explains the risks of rising sea levels pushing groundwater up, flooding areas beyond the sea level rise models. In the same article, Professor Kristina Hill, an associate professor at University of California, Berkeley, was quoted to say that “We’ve way underestimated the flooding problem”.2
What can we do about it?
A fundamental dilemma of Climate Tragedies in old cities is the memories and history that will undoubtedly sink with it. Folks have strong emotional attachment to their homes hence they would understandably be reluctant to leave. Even if they can be convinced to uproot, once flooded, the monetary value of these assets and its ability to act as financing collateral diminishes. Often, the affected are left without a financially feasible option to relocate.
Our institutions and leaders have a moral obligation to exercise their resources to assess the risks at hand and generate a response plan to minimize the impact to its citizens. For preventive measures, local councils and state governments should integrate climate risk assessments as part of their development assessment plans, to be prioritized along with overall environment impact assessments and traffic impact assessments. This is to mitigate the heavy costs of relocation and post-disaster reliefs.
Recently, cities such as New York and Sydney are considering government buyouts of flood-prone homes. However, this process is often legally painful and expensive, making it difficult for emerging economies to consider. For governments who can’t afford a buyout, options under consideration include flooding and damages insurance that could cushion Climate Change impacts. Nonetheless, there is great urgency in innovative thinking on this subject to begin to build a safety net for these folks.
As millions and billions are being spent on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) innovation investments, my thoughts are swimming toward not letting our weakest drown in the coming floods.
Sea level rise during high tide by 2030 is modelled by Climate Central based on the IPCC’s AR6 Leading Consensus (IPCC 2021) model and Climate Central’s proprietary CoastalDEM land elevation model. The model assumes global emissions of heat-trapping pollution continue to rise at current trajectory with 95th percentile sensitivity.
Regularly, we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
show/hide list of writers
Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Funmi Adeniyi, Cape Town We aren’t only scientists or artists — we are translators. We, particularly when talking about sustainable urbanisation and regeneration, need to queer this idea of who is “allowed” to express creativity or provide solutions, and must support to develop more linkages between and across these different ways of being.
Madhur Anand, Guelph In my poetry, I have confront head on many scientific topics and some of my own ecological research through various forms, including found poems from my own scientific articles.
Eduardo Blanco, Senlis As a scientist, I am happy to systematise this information in graphics, tables, and other cartesian representations. However, it is not the only way to represent it and definitely not the more accessible. So here is the first opportunity: to use art to create a shared and collaborative understanding of place.
Carmen Bouyer, Paris It’s striking how artists and scientists are complementary to each other’s way of relating to the world. They possess a sort of yin and yang polarity that can allow the weaving of the emotional with the practical, the ephemeral with the systematic, the unique with the replicable, the subjective with the objective, the intuitive with the rational.
Lindsay Campbell, New York There are benefits to bringing together multiple perspectives, to tackle the truly wicked problems that we haven’t been able to solve with narrow, disciplinary solutions.
Paul Currie, Cape Town In African cities, the arts and the sciences were not always separated. Art was part of science; science was part of art – the ways of understanding and making meaning of our environment made use of both scientific and artistic process.
Edith de Guzman, Los Angeles Combined, art and science can deliver a one-two punch of fact and emotion — leaving the viewer/visitor/participant to complete the exchange by reaching a deepened understanding, a change of heart or mind, or better yet, being moved to take action.
Chris Fremantle, Ayrshire If we want more co-creative collaborative work to transform cities, then we need ways to talk about success that are useful to artists and scientists and also environment managers and policymakers as well as to community groups and elected representatives. All of them.
David Haley, Ulverston Co-created projects by artists and scientists may be interesting, but a co-learning dialogue with diverse, local people and other-than-humans, like pigeons, may be more insightful and creative.
Sarah Hines, Washington So many of our human needs and behaviors, when magnified times 7 billion or more, seem to conflict with creating benefits for nature. But this is precisely where the well-defined problem, a well-loved place, or a provocative piece of art or performance or data, can advance the conversation and practice.
Ito Keitaro, Munakata We considered how to implement Green Infrastructure in the local community to provide ecosystem services for local residents. Preserving areas such as wildlife habitats and spaces where children can play is a crucial issue nowadays.
Dave Kendal, Hobart Work as individuals and in small groups, rather than the large groups and teams that dominate contemporary science. This allows a few voices to explore the limits of their thinking, rather than retreating to the shared, consensus, agreement of most science.
Christopher Kennedy, New York Regenerative artworks hold immense promise but also present a cautionary tale. They highlight a common friction many artists encounter when attempting to emulate ecological processes while also experimenting with aesthetic forms and concepts.
Nikki Lindt, New York We need this untapped laden potential of collaboration to ignite new ideas, well-being, new experiences, new perspectives, and needed solutions.
Patrick Lydon, Daejeon Though science and art both give us reason to wonder and imagine and to move closer to nature-truth, both are also capable of missing the mark if operating alone. If science writes the truth of what we can see, then art undulates truth in the spaces between. In weaving together these stories we will find how to move forward.
Mary Miss, New York Maybe the easier part of the question is how artists and scientists can co-create projects: get two curious open-minded people from different fields who are willing to take a serious look at vocabulary and give them time to explore each other’s ways of seeing and thinking.
Mary O’Brien, San Francisco Bay Area For art to remediate the damage humans have done to our own environments will require specific knowledge, as well as emotion; aesthetics as well as solid data—the kind of collaboration that many damaged rivers and lands could use right now.
Marguerite Perret, Topeka We are all time travelers, but if we employ creativity and science as essential tools for personal and environmental resilience, we can embrace a sense of purpose-based optimism in the face of the many challenges we face in the present and future.
Cristián Pietrapiana, New York Maybe scientists are the best-qualified ones to identify a problem and then brainstorm with artists and participating audiences on possible viable solutions.
Baixo Ribeiro, São Paulo We realized that we could go beyond simple artistic interventions in schools if we opened a creative dialogue with teachers and the entire school community. We ended up developing a methodology that combines art and science in the solution to one of the biggest problems of Brazilian education, which is school dropouts due to a lack of student’s interest in their schools. | Percebemos que podíamos ir além das intervenções artísticas pontuais nas escolas, se abríssemos um diálogo criativo com os professores e toda a comunidade escolar: funcionários, pais, vizinhos das escolas, agentes culturais do bairro e assim por diante.
Eric Sanderson, New York Scientists and artists need to help people accommodate the change that is already here, and the more dramatic and consequential change yet to come. We need to change minds to change cities.
Wendy Wischer, Salt Lake City As an Eco Artist, I am compelled to focus on environmental issues; finding pathways, and creating experiences, that translate data into personal meaning in hopes of finding impactful ways to connect people more deeply with the environments they live in and with each other.
Ania Upstill, New York We listen to the rich narratives of scientific knowledge and help translate them into words or images that invite passersby to learn these stories, to understand more of the land and sea around them; we arrange for a mural or poetry to be placed on the outside of the wall that is begging for decoration, ask for a storytelling bench for where we have seen people looking for a place to sit.
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. David's dad told him once that he needed a back up plan, something to "fall back on". So he bought a tuba.
Let’s embody our wish for flourishing urban nature in the very fabric of our projects by embodying diversity within our teams.
Storytelling about humans and nature
We know that different ways of knowing produce different insights. Scientific knowledge produces key knowledge about urban social and natural systems and how they might be sustainable and regenerative. Similarly, artistic practice and expression yields its own knowledge, which often connects us to deeper emotional paths of understanding. Both are approaches to storytelling about humans, nature, and how they connect to each other. It is important to acknowledge that they share some methods (e.g., curiosity) but not all.
What if scientists and artists worked together to co-create knowledge? This could be in active co-production, or even just in sharing ideas about shared objects of inquiry. This kind of sharing happens relatively rarely — most people in art and science tend to work squarely within their disciplines — but more and more of us are trying to create useful spaces in which artists and scientists interact.
What new territory of understanding might we encounter with such interactions? We have explored these ideas before at TNOC, in roundtables and also in our art-leaning exhibits, which routinely feature artists and scientists side-by-side.
In this roundtable, we ask a collection of scientists and artists, each actively engaged in some form of art-science collaboration, how they approach it. Some are artists, some are scientists, some are both. All are interested in exploring a fizzy boundary of expression at the intersection of artistic and scientific approaches to storytelling. Key to the question of this roundtable: can we be changed by interactions with other ways of knowing, changes in ways that would enrich both useful knowledge and our interdisciplinary practice?
A cohabitation of multiple worlds
There are many layers to regenerative practices as we may understand them, ranging from the personal to the collective, from the social to the environmental, all interconnected. We envision coalitions that bring together artists and scientists, along with technicians, gardeners, citizen’s groups, and more to regenerate life systems in the urban landscape. We see projects that restore, protect or facilitate the expansion of urban forests, urban rivers and wetlands, bettering the quality of water, air and soil, as well as plants/animal/fungi habitats. In turn, urbanites are being restored, protected, and expanded in their possibilities of expression as all of those lifeforms return to their daily awareness and experience in cities.
Embodying diversity as a group
As land care and ecosystem regeneration become increasingly paramount, more artists and scientists and practitioners are dedicating their efforts to participating in such practices together. For example, in France what seems to be a small movement is set to grow as we remember that collaboration between species is a matter of survival and wellbeing for humans and all other life forms. We are one, with multiple shapes. In the same logic, collaboration between knowledge bases is crucial to addressing problems that haven’t been solved by monolithic thinking, and may have been created by it.
Let’s embody our wish for flourishing urban biodiversity in the very fabric of our projects by embodying diversity within our teams. As we practice combining various ways of being and forms of intelligence, we become more flexible, aware, and open. We become more likely to understand, respect, and learn from the intelligence of other people, but also of plants, animals, soils, and more.
Madhur Anand is the author of the book of poems A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (McClelland & Stewart/PHRC, 2015) and the experimental memoir This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (Strange Light/ PHRC, 2020), both considered trailblazing in their synthesis of art and science. She is a full professor of ecology at the University of Guelph, and was appointed the inaugural director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research.
I confronted head on many scientific topics and some of my own ecological research through various forms, including found poems from my own scientific articles.
I’m unusual in that I co-create as both an artist and a scientist. In my first collection of poems, “A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes” (McClelland & Stewart, 2015), I confronted head on many scientific topics and some of my own ecological research through various forms, including found poems from my own scientific articles. “Parasitic Oscillations”, my second collection of poems builds toward a body of work to balance the various aspects of living and practicing as both a poet and (global ecological change) scientist in the Anthropocene, a time of unraveling. It takes a focused approach to interrogating (rather than trying to extinguish) the inevitability of undesired cyclic variation (the so-called “parasitic oscillations” from signal processing) caused by feedback (noise) in the amplifying devices of both poetry and science, fields that are still disparate in our world.
A new question emerges: how might we utilize these oscillations caused by feedback to bring our multiple understandings of the world closer together, to talk to one another while embracing the inevitability of noise? Feedback is examined through several interacting currents and recursive structures: my own work between the arts and the sciences, living between North American and Indian culture, as well as examining contemporary environments through the lag effects of the (colonial) past.
These interdisciplinary conversations need to happen more broadly in society, we need to have artists and scientists meeting more regularly for co-creation to occur. We are trying to develop these spaces at the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research.
Eduardo is an environmental engineer specialised in sustainable urban development, regenerative design, and biomimicry. After five years of consulting for Brazilian municipalities, Eduardo is now researching and practicing regenerative design and ecosystem-level biomimicry at Ceebios, a French biomimicry network. Eduardo is also an amateur artist, experimenting with visual art techniques such as urban sketching, watercolour, and embroidery.
As a scientist, I am happy to systematise this information in graphics, tables, and other cartesian representations. However, it is not the only way to represent it and definitely not the more accessible. So here is the first opportunity: to use art to create a shared and collaborative understanding of the place.
Artists have imagined new futures for our urban realities for a while, creating visions and representations of desired worlds. An excellent example is Luc Schuiten’s work. With his “vegetal cities”, the artist creates a utopic version of existing cities, in which human and non-human beings are fully integrated and in symbiosis. Besides that, artists are also great at interpreting society. They gather and process data with sensible approaches and highlight societal aspirations, needs, and struggles, creating references and dreams for a new path.
On their side, scientists also are great at that task. Nevertheless, here the method is not sense-oriented but structured. In a formalised method, scientists gather and treat data to draw insights. These outcomes delineate visions of new futures, impacting public policies and the real world. One example is the work done by the International Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which defined the need for transformative changes in our society to fight the ecological and climatic crisis. In urban design, such transformative changes include designing projects that protect biodiversity, restore ecosystems, and enhance their functioning.
These two practices, scientific and artistic, somehow converge. Not in their methods but definitely in their outcomes. Despite this, artists and scientists rarely work together. The good news is that opportunities exist for regenerative projects.
Regenerative design is interested in creating projects anchored on the site reality and fostering positive impacts for society and nature over time. An engaging narrative, nurturing hope in the middle of the crisis. Unfortunately, regenerative projects still struggle to see the light and reach implementation. Despite being an amateur visual artist, I am a scientist and regenerative practitioner. From my experience, I would say that regenerative design practice (or even just sustainable urban design practice) has two main weak points limiting its advancement today: (1) Project teams still fail to understand the site reality and anchor the project to the site reality and needs, and (2) The project team designs in a top-down and technocratic manner.
Nevertheless, we could tackle these two limitations by integrating more sense-oriented and artistic approaches to the formal and scientific methods for regenerative design. For instance, we need to understand the local ecosystem and its flows, the non-human beings sharing that space with human society, the local community, and their culture and needs. As a scientist, I am happy to systematise this information in graphics, tables, and other cartesian representations. However, it is not the only way to represent it and definitely not the more accessible. So here is the first opportunity: to use art to create a shared and collaborative understanding of the place. The opportunities are vast. One could do a socio-ecological diagnostic based on drawings done by the community about their perceptions of the place or still an artistic performance that could highlight the role of a local species or the local cultural and ecological heritage.
In the sequence, we could use art to engage society in the creative design process, promoting co-designed and bottom-up projects. We could use artistic narratives, poetry, or paintings to create representations of the community’s expectations and visions for the project site. We could also use art to highlight a forgotten site asset that deserves to be remembered and heard during the design process, like a previously covered and artificialised river.
Finally, art can bring us together, and create a shared space and language in the regenerative design process, that today remains too scientific-centred. Not everyone can make a regenerative master plan, but everyone can draw a simple sketch or write a small poem about the world they dream of living.
Carmen Bouyer is a French environmental artist and designer based in Paris.
It’s striking how artists and scientists are complementary to each other’s way of relating to the world. They possess a sort of yin and yang polarity that can allow the weaving of the emotional with the practical, the ephemeral with the systematic, the unique with the replicable, the subjective with the objective, the intuitive with the rational.
Art and science, specific complementarity and common language
A common barrier I see to art-and-science collaboration is a misunderstanding of the ways in which we can profoundly enrich each other’s work. We often overlook the methodologies and ideals we actually share. That’s why I would like to expose the harmonies and communalities that touch me and that might serve as grounds for co-creation.
It’s striking how artists and scientists are actually complementary to each other’s way of relating to the world. They possess a sort of yin and yang polarity that can allow the weaving of the emotional with the practical, the ephemeral with the systematic, the unique with the replicable, the subjective with the objective, the intuitive with the rational. It’s crucial to acknowledge that we all carry our unique blend of all of these qualities.
The common element I see is a profound curiosity for the world and the way it works, visible and invisible. The general method seems similar as well: practices based on intensive research phases followed by many experimentations and the creation of a formalized result designed to be shared with a large number of people. This end result would touch its audience through highlighting common, frequently expressed patterns and ideas – discovered or seen through different lenses – in the realms of the practical or the emotional, using numbers or symbols.An ideal behind this shared quest to describe the world with much precision is often the possibility of improving the ways we all live together and our collective wellbeing.
Examples of ways of weaving artistic and scientific processes to regenerate ecosystems in cities
In ecosystem regeneration, interdisciplinary work is present at every step. The first collaborator is local land in all of its diversity of expression. It is the guide, the conductor of the orchestra. It is the species and the people who live there, as well as the caretakers of the land — gardeners, farmers, neighbors, technicians. Sometimes artists and scientists are from the place in which they work, but many times they are not and so their first task is really to learn, then co-create. From my professional experiences as an ecological artist and also as a witness to art and science collaborations I would like to give a few examples of how the artists can add their methods to scientific ones in service to the regeneration of a place at various stages of the project.
1. Learning from what already exists in and about the place
Artists will do research about the cultural practices and stories related to the place. They will get in touch with the local, tangible and intangible cultural heritage (oral traditions, stories, songs, poetry, musics, dances, handicrafts, costumes, festivals, rituals, etc.) as well as so-called contemporary art forms (painting, sculpture, photography, installation, performance, and video art), theater, cinema and literature. These researches will highlight cultural ways of relating to the local land, serving as milestones to design culturally relevant regenerative projects.
2. Getting to know a place through a data collection phase
Artists can propose sensing methodologies to learn from the land and get in touch with the realities of the place to regenerate. For example through classic documentation (sound recording, drawing, photography, video, etc) as well as collective approaches (shared meals, walks, discussions, workshops) artists can collect data and document what the land looks, sounds, tastes, smells and feels like. Artistic events can be designed to enable participants to experience the space in new and unexpected ways to learn from its specificities and nurture their bond with it. Through methods like deep listening, meditation, movement, dance, collective action, assembly, and more, the project team, locals and visitors, are invited to explore their perception of the space. Artistic teams can also create open spaces, stages of some sort, where the sharing of existing land based knowledge can happen, be highlighted and celebrated.
In this sensing approach artists usually bring a special awareness to the non-measurable parts of the local reality — the intuitive, emotional, symbolic and spiritual, and by doing so complementing the evidence based scientific approach.
3. Structuring a regenerative project for the space
When the time comes to design the regenerative project, artists might propose methodologies based on imagination. Using fiction and storytelling tools opens the space for things hard to tell and even the unknown to be expressed in metaphors. Centering fluid imagination unables the expression of the subjectivity of all the people involved. It is also a space where non-human forms of intelligence can be given a voice, through stories. Once verbalized, those important realities can be embedded in the making of informed design choices. In this co-creation phase, art can also be used to test ideas, by giving them shape, using 3D rendering, photo-collage, animation, fictional text, poetry, songs, theater, performance, and more. These media can be used as templates to compare various design options and make the best decisions in conversation with the local communities and various actors of the project. As we work collectively, artists might also offer safe spaces for the participants’ emotions to be expressed and integrated – often using simple games, offering a space to write, to tell — creating accessible spaces for conflict resolutions and co-construction.
Another important aspect is the artist’s capacity to bring her-his sense of aesthetic to the landscape design choices. The creatives might propose shapes and forms that will contribute to the beauty, meaning, even the feeling of sacredness of the regenerated space.
4. Regenerating the land
As we restore landscapes, we restore our cultural ways of relating to them. Ecological regeneration is inseparable from cultural regeneration. This may be in the form of songs, crafts, films, books, dances, collective activities, and more. Highlighting and restoring ancient land-based stories and celebrations, as well as amplifying new ones ties people to the land and to each other, ensuring the longevity of land stewardship. It roots land regeneration into collective healing, vitality, and joy.
Artists can amplify the positive effects of such regenerative projects by sharing their stories through film, photo reportage, audio piece, illustration, and more, diffusing the new narrative about the place, and offering clues for other people wishing to regenerate places elsewhere. The artist might have documented the whole project from its start and create a form of classic archive, or tell the stories in a very personal, non-conventional way.
As the regenerated space blossoms, artist teams often imagine activities that celebrate it and invite people to connect with it, to inhabit it. For instance, through the programmation of outdoor art events, such as art workshops, concerts, plays, screenings, or by installing art pieces in or around the space. This too makes it buzz with life!
Paul Currie is a Director of the Urban Systems Unit at ICLEI Africa. He is a researcher of African urban resource and service systems, with interest in connecting quantitative analysis with storytelling and visual elicitation.
Funmi holds a Ph.D. in Law (Human Rights Protection) and has more than a decade of cross-sectoral experience in the private, public and academic spaces. Funmi works at ICLEI Africa as a people-centered rights-based expert on various projects.
We aren’t only scientists or artists — we are translators. We, particularly when talking about sustainable urbanisation and regeneration, need to queer this idea of who is “allowed” to express creativity or provide solutions, and must support to develop more linkages between and across these different ways of being.
Creativity and creation in African cities
When asked to develop a reflection on the role of scientists and artists, we suppose the first question we need to ask is: which ones are we?
Can we not be both? We understand the need for those classifications in terms of subject matter or discipline, but we don’t necessarily have to be binary in our thinking. What is clear to us is that we — and society? — are caught in a normative position about the specific ways of knowing and practicing that scientists are expected to follow and that artists are expected to follow. For natural scientists, we expect that they follow clear rules and methods with a specific structure — particularly one that is “replicable” — to arrive at clear answers or solutions; while artists are expected to explore, try new processes, and are given specific license to create and be creative — and to a degree are expected to be inscrutable, abstruse, or perplexing.
We aren’t only scientists or artists — we are translators. We appreciate that there are different ways of expressing creativity in arts and in sciences, but these processes are named differently, and we, particularly when talking about sustainable urbanisation and regeneration, need to queer this idea of who is “allowed” to express creativity or provide solutions, and must support to develop more linkages between and across these different ways of being.
We are translators. We sit in the tension points between multiple ways of knowing and doing. And our role is, typically through deep listening, to put ourselves in the shoes of others and to try to understand their interests, and then to work out how to frame them through alternative lenses. Ideally, in this process, we’re helping people to articulate their own needs and agendas and helping them to articulate them to others.
This intermediary and translation role, at its core, aims to speed understanding and articulation across different sectors and different areas of urban development and ideally, help build trust and align complementary actions. This role acknowledges that because people experience and understand the realities of the world in different ways, the realities of the world are actually different. Everyone has developed their worldviews through their different lived and taught experiences. The reality of the same city could be very different if understood through the lens of an urban spatial plan or if it is understood through deep observation or through the daily hustle of a vendor.
The problem statement of much of our work in unpacking urban systems was framed well by a colleague in Dar es Salaam: “we planners aren’t thinking about urban dynamics; yes, we have trends and numbers in mind, but we aren’t looking at who is also planning and making the city. We can see the moto taxis riding and parked on the streets, but if we look at the plans, there is no demarcation for moto parking, and therefore they don’t exist! There are two separate systems, and they overlap very little”
So, our job as translators is to bring these systems together into a bit more alignment and harmony — and the best way to do this is through co-productive process.
Elements such as equality, diversity, accessibility to knowledge, and reciprocity are central to co-productive processes. We embed these in the ways that we create space for different kinds of people and welcome their different walks and their different practices – whether as scientists, artists, or as practitioners on the ground – to come together and reflect on the work that they do and iterate better ways of doing. Co-production also urges these different interests to take a step back and reflect on how they are contributing to the change that they hope to see — this in itself is a creative act. It is in making sure that the spaces we create, and curate are diverse and not exclusive of contrarian voices. Practically, this is what we’ve been able to do with the RISE Africa platform, where the space for co-production of knowledge and better ways of doing is created amongst scientists, artists, practitioners, students, and different people.
Beyond inclusivity, we also consider the accessibility of knowledge. It is the norm that many regenerative projects are not inclusive of different thoughts, different voices. This matters in African urbanism because the premise of what cities are, and could be, is similarly based on normative assumptions and normative practice from the global North: Our urban planners and engineers have been trained based on principles developed in the North and therefore, their everyday practice, and what they consider to be good practice, may not intrinsically be based on the contextual possibilities in their own cities. Democratising spaces and embracing different forms of knowledge from different disciplines and different peoples is key to shifting these norms and creating true regenerative projects that speak to the lived realities of people on the ground.
Co-production has become the term for acceptable development processes, particularly in the Global South. However, it is often not questioned on whose terms these co-productive processes take place. Given that the central ideology of co-production emanates from people trained through tertiary education, typically of scientific background, the normative position is that it is a structured, scientific approach, based on a set of rules that are then imposed upon all participants in such a process. We realise, through working in global South contexts, that in order to successfully coproduce you need to embed artistic lenses and processes into the meaning-making process — the use of ‘boundary objects’ here is valuable in translating across realms of knowledge. The HiddenFlows photographic exhibition is a great example of how we invited photographers to share images of how resources moved through their cities and served as a valuable artifact around which we could organise several policy conversations.
To understand the contextual possibilities in African cities we must take a few steps back, probably centuries back to understand how co-creative processes worked in Africa and still work in Africa. In African cities, the arts and the sciences were not always separated. Art was part of science; science was part of art — the ways of understanding and making meaning of our environment made use of both scientific and artistic process. To have that understanding split into boxes, where we do not see the convergence, is foreign. It is alien to many African cities and to the understanding of how we co-produce and how we do things in Africa. And so, to align developments in Africa, we must review the background of what development means, or what co-productive processes mean. We must understand that binary classifications are not working for us, and we need to re-embed creativity in everyday practice.
Lindsay K. Campbell is a research social scientist with the USDA Forest Service. Her current research explores the dynamics of urban politics, stewardship, and sustainability policymaking.
There are benefits to bringing together multiple perspectives, to tackle the truly wicked problems that we haven’t been able to solve with narrow, disciplinary solutions.
Throughout my career as a research social scientist with the USDA Forest Service, I have sought out engaging with the arts as another “way of knowing” that is complementary to scientific knowledge — both of which have relevance to the work of land management and environmental stewardship.
Build understanding of and engagement with urban social-ecological systems through arts.
Facilitate transdisciplinary collaboration between artists, scientists, and land managers.
Curate events and public programs that explore ideas emerging from these collaborations.
We work in multiple modes including: artist residencies, convenings, and exhibitions, and I’ll offer some reflections and examples of each here to show how we co-create regenerative ideas and actions in cities.
With the residencies, we embed artists with agency teams of scientists and land managers, curating collaborations instead of commissioning artwork. We promote mutual curiosity and reciprocal sharing of ideas and approaches. We are less interested in bringing in artists “after the fact” to promote, design, or translate our scientific findings, instead, we are interested in artists-as-investigators, and how we can work across disciplinary divides. We are interested in the way artists push us at all stages of knowledge production to:
Pose new questions we wouldn’t otherwise;
Engage different methodologies for understanding place and the environment – including more embodied and emotional approaches; and
Communicate differently about our insights and reach the public in new ways.
Each of these stages is an opportunity for us to produce new knowledge, reflect critically on our practices, and transform our work. For example, one of our 2016 UFS Artists in Residence, Mary Mattingly, created Swale, a floating food forest. The project began with the observation that foraging is prohibited on NYC parkland and posed the question: “why can’t food be free?” The residency helped catalyze reflective conversations between the public, land managers, and researchers about how and why we might adjust the rules around foraging and food in parkland in the future. And the images of and experiences on Swale had a broad public reach – sparking fascination, learning, and delight.
Our convenings take many forms, but I draw attention here to our Stewardship Salons. We began this work with a Native Hawaiian master teacher, Kehuki Kealiikanakaoleohaililani, who led a 2-day workshop with NYC and Hawaii practitioners to give them exposure to native Hawaiian lifeways in order to enliven and expand their land management and conservation work. Kekuhi encouraged us to “start with who we know” in organizing these learning spaces, so we created a rotating series of salons. We facilitate place-based, co-learning between land managers, scientists & artists, engaging diverse cultures of care in the cosmopolitan city of NYC and creating a non-hierarchical space for dialogue. In this work, we share biocultural stewardship practices and surface place-based narratives about the land that are sometimes less often shared, read critically together, are embodied in space through walks and sharing food, and strengthen our own community of practice. I have heard in our evaluations that the artists find the salons to be one of the most grounded ways of learning about the practice of stewardship in NYC. Our natural resource management colleagues are eager for professional development, and space to reflect and think. And as qualitative researchers, we have much to learn from sharing lived experiences of place. So, there is something to be gained for all of us, engaging as both students and teachers in learning from place (See also McMillen et al. 2020).
Finally, we curate exhibitions, both in-person and online. Who Takes Care of New York? Debuted at the Queens Museum in 2019 and was adapted to virtual with The Nature of Cities in 2020. We brought together social scientists, data visualization specialists, curators, and artists to co-produce an exhibit that brought stewardship to life through maps, photographs, publications, videos, and public performance. With this work, we sought to amplify the voices, stories, and practices of stewards and to inspire attendees about their power to create positive change in their neighborhoods. Our exhibition takes on many modes:
We notice, connect with, and care for the urban forest through landscape photography.
We amplify the voices and actions of stewards through mapping and artist publications.
We make stewardship networks more visible through data visualization and performance art.
We adapt to change, envision, and enact new worlds through spatial mapping and through photo collages rooted in interviews with stewards.
Ultimately, I believe that care is not finite. If we can see it more clearly, perhaps we can grow it, and maybe that’s the most transformative action we can take in our urban ecosystems.
Reflections on process – Looking back on these different forms of art-science-land manager collaborations, I have a few reflections on what it takes to make them successful and why they are so important:
Collaboration takes time: you can’t just put people in a room and expect collaborations. You have to invest in the relationship: the structured meetings, but also the studio visits, the coffee chats, the walks in the field. Sometimes the best ideas are scribbled on a napkin over coffee.
Transdisciplinarity requires resources, and those can be hard to come by. We tend to fund things in silos — takes a leap of faith by a funder to support people “coloring outside the lines” — and learning-by-doing.
This work requires mutual respect and willingness to flex. If you just want to stay in your lane and do what you are trained to do, then co-production is not for you.
But, ultimately, I’ve learned they create opportunities -They provide different entry points for folks who have historically been excluded from science and decision-making roles in urban ecology, so they offer opportunities from a diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) perspective to meaningfully expand our community of practice.
Finally, there are benefits to bringing together multiple perspectives, to tackle the truly wicked problems that we haven’t been able to solve with narrow, disciplinary solutions.
Chris Fremantle is a producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. He produces ecoartscotland, a platform for research and practice focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers.
If we want more co-creative collaborative work to transform cities, then we need ways to talk about success that are useful to artists and scientists and also environment managers and policymakers as well as to community groups and elected representatives.
How do we know what success looks like in co-creation?
Artists and scientists have different measures of success. Stuart Jefferies in his recent book Everything, all the time, everywhere: how we became postmodern (2021) characterises this in terms of data and storytelling. He argues that these are basically incompatible ways of knowing. But if we want more co-creative collaborative work to transform cities then we need ways to talk about success that are useful to artists and scientists and also environment managers and policymakers as well as to community groups and elected representatives.
As part of a team evaluating Cultural Adaptations, an EU funded transnational urban climate adaptation project, we adopted an approach widely used in evaluating environmental and innovation focused knowledge exchange. Knowledge exchange, whilst a technical term in academia and public policy, is actually a really useful way to think about any engagement between different communities, whether those are within academia, or even between cities in different countries, or between environment managers and inhabitants. In every case those involved need to realise that different perspectives and understandings have value, some learning needs to take place, perhaps some policies or practices might change. This is particularly important in the context of co-production. Attitudes towards valuing all sorts of different ways of knowing have to shift, and if people choose to keep working together in the long term, that is a sign of significant impact.
The approach we used, originally developed by Laura Meagher, Catherine Lyall, and Sandra Nutley and developed with David Edwards, picks up on these characteristics. It focuses on the manifestations of interactions between people over time, particularly coming from different disciplines and practices. The focus is put on conceptual shifts, capacity building, instrumental impacts, attitudinal shifts, and enduring connectivity. The following table provides a useful unpacking of these characteristics of knowledge exchange impact.
Type of Impact
Description
Conceptual
Seeing or feeling things differently (“a-ha” moments). One of the basic characteristics of the arts is to ask us to imagine the world as different In the context of art science co-creation of regenerative cities, the aha moments that the arts can create are critical to imagining change.
Capacity building
Developing knowledge and skills of practitioners, managers, and policymakers. Capacity building includes everything from formal research through to communities learning new things about their city and different behaviours that enable it to become regenerative
Instrumental
New ways of doing/making. Changes in policy/regulation/standards. Whilst this is often seen as the objective of projects and measured in terms of policies and funding, it is often dependent on aha moments and capacity building before policies and practices change in substantive ways.
Attitudinal shifts
Increased willingness to work collaboratively / across sectors. Valuing co-creative collaborative work and investing the time and resources to deliver it is critical. Shifts in organisational commitment to co-creative and collaborative work are significant indicators.
Enduring connectivity
Lasting relationships and ongoing interactions. We recognise that cross-disciplinary working is challenging because we revert to our silos so people working together across arts and sciences, between academia, environment management, and communities beyond a first project is a significant sign of impact.
Each of these can be documented in qualitative and also in quantitative terms.
In the evaluation of the Cultural Adaptations project we saw evidence of the impact of artists working with environment managers on urban climate change adaptation projects across all these categories. The artists proposed new approaches to green/blue infrastructure, drew attention to intergenerational perspectives, empowered inhabitants to set briefs, and led senior managers in place-based approaches to strategy (see the project website for more detail). Sustainability managers and policy makers led cultural sector partners in exploring what the implications of adaptation are and in developing plans.
In fact, the project was possible because of long-term work between Creative Carbon Scotland, the arts organisation and Sniffer, the environment organisation leading on adaptation work in Scotland.
There were many ‘aha’ moments in the project, for instance by the environment managers interviewing to recruit artists realising the breadth and social engagement of arts practices. Conceptual shifts can be moments of realisation of a different perspective, or a significant shift in the conceptualisation of a problem. We noted instrumental impacts in terms of additional funding invested to involve the cultural sector in climate change adaptation policy development and we certainly noted attitudinal shifts towards collaborative working.
I had worked with another team and used the framework in the context of a design-led innovation programme, written up in Impact by Design (2016). Laura Meagher and David Edwards (2020) have recently published a paper on the framework which also explores potential causal factors.
References:
David M. Edwards and Laura R. Meagher, ‘A Framework to Evaluate the Impacts of Research on Policy and Practice: A Forestry Pilot Study’, Forest Policy and Economics 114 (May 2020): 101975, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2019.101975.
Chris Fremantle and Leslie Mabon. ‘Cultural Adaptations Evaluation Report’. Edinburgh: Creative Carbon Scotland, 2021 https://doi.org/10.48526/rgu-wt-1513437
Chris Fremantle et al., ‘Impact by Design: Evaluating Knowledge Exchange as a Lens for Evaluating the Wider Impacts of a Design-Led Business Support Programme.’, 2016.
Stuart Jeffries. Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Post-Modern. London ; New York: Verso Books, 2021.
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’.
Unreal Estate: A Dialogue with Pigeons
Co-created projects by artists and scientists may be interesting, but a co-learning dialogue with diverse, local people and other-than-humans, like pigeons, may be more insightful and creative.
With two-thirds of an expanding/migrating human population expected to live in cities by 2050, how will we/they cope with the nexus of climate, species, and cultural crises? Are cities fit for purpose? Are regenerative city projects relevant and what can artists and scientists contribute? To start this brief inquiry, I asked some pigeons what they thought about the situation…
The pigeons told me that since their cultivation in Mesopotamia about 9,000 years ago, cities have always been about ecology and economics, culture and power. Initially created within the Fertile Crescent, as fortified trading posts to protect and barter cereals for other goods, these settlements offered sedentary forms of culture and social order. Alongside agriculture and animal husbandry, writing, philosophy, construction, planning, and money emerged as marks of civilization. And the rest, as they say, is history. However, such organisation was completely dependent on the natural resources of water, biodiversity, and a clement climate.
Feral Pigeons, Central Manchester. Photo: David Haley
Meanwhile, around the same time that cities were invented in Mesopotamia, rock doves were worshiped, domesticated, and eaten by people. Some rock doves escaped to evolve into town or feral pigeons, adapting to and thriving from urban development. Feeding on people’s excess grains, these pigeons found shelter and nesting sites in urban construction. Their symbiotic contribution was to give excrement, as precious organic fertiliser, for the expanding agricultural systems that advanced human sustenance and well-being.
Fast forward to the present day… Now regarded as ubiquitous pests and the subject of much misinformation, pigeons and their excrement are thought to generate disease, deface civic buildings, and devalue the real estate owned by international investment corporations. Instead, synthetic fertiliser is now procured from industrialised carbon-based processes that profit agro-industrial global markets, while millions of city dwellers go hungry. Forced to migrate from subsistence farming to become dependent on faltering urban infrastructure and systems, city streets are paved with homeless and destitute people, rather than gold. This shift in values mirrors the nexus of climate, species, and cultural crises. Pigeons, however, are one of only six animals that can understand the reality of mirrors … a capability that now seems lost to humans.
Regenerative Designs, like decolonisation, have become “hot topics” recently and there are many things that our existing cities and future cities can learn from them. Indeed, there are things that they can learn from each other to co-create better ways of living and being. Remaining vigilant to avoid the pitfalls of dogmatic framework methodologies, we need to be simultaneously critical of the power within the systems we deploy and open to other ways of becoming. In other words, cities need to be able to emerge with planetary and human evolution, rather than trying to dictate it; something pigeons have done despite human attempts to cull them from cities. Regeneration must, also, be understood in the context of natural death and renewal of all living systems. If cities are to have future meaning, we must accept collapse as well as regeneration.
Co-created projects by artists and scientists may be interesting, but a co-learning dialogue with diverse, local people and other-than-humans, like pigeons, may be more insightful and creative. Such citizen participation could be more useful when it comes to regenerating how we live as a whole. We may then be able to attribute real value to how cities, serve their inhabitants by being embedded in ecology and culture, rather than extractive global economics and power for the few.
This is the message brought home from the perspective of a flock of feral town pigeons, one of the most intelligent, successful, and resourceful species on our planet.
Sarah has spent her career in the Forest Service linking scientists and scientific information with communities and decision makers at local to national scales to inform stewardship and develop social-ecological connections and resonance. Sarah has an AB in biological anthropology from Harvard University and an MS in environmental policy and MBA from the University of Michigan.
So many of our human needs and behaviors, when magnified times 7 billion or more, seem to conflict with creating benefits for nature. But this is precisely where the well-defined problem, a well-loved place, or a provocative piece of art or performance or data, can advance the conversation and practice.
We adults sometimes suffer from the misconception that consensus must be achieved before cooperation begins. Yet, watch any group of preschoolers around a pile of blocks or Legos, or on a playground, and you may see how cooperation may (emphasis on the may) arise organically even without consensus. The object in question — the blocks, Legos, or playground — serves as a “boundary object”, sitting in the middle among different perspectives (Star, 2010). The boundary object allows individuals to work together even if they have different perspectives, goals, motivations, or understandings (Grove et al, 2022). It opens up possibilities for communication and exploration, for co-creation.
Thinking about it in another way, how many times have you, as an adult, not known quite what to say or how to start a conversation with another person? Oftentimes, we unknowingly reach for boundary objects to get the conversation going — a compliment on a piece of clothing, on new glasses or a haircut, or even a piece of art hanging in someone’s office. Sure, this is not quite the same as co-creating something with someone, but it’s where we often start as adults — by reaching for something tangible that can spark interest, conversation, and sharing stories and perspectives. I believe that children are innately wired to create and to co-create. I believe also that they are wired to care, to express empathy and love, especially if they are raised with care and love. Adults share much of this same motivation, but it may manifest in different and more professionalized forms, or it may be snuffed out altogether by society’s attempts to replace creation and care with consumerism. Why not tap into what we know is there, deeply rooted, inside each of us?
For our purposes, it may be useful to think about potential boundary objects that may exist in cities to bring lots of different types of people together. Such boundary objects could be a problem, a place, or an object (such as art), acts of creation (performances), or even data systems. We can look for these boundary objects, however mundane they may seem, or we may create new ones. Their purpose is to discover, illuminate, and advance perspectives where before there was little exchange or interaction. In many cities throughout the country, the USDA Forest Service has been advancing systems solutions to complex problems by using boundary objects. “How do we reduce wood waste in Baltimore?” is a simple question that used “the problem” of urban wood and “the place” of Baltimore. The more we asked this question to different people the more perspectives and threads we heard — the problem was no longer just wood or Baltimore, yet the question was incredibly useful to begin to map all the different components of a system — one that included vacant buildings, neighborhood trees (or lack thereof), employment, health, social cohesion, recidivism, stewardship, art and design, and so much more. Thus, the systems diagram also became a boundary object.
Baltimore Urban Woods Systems diagram, by Morgan Grove. From Grove et al, 2022.
While boundary objects are incredibly useful, they do not always inherently promote regeneration or regenerative projects — but they do get us closer. Regenerative projects can be thought of as endeavors that create reinforcing, positive benefits for people and nature. Creating positive benefits for nature is not always easy, obvious, or self-evident. So many of our human needs and behaviors, when magnified times 7 billion or more, seem to conflict with creating benefits for nature. But this is precisely where the well-defined problem, a well-loved place, or a provocative piece of art or performance or data, can advance the conversation and practice. This is where learning, love, and care can complement boundary explorations to find regenerative possibilities.
“What would it take….?” is a favorite phrase that I like to use with respect to boundary objects. “What would it take for this neighborhood to have a better food supply?” “What would it take to reduce how vulnerable this neighborhood is to extreme heat?” “What would it take to help every person and creature who lives here feel welcome and loved?”
Zoom all the way out: there is a little blue dot, orbiting in space. It has billions of people — many wrestling with insecurities around their basic needs, plummeting biodiversity, skyrocketing greenhouse gas, and other toxic emissions trapped in its atmosphere, problems with too much and too little water, and more. It is our ultimate boundary object. “What would it take…?”
References:
Grove M, Carroll J, Galvin M, Hines S, Marshall LL and Wilson G (2022). Virtuous cycles and research for a regenerative urban ecology: The case of urban wood systems in Baltimore. Front. Sustain. Cities 4:919783. doi: 10.3389/frsc.2022.919783
Star, S. L. (2010). This is not a boundary object: Reflections on the origin of a concept. Sci. Technol. Hum. Values 35, 601–617. doi: 10.1177/0162243910377624
Keitaro is a professor at Kyushu Institute of Technology and teaches landscape ecology and design. He has studied and worked in Japan, the U.K., Germany and Norway and has been designing urban parks, river banks, school gardens, and forest parks.
We considered how to implement Green Infrastructure in the local community to provide ecosystem services for local residents. Preserving areas such as wildlife habitats and spaces where children can play is a crucial issue nowadays.
Is this collaborative work with nature and science? Landscape design corresponding to nature
Ecosystem Services (ES) are the ecological characteristics, functions, or processes that directly or indirectly contribute to human well-being. Green Infrastructure (GI) is characterized by its multiple benefits. These days, GI is defined as infrastructure and land use planning which enhances regional and national sustainability in Japan.
This project started in 2008, and the restoration plan was developed in cooperation together with local residents. We also considered how to implement GI in the local community and could provide ecosystem services for local residents. Preserving areas such as wildlife habitats and spaces where children can play is a crucial issue nowadays. The planning site had the potential to be a place for children to learn local ecology.
Therefore, we designed the riverbank fishway not only for nature restoration but also as a place for children’s ecological learning. This chapter demonstrates the process of GI construction on the river Onga estuary in Japan to contribute to regional biodiversity conservation and provide ecological learning for children. It also should be noted that the purpose of urban landscape design or planning is to connect nature and people’s daily lives. In other words, an integrated approach in terms of “nature rehabilitation” and “lifescape” will be essential to create vernacular places in the future.
Design issues
At the first stage of this project, the presented image of the fishway was trapezoid shaped. I thought it might have a function for fishway, however, it would not be beautiful for regional landscape. Therefore, I used the curvature of the Nishi River which flows next to the Onga River when I determined the shape of the fishway for local landscape and ecological functions. It was difficult for designing the shape of the fishway, so I quoted the curvature of the Nishi-river because that natural river shape would reflect the land shape of this site (Figures 1 and 2).
Figure 1.Figure 2.
And after discussing current issues, we designed the shape of the new riverbank fishway by using a 1/200 scale study model. The tide and brackish water are distinguishing phenomena at the river mouth zone, and very important for many water creatures to build their habitats. After 10 years of construction, the river sand shaped the curve naturally. It was interesting to see our curvy shape for the corridor is corresponding to the natural design. Is this collaborative work with nature and science (Figure 3)?
Figure 3.
The new riverbank fishway was designed for biodiversity conservation and landscape design as well. Additionally, concerning accessibility to the water area for the users, the levee crown was connected to the water area by a gentle slope. The gentle slope angles were designed to consider children’s play space based on Gibson’s affordance theory(1979). Thus, these designs and changes would be beneficial for enhancing water biodiversity, and children can observe and learn about the abundant water ecosystem with easy access to the water surface. Finally, the area at the end of the lower riverbank fishway was designed for a tidal flat that can attract not only water creatures but also birds.
References:
Ito. K.(2021) Designing Approaches for Vernacular Landscape and Urban Biodiversity, Urban Biodiversity and Ecological Design for Sustainable Cities, pp. 3-17, Springer DOI: 10.1007/978-4-431-56856-8_1
Ito. K. et al. (2021) Landscape Design and Ecological Management Process of Fishway and Surroundings, Urban Biodiversity and Ecological Design for Sustainable Cities, pp. 105-121, Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-4-431-56856-8_5
Dave is Senior lecturer in Environmental Management Geography, Planning, and Spatial SciencesBefore joining The University of Tasmania, Dave was a postdoc at the University of Melbourne, and before that a researcher at the Australian Centre for Urban Ecology, a division of the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria.
Work as individuals and in small groups, rather than the large groups and teams that dominate contemporary science. This allows a few voices to explore the limits of their thinking, rather than retreating to the shared, consensus, agreement of most science.
Who are the Horse Lords of Science?
Engaging with the climate and biodiversity crises we face is a key step on our journey towards regenerative ways of living. Eminent scientists want us to consider extreme climate scenarios more seriously. Yet science isn’t very well equipped to explore post-apocalyptic futures. But art is. Classic films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still to Princess Mononoke explore the implications of human destruction of nature. Music also travels through dramatic climate change (from Billie Elish and metal drummer John Mollusk ft. Greta Thunberg) and environmental destruction (Joni Mitchell to Napalm Death).
I wonder if there is anything we can learn as scientists from the ease that music and film traverse diverse apocalyptic futures and trigger awareness in youth and broader society? I see a few lessons in how to better embrace and share our looming destruction:
Work as individuals and in small groups, rather than the large groups and teams that dominate contemporary science. This allows a few voices to explore the limits of their thinking, rather than retreating to the shared, consensus, agreement of most science.
Be political and aware, not ambivalent. Many scientists decry they have a political position. Yet all science is political. Revealing and embracing the political is a fundamental step
These two lessons will inevitably lead to a third: embrace and celebrate diversity and inclusion. Engaging with multiple ways of knowing (culturally diverse, first peoples) allows us to explore multiple post-apocalyptic visions and inequality in the drivers and outcomes of the trajectories we are on.
I also wonder whether there is anything we as musicians can learn from scientists and the science of nature and society about creating music for the apocalypse? Perhaps:
Embrace limitations and focus – today’s music software and tools allow unlimited possibility of expression. Yet meaning comes from deep engagement and limits, perhaps those we impose on ourselves or artificially introduce. Increasingly, some of those limitations come directly from science – either as field recordings or using scientific data in composition and arrangement.
Draw inspiration from evidence. There is an enormous body of scientific knowledge on environmental harms, but also environmental solutions (e.g., nature-based solutions) that can inform our art and be the grain of truth at the heart of our art.
I’m inspired by the possibilities of artists and scientists working together, co-creating works to increase awareness of the biodiversity and climate crisis, and take some positive, regenerative steps toward solutions. Taking cues from the lessons above, we could:
Work together in small teams where our distinctive and diverse voices are allowed full expression — even extreme expression.
Scientists should be encouraged to explore the limits of science, to go where others fear to tread
At the same time, artists can use scientific data to limit possibilities and focus their expression.
Be political!
Most great bands release a couple of great records, then split due to “musical differences” or stagnation of ideas — perhaps the tenure system at universities entrenches stagnation. Collaboration with artists could be an antidote to this stagnation. Rather than getting the (Ph.D. or postdoc) band back together — let’s rail against our scientific past and look for new artistic collaborations to produce transgressive, experimental art/science.
Christopher Kennedy is the associate director at the Urban Systems Lab (The New School) and lecturer in the Parsons School of Design. Kennedy’s research focuses on understanding the socio-ecological benefits of spontaneous urban plant communities in NYC, and the role of civic engagement in developing new approaches to environmental stewardship and nature-based resilience.
Regenerative artworks hold immense promise but also present a cautionary tale. They highlight a common friction many artists encounter when attempting to emulate ecological processes while also experimenting with aesthetic forms and concepts.
In 1976, John Seymour published The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, a call to revive traditional farming and permaculture practices. Throughout, Seymour highlights Albert Howard’s (1943) “The Law of Return” — anything you take from the land must be returned to the soil in order to ensure ecological health and resilience. The concept is arguably a westernized re-articulation of practices used by Indigenous communities and others that stress the importance of reciprocity and stewardship in land management practices. Robin Wall Kimmerer explores this beautifully in her book Braiding Sweetgrass (2015), explaining that today, landscapes are not necessarily “broken” but rather our relationship with land is fractured. She advocates for what Enrique Salmón describes as “kincentrically managing the land”, an act of reciprocal caregiving that honors the needs of more-than-human communities alongside human ones.
Over the past decade, the popularization of regenerative practices in agriculture and urban design is perhaps a contemporary take on this ethos with artists and designers experimenting with a range of strategies from bioremediation to novel platforms for social engagement. These efforts draw from a long history of artists exploring the notion of regeneration, especially in urban environments, a response partly to legacies of systemic racism and urban disinvestment. In North America, one of the earliest contemporary examples is Patricia Johanson’s Fair Park Lagoon (1981) in Dallas, Texas. Working with local scientists, city planners, and engineers, Johanson designed large terra cotta-colored sculptural forms from gunite that create pathways and habitats to restore the degraded Leonhardt Lagoon.
In another well-known work, Revival Field (1991- ongoing), artist Mel Chin collaborated with agronomist Rufus Chaney to create a land-based sculpture that doubled as an experiment in phytoremediation, a form of bioremediation that uses hyperaccumulating plants to absorb substances such as heavy metals in an attempt to remediate the Pig’s Eye Landfill in St. Paul, Minnesota. More recently, other artworks like Francis Whitehead’s SLOW Cleanup, (2008-2012) similarly experiment with phytoremediation to restore land contaminated by gas station storage tanks, revealing the spatial distribution of racial and economic inequity on Chicago’s West and South sides.
Patricia Johanson’s Fairpark Lagoon, Dallas, Texas. Photo by Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Regeneration, however, is not simply about environmental remediation. There is a myriad of practices globally that one could contextualize as being regenerative socially, economically, or technologically (see for instance Shai Zakai’s Concrete Creek (1999-2002) or Zheng Bo’s Plants Living in Shanghai (2013)). Regardless of the focus, what is perhaps most important is the ability of these artworks to bridge siloed disciplines and inspire new collaborative practices that can uncover the hidden dimensions of a particular challenge. An approach that Elizabeth Grosz describes as a necessary disorientation or “making strange”, can motivate new perspectives and more earnest, open dialogue within planning processes. Yet, despite evidence of the benefits artists provide in these contexts, creative collaborations with urban planning offices or scientists remain patchy and underfunded and are easily co-opted by museums or developers who assume an artist can simply be inserted into a place to solve a presumed “problem”. Choreographer Sarah Wilbur describes this as a “philanthropic route to gentrification”, emphasizing the need to create inclusive platforms for diverse stakeholders to have a voice in any attempt at so-called “creative placemaking”, or in this case “regeneration”.
Regenerative artworks thus hold immense promise but also present a cautionary tale. They highlight a common friction many artists encounter when attempting to emulate ecological processes while also experimenting with aesthetic forms and concepts. Perhaps we need to revisit Howard’s Law of Return with a multispecies perspective in mind and find ways to meld traditional ecological knowledge with new regenerative practices to cultivate an art-science knowledge nexus. More than this, now is the time to bring artists to the planning table — precisely because they open a space for new ideas and ways of working which are sorely needed as urbanization and climate change accelerate globally.
Nikki Lindt, born in the Netherlands, is a New York City-based artist working primarily in the mediums of painting, video, and (underground) sound. MFA from Yale and her BFA from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.
We need the untapped laden potential of collaboration to ignite new ideas, well-being, new experiences, new perspectives, and critical solutions.
Over the years, many fields of knowledge (and professionals) have become more and more specialized and isolated, rich in very specific veins of understanding. These isolated vessels of knowledge have explosive potential, just as harbor cities, where historically the collision of new ideas and different ways of thinking collided synthesizing into completely new streams of thought.
We are living in very challenging complex and critical years due to human’s ongoing damaging ecological and social impact on the planet. We need this untapped laden potential of collaboration to ignite- new ideas, well-being, new experiences, new perspectives, and needed solutions.
Within the vast range of possibilities of collaboration and exchange, there is a pairing that has been particularly important to me as an ecological artist: art and science.
I have found the process of collaboration to be unique each time around. Collaboration has the potential to be an exciting synthesis of knowledge, ideas, working methods, and personal outlook. All of these aspects may not be apparent in the resulting work, but in strong open collaborations it all ends up in the communication pipeline, leading to rich discussions and personal growth for all involved.
My most recent collaboration, The Underground Sound Project, a Soundwalk, is a project which consists of stops along a trail in Prospect Park, Brooklyn (New York). Via a QR code linking to short videos on the project website, visitors are able to hear subsurface sounds corresponding to the features along that trail, such as trees, streams, soils, etc. The human impact on underground sound is also revealed in the project.
The Underground Sound Project was created during my time in the Urban Field Station Collaborative Arts Program Residency. There I was paired with a team consisting of ecologists, land managers, social scientists, and others.
I wanted the project to spark feelings of connectedness with nature, empathy with trees and other living non-human beings, and the ecosystem itself. I also wanted the work to speak to the changes the city faces through climate change.
During the development of the soundwalk, I had multiple conversations with ecologist Novem Aueyung and her team at NYC Parks, learning about the lives of trees, plants, and microorganisms in urban forests as well as the function of the non-living aspects of the ecosystem.
We had discussions about peoples’ relationship to their natural areas, their potential connection to and empathy for trees and the broader ecosystem but also the rich history existing within these ecosystems. Through this collaboration, I was able to find locations to record sound all over NYC that were relevant to climate change and the challenges facing the city. We zoned in on highlighting spots that had inherent meaning in their interaction with the city, for example, the wetlands restoration project in Hunters point, which serves as one of the city’s examples of stormwater retention. And Oakwood beach, where after being inundated by hurricane Sandy, local residents and officials have been looking for the best path forward, whether that means protecting the area from future flooding or creating a buy-out system for housing so the area can act as a natural buffer for future storm events.
When creating the narrative for the sound walk social scientists, Erika Svensen and Lindsay Campbell reflected with me on creating a context where visitors of many backgrounds could relate and feel connected through their own relationship with NYC’s natural areas. For example, we had discussions about interweaving reflections on the complex relationship and history of the park’s human inhabitants to the more ecological narratives of the natural areas.
Ultimately, these discussions also inspired me to set up a focus group with a local community who, at times, felt disenfranchised from natural areas in New York City. Through this focus group, I was driven and learned how to take some steps to help create a feeling of welcomeness, inclusiveness, and safety for visitors within the context of the project.
These are only two examples in the process of how The Underground Sound Project grew through collaboration, there were many others, expanding the depth of the soundwalk. I also hope that the exploratory nature of collaborating with an artist helped open their eyes to an unknown frontier right beneath our feet and in turn who knows where that will lead?!
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 is an Arts Editor here at The Nature of Cities.
Though science and art both give us reason to wonder and imagine and to move closer to nature-truth, both are also capable of missing the mark if operating alone. If science writes the truth of what we can see, then art undulates truth in the spaces between. In weaving together these stories we will find how to move forward.
Science and art are human stories. We often associate one with fact, and the other with fiction, however, both play their role in uncovering the particular kind of nature-truth required to bring about regenerative cities.
Part of our job as humans has always been to develop stories, like art, like science, that are capable of describing partial glimpses of this truth. Today, however, the human family is beginning to realize that as we bring together, understand, and respect more of these partial views of each one’s truth, the story becomes more full, more powerful, and more capable of bringing us into a place where our cities, our cultures, and the things we do come into alignment with nature’s truth. And nature’s truth, of course, is our home. This is where the secrets of regenerative cultures are held.
Installation view of “A City Designed by Trees” at the 2022 Daejeon Art & Science Biennale, with “Dangsan Namu” in the foreground.
Our City as Nature studio celebrates this nature-truth in the current exhibition A City Designed by Trees, commissioned for the 2022 Daejeon Art & Science Biennale.* Weaving together both fact and fiction, the exhibition touches on ideas from soil scientists, farmer practitioners, trees, quantum physicists, and many others. Though seemingly disparate, these ideas come together as part of a fictional, multi-media narrative that shows what cities might look like if we learned how to listen to the trees. Visitors—children, mothers, students, and all sorts—are also asked to share their own tree stories in a prominent place within the exhibition too. All are validated as meaningful.
The trees also have their say, in multiple ways. In the back of the gallery, a fictitious punk rock song — claimed to be written by local trees — is played as a music video. A “water goddess” and “tree spirits” perform. Alongside the video, a collection of drawings mix the whimsical and the practical into single narratives. In one drawing, park maintenance crews replace lawn mowers with goats, and the result is regenerative maintenance and a city-branded goat ice cream. In another, 10-lane streets are converted into forests with regenerative natural farms and tramways. Finally, a large area is dedicated to the Bomunsan Forest Protocols and a ‘master plan,’ purportedly dictated by trees. Here, a local mountain is depicted in an imagined future where forests, streams, meadows, and wetlands are allowed right-of-way through cities instead of car highways. Is this what trees would do if they had their say?
Installation view of “A City Designed by Trees” at the 2022 Daejeon Art & Science Biennale, showing drawings by two children who visited the exhibition, alongside quotes from experts in the “Tree Story Forest”.
The work also reminds us of the importance of local cultural knowledge. Here in Korea, there are trees called Dangsan Namu, old trees of various species (Zelkova, Camphor, Ginkgo) which act as the guardians and wise elders of most villages and neighborhoods. They are sadly unknown in new urban developments, and often felled for the sake of a parking lot or apartment complex. To remind the visitors of the importance of these tree elders, the entrance of the exhibition features a newly anointed Dangsan Namu. When entering the gallery, guests are asked to bow and say hello to the tree before proceeding. This kind of cultural knowledge is linked to similar practices in other cultures in Japan, Ireland, and India, and then linked again to science by way of Fukuoka Masanobu, Diana Beresford-Kroeger, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and others. Such links, across and through ways of knowing and seeing are the basis for resilience, and vital for the act of creating new, regenerative stories.
This entire gallery space is of course, also a story. Much of it contradicts the stories we tell ourselves as modern ‘developed’ societies. Most of it aligns with the stories of scientific knowledge, but some of it contradicts those, too. Yet, in this very interplay is the admission that nature-truth exists in ways that cannot be completely seen nor described by any one discipline.
A future urban plan titled “Bomunsan and a City Designed by Trees” by City as Nature, drawn in graphite, pigment pen, charcoal, and chalk on unbleached hanji, 140x70cm
Though science and art both give us reason to wonder and imagine and to move closer to nature-truth, both are also capable of missing the mark if operating alone. If science writes the truth of what we can see, then art undulates truth in the spaces between. In weaving together these stories—to which each person finds a foothold of validity in this world—we will find how to move forward. This beautiful woven fabric looks strange or foreign sometimes. It challenges what we hold to be true, and then asks that we challenge it back, not in pursuit of being right in an individual sense, but in pursuit of moving closer to a regenerative story together. If we can hold onto that, then artists and scientists, leaders from various political and cultural backgrounds, and people of all walks and ways can stand together with this nature-truth, on this earth, in this universe, and gaze out at a possible future.
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. David's dad told him once that he needed a back up plan, something to "fall back on". So he bought a tuba.
Knowledge development needs to center the idea of a joined conversation: reach out in all directions, and be open to being changed by what you encounter. Through collaboration, we may create something we could not have created by ourselves.
We’re all part of the elephant
In my life as a theatre artist, collaboration across the boundaries of discipline and method is common because in is required … essential to the success the whole. If the set and costumes and lights and music don’t “talk” to each other, we fail. If the design elements do not support the actors and text, or even fight them, we fail. If the actors are in a scenic dark — literal or metaphysical — and the audience doesn’t follow the story the playwright intended, we fail. Indeed, an oddity of theatre reviews for a designer is that it is better to disappear in supportive anonymity than be singled out for being “the only valuable thing in a horrible production”. For what is a produced play if not a wicked problem of a story telling truth? This is as true of productions Shakespeare or Lorrane Hansberry as it is of Lin Manuel Miranda, Lynn Nottage, Steven Sondheim, Sarah Ruhl, or Tristan Tzara.
Ok, maybe not Tristan Tzara.
Cities, as we more and more often say, are similarly wicked problems of scientific and technical knowledge, public opinion, policymaking, on the ground application, community, design, and storytelling. The storytelling I am talking about is both communicative (tell the story, from some angle) and exploring the story, perhaps from a new angle. That is, we explore the common challenges from the perspectives and strengths of our disciplines to learn something new, perhaps (or even probably) that some other discipline could not have discovered. This is as true for architecture and engineering as it is for ecology, sociology, community building, and artistic expression.
For this reason, we say: “through collaboration, we may create something we could not have created by ourselves”.
But we often don’t trust each other, and trust is the most fundamental, necessary but not sufficient requirement of collaboration. I have always been moved by Pippin Anderson’s thesis (in an essay at TNOC) that trust in other people’s ways of knowing is trained out of us, because our training is in great part focused on learning about how to recognize what is true and right — that is, learning a method to explore “truth”. The unintended consequence is that we learn to distrust or not even see other methods of inquiry. (Witness the persistent and tiresome criticisms of qualitative scientists by quantitative scientists.)
To collaborate across disciplines — and perhaps even aspire to transdisciplinarity — requires us to witness, trust, and be changed by other ways of knowing. I want to emphasize the latter in particular: that we should aspire to our own work within a discipline being changed by something we learn from another discipline’s approach to knowledge.
Yes. Right on.
To me, a starting place is to at least try to collaborate more, and make working teams that are more mixed — even mixed up? — in terms of discipline. The set designer doesn’t arrive at the end of the theatre production process to “dress” the actors; they are part of the production of the very beginning to working together to advance the ideas of the play.
Art may sometimes seem like a distant planet to science, but artists share many of the core personality traits of scientists: curiosity, imagination, a belief in the transformative power of ideas. But science and policy often seems to lag in their connection to art as a way of knowing and a source of ideas. (Practitioners often seem much more sophisticated in their integration with artists.) It may not be that scientists are the problem. Many scientists I talk to are personally enthusiastic about interdisciplinary collaboration and transdisciplinary action. More friction comes from the structures of science — hoary journal formats, narrowly conceived funding mechanisms, professional discouragements from out-of-the-box collaborations. [Three cheers for the European Commission, who seem to at least strive for a more modern and integrated approach to cross-disciplinary collaboration.]
In the realm of science and practice in urbanism, we often talk about creating multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary teams, but examples are more rare that we would like. I hope we can find new ways to mix science, policy, practice, and art into projects right from the start. In this way, all the knowledge centers of the project can learn from each other, and in particular, come to trust in other peoples ways of knowing. I firmly believe that this is the route to deeper and more usefully integrated knowledge — knowledge that can reach more people and can “meet them where they are”.
The elephant
The Elephant is a well-known metaphor about systems thinking in which people can identify the parts of the object that they are familiar with (or perhaps think is most important), but don’t know it is an elephant. Discussion of the amusing image often doesn’t proceed much beyond the idea that that elephant is the whole system, the entire entity, of which narrower perspectives and points of view are unaware. What is worth adding is that the elephant doesn’t work without all its parts, and all those parts interact (or should). If we think of the elephant as knowledge, does it work without acknowledging all forms of knowledge? Not really, no. Does a city’s sustainable ecological design work if the knowledge centers of ecology, transportation, energy, social services, creative expression, etc. do not work together? Not really, no.
As I have come to come to like to say, knowledge development needs to center the idea of conversation across ways of knowing: reach out in all directions, right from the beginning of a new idea, and be open to being changed by what you encounter.
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.
Maybe the easier part of the question is how artists and scientists can co-create projects: get two curious open-minded people from different fields who are willing to take a serious look at vocabulary and give them time to explore each other’s ways of seeing and thinking.
Maybe the easier part of the question is howartists and scientists can co-create projects: get two curious open-minded people from different fields who are willing to take a serious look at vocabulary and give them time to explore each other’s ways of seeing and thinking. At CALL we give them a specific task which is to lead a Walk through a neighborhood addressing an issue particular to that place. The artist speaks from her own point of view, knowledge, and experience as does the scientist.
We have considered whether there might be a curriculum developed that introduces both parties to these territories they may be unfamiliar with. Finding support for such a program or the time for this joint engagement is always a challenge as it is to fund projects. Funding becomes a primary issue and an area that we must endeavor to develop. Can foundations and granting agencies be encouraged to shift their support toward this kind of preparation as well as the projects themselves?
One of the most challenging aspects of this work is learning how to work in an open, equitable way with communities where the issues are often most pressing. And how are true partnerships with the people of a place developed? In the midst of busy lives with many challenges, how is it possible to create engagement? And since these issues have taken years or decades to develop, they will not be addressed by singular encounters. How are projects sustained over time? What kinds of relationships need to be developed with city agencies, NGOs, academic institutions, or community organizations to support ongoing engagement with communities? And how is the vision of the original partners maintained?
Cynthia Rozenzweig, along with many others, has emphasized the importance of making changes, having an impact at scale. It means that developing projects for cities is of the greatest importance. While doing that, how can we think in terms of providing models that are pathways for others? Asking questions seems to be the starting point for all this challenging, inspiring, often frustrating work. It will help us collectively imagine a future of greater sustenance.
Mary O’Brien is a multi-disciplinary artist—a writer, and sculptor who initiates the re-search and community engagement plans for Studio of Watershed the practice she co-founded with artist Daniel McCormick. Following a scientific trajectory the Studio cre-ates restorative interactions with damaged lands and waters through an aesthetic lens. By enlisting the support of art organizations, government agencies, and community groups, their works are intended to become a catalyst for positive ecological action. .
For art to remediate the damage humans have done to our own environments will require specific knowledge, as well as emotion; aesthetics as well as solid data—the kind of collaboration that many damaged rivers and lands could use right now.
Do No Harm
In a recent social media post, a science-minded citizen lamented the harm cairn-making had on a small North Carolina river. Among the post’s commenters, were many perturbed by the sight of a massive group of stacked rocks behind the floating carcass of a large salamander. But others decried the criticism, defending the freedom to create. An artist wondered what the fuss was about: Don’t we have more to be concerned with like toxins in the water, and dams?
Flood Plain Woven Wall, Studio of Watershed Sculpture with The Nature Conservan-cy, Nevada and Center for Art + Environment. Photo: Mary O’Brien
Sure, dams and toxic run-off do tremendous damage to rivers, but the damage created by pulling rocks out of the river to create social-media iconography goes beyond the river. The rock-balancing is not real science, nor is it really art. It certainly is not informed art. Conflating river rocks with artifacts and assuming they can be arranged better by human manipulation is an attitude stuck in an anthropocentric point of view.
The acts of rock-stackers have a wide-ranging impact. In the case of the North Carolina river, the habitat of the hellbender has been disturbed. Known as the “last dragons”, the hellbender is a threatened giant, salamander species dating back 65 million years. It is unlikely the river will recover before the next mating season. The National Park Service rightfully labels these acts as “ephemeral vandalism”. Accepting these damaging structures as art weakens the intersection where science and art should collaborate.
Art in natural environments is a juncture where the professions of art and science can collaborate in meaningful ways. Environmental Art must be informed enough to both respect the science and carry the emotions of those seeking the beauty of natural spaces. For art to remediate the damage humans have done to our own environments will require specific knowledge, as well as emotion; aesthetics as well as solid data — the kind of collaboration that many damaged rivers and lands could use right now.
Artists have an especially important mandate to work and share insights with scientists. Artists can express scientific information in ways no other profession can, reaching populations with information and ideas that might not otherwise be heard. Scientists can learn how influential their data will become when expressed as art. Scientists and artists practice similar approaches to their work, and like the “leave-no-trace” ethic of wilderness travel, a do-no-harm principle needs to permeate both professions.
As a start, artists who work in the natural environment could learn about the damage scientific ignorance can cause. They can experience this from those who know and care for the natural systems of our lands and waters. Scientists can acknowledge that professional artists need to acquire a deep knowledge of the issues their works embrace. No longer are Environmental Artists those who paint water towers or dig up habitats to make monumental earthworks.
This tendency to make the world respond to “our way”, often leads to conflict. By that definition, we are at war with our environment. This is where artists and scientists can practice the do-no-harm ethic in restoring the places and systems for which they are passionate.
When artists incorporate science into their works, they can develop expertise to remediate some of the issues that scientists have already figured out. They can create hard-working projects that serve communities. We would do well to heed the demise of the hellbenders. Humans may not be able to adequately repair the damage we have done to our earth, but we can collaborate to give it the advantage it needs to heal itself.
Sky Opening, Studio of Watershed Sculpture with Interlochen Center for the Arts, Interlochen, Michigan. Photo: Chris Hintz
Marguerite Perret conducts collaborative, arts-based research that scrutinizes the narratives inherent at the interstices of art, science, healthcare and personal experience.
We are all time travelers, but if we employ creativity and science as essential tools for personal and environmental resilience, we can embrace a sense of purpose-based optimism in the face of the many challenges we face in the present and future.
Navigating wormholes: A re-imagining of time and place
The transition from town to pit is through a small wooden shed-like Visitors Center, where visitors pay a $3 fee to enter a long narrow arched tunnel lined with concrete walls painted white and illuminated with a continuous line of outdated fluorescent light fixtures overhead. It has a dystopian 1960s sci-fi sensibility, reminiscent of low-budget movies that featured homemade time machines. This portal opens onto a small, covered observation deck with a striking view of a disarmingly beautiful copper green lake set in a granite crater that measures 7,000 feet long by 5,600 feet wide and reaches a depth of 1,600 feet. Then it occurs to you — you are not traveling through time. The Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana is a wormhole where the past, present, and future collide.
Time Tunnel at the Berkeley Pit,. Photo: Bruce Scherting, 2022
Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder suggests that the past still exists, while the future is already happening. Certainly, this is true of the Berkeley Pit, the largest superfund site in the United States. The discovery, extraction, and processing of rich copper deposits in Butte in the 19th and 20th centuries facilitated electrification and technological modernization of the world. But this past remains present as toxic water from a deep bedrock aquifer endlessly rises through a vast network of underground mine shafts, flooding the pit. Maintaining pit water levels through treatment and redistribution to prevent contamination of drinking water or entering the watershed or killing wildlife, is a forever problem.
I am visiting the pit as part of a fellowship grant focusing on superfund and brownfield sites in Montana and Kansas — two disparate states connected by the Missouri River. Both superfund and brownfields involve physical locations that have been compromised by commercial or industrial activity. The difference, as defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is a degree of contamination. Currently, there are 1,334 superfund and 450,000 brownfield sites nationwide
Berkeley Pit, satellite view courtesy Google Earth, screen shot, 2022
In Topeka, there are 19 brownfields along the Kansas River, which empties into the Missouri. I am developing an interdisciplinary art/science research project to re-imagine these and other less dangerous but still environmentally degraded sites. Because communities struggle with finding the financial and civic support to rehabilitate these properties, they often remain invisible, ignored, or forgotten, like ghosts on the landscape.
A common criticism of many reclamation initiatives is the lack of creativity and innovation in their approach, but collaborations can lead to fresh ideas and inventions. The goal is to advocate and build support for an ecologically sound plan by engaging a broad audience intellectually, emotionally, and through the senses. And while this project is primarily rooted in the sciences and visual arts, implementing change will require the participation of an expanded network that includes governmental agencies, and community representatives.
One planned component is a re-imagining of these sites through augmented reality (AR) interventions developed by art students working closely with university biology faculty and their students. A website will direct visitors to physical locations, where, by positioning their phones or other portable devices over a marker, they will be able to view still and animated conceptualized proposals offering alternatives to distressed properties and links to the underlying science-based content. A self-guided tour will be available to the public in summer 2023 and featured in an international AR festival later that year.
EPA Map of Brownfields along the Kansas River, screen capture, 2022
In complement, I will be working with field biologists and collections managers surveying and mapping current and historic biodiversity at these sites. For over a decade, I have worked in biological collections at museums and universities in the U.S. and internationally. Collections are data, reflecting changes in the diversity and the movement of species over time. Success in rehabilitating these areas will require an integrated approach to assessing and evaluating mitigation and reclamation efforts to ensure fragile ecologies are not destroyed while following best remediation practices. A related project will involve working with a biologist and students in designing habitat enhancements for riparian species that live along the Kansas River and the Shunga Creek tributary.
Truly inter and trans-disciplinary collaborations require investment in relationships in which all partners are respected for their knowledge and are open to learning from each other. Partners need to be committed to creating something new together jointly from the development and design of the project through implementation. They must also be flexible and responsive to each other when things change as the project evolves. We are all time travelers, but if we employ creativity and science as essential tools for personal and environmental resilience, we can embrace a sense of purpose-based optimism in the face of the many challenges we face in the present and future.
Originally from Buenos Aires, Pietrapiana lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited at Exit Art NY, AES Gallery NY, Local Project, The Argentine Consulate in NYC, El Bodegon Cultural de Los Vilos Art Center in Chile and Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires, among other venues and part of the Pfizer Corporate Collection, The Springfield Museum of Art and private collectors.
In trying to answer the question, maybe scientists are the best-qualified ones to identify a problem and then brainstorm with artists and participating audiences on possible viable solutions.
Habits are tough to change. From mass plastic consumption to the so-called ‘fast fashion’, trash, pollution, and depletion of resources seem to be some of the many human legacies engraved in human habits. We tend to forget though, that once a natural system is destroyed, is very hard to get it back.
Before attempting to change toxic habits, the first step is to be aware of them. In my work as a visual artist, I humbly try to point at issues mostly related to the overarching theme of our climate crisis. This ongoing series of interventions made on newspapers somehow invites viewers to get into each piece ―if they wish― read the news, analyze the context, and ultimately develop independent and critical thinking, much needed in the age of fake news and manipulative social media.
I would guess that regenerative projects need people’s support and participation, starting with awareness.
In trying to answer your question, maybe scientists are the best-qualified ones to identify a problem and then brainstorm with artists and participating audiences on possible viable solutions.
Art has many purposes and takes but, in this case, it can:
help look at the problem, approach it from a different angle, in other words, think differently
act as a communication tool for the public/community at large
become a teaching agent, where artists can be paired with scientists and develop lesson plans that could later be presented to teachers and students. In my latest exhibitions focused on climate change, I have worked with teachers and students from Middle College High School in Queens, NY. We could present them with documents, problem-solving activities, and hands-on projects.
In my limited experience with scientists-that deserve all my respect―they sometimes could be ‘caught’ in deep details of research and artists may come in handy in order to ‘translate’ the issue in a more viable way for the public to read.
I have been reading on climate change for the last six years and have been incorporating it into my practice. A collaboration with a scientist would be a project that I would be interested in participating in.
Besides my regular work, please allow me to attach two video clips done for past exhibitions that might help illustrate my work.
Baixo is President of the Choque Cultural gallery in São Paulo.
We realized that we could go beyond simple artistic interventions in schools if we opened a creative dialogue with teachers and the entire school community. We ended up developing a methodology that combines art and science in the solution to one of the biggest problems of Brazilian education, which is school dropouts due to a lack of students’ interest in their schools.
I answer the question with an example of a project that involves art and science, as a way of making education in schools much more exciting.
The project began about fifteen years ago and aimed to animate public schools in poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of São Paulo, through artistic actions involving graffiti and other youthful languages so dear to students. Since the beginning of the 2000s, we have been dealing with these new languages in the field of contemporary art, through exhibitions, urban interventions, seminars, publications, and a cultural center formed by a gallery and an engraving workshop: the Choque Cultural.
We realized that we could go beyond simple artistic interventions in schools if we opened a creative dialogue with teachers and the entire school community: employees, parents, school neighbors, cultural agents in the neighborhood, and so on. We ended up developing a methodology that combines art and science in the solution to one of the biggest problems of Brazilian education, which is school dropouts due to a lack of students’ interest in their schools.
There are several reasons that lead to this lack of interest, according to the good research we have: lack of perspectives for the future, lack of belonging to the school, disconnection between the school and its territory, lack of integration between the communities that intersect in the school, lack of integration with the neighborhood, the city, and the world. All these shortcomings are further accentuated by the lack of adequate infrastructure in Brazilian public schools. For these reasons, our project has grown and gained greater importance, as it brings back the lost interest in the school environment and, consequently, strengthens the community spirit.
Our methodology is based on the following principle: the school must form autonomous and critical citizens, capable of transforming their future, acting creatively and collaboratively. Based on this premise, we undertake actions that stimulate the transformation of the school environment, making it more interesting and personalized, through collaborative artistic productions that count on the participation of all in the processes. Over the years of experience, we have created action chains that adapt to the different types of communities we serve: from the very precarious to those organized into broader networks.
The chains of actions can be summarized in the following topics: (1) Tasks for painting and creative occupation of areas of common use in schools with the participation of the entire school community; (2) Planting of vegetable gardens and orchards, installation of compost bins and recycling stations, installation of diverse workshops for collaborative work; (3) Mapping and connecting cultural agents in the territory for the administration of classes in the workshops and for the extension of the performance of the school community in spaces in its neighborhood; (4) Systematization of local experiences and development of network programs with a view to scalability.
After the experience reached more than 100 schools, formed a network with hundreds of teachers, and served thousands of students, we began to receive attention from universities and some awards. And we think that this recognition is very important because it can put us in contact with more artists and scientists capable of expanding our experience, taking it to other cities, and even to other countries where education suffers from the same evils as Brazil.
Painted school for kids in São Paulo. Photos by Fernanda Ligabue
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Percebemos que podíamos ir além das intervenções artísticas pontuais nas escolas, se abríssemos um diálogo criativo com os professores e toda a comunidade escolar: funcionários, pais, vizinhos das escolas, agentes culturais do bairro e assim por diante.
Respondo à pergunta com um exemplo de um projeto que envolve arte e ciência, como forma de dinamizar a educação nas escolas.
O projeto começou a cerca de quinze anos e visava animar escolas públicas de bairros pobres da periferia de São Paulo, através de ações artísticas envolvendo graffiti e outras linguagens juvenis tão queridas pelos estudantes. Desde o começo dos anos 2000 já vínhamos lidando com essas novas linguagens no campo da arte contemporânea, através de exposições, intervenções urbanas, seminários, publicações e de um centro cultural com galeria e oficina de gravuras: a Choque Cultural.
Percebemos que podíamos ir além das intervenções artísticas pontuais nas escolas, se abríssemos um diálogo criativo com os professores e toda a comunidade escolar: funcionários, pais, vizinhos das escolas, agentes culturais do bairro e assim por diante. Acabamos por desenvolver uma metodologia que une arte e ciência na solução de um dos maiores problemas da educação brasileira, que é a evasão escolar por falta de interesse dos alunos pelas suas escolas.
São vários os motivos que levam a esse desinteresse, segundo as boas pesquisas que dispomos: falta de perspectivas de futuro, falta de pertencimento à escola, desconexão entre a escola e seu território, falta de integração entre as comunidades que se intersectam na escola, falta de integração com o bairro, a cidade e o mundo. Todas essas carências são ainda acentuadas pela falta de infraestrutura adequada nas escolas públicas brasileiras. Por esses motivos, nosso projeto foi crescendo e ganhando maior importância, pois traz de volta o interesse perdido no ambiente escolar e, por consequência, fortalece o espírito comunitário.
A nossa metodologia parte do seguinte princípio: a escola deve formar cidadãos autônomos e críticos, capazes de transformar seu futuro, agindo criativa e colaborativamente. A partir dessa premissa, empreendemos ações que estimulam a transformação do ambiente escolar, tornando-o mais interessante e personalizado, através de produções artísticas colaborativas e que contam com a participação de todos nos processos. Ao longo dos anos de experiência, criamos cadeias de ações, que se adaptam às diferentes tipologias das comunidades que atendemos: desde as bem precárias até as organizadas em redes mais amplas.
As cadeias de ações podem ser resumidas nos seguintes tópicos: (1) Mutirões de pintura e ocupação criativa das áreas de uso comum das escolas com a participação de toda a comunidade escolar; (2) Plantação de hortas e pomares, instalação de composteiras e estações de reciclagem, instalação de diversificadas oficinas para trabalhos colaborativos; (3) Mapeamento e conexão de agentes culturais do território para administração de aulas nas oficinas e para a extensão da atuação da comunidade escolar em espaços do seu bairro; (4) Sistematização das experiências locais e elaboração de programas em rede com vistas à escalabilidade.
Depois da experiência ter alcançado mais de 100 escolas, formado uma rede com centenas de professores e atendido a milhares de alunos, começamos a receber a atenção de universidades e alguns prêmios. E achamos que esse reconhecimento é muito importante, pois pode nos colocar em contato com mais artistas e cientistas capazes de ampliar a nossa experiência, a levando para outras cidades e, até mesmo para outros países onde a educação sofra dos mesmos males que a brasileira.
Eric Sanderson is a Senior Conservation Ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City.
Scientists and artists need to help people accommodate the change that is already here, and the more dramatic and consequential change yet to come. We need to change minds to change cities.
I think the most important word in the prompt is “regenerative”. It is the kind of word that reflects the challenges that the nature of cities face in the third decade of the 21st century.
It is becoming clear that we have built too far and too fast. We are on the precipice of a great unbuilding and in that unbuilding lies an opportunity for regeneration. It is the role of artists and scientists to help city leaders and residents see, understand, and respond as three assumptions on which cities have long been built begin to fail.
First, we assumed the climate it is stable. It is not. Climate change is poised to wreak havoc through the horrific consequences of severe storms, heatwaves, floods, and droughts. Cities have extended into places they were never meant to be, such as land-filled salt marshes and shallow bays, in old wetlands and regardless of streams, and into fire-prone forests, flood-prone riparian zones, and vast, waterless deserts. Those extensions were based on assumptions about the stability of the climate, the availability of water, and the height of the sea. As the climate changes, it’s proving those assumptions were falsely placed.
Second, we assumed that easy energy from fossil fuels would last indefinitely into the future. It will not. For thousands of years, people largely lived close to where they worked, and that need created the density that cities needed. Over the last 70 years or so, cities have sprawled outward on the assumption that there was enough easy energy to reassemble the city whenever it was needed through the commute. People who could afford the commute live far away in their own private parks of suburban spaces and drive their personal vehicles on highways into the heart of cities, then drive back. Thus, we diluted density, killing central cities; debilitated transportation, by siphoning money, space, and attention from more effective modes; and enabled sprawl, which enabled climate change and also put urban structures in the way of the climate.
Third, we have assumed that there will always be more people willing to take the urban gamble. Yet as the 21st-century proceeds, cities will increasingly compete for their critical resource — people. The demographic transition is proceeding apace, with profound consequences for humanity and the planet. Large parts of the Americas, Europe, and Asia are already approaching stationarity in terms of the balance between birth rates and death rates, where population growth, where it still exists, is sustained mainly through immigration. Yet, every immigrant is also an emigrant; net immigration to one geography means net population losses from another. These demographic changes, which appear to be an inevitable consequence of the urban lifestyle over the decades, have two critical implications. First, we won’t need as much infrastructure in the future as we have heretofore. In fact, what was considered essential urban infrastructure in the past will become a burden on cities to fund and maintain in the future. Second, these considerations suggest that whichever cities act first and decisively to identify the critical infrastructure and preserve it in climate-safe localities, will also gain a decisive advantage in the future competition over the distribution of a future urban citizenry.
These considerations suggest that one role of artists and scientists, working singly and collectively, is to normalize the idea of regeneration, which includes unbuilding in some places and building wisely in others. Scientists and artists need to help people accommodate the change that is already here, and the more dramatic and consequential change yet to come. We need to change minds to change cities.
The change will be difficult, but it is also an opportunity for adaptation, for resurrection, for regeneration.
Visiting Director for the Contemporary Art Galleries at UConn in Storrs, Connecticut, Wendy Wischer is an artist and educator with a focus on artwork in a variety of media from sculptural objects to installations, video, projection, sound, alternative forms of drawing and public works. Much of the artwork is based on blurring the separation between an intrinsic approach to working with nature and the cutting edge of New Media.
As an Eco Artist, I am compelled to focus on environmental issues; finding pathways, and creating experiences, that translate data into personal meaning in hopes of finding impactful ways to connect people more deeply with the environments they live in and with each other.
The wording of the prompt is something to take note of — regenerative implies healing and restoration to something injured or damaged so we begin from a place where healing is needed. Since it can also refer to a spiritual renewal, we can consider the possibility of renewing our relationships with our environments and communities. We can use climate change as an opportunity to repair our relationship with the planet.
For artists and scientists to co-create regenerative projects, a platform is needed where they can come together to discuss and share ideas. A platform that values the input of both equally, while recognizing that each discipline may have different values. We need a platform that embraces imagination as well as scientific research, of the past, and an understanding of the current changes, while also incorporating innovation around the future.
At the same time, community engagement is a critical component that isn’t mentioned in the prompt. Community input is necessary for projects to be relevant and respond to the values of the specific community. There are elements of the history and culture around a city that can be valuable to restorative endeavors. Community engagement also holds the possibility of creating citizen stewardship of the projects which is necessary for them to be, and remain, sustainable. We have to let go of the individual and work with each other for each other. We need to foster public trust and social coordination.
Some of the conversations around restoration question what we are restoring to. On a planet that is changing rapidly, we need to factor this transformation in which means embracing these changes as part of the healing. Adaptation will need to be at the foundation of any successful project.
Often the artist, similar to the scientist, seeks connections or patterns that are not obviously apparent to everyone. This search for a common thread by the artists can broaden the intellectual and scientific research by exploring areas not directly related to the observable evidence. They can explore areas that may be apart from the original question and in a different direction than the conclusion, yet prove to have links in a variety of ways from emotional, psychological, cultural, and discursive connections that then offer new ways of seeing and understanding the original data or questions.
I believe that art and creative problem solving can play a significant role in helping us understand the complexity of the world around us, see critical issues from multiple perspectives, and communicate with each other in ways that embrace diversity and foster respect and responsibility. The success of this is expanded greatly when combined with a deeper scientific understanding of these critical issues. This is where interdisciplinary collaboration shines, as we can do far more together than in one discipline alone.
As an Eco Artist, I am compelled to focus on environmental issues; finding pathways, and creating experiences, that translate data into personal meaning in hopes of finding impactful ways to connect people more deeply with the environments they live in and with each other.
Ania Upstill (they/them) is a queer and non-binary performer, director, theatre maker, teaching artist and clown. A graduate of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre (Professional Training Program), Ania’s recent work celebrates LGBTQIA+ artists with a focus on gender diversity.
We listen to the rich narratives of scientific knowledge and help translate them into words or images that invite passersby to learn these stories, to understand more of the land and sea around them; we arrange for a mural or poetry to be placed on the outside of the wall that is begging for decoration, ask for a storytelling bench for where we have seen people looking for a place to sit.
There are many different ways of looking, and there are many different ways of listening. As a theatre artist, I look for how people use space, for opportunities for them to explore movement and texts with their voices and bodies. I listen for narrative arcs, compelling stories, emotionally charged messages, and sounds that create a sense of geographical location. I know that scientists look and listen for patterns in natural systems, patterns in land use, and qualitative and quantitative data that can be analyzed. All of this information — what I have been trained to gather and what scientists are trained to gather — is valuable, and it is particularly valuable when combined.
I recently took a walk with a scientist, Dr.Michelle L. Johnson from the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station around our shared neighborhood of Astoria, Queens. One of the neighborhood projects she pointed out to me was the restoration and planting of a shoreline riparian zone. The first thing that struck me about the area was the lines of shiny ties strung over the planted area, dancing in the sunlight. I wondered if they were an art project; instead, I learned they were there to attempt to keep birds from eating the new plantings. The second thing that struck me was the large amount of trash washed up by the tide into the catchment area of the new riparian zone. Michelle pointed out the ineffective nets that had been set up to prevent the trash build-up, worn down and twisted by the tides. We saw the baby plants that had been seeded into the zone, how some were doing better than others, and where the sea wall had been patched to resist flooding.
As I listened, I thought about how privileged I was to experience this explanation, this rich description of the shoreline’s life. If Michelle hadn’t been with me, I would have walked by unaware, perhaps momentarily enjoying the sparkle of what I now know are decorations designed to keep away hungry birds. Maybe I would have still noticed the trash, with some consternation. But without this narrative that Michelle so generously supplied, I would have had very little conception of what was actually going on in the riparian zone, of the importance of this work to combat rising tides and to keep the basements of the nearby low-income New York City Housing Authority apartments from flooding. How many people, I wondered, walk by each day without a second glance at this project? How many people are missing this narrative?
I can imagine a project where, alongside scientists and engineers, artists are involved to co-create in this riparian zone. We take the invitation of a bird-repellent system of shiny tags and turn it into an intentional art piece that brings joy to onlookers and still effectively keeps away hungry avians. We listen to the rich narratives of scientific knowledge and help translate them into words or images that invite passersby to learn these stories, to understand more of the land and sea around them; we arrange for a mural or poetry to be placed on the outside of the wall that is begging for decoration, ask for a storytelling bench for where we have seen people looking for a place to sit. In all of this work, we listen to and learn from our scientist collaborators, and they listen to and learn from us, each sharing the information that we have gathered. We share, we learn, we create something beautiful together – something richer than we could have created alone.
Edith is a researcher-practitioner, educator & curator working with diverse audiences on climate change solutions. A cooperative extension specialist with UCLA, she investigates best practices for the sustainable transformation of cities. She has a PhD in environment & sustainability, a master’s in urban planning & a BA in history & art history. She can also be found hiking, playing guitar, or creating art exhibitions that explore the human-environment connection.
Combined, art and science can deliver a one-two punch of fact and emotion — leaving the viewer/visitor/participant to complete the exchange by reaching a deepened understanding, a change of heart or mind, or better yet, being moved to take action.
Living in a post-truth era means that many of our fellow humans experience an outsized amount of their daily interactions through content generated by virtually anyone with access to the internet. It is a Shakespearean irony that at this very moment — when we have more access to information than ever before — the sheer volume of information seems not to be making us any wiser but rather drowning us in a sea of content overload and confusion.
The act of connecting art and science can be an antidote to this predicament. Combined, art and science can deliver a one-two punch of fact and emotion — leaving the viewer/visitor/participant to complete the exchange by reaching a deepened understanding, a change of heart or mind, or better yet, being moved to take action. At the intersection of art and science, we see Aristotle’s artistic proofs in action: logos (in our case, science) and pathos (art) come together to point to ethos (the viewer or participant’s interpretation).
Interdisciplinary partnerships to bridge these spaces can provide profound ways to practice these connections. Such a partnership is taking place in Los Angeles between Avenue 50 Studio, a nonprofit arts presentation organization, and The Los Angeles Center for Urban Natural Resources Sustainability (or LA Urban Center), an information and research destination hub that generates new science and delivers information and technology to broad audiences. A grant provided by the latter and by the US Forest Service Region 5 is enabling a series of art and science programming that is engaging artists and scientists around the climate crisis. The programming has included art shows and art talks on drought, wildfire, and extreme heat; a public art installation on shade equity; and panel discussions with both artists and scientists working in these spaces. The opportunity to forge this partnership between Avenue 50 Studio and the LA Urban Center came out of a mutual understanding by each entity that when it comes to engaging audiences on environmental issues, engaging only through the lens of art or science means missing the chance to challenge ourselves, grow, and forge new understandings.
We saw these ideas in action when this partnership of entities supported a group of 17 artists and activists in LA’s vibrant Highland Park neighborhood to raise awareness of shade as an equity issue in an outdoor public art installation called “Shade In LA | Rising Heat Inequity In a Sunburnt City.” Organized by community-based arts organization Arroyo Arts Collective, artists used umbrellas as their canvas to present a full spectrum of takes on the topic — from how the legacies of racist exclusionary housing policy still cause low-income neighborhoods to be hotter, to the role of tree canopy in providing physical and mental respite on hot days. The partnership is taking an action-oriented approach, and the opening event was paired with a free tree adoption event by the nonprofit organizations North East Trees and City Plants, with support from the LA Department of Water and Power, with more than 70 shade and fruit trees adopted by community members.
Public engagement — through the truths that art and science can deliver — can move people from observers/consumers to actors bringing positive change. In LA, we are fortunate to have a constellation of organizations looking to do just that, day after day.
Shade In LA artist Aleka Corwin speaks at the opening of the public arts installation. Photo: Genaro Molina, Los Angeles TimesArtists’ umbrellas suspended high above the opening of the public arts installation Shade In LA. Photo: Genaro Molina, Los Angeles TimesShade In LA curator Jolly de Guzman and the author at the opening of the public arts installation. Photo: Genaro Molina, Los Angeles Times
If we want to conserve species inside cities, we need to develop better plans to protect larger natural habitats, at scales species need.
How big is your house and property? Is it smaller or larger than you want it to be? Or is it just the right size? Do your house and property give you all that you need? Do you live in a neighborhood with many neighbors or not enough? Are your neighbors at the right distance, or too far or close than you want? The responses to these questions make it clear in several cases that we decide to move from our actual house and neighbor to a new one or to stay where we are. But, why am I asking this to you? It is because animals respond to similar types of questions to decide where to establish a territory (have a house) or if to stay in the established territory. And have you ever wondered how big or small the territories of the animals are? Or if individuals of the same species have territories of similar size? Or if animals living inside cities have smaller or larger territories than animals in natural habitats such as national parks or larger forest areas?
Before I go in-depth on the previous questions and provide some examples, I would like to bring attention to how scientists measure animals’ territory size and why this is so important from a conservation perspective. To measure territory size in animals it is necessary to individually identify the animal. To do this, scientists use marks that allow them to recognize each individual and then follow each individual to determine which is the habitat area they use. For example, radio collars are used to mark large mammals (e.g., bears, lions, hyenas, wolfs, monkeys, or elephants), birds (e.g., eagles, turkeys, geese, toucans, parrots, or ducks), or reptiles (turtles, crocodiles, or snakes). Each radio collar transmits a unique signal to the receptor (an antenna) that follows the area used by each individual. For small animals (beetles, butterflies, frogs, birds, lizards, mice, or squirrels), it is most common that the use of color bands, color rings, or color marks visually allows identifying each individual and mark using a GPS where the animal is. Finally, with the reduction in the size of microchips and their cost (not enough yet), it was possible to develop transmitters that could be detected using cell phone towers or satellites and obtain the position of the individuals in real-time. Actually, these types of studies have increased in importance due to the destruction of natural habitats associated with agricultural or urban development because it produces a reduction of the natural area available to establish a territory. This reduction of natural areas means that animals also reduce their numbers because they did not fit in the available area, consequently reducing the population size of each animal. However, not all animal species are decreasing in numbers since the creation and expansion of urban areas increases the availability of this novel habitat (have less than 6000 years of existence) and the group of animal species associated with this habitat (e.g., mice, rats, pigeons, foxes, sparrows, starlings, raccoons, etc.) increase too.
Coming back to the original questions about territory size, how big is the territory in bird species that love urban areas compared to the territory size in natural habitats? And how big is the territory in bird species that love natural areas compared to the territory size in urban habitats? Well, we expect that urban species have larger territories in urban areas because they are the preferred habitat and smaller territories in natural habitats and because the availability of the right habitat inside natural habitats is reduced. On the other hand, we expect larger territories in natural areas for species that prefer natural habitats to live in compared to the territories they will have inside cities. However, as happens many times in science, things are not as it is supposed to be, at least for three bird species in Costa Rica. The first species is the House Wren (Troglodytes aedon) which, in the tropics, is a very common bird in urban areas with gardens and isolated bushes and trees, and not very common close to natural areas such as forests.
House Wren Troglodytes aedon a species that take advantage of humans to modify habitats inside cities (for example the nest in the wall gap in the picture) and for that reason have smaller territories than in rural or natural areas. Photos: Leandro Arias (adult bird), Luis Sandoval (nest)
The second and third species are the White-eared Ground-sparrow (Melozone leucotis) and Cabanis’s Ground-sparrow (Melozone cabanisi) that prefer very dense vegetation areas (e.g., thickets, young secondary forest, and forest edges) to inhabit and inside cities this is very rare.
Cabanis´s Ground-sparrow Melozone cabanisi an endemic bird species of Costa Rica, that have larger territories in urban areas because the vegetation in those places are open and lack food resources that are more common in its natural habitats as in the picture. Photos: Luis Sandoval
These three species showed larger territories in the less preferred habitats, the House Wren had larger territories in natural habitats, and the White-eared and Cabanis’s Ground-sparrows inside cities, contrary to our expectation. This may happen because, in less preferred habitats, obtaining resources (e.g., enough good food and nesting materials) is harder, because plants they use to eat do not produce enough fruits and seeds and are less common, insects that are part of the diet also decrease because we apply a lot of chemicals to control them inside cities or do not plant the correct plants for them to occur. Therefore, birds need to have larger territories to survive and reproduce.
So, this unexpected result about territory size inside cities for species that occurs previously but, after the city development decreases in number, it is worrying. This is because they are rare (lower abundance) and need larger territories to survive, two characteristics that increase the probability to disappear from the remaining natural habitats inside cities. Therefore, if we want to conserve those species inside cities, we need to develop better plans to protect larger natural habitats or to increase the amount of plants birds need to eat or attract insects they need. Between the things we can do are:
To create or maintain a lower vegetation stratum in parks, because the majority of parks only have grass and trees, and a lot of species need bushes and small trees to survive.
To maintain the leaves on the ground, because those leaves are houses of many insects that are the main food source for birds, lizards, or small mammals; and also produce nutrients for plants.
To promote the creation of natural corridors between natural vegetation patches or parks to allow the animals to move and have access to more resources.
To plan a large variety of natural plants in houses and building gardens, because as larger the plant diversity larger the probability of providing food and refuge to more animal species.
Juárez, R., M. P. Angulo Irola, E. M. Carman & L. Sandoval. 2021. Territory size, population density, and natural history of Cabanis’s Ground Sparrow, an endemic species found in urban areas. Ornithology Research 29:227-239.
Juárez, R., E. Chacón-Madrigal, & L. Sandoval. 2020. Urbanization has opposite effects on the territory size of two Passerine birds. Avian Research 11:1-9.
Although, not without controversy, Assisted Migration is one tool in a larger toolbox of strategies that can be aided by more transdisciplinary collaboration as we work toward building resilience in and around our cities. It presents unprecedented and exciting opportunities.
In April of 2022, the New York Times ran a viral piece on its front page entitled Trying Everything, Including Lettuce, to Save Florida’s Beloved Manatees. It details a sordid tale of Floridian Manatees — sea cows — struggling for survival amid a riverine habitat polluted by industrial effluents and agricultural and stormwater runoff that was choking out the seagrass upon which they rely.
It spoke of an experiment that would be funny if it weren’t so tragic, of well-intentioned scientists and citizens dumping tons of romaine lettuce into local waterways as a last-ditch effort to curtail mass starvation events. It’s not every day that aquatic vegetarian mammals are graced with front page coverage in the Times, but it’s precisely these kinds of stories that are likely to persist in one form or another as we hurdle deeper into the 21st century. Perhaps even more than the memetic images of starving arctic polar bears clinging for dear life atop melting ice rafts, accounts of charismatic megafaunal plight in our own backyards seems to pluck at heartstrings in particularly visceral ways, and implore us to action.
AI-generated composition depicting “The Mass Movement of Species From Desertifying City” (by the Author via Midjourney)
Yet, somehow immediately, another image came to mind―not of emaciated sea cows, but that of an upside-down Black Rhino, blindfolded and dangling precariously from a helicopter as it hurdles toward a distant horizon. These are images depicting the early stages of another grand experiment―the Assisted Migration (AM) of species from one place to another.
African Black Rhinoceros in transit (Source: Atlas Obscura/Cornell School of Veterinary Medicine)
In the case of the critically endangered African Black Rhino, it entails a one-way trip for groups of selected individuals to various partner sites across South Africa with the goal of extending their range to well-suited and lesser-poached locales. Early data for the Black Rhinos are promising, with the WWF accounting for a 21% increase in South African populations since 2003. In the case of the starving Floridian manatee, it might conceivably entail a search for congruous aquatic habitats elsewhere in the US; For example, in and around the port of Galveston, TX, where, by all accounts, the seagrass is thriving by comparison.
But would they survive such a trip? Who would pay for it? Who would benefit? Would it be socially, ecologically, and politically viable? And what about the unanticipated problems of adjustment on both sides?
These are just a few of the complex questions that are implied by Assisted Migration (AM), an emerging practice for human-led adaptation. Contemporary examples of AM extend beyond just fauna to include many beloved or economically valuable plants and trees whose historic range is becoming untenable. Proponents of AM argue that if climate or anthropogenic pressures prove too high for a species to survive in situ, it may be possible to help them move to new, less risky locales. AM is controversial because it often conflicts with established conservation paradigms that favor maintaining the status quo of species ranges, and in situ management strategies.
Although there have been vigorous debates among land managers and conservation biologists in recent years, it appears to be a subject insufficiently interrogated here at TNOC, especially amongst designers, artists, and urban ecologists. It’s time we applied this topic not only to exceedingly exotic plants and animals, but to our own species, and our primary habitat: cities.
What are the implications of considering AM of cities? To cities? Within and for cities? And what does it mean for the future of nature in cities?
Assisted migration of cities
It is important to recognize that AM was largely a sociological notion before it was an ecological one. Before the 2000’s the use of AM in the English language refers primarily to the movement and displacement of human populations: across and within various regional and national borders and for various reasons not limited to climate risk aversion. It wasn’t until the late oughts and early 2010’s that interest (and debate) exploded among ecologists and conservationists (evidenced by analogous terms like facilitated migration, assisted colonization, species translocation).
AM of cities considers the possibilities for urban populations in risk prone areas, rather than investing in adaptation or mitigation (or continuously rebuilding in the same place), to pick up and move elsewhere. Starting in the 1960’s and 70’s, AM was used to describe efforts by federal and local actors to do just this.
Use of Assisted Migration (and analogous terms) over time (Source: Google Scholar)
Consider, for example, the case of Soldiers Grove Wisconsin, a small logging town established along the banks of the Kickapoo river. After decades of devastating flood events and expensive subsequent rebuilding efforts, local authorities began to plead for federal funding—not to simply rebuild after flooding or invest in expensive levee projects along the Kickapoo, but to shift the entire city further from the river and onto higher ground. In the late 1970’s, they finally received authorization and federal funds to relocate large portions of the residential and business district to an area better suited for long-term resilience, with the lowlands of the former settlement converted to public open space.
(Soldiers Grove, WI Newspaper Headline from 1970’s Source Madison.com)
Soldier’s Grove provides an example of what’s possible when local, state, and federal stakeholders work together on wicked challenges and think big. The question is whether the wholesale relocation of entire cities can or should be upscaled to other contexts in the face of climate change.
Today, this process is commonly referred to as “managed retreat” or “Climigration”, whereby entire communities are compelled (by legal and financial instruments) to move away from places threatened by floods, droughts, fires, and high temperatures. This usually entails a federally funded “buyout” of a homeowner’s property and assistance for relocation to a place of their choice. Unlike the case of Soldier’s Grove, a challenge often arises when some homeowners choose not to move or choose to move from one floodplain to another. There are many complex socio-economic factors at play, including questions of land dispossession through eminent domain, and the often-disproportionate impact these risks pose on already vulnerable communities.
To ensure such efforts are done equitably, with substantial subsidies to assist those who can’t afford it, managed retreat on a large scale entails enormous initial investment and the capacity for long term planning (not exactly the strong suits of contemporary American political system). Yet to date, the federal government in the US, primarily through the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has already spent billions of dollars relocating at-risk populations (from floodplains, coastal areas, superfund sites, etc.).
Federal buyouts to date in the US: Source: March, K et al. (2021)
But how might strategies for AM in the flood-prone parishes of coastal Louisiana look different from those targeting the high-end vacation homes in The Hamptons, on the coast outside of New York City? Notwithstanding the obvious logistical, geopolitical, and socioeconomic constraints, embracing AM of cities must contend with the reality that no place is really “safe” from the disruptions brought on by a rapidly changing climate.
The risks we face today extend beyond merely flood risk to include myriad challenges of drought, wildfires, agricultural failures, and civil unrest, among many others. The risks we face tomorrow will include those that we can’t currently anticipate, occurring in places we never thought they would.
Responding to these unpredictable patterns of disturbance may require that we collectively upend conventional models of home ownership and financial equity, which are currently based on long-term settlement in a single place. Resilience may soon entail frequent cycles of re-settlement in response to shifts in the geography of livability. In some ways the bourgeoning #Vanlife movement and the normalization of remote work and digital nomadism (for some) offer glimpses of the alternative models that may continue to set the stage for a more itinerant future. Will these trends remain reserved for the middle class with the skillsets and the means to move?
Or can we imagine it becoming a normalized reality for all?
If the assisted migration of entire cities seems far-fetched, it shouldn’t—especially if we pause to consider the estimated 250 million people globally living in areas that could be underwater by the end of the century.
Assisted Migration To (and Within) Cities
As with AM of cities, AM to and within cities is nothing new. For as long as humans have built and settled in particular places, we have been in the habit of moving things around and moving things in with us. We call it by a different name: Gardening. But gardening, perhaps, requires a more expansive definition as a process that includes not only conventional modes of planting selected species in our yards, but the various ways in which we curate plants, animals, and materials, and, in turn, how they cultivate us as humans. For thousands of years, we’ve harvested materials in some form or another from the larger landscape. Stone, mud, and timber are shaped into houses and temples and prisons. Even our sleekest modern buildings, rendered in steel and glass and gypsum are ultimately highly processed landscapes. In and around our built structures we cultivate our private and public landscapes in ways that reflect our norms and needs: For beauty, for shade, for food, for belonging.
We move species in and around with us in cities because they bring us joy. We own teacup yorkies and labradoodles that have been selectively bred to exhibit the traits we prefer. We plant begonias and lilies in our front yard to project an image of ourselves to the neighborhood. Many have known the pleasure of sneaking a clandestine cutting from a neighbor’s cactus and carrying it with the poise of an international spy, to plant one’s own garden (it’s a common theory in some urban gardening circles that stolen plants grow better). Gardening extends to commercial plant and animal trades, local seed banks and informal modes of seed exchange. Gardening includes the stowaway seeds we bring back with us on the soles of our shoes, embedded in the dried mud of a recent adventure abroad. Even our giving in to the allure of the latest houseplant (or pet spider) trend on social media often entails the mass movement of captives from some distant rainforest and into our bedroom.
Adding these exotic species to our urban landscapes often supplements, rather than supplants what was already there before. Invasiveness on the part of many common urban species is the exception rather than the rule. It’s by these means (and many others) that the vegetation observed in cities have grown to be, on average, more biodiverse than their surrounding hinterlands. This, of course, flies in the face of many tropes of city life as being somehow devoid of ecological complexity.
Cities are now home to a number of fascinating novel ecosystems (“freakologies”) that have arisen in tandem with our cities. From the thriving populations of escapee green parrots in the Telegraph Hill district of San Francisco to the Mexican Freetail Bats who’ve taken up residence underneath Austin’s Congress Bridge. These novel conditions are produced by (and generative of) many layers of social, ecological, and spatial complexity that were only beginning to understand.
Sometimes we go to extreme lengths, mobilizing considerable labor and resources to move species around. In 2014, private donors to the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business famously paid over 400 thousand USD to move a 250-year-old, 700,000-pound Burr Oak a single block to save it from the pressures of development. Salomé Jashi’s beautiful 2021 Documentary Taming the Garden depicts the movement of a single enormous tree across the Black Sea to a billionaire’s private garden in Georgia.
Film still from Salomé Jashi’s Taming the Garden Documentary (2021)
Whether by chance or by charter, we’ve proven ourselves capable of fundamentally altering the geography of other species. What if we embraced our capacity to cultivate novel urban ecosystems with more collective intention?
Assisted Migration For Cities
For better or for worse, the world we have inherited, the world we’ll leave to our children is an urban one. Recognizing the realities and disruptions of climate change means exploring new sets of intentions, new frames of mind, and new goals. Rather than fetishizing the protection or re-establishment (at all costs) of what thrived in a particular urban context in the past, we might instead invest our resources and attention on anticipating what might thrive there in the future.
AM for cities offers a hopeful conclusion to this triad and considers an alternative to the retreat of our own species away from cities. In an ironic twist on the very logic of AM, what if the intentional translocation of species in and to our cities help us to ultimately stay put?
AM for cities requires we look at species, not in terms of their geographic origins, but instead on their functional traits. Focusing on traits allows us to consider how and where those traits can be better leveraged in and around our cities and toward specific measures of socio-ecological resilience.
For example, in a hotter, drier future we might focus on drought-tolerant trees with big shady canopies which mitigate urban heat islands and maximize thermal comfort for the neighborhoods below. In an era of insect collapse, fast growing, perennial species with dense above-ground biomass might better support pollinators and viable habitats for other urban invertebrates. In an era of increasing urbanization, more intense storms and erratic stormwater runoff patterns, we must shape and plant our urban landscapes to better capture excess water and pollutants. In an era where human values will continue to matter a great deal, we must design planting and maintenance regimes that balance the need for urban beauty with the imperatives of ecological performance.
In some cases, finding appropriate species may require us to look far afield, and other times the answers may be right in front of us. As urbanization continues to shape the biotic and abiotic factors of terrestrial ecosystems, some common urban species that may be considered weeds today, may in fact become the keystone species of the future, providing a range of services that we don’t currently recognize.
Consider a recent example, beautifully documented by researchers Yuanquiu Feng and Yun Hye Hwang, detailing a dense Mangrove plantation intentionally introduced by informal occupants of a former landfill in the Baseco District in Manila, Philippines. Here, vulnerable urban communities recognized the need for an increased sense of community identity and ecological resilience along a riparian bank that was subject to frequent flooding during the seasonal monsoons.
Atop heaps of Styrofoam, plastic, and other discarded detritus, they cultivated the only space available to them, and it has grown over the course of just 10 years, into a thriving novel urban forest, offering provisioning functions to local residents and significant reduction in flood events. The success of these efforts has even sparked renewed interest in the revitalization of the larger Pasig River network (one of the world’s most polluted), with a number of other projects now underway.
Mangroves in the Baseco District of Manila, Philipines (Source: Yuanquiu Feng and Yun Hye Hwang for Places Journal)
Other higher profile precedents are being developed by Landscape Architect Kate Orff/Scape Studio. Visionary waterfront proposals like Living Breakwaters and Oyster-tecture propose a network of coastal “scaffolding” that allows various aquatic species (including Oysters), to move in and thrive, while simultaneously providing water quality benefits, economic opportunities, and coastal armoring against future storm surges. The bold idea implied here is that we design and provide an armature upon which novel ecosystems emerge over time. We can invite rather than prescribe. We can catalyze new ecosystems rather than merely mourn the loss of historic ones.
Some may dismiss these approaches as overly optimistic hypotheticals. Yet, they are not as untested as they may initially appear. Researchers at Arizona State University recently reported that sunken ships provide the ideal habitat for reef-building corals, citing decades of case studies where accidentally or intentionally sunken vessels have been overtaken by thriving aquatic ecosystems. Could a larger-scale, more intentional version of these approaches (seeded with translocated coral species that can thrive in warmer waters) potentially offset the mass die-off of coral reefs elsewhere?
Oyster-tecture (Source: Kate Orff/Scape Studio)
The Mesquite Mile, a project of which I am a co-collaborator along with Kim Karlsrud, Travis Neel, and Erin Charpentier, employs an AM approach for the purpose of urban afforestation. In this work, we focus on a single iconic species: the Honey Mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa).
The Mesquite has long been considered both a savior and a scourge for ranchers and farmers since the times of early Colonization across the southern High Plains region, providing needed shade and food for livestock during the hottest, driest stretches of summer, but quickly invading open grasslands and pastures when undigested seeds are deposited in the fertile droppings of cattle.
To contemporary farmers and ranchers in West Texas, the Mesquite is largely considered an invasive nuisance tree and is routinely removed through controlled burning, mechanical or chemical means in rural landscapes. Meanwhile, in nearby cities such as Lubbock, there exists an entirely different, and considerably more positive perception of this tree, its value, and its meaning. Urban properties in this semi-arid climate with any kind of tree come at a premium. It’s here in the city that the Mesquite, in particular, is widely known and celebrated for its lore, its delicate foliage, its pollinator-friendly yellow flowers, and its association with smoked meat.
It’s perhaps not surprising that urban trees are associated with increased property values, decreased heating and cooling bills, and higher urban biodiversity. But planting from a sapling can take decades to pay off (if at all). This high level of risk and lengthy time frame are more than many are willing to stomach. It’s this inverted perception of the Mesquite that drives our team toward a (provocatively simple) reciprocal bargain–to carefully facilitate the strategic relocation of these trees from one context to the other, and in so doing maximize their cumulative benefits over time.
Drawing upon over 4 decades of collective experience, we are exploring what is possible when Art, Design, and Science productively collide. Utilizing AM as a mode of public art and public placemaking, we are working with both urban and rural stakeholders to remove nuisance Mesquites from properties in the periphery of Lubbock county and replant them into volunteer front yards in the Heart of Lubbock neighborhood. To view footage of our pilot-scale assisted migration experiment, please follow this link.
These efforts, of course, are not without challenges. The success of any given transplant depends heavily on its size, the season in which it is transplanted (dormant defoliated is best), the underlying health of the tree, and the conditions of its new home. Another important factor is making these efforts palpable to the public by introducing conspicuous aesthetics of sustainability and supplementary programming alongside these interventions to encourage long-term care can be established. Public buy-in is an equally vital aspect of urban sustainability, without which even the best ecological intentions could fall flat. The long-term goal of these efforts is to invite communities to register these actions as contributive to a collective whole that extends beyond the purview of private landscape choices that currently dominate (and atomize) the identity of residential neighborhoods.
Stills taken from documentation of a transplanted Mesquite Tree from Tahoka to Lubbock, TX (Source: The Mesquite Mile, Travis Neel, Erin Charpentier with Commostudio)
We are currently seeking additional funding to increase the scale of our Mesquite migration efforts and amplify the scope of our community engagement. This includes the creation of a public website for the project, a multi-lingual survey assessing public perceptions and needs, and the creation of a larger-scale network of demonstration sites in areas of the greatest need. We intend to track how translocated trees contribute to local biodiversity, hydrologic response, and thermal comfort over time.
Moving into an unsettled future
If the past 200 years of our urban story has been largely about mastering the patterns of settlement, the next 200 years will be marked instead by the patterns and processes of unsettlement. Although, not without controversy, Assisted Migration is one tool in a larger toolbox of strategies that can be aided by more transdisciplinary collaboration as we work toward building resilience in and around our cities. It presents unprecedented and exciting opportunities for Designers, Artists, planners, policymakers, and scientists to take action together. The issues and examples raised here barely scratch the surface. Consider this a call to continue and expand the conversation, here on TNOC, and within our disciplines. How is it that you consider the ethics, aesthetics, and ecological implications of Assisted Migration of, to and for cities?
An initial glance may suggest informality implies unsophistication. As Lizulu demonstrates, informal governance structures are complex and involve intricate relationships not dissimilar from “traditional” conceptions of “formal” governance systems.
Informal organizational structures are commonly involved with greening efforts in cities, such as waste recycling and urban agriculture efforts. They are particularly relevant in cities of the Global South, where large percentages of the economy and labour are in the informal sector. Collaboration between the formal and informal sectors poses a key challenge for the successful implementation of such innovative initiatives. This short article analyses the formal-informal relationship through a discussion of a river restoration project situated in Lilongwe’s largest informal market, Lizulu Market. As Malawi’s largest city, and one of Africa’s most rapidly urbanising areas, this case study constitutes a window into a pressing challenge for environmental governance.
This essay is part of a case study for the project IFWEN: “Understanding Innovative Initiatives for Governing Food, Water and Energy Nexus in Cities” (a JPI Urban Europe and Belmont Forum Project). www.ifwen.org
The context of a larger role of local governments under rapid urbanization
Many developing countries, such as Malawi, have introduced a series of decentralisation initiatives in recent decades. Malawi’s political structure takes the form of a democratic republic with a parliamentary system of governance. Following three decades of highly centralised governance, a drive toward decentralisation with support from donors occurred in the late 1990s with an aim to bolster poverty reduction strategies. As with other donor-assisted initiatives, organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have strongly urged the central government to grant greater autonomy to local municipalities.
Plans to introduce further decentralisation measures have been frequently referenced in national plans such as the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy (MGDS) and Poverty Strategy Reduction Papers (PSRPs), introduced in 1998. The Malawi National Decentralisation Policy and the Local Government Act were key in delegating greater powers to local authorities. However, local governments, instead of being entirely independent actors, must commonly develop policy that fits within existing frameworks and broader development agendas set by the national government. Amendments to the Local Government Act made in 2010 resulted in the formation of 35 councils to be governed by local municipalities. Though city authorities do not have decision-making power over all sectors, they are granted the ability to legislate in some urban services, such as water provision and waste management. Urbanisation has occurred slowly across Malawi, with just 16.1% of its 17-million population classified as urban in 2018, but it is expected that this percentage will increase rapidly in the next decades. Lilongwe, which became Malawi’s capital in 1975, tends to continue its growth trajectory owing to its status as the nation’s political and economic hub.
Due to a lack of control over certain key sectors caused by limited decentralisation and low budgets for local services, many plans city governments draft are unlikely to be realised without significant support from the central government. Poorly financed urban services under unplanned urbanisation are key problems for many cities in the Global South. Though government masterplans suggest conserving nature is a key goal, these goals are mostly confined to paper and aren’t reflected in Lilongwe’s landscape where land allocated for green space becomes occupied by housing and commercial enterprises at apace. As a result of extensive deforestation and rapid unregulated urbanisation in recent years, the capacity of Lilongwe’s green infrastructure has diminished and continues to threaten the ecological sustainability of the urban area, making it vulnerable to disasters such as flooding, which will tend to increase in scale and frequency due to climatic changes. Insufficient waste management increases the risks of these events occurring, as a considerable proportion of the uncollected waste ends up in Lilongwe’s rivers and streams. However, in Malawi, and across the Global South more broadly, local governments continue to develop innovative initiatives with even limited resources.
Waste management in Lilongwe
Up to 700 tonnes of waste was generated daily in Lilongwe City during the early 2010s, though only around 30% was collected by public or private actors with the rest being disposed of by burning or dumping. Though efforts are being made to widen the provision of public waste collection, only the wealthiest neighbourhoods are currently serviced. As of 2015, Lilongwe’s waste management programme had just four garbage trucks in operation for a city approaching a million residents. A lack of human and financial capacity to enforce rules instated by the Environmental Management Act and the Lilongwe City Waste Management By-laws have been identified as key drivers of pollution in the city, as many new developments entail indiscriminate disposal of waste that is often eventually found in Lilongwe River. Pollution in Lilongwe River is one of the greatest concerns of Lilongwe City Council (LCC) due to its importance as the city’s main supply of water. Inherent inequities in the city’s waste management programme manifest in the unequal geography of harmful waste disposal sites, which are almost exclusively near the city’s poorest informal settlements where access to sufficient sanitation infrastructure is low.
Compost site before the river clean up started. Photo: OWI, 2017
To help address the city’s struggle with pollution and environmental degradation, a waste management scheme in Lizulu Market has been developed through a partnership between the local government and national and international organizations. The scheme is part of the Urban Natural Assets for Africa project, initially funded by the Swedish International Development Agency. Initial efforts were made to identify the most pressing environmental challenges facing natural assets in Lilongwe. Following this, waste was commonly identified by many participants as a key development challenge that poses issues for the city’s food, water, and energy sectors. A local waste management NGO, Our World International, won the bid to run the project and worked closely with ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability on the ground to implement the project. Overall, the initiative sought to partially resolve the pollution in Lilongwe River by introducing formal waste collection sites in order to prevent waste from the market being dumped into the river. Over 2,000 members of the community have been involved in the project’s capacity-building exercises and 22 volunteers were trained in composting. 15 tonnes of compost have been produced and workshops assisted 5,000 more on the benefits of sustainable waste management.
Challenges and opportunities for formal-informal collaboration
A key challenge for the waste management initiative was the formal-informal collaboration between LCC and the informal governance structure at the site. There were attempts to work with local government on the benefits of working with informality yet, during the initiative’s early stages, Lilongwe City Council wished to formalise the site as part of a broader project to reclaim land outside of official planning documentation. Given the informal nature of much urban service provision in Lilongwe, any initiative seeking to innovate within these sectors must engage with informality. As opposed to eradicating informality to accommodate and implement expensive infrastructural projects, it can be more cost-effective for governments to work within these informal initiatives which can instead be better incorporated into existing networks benefiting from the existing organizational capacity. This is what the initiative set out to achieve, yet it was challenged by Lizulu’s complex informal governance system.
Balancing informal and formal structures of governance was a demanding task in Lizulu, but informal organizations can be effective. In contrast to the common perception of informal governance as disorganised, each market section has its own representative that sits on a broader market committee which is associated with the Lilongwe Urban Vendors Association (LUVA). The project team liaised with LUVA to discuss issues relating to informal markets and to promote collaboration between volunteers and market vendors. Composting profits were partly redirected toward the market committee as a method of ensuring the future sustainability of the initiative.
Many composting projects are situated in places where communities live due to the strong community ties that often already exist in neighbourhoods. The story in the informal market was very different in that it is a place of work rather than residence, so it was essential that composting would generate income for the people involved. Some of the volunteers wanted the compost for their plots of urban agriculture, but the project needed to market the compost to a broader client base, to generate a surplus of compost. However, the market for compost remained limited and few buyers existed. This perhaps indicates that continued engagement outside of those in the immediate vicinity of the project, e.g., those involved in urban agriculture, will be necessary. The local government can also purchase some of the compost to use in its own agricultural land, as this would create incentives to avoid waste being disposed of in the river, which presents much higher financial costs in terms of waste removal and increase in flood risk.
The benefits of the initiative will be revealed not only through the success of the project, but through the lessons learned by the stakeholders involved which could help develop initiatives that are financially viable yet come with tangible impacts which are equitably distributed. Considering the notably small-scale nature of the project, it was unrealistic to anticipate that a small group of volunteers could clean up the city’s biggest market. Consequently, greater integration between sectors could increase the chances of success of the project. For example, urban agriculture is important for livelihoods in Lilongwe – particularly in informal settlements on the city’s periphery where many of the project volunteers were recruited from. Closely integrating composting initiatives with the city’s agricultural sector would bring incentives for further participation of volunteers. This could occur through more closely engaging strongly established informal market exchanges which have emerged through many years of urban agriculture with these recent advances in composting activity.
An initial glance may assume informality implies unsophistication. As Lizulu demonstrates, informal governance structures are complex and involve intricate relationships not dissimilar from ‘traditional’ conceptions of ‘formal’ governance systems. The case demonstrates that, when working in cities within developing countries, it is critical that informality is taken into consideration in any planning and policymaking domains, at least as a starting point. Even where there is social take-up, the extent to which a project can achieve its objectives is limited if the formal structures of governments do not learn to establish connections and collaborate with existing informal structures. By considering these embedded contextualities both throughout and prior to project initiation, issues relating to informality could be mitigated by incorporating this variable during the planning and collaborative process. This co-production planning philosophy can help ensure that environmental initiatives are equitably designed and executed to suit the needs of the communities that they seek to serve.
Andrew Hughes and Jose A. Puppim de Oliveira Sheffield and São Paulo
Jose A. Puppim de Oliveira is a faculty member at FGV (Fundação Getulio Vargas), Brazil. He is also Visiting Chair Professor at the Institute for Global Public Policy (IGPP), Fudan University, China. His experience comprises research, consultancy, and policy work in more than 20 countries in all continents.
Waste Lilongwe river: Beck, A. & Cruxen, I. A. (2019). New uses for old rivers: Rediscovering urban waterways. Projections, (14). https://projections.pubpub.org/qctest
We live in an era where integrating diverse nature and diverse human experiences is crucial for cities to better plan their future sustainability. To do this we’ll need better studies of how people perceive and value urban nature.
Many cities around the world are planning to enhance urban nature. For example, many global cities have promised to plant a million trees, such as Shanghai, New York, Singapore, and Miami, and there are large tree planting initiatives in Uttar Pradesh, Ethiopia, and China, among many others.
But most of these plans to enhance urban nature usually rely on the premise of technical expertise, such as planting the right amount and types of trees, in the right places, to provide the desired benefits.
However, plans to enhance urban nature will not be successful unless these plans reflect what is important to the diverse range of people living in cities today. To understand these needs, we must first understand how the community perceives urban nature and its benefits.
Here we discuss what it means to consider diversity in people’s perceptions of urban nature, with a focus on urban forests and urban trees. We refer to diversity in four ways: 1) the diversity of urban nature places, 2) the diversity of urban people, 3) the diversity of how people perceive things, and 4) the diversity of how we study this perception. This is based on our own recently published research.
We recognize that our lens is tree-centred. We do not talk about other important aspects of urban nature, such as wildlife, gardens, and water bodies. However, this lens provides us with an opportunity to speak more concretely about how people perceive this key element of urban nature, one that is constantly being planted, removed, and distributed in our cities. Ultimately, people perceive nature as concrete elements or landscapes: a tree, a park with trees, a forest, rather than as an abstract concept: a green space, the green infrastructure of the city, the canopy cover of an urban area.
Before we continue, we want to clarify that we write about the science of studying diversity in people’s perception of urban nature, and not its politics. We are interested in understanding how these perceptions are studied by considering diversity. We are cognizant that our research has political implications, some of which we discuss, but our intention is not to discuss diversity in political terms, such as the political issues behind trees, biodiversity, native vs. non-native nature, immigration, ethnicity, and gender, among other aspects.
What do we mean by diversity in people’s perceptions?
Diversity is integral to people’s perceptions of nature as it refers to the diverse experiences people have with urban nature. Perceptions can tell us how people process the information from these experiences. Processing this information is key to activating the benefits we may derive from urban nature, such as reduced stress levels after spending time in a treed area.
A useful way to understand the diversity of how people perceive things is to distinguish more abstract and stable perceptions, such as values (what people consider important) and beliefs (what people think is true), from less abstract and more variable perceptions, such as attitudes (people’s disposition towards something) and preferences (whether people like something). Let us illustrate this.
If we ask you, “How do you perceive the tree in front of your window?”, you may tell us you don’t like that type of tree, or that you really love its fall colours, or that you used to climb it as a child. But if we ask you “How do you perceive all the trees in your city?”, this may activate thoughts about trees being good, or the city being better with trees. The first set of responses are more concrete, more variable perceptions, and the second are more abstract, more stable perceptions. Less abstract perceptions usually tap into the notion of what we like in a particular situation, or people’s attitudes and preferences. More abstract perceptions usually tap into the notion of how important trees are in general, or people’s values and beliefs.
This shows how there is not one way of perceiving something; there are many. It also illustrates how difficult it is to simplify people’s perceptions or generalize all perceptions across all people and all situations. The previous example is a theorized and ideal situation with direct, simplified answers. In reality, a person responding to these questions may mix different types of perceptions depending on what they want to talk about. Calling perceptions values, beliefs, attitudes, or preferences is how to codify things for research purposes, but people do not think in such strict cognitive codes.
Diversity can also refer to the various forms of urban nature. Different places with trees may prompt very different human meanings and are likely to be associated with very different perceptions. Trees are found in parks, streets, backyards, in natural forested areas, and sometimes on rooftops (Figure 1). If we ask someone how they perceive a street tree, a tree surrounded by other trees, a tree that they planted, or a fruit tree, the answer may be different. Again, this is how we codify nature for research purposes: people may perceive things in different ways, such as perceiving the landscape more than its elements, or vice versa.
Figure 1: Different contexts in which urban trees are perceived, including (from top left-hand clockwise): a public park in Hồ Chí Minh, Vietnam; gardens in Melbourne, Australia; a pedestrian walk with trees and fruit trees in an intersection in Toronto, Canada (photos by ®COrdóñez and ®JKowalski)
Diversity also refers to the diversity of who is perceiving (Figure 2). Many cities are diverse in their people, with many ages, genders, sexualities, abilities, cultural identities, nationalities, ethnicities, and religions living next to each other. Many Western cities today are ethnically and culturally diverse mostly due to recent immigration. For example, Toronto boasts a foreign-born population of about 50%. In Australia, 25% of the population is foreign-born. In many European cities, this is about 15-20% or higher. Read an interesting post in TNOC about urban nature in multicultural cities. So, to study people’s perceptions, we can choose to recruit people into studies who represent certain populations that represent certain age, gender, cultural background, or other minority demographics, or sample with an intention to generalize across majority demographics.
Figure 2: Different people perceiving and capturing their perceptions in different ways, including (from top left-hand clockwise): a public park in Toronto, Canada; a large forest in Köln, Germany; a group talk about trees, in Pereira, Colombia; people filling personal diaries about trees in Cali, Pereira, and Bogotá, Colombia (photos by ®COrdóñez and ®JKowalski)
Finally, diversity can also refer to the ways we study people’s perceptions. Decisions about which perceptions to measure, what is being perceived, where to measure these perceptions, and who to study, are fundamental to how we study things. We can use techniques such as surveys, photos, field trips, personal diaries, and group conversations to capture empirical data, as well as recruit different amounts of people, and analyse answers in different ways depending on what we want out of the data.
What the literature says
We asked the following questions of the literature on people’s perceptions of urban forests or urban trees:
What urban forest places are investigated?
What methods of data collection are used?
How are people sampled and recruited?
What types of urban forest perception responses are examined and how is the diversity of responses treated?
We collected 178 articles using academic databases by using systematic, replicable searches. All these studies were relevant to people’s perceptions of urban forests or urban trees. To analyze the articles in the collection we developed a classification mechanism to identify patterns on how diversity was treated across studies. We also analyzed the text of the articles using text analysis algorithms with the goal of generating semantic maps based on the relationship of terms and concepts in the articles.
Figure 3 provides an overview of the content of the articles. Most studies took place in the US, although there are studies around the world. Most studies have been published recently. Most studies focused on asking people about what they thought about trees in general or in a park context. Most studies used surveys with predetermined answers that pre-defined what people were supposed to perceive. Few of the studies examined perceptions in more than one city or country. While most studies considered demographics and reported demographic profiles, these considerations were restricted to gender and limited to the differences between (cis) men and women. Only a fraction of the studies examined people in the minority of the countries and regions involved, such as ethnic, racial, gender, and age (e.g., seniors, children) minorities. And finally, most studies only focused on people’s positive perceptions or perceptions of benefits.
Figure 3: Characteristics of the studies found, including countries and cities where they took place, year of publication, research approach, context of investigation, data collection technique, geographical unit – such as one city, one country, or many –, and whether ethnic and demographic diversity were considered (images reproduced with some changes from the original article by the authors)
What it means
Overall, our results demonstrated that the current research on people’s perceptions of urban forests and urban trees does not consider diversity adequately. It is narrowly focused on certain perceptions, one method to capture these perceptions, and minimal considerations of demographic diversity.
Deriving practical implications, such as planting the right type of tree in the right place to provide the right benefits, has been a primary motivation of the research on people’s perception of urban nature. However, our analyses show that using the existing evidence to apply actions broadly across all people and situations can have profoundly negative impacts for people and urban nature. For instance, the studies we reviewed investigated people’s perceptions of trees in different situations, both as concrete elements (specific trees in specific streets or parks) and as abstract notions (all the trees in a city). These different contexts mean that people are perceiving different things, making it very difficult to generalize how people give meaning to trees in cities and deduce what is the best tree to plant in which situation. Many of the studies we examined were motivated either by including trees in urban planning and design or by identifying how people assumed to represent the majority give meaning to urban trees, rather than by coming up with the best way of dealing with urban trees in specific situations and by specific people.
A lot of research in urban nature today is focused on how unevenly nature is distributed across the city. While this can help us understand issues of resource distribution and where to place management efforts, a complementary, but often overlooked, aspect of this is giving people a platform to express how they think, feel, and behave with urban nature. Failing to recognize these diverse ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, can be detrimental to our plans of enhancing urban nature. For example, failing to recognize how different people perceive urban nature may potentially replicate structural racism and may perpetuate normative and inaccurate beliefs about how people perceive the worth of urban nature. In other words, there is a risk that the way we study people’s perception of urban nature today can (re)produce colonial Anglo- and hetero-normative, as well as ableist perspectives in the ways we manage urban nature. It is not just remiss of researchers to overlook this diversity; it risks reproducing non-diverse and unjust forms of domination that exclude nature and people in cities.
Recently, many studies have criticized the literature on people’s perception of urban trees. For instance, some authors have conceptually argued against notions such as:
People may perceive urban trees in similar ways, but some of these perceptions may also depend on the situation or the person.
Knowledge of the benefits of trees may change some, but not all, perceptions since many perceptions are more fundamental and abstract and developed through lived experiences.
Not everybody holds normative positive beliefs about urban trees.
People value urban trees for many different reasons including aesthetic, cultural, ecological, economic, environmental, health, psychological, and social reasons.
The public is always a reliable source to understand what makes urban trees important to urban communities.
We also think that a deeper examination of diversity in people’s perceptions about urban nature is needed. We live in an era where integrating diverse nature and diverse human experiences is crucial for cities to better plan their future sustainability. Understanding such diversity is a necessary step in connecting humans to the natural environment and facilitating biodiversity planning and decision-making. Such information can inform better approaches to meet community needs and promote the wide range of benefits from urban nature.
Efforts to advance this research should include: 1) stronger interdisciplinary collaborations between the natural and social sciences; 2) a clear definition of what is being perceived, how it is being perceived, and who is perceiving it; and 3) addressing the diversity of perceptions, places, people, and methods with intention. Diversity should become a core goal of researchers and practitioners alike.
Camilo Ordóñez Barona and Janina M. Kowalski Melbourne and Toronto
Many thanks to our colleagues Drs. Jason Byrne (University of Tasmania), Dave Kendal (University of Tasmania), Kathleen Wolf (University of Washington), and Tenley Conway (University of Toronto) for their support and co-authorship of the original work referenced in this article.
Janina Kowalski (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the governance, accessibility, and human-nature interactions of urban food trees.
The vision is that all residents and visitors of southeast Michigan — people of all ages, backgrounds, ethnicities, abilities, and interests — are connected to these water resources, feel welcome on its trails, and share in the benefits and opportunities offered by access to water.
The portion of the Great Lakes basin ecosystem stretching from southern Lake Huron through western Lake Erie is a unique urban refugium where the tapestry of life has been woven with elegance, where the music of life has been rehearsed to perfection for thousands of years, where nature’s colors are most vibrant and engaging, where time is measured in seasons, and where outdoor recreation takes center stage. This region, better known as Metropolitan Detroit, is where the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan and many partners are knitting together 160 miles of greenways and 156 miles of water trails to become The Great Lakes Way.
Great Lakes Way Vision Map. Credit: Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan
Metropolitan Detroit is situated in the heart of the Great Lakes which represent one-fifth of the standing freshwater on the Earth’s surface. This Great Lakes Way is unique for its continentally significant natural resources and history, including Native American, Underground Railroad, shipbuilding, automobile manufacturing, Arsenal of Democracy, and more. Along The Great Lakes Way, you will find one of the largest freshwater deltas in the world – the St. Clair Flats, a Wetland of International Importance designated under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, four Important Bird Areas designated by the National Audubon Society, the only international heritage river system in the world – the Detroit River, the only international wildlife refuge in North America, a Regional Shorebird Reserve designated under the Western Hemispheric Shorebird Reserve Network, one of the three best places of watch hawk migrations in the United States, one of the top ten metropolitan areas for waterfowl hunting in the United States identified by Ducks Unlimited, and an internationally renowned sport fishery that attracts tournaments offering $500,000-$1.5 million in prize money. The Great Lakes Way traverses along or through 30 different federal lands, including a national park, 15 state parks or state game/wildlife areas, two metro parks, and 90 county and city parks. Together, these natural resources and recreational, historical, and cultural amenities provide a compelling outdoor experience for nearly seven million people living in the watershed and millions more annual visitors, an urban experience that is truly unique.
Building on the foundation of the GreenWays Initiative
For too long, many cities in Metropolitan Detroit could not make the match requirements on federal and state greenways grants. These communities simply did not have the discretionary funds, or parks and outdoor recreation did not rank high enough to get the necessary municipal funding to make the match on greenway grants. The solution was for the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan to raise this money from the private and foundation sectors so that more greenway trails could be constructed, and subsequently realize their many benefits. In 2001, the Community Foundation raised $25 million to create its GreenWays Initiative – the first of its kind in the nation – to help make match requirements on greenway grants. Over time, this initiative grew to $35 million and leveraged $150 million to build more than 100 miles of greenway trails. Standing on the shoulders of its GreenWays Initiative, the Community Foundation is now championing The Great Lakes Way.
Status of The Great Lakes Way
The vision is that all residents and visitors of southeast Michigan – people of all ages, backgrounds, ethnicities, abilities, and interests – are connected to these water resources, feel welcome on its trails, and share in the benefits and opportunities offered by access to water. All the water trails or blueways are complete and available for use. Preliminary mapping of greenways found that 64% are completed or partially complete, 25% are planned, and 11% remain to be completed. Through this initiative, the Community Foundation will be amplifying the important work of local trail organizations so that they don’t lose their identity and will be ensuring that they benefit from being part of a larger trail system. The Great Lakes Way will build on existing assets and programs, ensure broad equity, and put the Great Lakes Way into the consciousness of residents and visitors to the region.
No. 1 Riverwalk in the United States
As recently as the early-2000s, a considerable portion of Detroit’s waterfront land between the MacArthur Bridge to the island park called Belle Isle and the Ambassador Bridge to Canada was either abandoned buildings, underutilized street parking lots, material storage piles, or cement silos that prohibited access to the Detroit River. For over a century, city planners identified the highest and best use of this land to be “industrial” because of obvious revenue returns. Detroit was an industrial town, and it had a working riverfront that supported industry and commerce.
However, times had changed. There were fewer people and industries, and much underutilized and undervalued riverfront land. Detroiters had long lost their connection to the Detroit River, and they wanted to improve public access to it and redevelop it in a fashion that would improve quality of life, catalyze economic development, and help change the perception of Detroit from that of a Rust Belt city to one that is actively engaged in sustainable redevelopment.
Out of this growing public interest to reconnect to the Detroit River, the ecological recovery of the Detroit River, and strong public and private support to revitalize Detroit, the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy was created in 2003 to transform Detroit’s international riverfront – the face of the city – into a beautiful, exciting, safe, accessible world-class gathering place for all. Nearly three million annual visitors are already using it and, in each of the last two years, the Detroit RiverWalk was named the No. 1 riverwalk in the United States by USA Today. In many respects, the Detroit RiverWalk is a model for The Great Lakes Way.
Benefits
By any measure, the benefits of The Great Lakes way are impressive. Benefits include:
promoting outdoor recreation – in Michigan, $26.6 billion is spent annually on outdoor recreation;
catalyzing economic development – in its first ten years, the Detroit RiverWalk alone spurred approximately $1 billion of public- and private-sector investment;
increasing adjacent property values – studies have found that homes close to a greenway have an approximately 20% higher mean sales price;
connecting young people with nature – 80% of all people in the United States live in urban areas and many are still disconnected from nature;
furthering conservation through habitat rehabilitation and enhancement – green infrastructure, pollinator gardens, stopover habitats for birds, and spawning and nursery habitats for fishes – and creating wildlife corridors;
connecting diverse people to each other and building community.
International Connections
Windsor, Ontario, Canada and Detroit, Michigan, USA are Great Lakes border cities on the Detroit River. Windsor has a long history of greenways dating back to the 1960s. In many respects, Windsor’s waterfront greenways were an inspiration to Detroit’s greenways that gained traction in the 1990s.
With the announcement of a new border crossing between Windsor and Detroit – the Gordie Howe International Bridge – greenway stakeholders came together to envision cross-border linkages and released a U.S.-Canada Greenways Vision Map in 2016 to connect emerging greenways. In response to this 2016 vision map, the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority committed to including a dedicated bicycle and pedestrian lane on the new Gordie Howe International Bridge, projected to be completed in 2024.
Gordie Howe International Bridge with dedicated pedestrian and bicycle lane. Credit: Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority.
Detroit’s greenways are part of Michigan’s Iron Belle Trail that extends more than 2,000 miles from Ironwood, Michigan, located at the far western tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to Belle Isle State Park in Detroit and The Great Lakes Way. Windsor’s greenways connect to Essex County greenways and are part of the Great Lakes Waterfront Trail that stretches along the shores of Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, Lake St. Clair, Lake Huron, and the St. Clair, Detroit, Niagara, and St. Lawrence Rivers from the Quebec border to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario – a total of 1,865 miles. The Great Lakes Waterfront Trail is also connected to the Trans Canada Trail that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic Oceans – nearly 17,500 miles. It is the longest recreational, multi-use, trail network in the world.
When the new Gordie Howe International Bridge opens in 2024, these four trail systems will be connected, providing binational outdoor recreational experiences unparalleled in North America. Partners are now exploring joint outreach, promotion, and binational experiences.
Next Steps
The next steps for The Great Lakes Way include:
engaging communities and putting The Great Lakes Way into the consciousness of residents and visitors via marketing, communications, community engagement, and outreach strategies;
engaging with and providing support to under-served communities;
building support and seeking additional partners;
raising necessary funds to sustain the initiative; and
strengthening transboundary collaboration on trails and exploring national and/or state trail designations to raise its profile and help ensure long-term sustainability.
Pollinator conservation cannot be approached in isolation. All cities have something to offer. It is essential to establish partnerships and strong networks and to engage all citizens because this collaboration will lead to the success and lasting effect of pollinator initiatives and strategies.
Biodiversity faces increasing challenges with the development of cities. Land-use change, intensive agricultural management and pesticide use, invasive alien species, diseases, climate change, and environmental pollution are threatening bees and other pollinators. Helping them to survive means ensuring food security and maintaining healthy ecosystems.
Nature conservation and the improvement of urban areas are offering a variety of ecosystem services that support the transition to healthier, more adaptable, and resilient cities. We are already acquainted with terms like ecosystem-based adaptation, climate change, green-blue infrastructure, or nature-based solutions, all of which understand essentials for rich biodiversity including pollinator species.
However, in order to boost action throughout cities, it is necessary to re-establish the relationship between people and nature in urban areas in order to raise awareness of the importance of biodiversity, particularly, pollinators. That was the topic discussed at a TNOC Festival Seed Session “Pollinator-friendly cities – what are the cities doing to protect biodiversity?” presented by the Landscape Laboratory (Guimarães, Portugal). The final result was a vivid colour palette full of ideas (see the figure below). Cities such as Northumbria (Great Britain), Melbourne (Australia), Bristol (England), Turin (Italy), Zurich (Switzerland), Newcastle (England), and Guimarães (Portugal) brought the mural to life with proposals and suggestions about how pollinators are being protected in these cities and beyond.
There have been several suggestions, such as: (i) Bed & Breakfasts & Biodiversity (B&Bs) – for birds, bees, and butterflies endangered by urban expansion, where pollinator tunnels or highways are built to connect “B & Bs” or “pollen booths” to rest and recover; (ii) butterfly gardens monitored by citizens in “community spaces” (e.g., mental health clinics, community gardens, family houses, among others); (iii) installation of informative panels explaining why particular places should be protected; (iv) changing the frequency and timing of weed removal to provide refuge and food for pollinators; or (v) leaving bare earth for ground-nesting solitary bees, who prefer to nest in bare, firm, and sloped ground.
Wall of ideas – what is your city doing to protect pollinators? Photo: Guimarães Landscape Laboratory
Pollinator conservation cannot be approached in isolation. All cities have something to offer. It is essential to establish partnerships and strong networks and to engage all citizens because this collaboration will lead to the success and lasting effect of pollinator initiatives and strategies.
The message is simple: cities should collaborate, exchange experiences and the best practices, and support one another in order to achieve the common goal: to protect biodiversity, in particular pollinators, and provide a greener and more colourful legacy for future generations.
Guilherme Sequeira Braga is an Environmental Education Technician at the Landscape Laboratory of Guimarães. Degree in Biology and Master in Ecology, Environment and Territory from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto.
Ana Pinheira and Guilherme Sequeira Braga Guimarães
Museums and collections surely served to materialise the appropriation of history, englobed within Britannia’s magnanimous fold. One almost expects Tarzan to come swinging from the roof trusses, the archetypical English gentleman who whitewashes the colonial-industrial complex with the image of unsullied nature.
At the end of November 2021, spending a few days in London, I paid a far too brief visit to the Natural History Museum. I had devoted the daylight hours to a survey of the skyscrapers burgeoning in the City’s business district and got to the museum just as the pale sun was slipping under the horizon, with the wannest of autumnal curtain calls. Just a first peek, so to speak, to get a feel for the place … in the hope that some future, hypothetical opportunity would offer up a more ample occasion for perusing its collections. The kind of visit-on-the-run where the harried contemplation of portions of exhibits has to be executed on the double.
Charles Darwin and Guy the gorilla, the one in marble, the other stuffed. Photo: Joseph Rabie
One enters through Hintze Hall, the museum’s architectural centrepiece, a Gothic Revival-cum-Romanesque cathedralesque space under a skylit, metal-arched roof, attesting to its construction in the nineteenth century. The deep alcoves on both sides, the high-flung first-floor balconies, are populated with the display of a host of animals, vegetables, and minerals – their remnants, to be more precise—spectacular highlights from the museum’s collections. The whole is riotously ornamental, the hall’s ceiling panelled with gilded illustrations of plants; the entire building’s interior and exterior abounding with terracotta sculptures of manifold forms of life, animals particularly, existent or extinct. The skeleton of a blue whale hangs from the roof, the bones gently bathed in blue light, in case you don’t get the point.
That the museum should be a cathedral—a cathedral to nature—was at the heart of its founder, Sir Richard Owen’s, intent. And indeed, at the further end of Hintze Hall, where one might have expected an altar, a broad flight of steps goes upwards to a landing; and where might have officiated a priest, a statue of Charles Darwin presides, holding a watchful eye over the scientific corpus in which he played such an instrumental role. A reminiscence, vaguely so, of bearded God painted on some Baroque ceiling, ensconced in a cloud, overseeing the world.
Charles Darwin and Guy the gorilla, the one in marble, the other stuffed). Photo: Joseph Rabie
Designed by Alfred Waterhouse, who was the mastermind behind its elaborate, naturalistic ornamentation, the museum’s Historicist style is characteristic of Victorian architecture. In incorporating previous styles, one wonders whether the British Empire endeavoured to take possession of time, just as it had so ruthlessly gone about taking possession of space[i]. As such, museums and collections surely served to materialise the appropriation of history, englobed within Britannia’s magnanimous fold. One almost expects Tarzan to come swinging from the roof trusses, the archetypical English gentleman who whitewashes the colonial-industrial complex with the image of unsullied nature.
For early twentieth-century Modernist architects, such stylistic pastiche was anathema. Architecture should express the honest authenticity of contemporary materials and techniques, no frills attached. “Form follows function,” said the American architect, Louis Sullivan (who was a brilliant ornamentalist, it might be added). It became a rallying cry; ornament had to go; it was aesthetically reprehensible—a kindred cry was “Ornament is crime!” This was Austrian architect Adolf Loos, for whom decoration incarnated the irrational pulsions of primitive societies, to which Modernity’s antidote was to be the scientifically enlightened blank wall.
Of course, form follows function—how could it be otherwise, singularly when one contemplates the creatures on display in this museum? If it were not so, how might an eagle fly in the sky, a salmon swim in the sea, a monkey swing through the trees?
And as far as ornamentation goes, examination of the myriad forms that life has taken—the exquisitely patterned plumage of birds; the fulgurant colours and shapes of flowers, and their fragrance too; the elegantly exoskeletal workings of insects—one is forced to recognise that decoration forms an axiomatic part of nature, that could never be dismissed as something superfluous. One has the distinct impression—looking at the fantastical, imaginative, ornamentally beautiful forms taken by nature—that however seriously natural selection managed evolution, seriously playful forces were at work. Forces that never gave a damn about adhering to some “natural” tenet in which everything is to be determined by rational necessity. As if reducing life’s forms to explanations based purely upon survival of the fittest, or upon guaranteeing the reproductive cycle, somehow don’t provide closure.
***
Going up the stairs, one comes face to face with the statue of Charles Darwin, seated with his coat splayed over his knees, surveying pensively (or so it seems) the ongoing repercussions of the revolution in the natural sciences that he launched in the nineteenth century.
Visitors from all over the world cluster around him, some turn their backs and take selfies, contorting their bodies so as to get the great man to gaze over their shoulders. And on occasion, wedding ceremonies take place in his presence, since Hintze Hall is available for hire for festive occasions[ii]. A publicity photograph on the museum’s website shows a table for two, presumably the bride and groom, placed literally at Darwin’s feet. One wonders whether this is to get his unction in favouring the perfect evolutionary outcome for their match.
Continuing up the stairs to the right of the statue, and turning left on the balcony, one comes face to face with a large hominoid, hairless chest jutting over a black-furred belly, eyes under protruding brow hidden in the shadows, mouth cast in a solemn scowl. A label tells us that this is (was) Guy the gorilla, London Zoo’s best-loved resident, a western lowland gorilla who lived from 1946 to 1978, immortalised at the taxidermist’s hand, and relocated to the museum.
Guy the gorilla was named for Guy Fawkes, for no other reason than that he happened to arrive at the London Zoo on November 5th, the anniversary of the failed Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. An infant, he had been abducted from gorilla society in the Cameroons tropical forest, at the demand of the Paris Zoo. He finally ended up in London, after being swapped for a tiger.
Guy is remembered for a morose demeanour, and the way he would fling himself around his small cage. Among zoo-goers, he became an all-time favourite, charmed by the contrast between his great size and peaceable nature (when he was not protesting against the size of his living quarters). He was known to carefully examine birds that alighted on his hands[iii].
Guy died from a heart attack while undergoing dental surgery, his teeth ruined by visitors who showered him with sweets. And supreme indignity, his epidermal envelope was taxidermized for display in a glass cabinet, body contorted into a pose for an everlasting instant of posterity. How would you feel, morally, if a flesh and bloodless, stuffed Charles Darwin—rather than a dignified representation in stone—greeted you as you came up the stairs?
Confiscating the existence of the likes of Guy the gorilla is the vocation of zookeepers the world over: incarcerate, enslave, put on display like an object, take possession of. As a form of subjugation, it is part of the toolbox of colonial exploitation, pillage, and servitude inflicted for the gratification of the masses back home. Guy may have been the darling of zoo-goers, the star who made the show pay. All he was “offered” was meaningless fame in exchange.
***
Many years ago, on a previous visit to London, on Saturday, 22nd September 2007 (to be precise), I encountered a crowd of gorilla-suited humans running across the Millennium Bridge. This was the annual Great Gorilla Run, an event organised to raise funds for gorilla conservation. Unknowingly, or perhaps knowingly, they were doing penance for how London had martyrized Guy.
[i] See article describing Alfred Waterhouse’s architectural project on the museum website, with drawings and photographs showing examples of the building’s elaborate ornamentation. And another article about the ceiling of Hintze Hall.
A gray shadow, a streak of energized air in a faint vibrating gray which I barely noticed in the split second I perceived it, and then the impact, the splintering sound, the noise of thick feathers brutally brushed back and scrunched up, the awareness of a sudden resistance to the rotation of my bike’s front wheel.
I wasn’t in a good shape when I broke the sparrowhawk’s wings.
A gray sky over Berlin, a cold eastern wind. An early March day that never had properly lighted up and already started to sink back into dawn. No rain, no snow, but this dry and uncomfortable wind. I was cycling back towards my flat. The gusts came from the North-East and hit me from the right side. They had blown over the great gray Northern European plain, rushing along all the way under the same gray and somber sky, from Kiyv, from the Dnieper floodplain, where now was a war. A war, black smoke rising, shells falling and bursting, under this same bleak cloud cover which stretched far over flat plains.
The wind broke through my clothes on the bicycle and made me shiver. I was slowly pedalling back from the COVID test station, hoping that I finally tested negative and could resume life with others. It was the third time I’ve had a Coronavirus infection this winter. They had come one after the other, like grey clouds rolling in from a cold sky. I progressed slowly on the bike, trying to make the necessary effort as less fatiguing for my muscles as I could. I hoped to get a test clearance, as I had to teach my seminar later, but I still felt weak and sickly. I had to breathe hard when I tried to accelerate the bike to more than pedestrian speed.
Then came the crash. A gray shadow, a streak of energized air in a faint vibrating gray which I barely noticed in the split second I perceived it, and then the impact, the splintering sound, the noise of thick feathers brutally brushed back and scrunched up, the awareness of a sudden resistance to the rotation of my bike’s front wheel. I stopped violently, bending over forward, but managed to halt.
I looked around me. There were two bird’s bodies lying in the middle of the crossing between two side streets, two heaps of gray-brownish feathers, two beings totally strange to the tarmac they were suddenly thrown on, the gale ruffling their feathers in gusts. I did not understand immediately what had happened. I did not see clearly. I saw the feathers and knew “bird”, I saw them lying on the street and thought “hurt”, and I also thought “beauty” — a shining kind of beauty by the way these beings were misplaced on the coarse asphalt. Two feathery heaps burning holes into the shell of reality, making me glimpse what is behind it. Those presences were the truth. And they were in a terrible state.
Photo: Andreas Weber
After my perception had adapted, I understood that the brown-grayish feathery thing close to me was a sparrow. It was dead. I saw the soft, gray and slightly pinkish lid over the eye which pointed to the sky, like a delicate veil which had shuttered the sight in the moment of impact, forever. I looked further down the street to the other bird. I only then realized what had happened. The second lump of feathers had somewhat reorganized and now sat flat on the street, looking at me.
It was a sparrowhawk. I understood it immediately now I saw her sitting. A female sparrowhawk. The plumage on her breast shone in a pattern of alternating black-and-white stripes. The upper side was tawny, dark brown on lighter brown and grey. She was in the middle of the road and looked at me. She held me in her gaze, in the radiant beam of two orange eyes which fixated me on the tarmac as though I was her prey — and not was she mine.
Photo: Andreas Weber
I pushed my bicycle to the post of a streetlamp at the curb. A car rolled into the intersection, and I wildly waved my arms in order to make them avoid the bird squatting in their way. The sparrowhawk still looked at me. So far, she had been motionless, hunkering low on the street. That she was alive was only manifest in her eyes, but there her aliveness was intense. The orange glow sent a beam of power into the world and made it glisten with every turn of her head. I was in its center, held in focus by an ancestral power. That was the most prominent experience: I was held in this power. And, then again, the bird sat flat on the street, clearly injured, probably in great pain, helpless.
My fingers shook when I fumbled the phone out of my pocket. I typed “Sparrowhawk injured emergency” in the search box and added “Nabu”, the acronym for “Naturschutzbund”, the name of a major nature protection NGO. I remembered that they run a wildlife sanctuary in the capital. I already had dropped a bird there: My son once brought a tiny warbler chick home from his way back from school. When I opened the door, he said: “Bad news. I have a little bird which fell out of the nest.” We gave the nestling the wrong food first, so the staff scolded us, but they managed to nurse the chick back to health.
“I have injured a sparrowhawk”, I told the lady who picked up the phone. Another lady, I thought, being up to doing tedious volunteer work with birds.
“Does she have a ring?” she asked.
“I can’t see. She is sitting on her belly.”
“Can you catch her?”
“Catch?”
“I can’t come to get her.”
I looked at the bird. Right now, she started to flutter. Her wings made a whirring and flapping noise and she slid some feet across the tarmac.
“I don’t know”, I said. “She is trying to escape.”
“If you manage, it would be great. If you don’t, then it is just as it is. There are many more migrant sparrowhawks from the northeast right now in Berlin”, the lady said.
Migrants from the northeast, I thought. Raptors arriving from Russia, from the Baltics, from Ukraine. In my imagination, I heard the splintering noise again when the birds had crashed into the whirring spokes of my front wheel. I felt nauseous. Bombs dropped in the northeast, splintering wood, shredding concrete, tearing up bodies. The sparrowhawk possibly had come from those regions. Then he crashed into my bike, in a scene of violence. Violence, suddenly exploding around her, around me. The dead sparrow on the street. The devastated hawk. My hands still slightly shook. I would not leave her here.
“Ok”, I said.
“Bring her to the university vet clinic if you manage to catch her. They treat injured wild birds.”
The sparrowhawk started to flutter again. Another car passed by, slowly curving around the bird who was now anxious to get away, but unable to fly. Two young men approached, as out of nowhere, and walked by, slowly, staring at the bird.
“Do you live nearby?” I asked the older one.
“Yeah. We’re just about to move house.”
“Could you help me catch the bird?”
“Oh sure. What bird is it?”
“A sparrowhawk.”
“A what?”
Obviously, he had never heard the name — the name of the second-frequent raptor on the Eurasian landmass, after the buzzard. But he was eager to help, as was his mate. They dashed off and came back moments later with a large moving box. In the meantime, I had searched for the location of a nearby sharing car on my phone. When the two young men were there again and I looked up, excited, and vibrating with the faint hope that this might not end with the death of this bird of prey, the sparrowhawk was gone.
“Where is she?” the older guy shouted.
“I think under that car”, I said, getting down on my knees, staring into the dark interstice between metal and road.
But there was no bird.
Sparrowhawks are in many respects lesser goshawks — a miniature version of their bigger cousins, just as buzzards are smaller-scale editions of golden eagles. Just like some model trains which both come in scale 0 and the smaller 00, the pairs look pretty similar, apart from their body size. Sparrowhawks and goshawks also have pretty close habits of hunting. Both are originally forest dwellers and are capable of maneuvering the dense stands of trees with incredibly speedy flight. Birds process on average three times more pictures per second than we do — for sparrowhawks a Netflix episode would be composed of a series of stills – and so are able to avoid crashing into obstacles.
At least the goshawk mostly manages — the smaller sparrowhawk is known for sometimes giving away security for a bigger impact of the attack. In Berlin, the Nabu folk know that they occasionally smash into glass fronts while they persecute small songbirds. They crash into cars — or bicycles. Human-made obstacles are far more destructive than naturally grown ones — like trees or foliage. Human-made objects are in the way of the sparrowhawks’ prime hunting asset: brutal speed and the willingness to risk it all.
The raptor usually waits hidden in a bush and then suddenly sweeps out of it, accelerates with frantic beats of his wedge-shaped wings up to 50 kilometers per hour, mostly only two or three feet overground, and then tries to capture the small songbird she had observed and singled out. All this happens so swiftly, in such a casually determined way, that most people rarely or never see a sparrowhawk. It is as though the bird’s body while hunting completely transformed into immaterial energy, a flash, an arrow made from light, and no longer a visible animal.
But, in spite of all this shapeshifting magic, on average, only every tenth attack is successful. That means that in times of dwindling bird numbers (because of crashing insect quantities), hunting becomes harder for the daring predator – and accordingly more dangerous.
“The bird is here”, one of the guys shouted. Somehow, she had made it across the street and into a corner at the bottom of a wall behind some bushes. She wanted to escape us, all her force pulled her to search for a protected hiding place and to sit there in the dark and to wait until the pain would go, until she could stretch her wings again, until she could stand on her sturdy, yellow feet with the sharp claws, until she could fly again and hunt, sweep down as a deadly gust from the top of a barren tree between two gray buildings and crash into a flock of sparrows, beating down her prey from the empty air and flying away with it.
I only hoped she would make it to the clinic. Unwillingly, she had maneuvered herself into the perfect spot the catch her. We just needed to push the box to the wall. Somehow, she slid in, beating her flight feathers hard against the container. I tilted the box over and closed the lid. Her claws made a scraping noise on the floor. I lifted the package up. The bird was lighter than I had expected.
The car was just around the corner. I put the box with the raptor in his cardboard shelter on the back seat, typed a message to the college that I’d be late to my seminar this afternoon, and started the engine.
Like many creatures of the silent wild who have become exiled from their lives in today’s agro-savannas devoid of wild corners and refuges for life, sparrowhawks are adapting to a life in cities. They hunt smaller birds and indeed predominantly feed on sparrows. In Berlin, those often roost in bushes in front of condominiums, fed by elderly women who rejoice in hearing the little singers’ chatter in front of their double glass windows. In the German capital, bird ecologists estimate that about fifty breeding pairs of sparrowhawks raise offspring every year.
In winter, their numbers are reinforced by wandering visitors from those parts of northern and eastern Europe where the cold season is still too inhospitable for them to survive. Then those reckless hunters from the dense spruce forests of the great northeastern plains have to maneuver between parking cars, whirring rental scooters, and bulky buses. And still, nearly nobody sees them. Only when the lesser bird folk starts their shrill alarm calls, we can glean that there might be a sparrowhawk planning an ambush.
The bird scratched the cardboard from time to time. I wondered which body parts had been damaged in the impact. At least one wing. Maybe both. Possibly also a leg. Or both. She did not stand; she lay stretched out on the floor. But maybe birds can’t stand with one wing hanging down. I sensed the muffled noises from the cardboard and hoped that she was not hurting too badly. I drove fast. I had the impression I was doing some sort of ambulance service. And then the students were also waiting for me. When the red light flashed in my face, I knew that I had gotten a speeding ticket. Plus, the extra fee the car-sharing company would demand.
I sped on, eager to give this being back its full life. My heart was low. The world seemed somber. There was this terrible war that had just started, and now I had destroyed a beautiful bird of prey. It felt gloomy and distorted. And somehow those two facts belonged together. I had not even been fast. I had had no chance to avoid the impact. Both birds only manifested in the moment when they shattered into my wheel. Before they had been invisible, they had been on the plane of a spiritual duel, somewhere in the land where only unseen forces act, where nothing had a fixed shape, where everything waits in order to burst into being.
The two birds had burst into disaster. And I was the one to be struck with it, to receive the message.
I thought of the dead sparrow. I had put it under the hedge behind the streetlight to which my bike was locked. I thought of the closed eye under its tender membrane. I realized that I had not paid much attention to this casualty. It did not feel fair. Sparrows are much more numerous than birds of prey (although their numbers are in decline, too), and somehow seem less remarkable as individuals. But I knew immediately that this was only what it seemed. A life is a life, and this one was over.
And then I thought of the day I had hit a sparrowhawk hunting sparrows before, and also caused a casualty. I had not thought of it before, so quickly had I had to act today. But now the memory struck me and gave me sudden gooseflesh. Today was not the first time I had run into a hunt in full flight. I knew all this already.
That other time was late January afternoon, on a bank of the Pò River in northern Italy. We slowly rolled through the thickening fog in our car. The stream lay gray and silent to the right, behind lone groups of bushes and trees. When a couple of shadows darted from the nothingness towards my windscreen, I had no chance to react, just as it had been today. A small bird hit the glass with a thump. For a fraction of a second, I saw the fleeting silhouette of some other little birds and the curved wedge of a sparrowhawk pursuing the chase.
I stopped. The sparrow lay in the brown leaves of the embankment, between the barren stalks and the withered dishes of last summer’s wild carrot blossoms. He looked at me, the black eye on his side wide open. He was breathing wildly and frantically, but not moving at all. He just looked at me, petrified, shaken by his breath. I took up the tiny animal with my hand. I felt his little heart racing. Still, he just stared at me. I feared he would die at any moment, would draw that soft veil over his eye and stop breathing. But he did not.
I put him into the low vegetation where a barren branch and some dense stalks formed a sort of natural platform, a kind of nest actually. I did not want him to lie on the ground. He still stared, silent, panting. I left him there, parked the car, and we walked some steps. The fog was closing fast, dusk fell, and the plain and the wide stream merged into one all-encompassing grey plain. Only the trees and plant stems provided some vertical movement, gave a low rhythm to the blurred landscape.
We turned back quickly. The air was moist and chilly. As I passed the little platform I had put the sparrow on, I could see that he was still there, eyes open. I went closer. And then, in this moment, he flew, rose up with the weightlessness of a creature of the sky, beating the wings a couple of times and then soaring, beating and soaring, fully back in the shape of his own aliveness, radiating life in every gesture of his undulating flight until he vanished in the fog towards the river Pò.
At the clinic, I did not need to wait. A young man, a vet student obviously, asked me to fill out a form. “Do not try to call and ask how the animal you delivered fares as we have far too much to do to be able to tell you”, it read in bold capital letters on the lower part. When I had marked my address and some more details, I pushed the cardboard box over the counter. Through an open door, I could see persons in green and blue surgical gear moving between stainless steel surfaces.
The sparrowhawk made a scratching noise when the student took the box. “You’re good,” he told me. “There is nothing more to do.” I walked out into the gray day and went slowly towards the parked car, under a low northeastern sky which was heavy on my body. It weighed me down like unbearably doleful news.
This is what a sustainable ecological culture means: It is not about sustainable materials or sustainable economics or sustainable political laws themselves—these all change with the winds—but rather, about figuring out an underlying cultural mindset that helps us to understand who we are, and how we relate to each other and to this living earth.
In the most densely populated city in the developed world, people walk to work through a forest instead of driving in traffic. They take vacations on the metro, family picnics on the edge of a cliff, and routinely walk from their doorstep into a vast urban national park called Bukhansan. This photo essay, originally published at The Possible City, is a reflection on time lived in Seoul, and also an inquiry. It asks what it means to have access to nature, and whether examples from Korea might help other cities become more resilient.
The images in this series were taken over a period of seven years, during which I made frequent visits to Bukhansan. While reading, I suggest the images can serve as points to stop and meditate. Take a deep breath and spend some time with each image, see what you notice, and consider how it makes you feel before continuing. That’s just a suggestion. However you do it, I hope you enjoy the little journey with me!
**
View of Jokduribong and the cityscape of Seoul, South Korea in Bukhansan National Park. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
It’s an hour now since the sun was supposed to come up. Outside the apartment window, a low mist hangs around the east side of this small valley. The granite cliffs of Bukhansan National Park poke out through it in places, rising above the tops of several dozen apartment towers.
Later in the day, I have a lunch meeting in the Bulgwang district, about twenty minutes from here on the metro. On this particular morning, however, I throw on a jacket and leave home early. There is something important that needs attending to.
Outside, autumn is waning. The light wind coming down the valley will soon be flicking away the last of the leaves. The metro station is due West of here, but I decide to walk east instead, along the stream and up into the mist at the foot of the mountains.
Getting from here to the Bulgwang district on foot will take a few hours of hiking—through forests, past small farms and mountain Buddhist temples, and across the pass just below Dobongsan—but I will eventually arrive, by my own feet, at the same physical place the subway would take me. I do not always get up early enough for this commute. I much prefer it when I do though.
Sunlimsa Temple on a Winter morning, one of hundreds of temples and hermitages in and around Bukhansan National Park in Seoul. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
The extra time it takes to reach my destination via the mountain may seem ridiculous when compared to driving, or taking the subway, or even walking along a sidewalk — indeed, all of these methods are faster than the mountain path. However, this “hike to work” has never once seemed like wasted time. Instead, it feels more like a gift of time, where I can experience the reality of life on this earth in ways that are not possible through the more rapid means of human movement.
In the forest, this word reality means something different from our typical urban usage of the word. Reality, here, is in the things that might at first seem mundane. It is in the fallen leaf, supporting the health of spores and microbial life that make a healthy soil possible; it is in the mist I walk through, supporting the life of the moss, lichen, and green algae as they absorb atmospheric carbon from their home on a shaded rock; it is in the water that trickles up from a spring, a tributary for all of the life—fish, waterfowl, plant, human, and otherwise—that takes place downstream.
The very freedom of being able to move through this landscape, to experience it, and to take part in these small bits of wonder offers a much-needed dose of ecological reality. However, it is also a privilege that not many urban dwellers are allowed to enjoy.
Partly for that reason, this ecological reality might seem far remote from our own daily realities and struggles. In truth, however, it is far closer than we think. The reality of walking through a mountain is of course different than the reality of our bank accounts, our jobs, our social lives, and appointment schedules, but it is profoundly connected to them, for all of these latter realities, in various ways, rely on the former. Without healthy forest ecosystems, and healthy watersheds within and around them, all life on this Earth suffers greatly.
An uncommonly clear day in Seoul as seen from the northwestern edge of Bukhansan National Park, with the old city center and Soul Namsan Tower in the center. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
The ultimate reality of the forest is that its health allows for the very possibility of a healthy city existing. There are plenty of cities that dismiss such ideas as unimportant and emanating from these cities we find piles of data on the ill effects of such a dismissal. People who live in cities without healthy forests are more likely to suffer from ill health, have higher instances of preventable diseases, tend to die earlier, have higher stress levels, higher blood pressure, and even higher rates of mortality during the pandemic.
Can forests really do that? Apparently, they can, and they do.
The fact that healthy forests, meadows, and riparian corridors are not weaving their way through every neighborhood is a good sign that we are not paying close attention to how absolutely reliant our health is, on the health of ecosystems inside and around our cities.
Making space for resilient, biodiverse, living forests and watersheds inside our cities, and allowing practical access to these spaces, plays a big role not only in human resilience and health but, more broadly, in helping cultivate more ecological mindsets and habits.
Sunlight filters through morning mist in Seoul’s Bukhansan National Park. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
Entering the edge of the forest, I pass Sunlimsa, the first of several Buddhist temples on this walking route. The temple reminds me of something my father-in-law says when he talks of meditation: Every day, every time, you should ask, who am I?
He tells me this repeatedly whenever we visit while holding his hands in a Buddhist meditation pose. Who am I. Who am I.
I like this provocation. It never seems to get old, because who am I is not a question we really ever find a concrete answer to. So far as my father-in-law is concerned, the answer is more a state of acknowledgement, an acceptance of the conditions in each moment, rather than a conclusion.
It can be immensely difficult to wrap our heads around such a concept. Credit much of this difficulty to the human tendency of considering our role in nature only as intellectual beings. We commonly do this through reports, presentations, and meetings, or through data, measurements, and statistics. This is one way of looking at the components of human and earth, and at times it can be very useful. But there are other ways to know our relationship with the earth. A commute through a small, forested mountain shows us something beyond our existence as intellectual beings.
People picnic atop (and along the sides) of a peak in the eastern edge of Bukhansan National Park. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
Here in the mountain, we can see the reality of who we are as ecological beings. Here in the mountain, it becomes clear that the climate movement cannot succeed, the regenerative city movement cannot succeed, no ecological movement will ever truly succeed unless this frame of reference—one where we are all embedded in nature in various ways—becomes part of the story.
Continuing up along a ridgeline, mist dissipates, a bit of sweat emerges. Blue sky above. Looking to the left from atop the ridge, the peaks of Bukhansan rise from the forest, with a Buddhist temple tucked into the foliage. Looking to the right, the densely packed alleys of the old Bulgwang district ramble through their magnificent maze.
We walk the line between two worlds here. A good place to ask that question, who am I?
** Answers Come When We Are Close to Nature **
Standing on this ridge line between the urban and the forest world, I turn to address the mountain with some thoughts. I ask:
This whole deal of walking through the forest and mountain to get to work in the city seems like a fantasy. Should I slap myself? Or, is the fantasy far more likely to be down there? Down in that place where we engage in the dream of endless economic growth, but somehow never really acknowledge the actual human and ecological costs of it. Surely, that kind of economic growth must be the unrealistic fantasy of these ages, and you, Bukhansan, you must be the solid and stable reality.
I wait for an answer. It is calm. No breeze. Somehow not a sound in this moment. The mountain seems to be ignoring my question. Maybe I was a bit fanatical. However, it is, calmly watching over all fantasies as they come and go, Bukhansan offers no judgment.
Looking into Seoul’s Bukhansan National Park from atop the park’s east ridge, about an hour’s hike from the nearest subway station. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
I continue along the ridge, now taking in the view of Seoul’s northern edge. This city has the highest population density in the world among cities in developed countries. It might seem miraculous that in the midst of this mega city, walking through nature is a feasible way to get around. In a way, however, Seoul’s density necessitates access to nature. People need it here more than most. It should be no surprise then, that Bukhansan National Park—the forested mountain area which forms much of the city’s northern edge—is the most visited national park in the world for its size.
Seoul denizens tend to love their nature access, and they use it well, for more than just recreation. People come into the mountain for the spring water, for ceremony and ritual, and we know an 87-year-old woman who still walks here multiple times a year, to forage seasonally as she has done since she was a child. She reminds us too, how the act is one of both giving and taking; it must be done in a way where both sides are enriched.
In most large cities around the world, access to such places—if they even exist—is often restricted or privatized. The ability for urban dwellers to have deep interactions with nature has historically been of trivial concern at best. Yet recently, this world seems to be realizing what so many Korean urban-dwellers have long known: meaningful access and communal care for nature should be a fundamental public right and responsibility in every city.
That statement is more than a feeling.
Over the past several decades, science has well established the need for urban nature for both psychological and physical wellness. Yet local access to nature is not just important to humans; it is critically important for the environment itself, and perhaps most importantly, for the success of movements related to climate, resilience, and the long path we must walk as a global society toward achieving ecological regeneration.
A group of retired women from Seoul returns home down the mountain in the morning. Like many of the elders here, they tell me of their regular walks into Bukhansan for leisure, exercise, and to drink water from one of the many springs. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
If these issues are all so interconnected, and if the roots of sustainability and resilience come from an acceptance of the duty to honor these interconnections—between ourselves and the living environments which support our lives here—then a true large-scale ecological solution can only come from a large scale movement to put ourselves back into these ecologies.
Can we really accomplish something as radical as putting entire cities back into balance with nature?
A bit further on along the ridge is a resting spot. I pour a mug of oolong tea from a tumbler. This is my favorite “café” in the Fall. A simple south-facing seat on a granite cliff, with a few Korean red pines around. The shape of the valley gives it a gentle warm air most days. Miraculously, it seems to be warm and calm here, even when cold gusts are whipping around the apartments back down in the valley.
Our greatest urban planners and builders might not have known my hiking route, but they knew the secrets of my favorite café on the side of a cliff just as well, and they incorporated this understanding into how they built cities. Cities have been built along principles garnered from nature for centuries. Among our most celebrated architects and scientists, the best of them knew that the place to find true ecological solutions is here in nature.
Such a pursuit into the field of nature-based solutions, however, requires a dedicated personal inquiry into nature herself.
When Einstein wrote “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better,” when Frank Lloyd Wright told us “Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you,” they were not merely being poetic. They were directly pointing us here. The answer to our greatest world issues is always in front of us, but only reveals itself when we take time and effort to remain curious, aware, and engaged with nature.
One of the author’s favorite lunch spots, overlooking the northeastern edge of Seoul city. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
A favorite lunch spot, overlooking the northwest edge of Seoul city. (photo, Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA)
Neither Einstein nor Wright could have claimed “access to nature” as an end-solution. Instead, they claimed something far more profound; that cultivating a relationship with nature is a foundation, a first step in healing our relationship with the rest of this earth, and in coming up with right solutions to our human problems.
This is true whether these problems are related to science, architecture, business, or the general art of building cities. If we don’t have opportunities to be in nature every single day, our ideas quickly stray from the ecological foundations that inform concepts like regenerative design and nature-based solutions. Without nature in our lives, the propensity for anthropocentric concepts to become unhinged from reality is immense. Without an anchor in the real world of nature, even the most well-meaning of projects can float off into fairytale castles, built on clouds of capitalism, materialism, or egotism.
When asked where to start in re-connecting an entire city into the ecosystem then, the answer seems obvious: start by re-connecting individual people to nature in meaningful ways.
Though missteps have been made here, many major Korean cities are lucky to have a large number of active everyday people who demand access to nature. Cities like Seoul offer good examples of urban areas that are trying to move in the direction of nature-connectedness, being helped by a vocal populace.
In many cases, this means un-doing a great amount of damage inflicted by a modern urban planning regime. For decades here, urban development has either ignored nature, destroyed nature, or followed the Corbusian scheme of body-slamming nature, so that it might submit to the image of man. Unfortunately, this path largely continues today in Korea, where the national standard still seems to include leveling entire landscapes to built walls of apartment towers, car-based infrastructure, and grandiose wind-swept public spaces devoid of activity. Even the so-called ‘smart cities’ such as Songdo still follow this paradigm. Yet there are clues of something else here in Seoul, too. In the older parts of the city—places where streams, forest gardens, and urban structures pay attention to and honor the landscape—there are signs of another possibility.
Fall foliage in Naksan Park, where Seoul Fortress Wall runs along the eastern edge of the old city center. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
In much of East Asia, the historical roots of urban planning follow what is sometimes called the feng shui of a city. This concept can still be found in places, embedded in the materiality, shape, and orientation of people and city, growing in relation to the landscape and seasons.
Outside of East Asia, similar concepts have long existed too, from Camillo Sitte’s argument for a ‘natural art sense’ in our building, to the insistence of Lewis Mumford and his mentor Patrick Geddes that cities are natural phenomena, to Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language. There are countless architects and planners in-between who have said as much about ‘natural design’.
As we look again at our cities today and remind ourselves what we love most about them, so too do we find similar themes. Our most treasured urban spaces are the ones that seem to sing in beautiful harmony, a song between a landscape and its inhabitants.
Fall foliage in the small urban forest at Deoksugung Palace in Seoul. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
Is it too lofty a goal for our cities to sing in harmony with citizens? Can we not again build cities that function in beautiful harmony with the landscape?
For some of us, harmonious cities might be unthinkable. Certainly, in contemporary cities, concepts like feng shui or a city built to artistic fundamentals have been dismissed as nonsense. As a result, buildings in modern cities have no relation with their environment, let alone with each other. Towering structures shout egotistically about themselves. Humans are drowned in a sea of glass and steel. Creeks are paved over without remorse. Meadows are sprayed with weed killer. Mountains and forests are made private or bulldozed from existence. The land in cities is often polluted so badly that humans are routinely poisoned by their own food and water.
How could we possibly start a conversation about urban-nature connection, when our cities and the industries that build them seem to be in such a state of disconnection?
During my own youth, growing up in Silicon Valley of California, the impossibility to walk into an urban field, forest, or mountain seemed like an unhappy reality that just had to be accepted. If anyone really wanted to get into nature from the city, they would need to jump in a car and burn a tank of gas to do it. A dedicated coalition of land stewards has helped to change this situation somewhat since my childhood, and a few tech companies are even helping embrace urban nature. But at times it seems like developing virtual reality still takes precedence over building a connection to actual reality.
Having lived in Korea, Japan, and Scotland during the past decade, the view I held of this reality—and of what it means to have access to nature—has been gently pushed in some amazingly hopeful directions.
** Global Sacred and Cultural Connections to Nature **
In Japan, for instance, there exist deeply rooted social connections to nature. For some thousands of years of recorded history, there have been remarkably constant undertones of seeing forests, mountains, and water sources as sacred.
Traditions that express these undertones have moved delicately through the years. These traditions span multiple disciplines and practices including rituals, cultural legends and stories, arts and crafts but also, ways of foraging, fishing, farming, and building cities. Though on the surface each of these practices is different—and indeed, even within each discipline, the regional differences might appear to be endless—they all rely in their own ways on knowing nature, as a prerequisite to taking action.
Torii gates line a path through the forest at Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto, Japan. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
To know nature is to enter into a relationship with the environment. To know nature is have an intimacy with the materials we use in our work. To know nature is to have an intimacy as well, with the ecosystem which produces those materials. When our jobs continue to rely on this particular kind of relationship and intimacy, we enshrine in that work, an ecological understanding that can be maintained from one generation to the next.
This is what a sustainable ecological culture means. It is not about sustainable materials or sustainable economics or sustainable political laws themselves—these all change with the winds—but rather, about figuring out an underlying cultural mindset that helps us to understand who we are, and how we relate to each other and to this living earth.
This cultural mindset is not something that can necessarily be rigidly dictated or planned. Instead, it must be fluid, and this fluidity seems to happen most effectively when we incorporate ourselves and our work into that nature, as a part of our daily habit. It comes from the practice.
You could call this a spiritual practice. Not necessarily a religious practice, but an individual practice that acknowledges the aliveness—or animating force—of the world, and which seeks to participate fully in this aliveness.
A man stops to photograph the cherry blossoms along the riverside at Minamitenma Park in Osaka, Japan. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
In much of the West, there is sometimes a belief that the spiritual and practical must be at odds with each other. Yet much of the culture that we find so fascinatingly beautiful in places like Japan—or Korea—recognizes the opposite to be true. The importance of relationships between humans and their environments is both practical and spiritual. These two ways of seeing and doing are not at odds with each other but are necessary complements to one another.
In practice, this way of thinking has been chipped away at by many human forces. However, in various ways, natural elements in Japan are still thanked, honored, and cared for to this day.
This accounts for at least part of the reason why, though urban areas here are often extremely dense, you’ll always find nature integrated into tight spaces in unique ways, and the ability to walk, bicycle or take public transit to expansive parks, nature reserves, mountains, pilgrimage trails, forested shrines, rivers, and recreation areas is readily available.
A bridge crosses the small lake in the Botanical Garden at Nagai Koen, Osaka, Japan. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
Similarly in Scotland, the understanding that a balanced human existence requires access to nature is well understood. In fact, it is enshrined in law.
Everyone in Scotland has the right to move respectfully through nearly all public and private land, or even to set up a camp and sleep. This Outdoor Access Code, as it is called, is both a right and responsibility, a pact where those who venture into the landscape are expected to “Respect the interests of others, care for the environment, and take responsibility for their own actions.”
The code was enacted on account of a people who see importance in expanding our connection to and understanding of “natural and cultural heritage.”
A somewhat typical view in the Pentland Hills, sheep and all, near Little Sparta the garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay in Scotland. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
It is liberating, when nature is ample and accessible, where “trespassers will be shot” is not an option for dealing with land access, and where one can literally walk, rest, and enjoy being in nature, almost anywhere, anytime.
Such an access code, however, also requires a cultural understanding. This understanding takes time, it takes willingness, and it takes education of a population from youth through adulthood, about the responsibilities we humans have as members of this earth community. We must know not only how to take, or even how to give, but how to relate with and understand the living world.
In Scotland—as in most of the industrialized world—this understanding has waned, and this waning sometimes creates situations where legislations like the Outdoor Access Code are abused. However, we should be reminded that it is only with such rights in the first place, that an understanding of our responsibilities can truly be rekindled.
The right to access nature is a starting point on the path to sustainable, nature-connected cultures.
Arthur’s Seat, a popular destination for just about everyone who lives in or visits the Scottish capital of Edinburgh. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
You and I have just done a little bit of globe-trotting through Japan and Scotland. Apologies for that. We are supposed to be hiking through a mountain in Seoul, and yet, here we are walking through Shinto shrines and meadows.
Nevertheless, it is telling how similar threads of thought run through these—and many other—cultures, no matter how different they might seem. These threads might be hidden where we live, but they are there, nevertheless. Just waiting to be woven into something beautiful.
But let us get back to Seoul, and our walk through Bukhansan National Park.
Turning to contemporary Korea, we find a country that is probably most well-known for endless rows of Soviet-style apartment towers, overly car-friendly planning, and severe air pollution. There are many urban politicians, academics, and activists making honest efforts, however, to reverse this image.
Some readers might know of the enviable mass transit proliferation, or even of the projects to tear down urban highways and restore the streams that were buried by those highways. In a slightly more subtle but wider scale movement, however, many Korean cities and towns have built thousands of miles of trails to provide public access through urban mountains and forests.
A winter evening walk above the traffic, through Gung-dong Neighborhood Park in Seoul. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
Though there have been plenty of ugly bumps along the way, Korea is quietly becoming a leader in urban nature access. Yet many of their best efforts have been inspired by looking at solutions from other cultures, in societies that are radically different from their own. Foreign concepts are studied, dissected, and then re-imagined, put back together in unique ways which are adapted to fit the local culture and ecological situations.
Another word for this is innovation.
** Dulle-Gil, and Innovations in Nature Access **
One of Korea’s such innovations for urban nature access is the dulle-gil, a kind of walking route that connects city and nature in a way that benefits people, environment, and commerce.
The dulle-gil came about in part because of an existing culture of walking around local mountains and rivers. On weekends, nature walks are something of a national event, with friends, or even three or four generations of a family going together, into the mountain on foot, with a full-out picnic in tow. Residents of Seoul love their local mountain Bukhansan so much, that on a good-weather weekend the mountain seems more like Disneyland—on the popular peaks, the lines certainly look similar.
Weekend hikers gather on one of the lower peaks in Bukhansan National Park in Seoul. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
Over the years, as the city’s population and tourism increased, the mountain became overly busy. The city went on a decades-long campaign to build more trails in other places around the city, many of them following traditional footpaths and foraging areas that have existed for centuries. The result is that today, an interconnected system of trails links the mountains, streams, hills, and forested land throughout the entire Seoul metropolitan area.
Yet even with all of these trails, on a popular weekend, Bukhansan was still overfull.
Part of the response was a new campaign to build a series of easier walking trails called dulle-gil. These dulle-gil avoid the more perilous mountain climbs and instead aim to connect neighborhoods by a mix of easier trails and local pedestrian-friendly streets. Typical dulle-gil routes are not deep in a mountain but instead flirt between the edge of mountain and city. These trails are popular with young and old who want to explore urban nature, yet who might not enjoy the steep vertical climbs and scrambling over cliffs.
Two views on the Eunpyong section of the Bukhansan Dulle-gil. Such trails offer easier routes that weave their way between urban neighborhoods and natural areas. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
These walking trails form a network that includes the 157km-long Seoul Trail, 63km-long Bukhansan Dulle-gil, 19km-long Seoul City Wall Trail, and several others. Such urban trails have spawned an impressive internal-tourism industry, where residents can effectively become tourists in their own city.
It is not unheard of, for instance, to spend a weekend walking directly from one’s own neighborhood, through forest, field, river, and mountain, to the other side of the city along trails like the Seoul Dulle-gil.
During such an all-day walk, one might take a lunch picnic on a cliff, stop at a nature café with a view of the forest in the afternoon, learn about the species in a local creek, and enjoy an outdoor barbeque in the evening. At the end of the day, there are even plenty of options to stay the night in a hillside guesthouse at the foot of the forest. The next day, home is a short and easy subway ride away.
Dokbawi Station is one of 23 subway stations with easy access to the Dulle-gil in Seoul. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
Cars are not needed for these experiences, thanks to the 23 subway stations with easy access to Seoul Trail, and 17 subway stations that will drop you off near the more central Seoul City Wall trail.
This kind of public transit access is one of Korea’s greatest social and environmental strengths. Even more surprising, much of this infrastructure was built only in the past few decades. In many major Korean cities, governments have gone to great efforts to make sure residents and visitors alike can not only get around the city but can also experience the biodiversity that threads its way in and around dense urban areas.
Paths like the dulle-gil are routes from here to there, and yet they are also opportunities. Places for anyone who walks them, to re-connect with the sacredness of the land. Some researchers even claim that walking these paths is a way to recover the authenticity of the human being. Taken in this light, these urban paths begin to feel reminiscent of other modern-day pilgrimage routes being revived around the world.
Indeed, the idea for these dulle-gil trails began not in cities, but in the more rural regions to the south, surrounding the magnificent Jirisan National Park. The success of these more countryside trails has spread widely, igniting a new interest in domestic travel. The experience of walking these trails has also inspired many young people to consider the charm of rural and village life. With so many of the smaller Korean towns and villages struggling to survive—and so many educated young people likewise struggling to find how they fit into the city—it seems a welcome phenomenon.
Stone walls built to calm the local winds line the streets of a village in Gurye-gun, through which the countryside Jirisan dulle-gil trail runs. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
In a way, these trails are helping to mediate some of the more reckless versions of urbanization that typically pay little attention to human and environmental wellness. A few days walking through picturesque old towns in the countryside, if anything, suggests the possibility of another way.
Can we find our way to a balanced flow between urban, rural, and natural systems—both social and ecological?
** Cities Win When They Celebrate Local Nature **
Continuing my own descent from Bukhansan into the city, I pass through a grove of pines along dusty granite rocks, a signature of urban development here. It is a sure sign that we’re close to the city. Passing through the forest, I arrive at Bulgwang an hour or so early. Fresh mind.
After passing the threshold of the forest, and entering the valley of apartment towers, I feel fortunate to have this breathtaking mountain park in my backyard. It is only so, however, because public demand for nature access here has been persistent.
Hikers gather in the forest along the edge of Bukhansan National Park in Seoul, Korea. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
With continued demand for nature access, the rivers that bring water from the mountain into the Han River are also recently coming alive with natural wetland plants, and waterfowl sharing space with humans. Nature’s own regenerative infrastructure designs are starting to replace degenerative concrete lining and highways that once aimed to quickly move vehicles and water through the city.
A new rhythm of urban slowness is developing, slowly.
None of this was easy. Those who visited Seoul in the 1990s saw a city that seemed to pride itself on the destruction of any living thing for a highway, 14-lane road, or apartment tower. Back then, the slightly more environmentally sane Seoul that is emerging today seemed like an impossible dream. Yet here it is. A seedling, perhaps, but one that is sprouting well.
In all of these positive examples, the point of critical importance seems to come back again to the act of knowing ourselves and our cities in relation to local natural landscapes. Could American cities also undertake urban planning projects with such a seemingly radical foundation as nature-connectedness? If we want to become global leaders—and, somehow, I think we do—then the answer can only be yes.
When citizens and leaders decide that they love nature more than they love speed and convenience, they will succeed in building ecological cities.
Although to be fair, some conveniences do just happen to align with local nature. Conveniences like the spring-fed public foot bath in Daejeon—a city 50 minutes by bullet train from Seoul.
Young people and families gather to relax at the outdoor public hot spring in the Yeusong district of Daejeon. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
What are the local nature-based innovations in other cities around the world? There is no replicable plan for successful projects, and no city implements urban nature or access to it in the same way because our local urban ecosystems—cultural and natural—are all unique. This is not a ‘road block’ to scaling up, but instead an opportunity for local creative solutions together with our environments. It is a chance for cities again to reclaim their uniqueness and an exciting, authentic sense of place.
Instead of removing, restricting, or covering up our ecological features, cities benefit immensely when they learn how to highlight them, putting in place programs that enable free public access, and that encourage civic responsibility and care. When done equitably, such urban nature access benefits small businesses, local economies, and human quality of life across age, race, and income levels, while simultaneously benefitting the environment.
An elderly couple cycle alongside the O River, through Minamitenma Park in Osaka, Japan. Photo: Patrick M. Lydon, CC BY-SA
I imagine cities where this narrative continues, and where:
More people choose to walk, wheel, hike, and bicycle through what slowly becomes an urban-nature heaven, and motorized transit, while still available, finds a niche that does not infringe so heavily on social and ecological life
Preserving, restoring, and providing reasonable access to an interconnected network of nature corridors becomes the standard, and highways and roads become the minor exception
Cities learn to celebrate what makes them culturally and ecologically unique, and the practice of bulldozing that uniqueness virtually disappears
In providing meaningful access to nature in cities, we are not solving all of these problems outright, but we are planting the seeds, increasing opportunity for people to discover new ways of growing more resilient, beautiful, ecological urban lives. Lives where people and the environment both win.
It all starts—as Einstein and Wright hinted—by experiencing ourselves in nature, and the nature in ourselves.
What happens to tree leaves once they hit the ground? In forests, they join a litter layer that is home to countless small animals and nurtures the growth of new plants. In the city, we remove them with noisy, polluting leaf-blowers.
Reconsidering leaf blowers
Calls for the ban of leaf blowers in urban centers are on the rise, including community group initiatives, municipal bans, opinion pieces, and proposed state/provincial and national-level legislation. The reasons include noise pollution, particulates, and other conventional pollutants, greenhouse gas emissions, and ecological disruption. Understanding the interconnected nature of these risks is necessary to inform policy concerning leaf blowers.
Portable gasoline-powered leaf blowers first emerged in the 1940s in Japan and had a rapid rise in popularity in North America. In 2009 alone, 4.9 million American households purchased a leaf blower (Butterfield, 2011, as cited in Boykoff, 2011). Conventional leaf blowers feature a fossil-fuel-powered two-stroke engine, but competition is rising from increasingly available electric models. Clearly, electric engines eliminate many of the nuisances of leaf-blowers: somewhat less noise (although they are not quiet), lower CO2 emissions, and fewer conventional pollutants. However, removing leaves by whatever means can still negatively impact soil ecosystems and habitats for overwintering wildlife.
Pollution from leaf blowers
Noise pollution
Noise pollution is probably the most frequently raised problem with leaf blowers. Leaf blowers emit noises well above the recommended limit of 85 decibels, with recorded noise levels as high as 106 decibels (Walker & Banks, 2017) — high enough to cause hearing loss, hypertension, and a host of other illnesses (Basner et al., 2014), and certainly high enough to disrupt the natural soundscapes within our cities. While those operating leaf blowers often wear protective earmuffs, they are not provided to others in the area. Increased noise in urban residential areas also has negative impacts on local wildlife, potentially counteracting recent efforts to increase urban biodiversity. For example, studies on the effects of anthropogenic noise on birds, including landscaping machines, report declines in reproductive success and changes in vocal communication (Ortega, 2012).
Chemical and particulate pollutants
About 30% of the fuel used by two-stroke engines does not combust, resulting in toxic discharges in the form of aerosols such as carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides, and hydrocarbons (Boykoff, 2011). Leaf blowers, whether gas or electric, also generate air blasts of up to 200 mph, which erode topsoil and lift dust into the air, further contributing to particulate-matter air pollution (Birch & Carry, 1996). These fine particles (PM10, PM2.5), re-suspended, in the air contribute to smog and low urban air quality (Costa-Gómez et al., 2020) and are damaging to the lungs of both the operator and others nearby. It is now estimated in California that lawn care equipment produces more conventional pollutants than cars.
Greenhouse gas emissions
While conventional pollutants are clearly the greatest concern with respect to the emissions from leaf-blowers, gas-powered models, like any fossil-fuel-burning technology, also produce greenhouse gases. For example, the average fossil-fuel-powered lawn mower emits about 48 kg of greenhouse gas per year per the Government of Canada’s One-Tonne Challenge. Work by the EPA indicates that small off-road engines (mostly lawn and garden care equipment) contribute significantly to emissions of GHGs.
While the small engine of a single leaf blower produces far less greenhouse gases than does the larger engine of a single car, they still use a huge amount of energy relative to the job to be done. Decarbonization and moving toward carbon-neutrality, as many cities have pledged to do, involves a critical look at our energy use. So, let’s examine the energy used by leaf blowers. A leaf blower, whether fossil-driven or electric, operates at a power of 1200W; a person on a bicycle can generate about 100 W, maybe 200 W if they are a super athlete with a great bike. So, to recharge a leaf blower’s battery by hooking it to a bike, you would have to pedal for at least 6 hours to provide enough energy for one hour of leaf-blowing.
Ecology of leaves and leaf removal
From an ecological perspective, the culture of “manicured” landscaping contributes to the decline of insects and other small creatures, as leaf litter provides habitat and food for many different invertebrates, including pollinators (Steinberg, 2006). Falling leaves also provide an important step in nutrient cycling, as leaves are broken down by decomposer organisms and nutrients are released to the soil into be taken up by plants. Thus, the regular removal of leaf litter in urban and peri-urban areas contributes to habitat degradation and simplification of ecosystems, breaking the ecological linkages between trees, soil, and invertebrates (David & Gillion, 2009). The effects of lawn care practices on this leaf litter ecosystem is an increasing area of research in urban ecology.
Leaf litter is home to a multitude of invertebrates
Leaf litter contains astounding biodiversity, which is still poorly studied. This includes insects, centipedes, millipedes, arachnids (spiders, harvestmen, mites), molluscs (snails and slugs), earthworms, and nematode worms, not to mention countless microbes. This biodiversity undoubtedly increases soil fertility through nutrient cycling, food for birds, and other crucial ecosystem services.
A few studies show how these organisms are deeply affected by the removal of leaf litter. For example, studies of agricultural lands bordered by woodland fragments find leaf litter is heavily correlated with the distribution of millipedes (decomposers who break down organic matter and contribute to soil fertility) and centipedes (active predators that control household and garden pests) (Horňák et al., 2020). In forests, a thick leaf layer increases diversity and abundance of beetles (Koivula, et al. 1999).
Many species of insects use the leaves as food; others, including predators such as spiders, centipedes, and harvestmen, use the leaf litter as hunting grounds to capture their prey (McIntyre, 2000). Many more species use the leaf layer as protection from the cold in regions with dramatic seasonal weather patterns. Important pollinators, including many native bee species as well as butterflies and moths (e.g., swallowtails and Luna moths), depend on leaf litter for overwinter survival. Thus, while municipalities increasingly encourage residents to plant flowers in support of bee conservation, providing habitat by leaving leaves is another important action we can take.
Leaf litter and nutrient cycling
Leaf litter is one of the major factors that replenishes soil nutrients in forest and urban ecosystems (Brussaard, 1997). Invertebrates feed on leaves, and fungi and bacteria feed on their waste, releasing nutrients for plants. Leaf litter improves soil quality for plant growth (Santorufo et al., 2012). Removing leaves breaks the feedback loop that ensures soil fertility. Removing leaf litter both eliminates the source of organic matter and inhibits the community of decomposers that release nutrients, rendering human intervention necessary to maintain soil fertility, including purchasing new soil and using fertilizers to enhance soil quality (Byrne, 2004). In addition to reducing the nutrients in our urban soils, removing leaves from our green spaces can result in those nutrients ending up where they don’t belong — for example, leaves left in the street contribute to a “phosphorus-rich tea” that can cause major pollutant problems for lakes.
When we leave the leaves, we are contributing to the development of a complex soil ecosystem. The role of invertebrates in the decomposition of leaf litter is a multi-level network of interactions. Macrofauna and microfauna interact to break down leaf litter. For example, herbivorous snails eat dead leaves and the resulting snail-poop is very rich in minerals and nutrients, creating an ideal environment for fungi and bacteria, which digest the complex organic molecules and release nutrients in a form bioavailable to plants (Astor et al., 2015). Earthworms bury the faeces to a depth where they decompose faster, feed the soil microbiome, and release nutrients at the level of plant roots (Coulis et al., 2016). The snail’s mucus trails also facilitate bacterial development. In general, increased diversity of invertebrates accelerates decomposition: both snails and millipedes consume dead leaves faster when they live together (Oliveira et al., 2010). These interactions boost plant performance and, in unmanaged sites, can increase plant diversity (Bennett, 2010). Biodiversity of soil invertebrates is a good indicator of soil quality for plant growth.
What happens when you remove leaf litter?
The leaf layer is a complex ecosystem with a network of interactions, each illuminating a piece of the puzzle as to how last year’s leaves feed the growth of this year’s flowers. Removal of leaf litter has been shown to decrease invertebrate abundance and diversity in similar ways in both forests and urban systems (Smith et al., 2006; Byrne, 2004; Hartshorn, 2020; Moreno et al., 2017). The invertebrate species most heavily hit by removal of leaf litter and disturbances were the larger animals, including pollinators and ambush predators like spiders (Byrne, 2004), which help control garden pests and mosquitoes. Removing the protective layer of leaves stresses overwintering species, significantly reducing their chances of surviving the winter. A small number of species thrive in cleanly mown lawns and become dominant to the exclusion of others, sometimes to the point of becoming pests (McIntyre 2000). Overall, the removal of leaf litter decreases invertebrate biodiversity within lawns and gardens, ultimately lowering soil quality and plant health.
It is clear that manicured lawns support much lower invertebrate diversity and lower decomposition rates and nutrient cycling; however, there has been little research on detailed mechanisms, e.g., leaf removal vs lawn mowing, or on specific effects on individual species found in different regions. Ecology is very place-based and best practices for conservation will differ between regions with different climates and different species present locally. Some sample suggestions are discussed below.
Options for leaf management
Many initiatives have suggested a middle ground between removing all the leaves and just leaving them where they fall. Clearly, leaves should be removed from stairs and paths as they can pose a slipping hazard. An overly thick leaf layer on lawns can impede grass growth. While gardeners are increasingly looking to replace lawns with permacultures of native plants, some lawn areas can be desirable, especially as playing fields that encourage exercise and outdoor activity.
Fall leaves installed in a pollinator garden on Concordia University’s campus
So, where should the leaves go? Compost bins are the most popular example of alternative places to store leaves. Leaves are also an effective mulch for flower beds, often providing the same protective cover for overwintering invertebrate species and plants while being cost-efficient. Another option is to leave leaves over winter, proceeding to pick them up in spring; in this way, they still provide an overwintering habitat for many organisms. Lastly, many gardeners do not pick up their leaves, but simply shred them with the help of a lawn mower. While this might still harm organisms found within the leaf litter, at least the nutrients are still present and can be transferred back into the soil.
Municipal bans on leaf blowers
Given the environmental and health hazards of leaf blowers and the ecological benefits of leaves, citizen groups in North American cities have been advocating for bans and regulations around leaf blowers for decades. While the initial demand often emerges from the nuisance associated with engine noise, citizen activists and municipal governments recognize the wider concerns around air pollution and its effects on wildlife and the environment. In Vancouver’s affluent West End borough, leaf blowers were banned in 2004. The Canadian National Capital Commission will ban the use of gas-powered lawn equipment in 2023. In the Montreal area, gas-powered two-stroke engine leaf-blowers have been banned in the suburban municipalities of Beaconsfield (June –September ban only, since 2018), St-Lambert (total ban since 2020), and in the Ville-Marie (2019) and Notre-Dame-de-Grâce / Côte-des-Neiges (2022) boroughs of the city of Montreal. Piece-meal bans like these are popping up across North America in response to citizen pressure.
While local initiatives often focus on banning the use of leaf-blowers, larger jurisdictions are putting in place regulations to prevent new gas-powered garden equipment from coming into use as part of their carbon neutrality strategies. The Forward Regulatory Plan for 2021-2023 from Environment and Climate Change Canada states that all new lawn and garden care equipment for sale in Canada from 2028 onward must be zero-emissions. The state of California has recently signed a similar bill to outlaw the sale of gas-powered lawn equipment by 2024. Of course, equipment purchased before these dates can continue to be used, but these initiatives clearly mark these devices as sunset technologies.
It is worth noting that none of these initiatives target electric-powered leaf-blowers. While these clearly produce less noise, fewer chemical pollutants, and lower greenhouse gas emissions than their fossil-powered counterparts, they do also generate particulate matter pollution by blowing around dust and use high amounts of energy relative to the work they do. They also disturb soil ecology as much as gas-powered models. So, beyond bans on gas-powered equipment, many are calling on urban landowners, both cities and private individuals, to simply leave the leaves!
Lidiya Beida, Felix Lambert, Emma Despland, Rebecca Tittler, and Carly Ziter Toronto, Inujuak, Montréal, Montréal, Montréal
Astor, T., Lenoir, L., & Berg, M. P. (2015). Measuring feeding traits of a range of litter-consuming terrestrial snails: Leaf litter consumption, faeces production and scaling with body size. Oecologia, 178(3), 833–845.
Basner, M., Babisch, W., Davis, A., Brink, M., Clark, C., Janssen, S., & Stansfeld, S. (2014). Auditory and non-auditory effects of noise on health. The Lancet, 383(9925), 1325-1332.
Bennett, A. (2010). The role of soil community biodiversity in insect biodiversity. Insect Conservation and Diversity, 3(3), 157–171.
Birch, M. E., & Cary, R. A. (1996). Elemental carbon-based method for monitoring occupational exposures to particulate diesel exhaust. Aeroso Science and Technology, 25(3), 221–241.
Boykoff, J. (2011). The leaf blower, capitalism, and the atomization of everyday life. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 22(3), 95–113.
Brussaard, L. (1997). Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning in Soil. Ambio, 26(8), 563–570.
Byrne, L. (2004). The effects of lawn management on soil microarthropods. Journal of Agricultural and Urban Entomology, 21, 151–156.
Costa-Gómez, I., Bañón, D., Moreno-Grau, S., Revuelta, R., Elvira-Rendueles, B., & Moreno, J. (2020). Using a low-cost monitor to assess the impact of leaf blowers on particle pollution during street cleaning. Air Quality,Atmosphere & Health, 13(1), 15–23.
Coulis, M., Hättenschwiler, S., Coq, S., & David, J. F. (2016). Leaf litter consumption by macroarthropods and burial of their faeces enhance decomposition in a Mediterranean ecosystem. Ecosystems, 19(6), 1104-1115.
David, J., & Gillion, D. (2009). Combined effects of elevated temperatures and reduced leaf litter quality on the life-history parameters of a saprophagous macroarthropod. Global Change Biology, 15(1), 156–165.
Hartshorn, J. (2020). A review of forest management effects on eerrestrial leaf litter inhabiting Arthropods. Forests, 12(1), 23.
Horňák, O., Mock, A., Šarapatka, B., & Tuf, I. H. (2020). Character of woodland fragments affects distribution of myriapod assemblages in agricultural landscape. ZooKeys, 930,139–151.
Koivula., M., Punttila., P., Haila, Y., & Niemelä, J. (1999). Leaf litter and the small-scale distribution of carabid beetles (Coleoptera, Carabidae) in the boreal forest. Ecography, 22(4), 424–435.
McIntyre, N. E. (2000). Ecology of urban arthropods: A review and a call to action. Annals of the Entomological Society of America, 93(4), 825–835.
Moreno, M. L., Rossetti, M. R., Pérez-Harguindeguy, N., & Valladares, G. R. (2017). Edge and herbivory effects on leaf litter decomposability in a subtropical dry forest. Ecological Research, 32, 341–346.
Oliveira, T. D., Hättenschwiler, S., & Handa, I. T. (2010). Snail and millipede complementarity in decomposing Mediterranean forest leaf litter mixtures. Functional Ecology, 24(4), 937–946.
Ortega, P. C. (2012). Chapter 2: Effects of noise pollution on birds: A brief review of our knowledge – Efectos de la Polución Sonora en Aves: Una Breve Revisión de Nuestro Conocimiento. Ornithological Monographs, 74(1), 6-22.
Santorufo, L., Van Gestel, C. A. M., Rocco, A., & Maisto, G. (2012). Soil invertebrates as bioindicators of urban soil quality. Environmental Pollution (Barking, Essex: 1987), 161, 57–63.
Smith, J., Chapman, A., & Eggleton, P. (2006). Baseline biodiversity surveys of the soil macrofauna of London’s green spaces. Urban Ecosystems, 9(4), 337.
Steinberg, T. (2006). American green: The obsessive quest for the perfectlawn. WW Norton & Company. Chapter 1.
Walker E., Banks, J.L. (2017). Characteristics of lawn and garden equipment sound: A community pilot study. Journal of Environmental and ToxicologicalStudies, 1(1).
Felix Lambert is currently a grade 6 teacher in Inukjuak, Quebec. His undergraduate studies were focused on terrestrial invertebrates and plant interactions in which he hopes to continue researching in future projects.
Dr. Emma Despland is a professor of ecology and invertebrate zoology in the Biology Department of Concordia University. Her research focuses on herbivorous insects and the plants they eat.
Dr. Rebecca Tittler is a Lecturer and Research Coordinator at the Loyola College for Diversity and Sustainability and the Loyola Sustainability Research Centre at Concordia University. Her research background is in landscape-level forest ecology; she teaches various cross-disciplinary courses in sustainability.
Dr. Carly Ziter is a new Assistant Professor in the Biology department at Concordia University in Montreal, associated with Concordia's hub for Smart, Sustainable, and Resilient Cities and Communities.
Faced with the growing threat of extreme heat, cities everywhere need to plan for urban heat resilience — proactively mitigating and managing heat across urban systems and sectors. Here are seven key principles and eight strategies or urban heat resilience.
Cities everywhere are getting hotter. Globally, every year from 2013 to 2021 ranked among the 10 hottest on record due to climate change. Urban areas are generally warming at a faster rate than rural or natural areas due to the urban heat island (UHI), a phenomenon whereby the built environment and waste heat lead to increased temperatures.
Risks of both chronic heat and extreme heat events (e.g., heat waves) are growing and negatively impacting communities in a variety of ways. First and foremost, heat kills. In the United States, it is the number one weather-related killer. It also affects quality of life, local economies, energy and water use, ecosystems, infrastructure, and agriculture. In a recently published study, we surveyed a diverse sample of planners in cities across the United States about heat. Over 80% of planners reported experiencing some heat impact and a majority of planners were at least somewhat concerned about heat.
It is also clear that heat exposure and vulnerability are inequitable. Heat disproportionately affects marginalized communities and intersects with other systemic inequalities related to environmental quality, workplace safety, housing, energy, transportation, and healthcare.
PAS Report 600: Planning for Urban Heat Resilience cover (American Planning Association 2022)
Faced with the growing threat of extreme heat, cities everywhere need to plan for urban heat resilience – proactively mitigating and managing heat across urban systems and sectors. Yet, compared with other hazards like flooding, heat governance, or the actors, strategies, processes, and institutions that guide decision-making for mitigating and managing heat as a hazard are underdeveloped. Our research suggests that few studies have examined heat planning and governance. In most cities, it is unclear who is responsible for addressing heat. But this may be changing, as a few cities, including Phoenix, Arizona, and Miami-Dade County, Florida, have recently appointed heat officials.
In order to help elevate awareness of heat risk and inform heat planning in cities, we recently published a new Planning Advisory Report for the American Planning Association entitled Planning for Urban Heat Resilience. This report, which is freely available to download thanks to a grant from the NOAA Extreme Heat Risk Initiative, explains the complexities of heat and outlines an actionable framework for holistically planning for heat resilience.
Breaking down the components of urban heat resilience, including heat contributors, impacts, and strategies (Ladd Keith and Sara Meerow)
A framework for planning for urban heat resilience
In our framework, planning for urban heat resilience means setting clear goals and metrics of success for both heat mitigation (cooling communities with vegetation and design of the built environment) and heat management (preparing for and responding to chronic and acute heat risk that cannot be mitigated). This requires a comprehensive “fact base” of information on current and future heat risk. Cities then need to develop a diverse portfolio of heat mitigation and management strategies, which should reflect future uncertainties. These efforts should be coordinated across different departments, sectors, and plans. And these strategies need to be implemented, monitored, and evaluated over time since heat planning is new in most communities.
When it comes to selecting heat resilience strategies, cities have a variety of options. We group these into eight categories, half of which are focused on heat mitigation and half on heat management.
Framework for urban heat resilience, with seven principles in the center and the eight categories of strategies (Ladd Keith and Sara Meerow)
When it comes to heat mitigation, the most commonly used strategy in the United States is urban greening, including urban forestry, green stormwater infrastructure, and other vegetation. But there are many other strategies that could mitigate heat including land use, urban design, and waste heat reduction. For example, efforts to enhance walkability and reduce vehicle use and building energy efficiency upgrades can also reduce waste heat.
Heat management strategies include policies and programs that focus on energy, particularly ensuring that residents have access to reliable and affordable indoor cooling, strategies geared towards reducing personal exposure to heat, public health, and emergency preparedness. Many communities are preparing for heat emergencies with early warning systems and cooling centers where people can shelter and seek assistance. Still, more emphasis may be needed on regulation to limit exposure and ensure that everyone can afford and access reliable indoor cooling.
Coordination is key
Effectively planning for urban heat resilience and implementing strategies will require that cities coordinate efforts across different disciplines and sectors, including planning, hazard mitigation, emergency management, public health, public works, parks and recreation, the energy sector, and many more.
Heat should also be addressed in all of the different community plans that shape the built environment and urban services — the network of plans. Thanks to the same NOAA grant that made it possible for the PAS Report to be free to download, we are also leading the development and piloting of the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard for Heat (PIRSH) methodology. PIRSH will allow planners to spatially analyze how different plans would affect heat risk and to identify policy inconsistencies. For example, one plan may call for additional vegetation to cool a particularly hot neighborhood, while another plan increases surface parking lots which could increase heat risks. We will publish a PIRSH guidebook and the Baltimore, Boston, Ft. Lauderdale, Houston, and Seattle pilot reports soon.
Visualizing the network of plans: Different types of community plans affect heat risk by shaping the built environment and waste heat (Ladd Keith and Sara Meerow)
Time to act
All heat deaths are preventable, yet heat impacts will continue to increase unless cities around the world plan for urban heat resilience. Although heat governance remains fragmented and is still in its early days, we see promising signs that more communities are beginning to acknowledge heat as a hazard and take action.
Ladd Keith, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning at The University of Arizona. An urban planner by training, he has over a decade of experience planning for climate change with diverse stakeholders in cities across the U.S. His current research explores heat planning and governance with funding from the NOAA, CDC, and National Institutes for Transportation and Communities.
Quite often city-makers who want to implement nature-based solutions run into many hurdles standing in the way of realising their green ideals. But how do you tear down those walls? Effective co-creation is a path forward.
More than half of the world’s population lives and works in diverse, bustling cities. And perhaps, if you are reading this blog, you have a desire to make these places we call home greener—it can be done with nature-based solutions! Quite often city-makers who want to implement nature-based solutions run into many hurdles standing in the way of realising their green ideals. In this blog, DRIFT intern and Connecting Nature project member Shibeal McCann shares how adaptability and communication can help to overcome these hurdles collectively.
During an enlightening session (“Building natural networks and delivering the deal with stakeholders”) at the Glasgow Innovation Summit (23-25 March), I heard experiences from the cities of Glasgow, Genk, and A Coruña, as they endeavoured to explore how to deliver city-scale green networks using nature-based solutions.
We heard three contrasting examples, yet a coherent story on governance with unifying themes emerged—of adaptability and communication. Each city initiated networks to achieve a common vision that could not have been achieved alone. We heard firsthand the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of building networks to deliver the deal with stakeholders. Knowledge was shared that has relevance beyond the region and context it came from. We discussed insights into how to build networks in our own work. What stood out is that delivering parks is by no means a walk in the park. Here are the lessons I took away from this session.
Session: Building natural networks and delivering the deal with stakeholders – Glasgow Innovation Summit
Lesson #1: Strike the right tone
While building networks between people and places is encouraged, it is not easy, as explicit knowledge and textbooks on the topic are few and far between. As project manager, Max Hislop presented the hardships faced when he and his team set out to develop the Glasgow Clyde Valley (GCV) Green Network Blueprint, Scotland, UK.
Their journey from development to delivery began over fifteen years ago. The GCV Network blueprint is a strategic master plan which seeks to turn Glasgow City Region ‘green’ by developing green networks. The master plan includes installing walking and cycling routes to break up the conurbation (high density of buildings) of Glasgow while leaving room for wild spaces to return to for wild animals. Three cheers for Glasgow’s response to the biodiversity and climate emergency we are facing!
In all this, communication is key. You need to speak the language of your partners in the process and avoid complex data. The GCV team learned this the hard way when they presented a detailed, integrated habitat model mapping the networks of species to urban planners. It flew over the crowd’s head. The team had to accept that data is only effective if it can be communicated properly to the audience in question. This setback forced them to adapt, and, since then, they’ve started discussing this topic with urban planners in a shared language, linking the model to the project’s overarching strategic development plan.
Key take-home: Communicate with planners, if you have strong simple graphics, people will make use of them, avoid complex data – simpler is easier to absorb and digest.
Lesson #2: Find a banner to unite under
Nature-based solutions work better when people and organisations collaborate to achieve what they could not attain alone. Working in partnerships helps to ensure that different needs are considered and local opportunities are exploited.
This state of mind led the city of Genk, Belgium, to form partnerships to deliver their Stiemerdeals. Mien Quartier unveiled the innovative ways in which her city involved stakeholders, including citizens, groups, and local citizens – developing a network of people within their project.
Revolving around 8 fixed themes: nature, relaxation, meeting, happiness, growth, water, creativity and entrepreneurship. https://www.genk.be/stiemerdeals
The Stiemer itself is a stream running through the city of Genk, physically connecting neighbourhoods, nature reserves, and strategic city sites. Since 2015, the city has started revitalising the neglected and polluted valley to realise its full potential. What initially began as a spatial and ecological transformation project, later evolved to include social and economic objectives, realising that these types of transformations could act in synergy.
So, what do these deals entail? The city of Genk collaborates with one or more local entrepreneurs and companies with a flexible approach to governance. Every Stiemerdeal is a tailor-made cooperation, a symbiotic relationship. Stiemer honey, beer, biscuits – you name it, together they’ve made it. In total, they made 37 deals within the first year, incorporating a huge diversity of entrepreneurs into the valley!
The Stiemerdeals offers partners both financial support and material support. At the start of the deal, the team co-creates a clear vision, for how one aspect of the valley can become a valuable asset for the city and deliver multiple benefits. It’s an innovative way to develop a flexible approach to engage people and organisations, give them a sense of ownership, and make them feel part of something bigger, creating a snowball effect.
For me, the key take-home message here is that complex objectives usually cannot be achieved by a city alone. We must increase the capacity to realise the full potential of nature-based solutions. By connecting and networking, and co-producing innovative business models we can accelerate the journey to reach the multiple goals of nature-based solutions together with local actors.
Lesson #3: Tear down those silos
Urban gardens in A Coruña
For our final lesson, we took a trip to the North-West of Spain, to the city of A Coruña, where Antonio Prieto González shared their process for working with urban gardens in the region.
The various benefits of urban gardens were apparent in his city from the outset, specifically as powerful tools for fostering social cohesion, bonding between generations, and ownership of public spaces.
The team in A Coruña didn’t have much experience with nature-based solutions at the start of their adventure. And there were other ongoing initiatives in the city — school gardens, private urban gardens, and community gardens — however, they were all disconnected. The team wanted to create a network to unite these similar initiatives because siloed government departments are one of the main barriers to achieving multi-functional benefits. Many different departments in the municipality were connected indirectly and directly to these urban gardens, like the education, employment, and environment department.
But how do you tear down those walls??
Their solution was combining two societal levels: organisational and strategic. Antonio and the team took the time to work both levels when delivering the urban gardens and simultaneously making interdepartmental connections to show that there is common ground.
Firstly, they organised meetings with relevant councillors and heads of the departments to secure political support. This enabled them to connect to the operational level, working with technicians from different departments. They needed both.
Once again, the process wasn’t a breeze — some departments were not so easy to contact; it’s hard to find the right people (who have to have the time and energy and are not always the first people you think of) -but it’s crucial when working in this horizontal manner.
The key lesson for me was that working on fenced-off projects isn’t enough. You need to align the goals and benefits of the nature-based solutions with the wider city goals. In order to achieve this, making connections from one team to another, and one project to another, is vital to create and build local alliances.
Reflections
To me, these three contrasting examples form a coherent story on governance. Each city initiated networks to achieve a common vision that could not be achieved otherwise, employing communication, adaptability, and operational versus strategic working.
I saw a testbed for what does and doesn’t work so well, revealing the dead ends encountered so that, for others, the journey will be shorter. In that way, this session was an excellent way to show the variety of governance innovations we work on in the Connecting Nature project, and beyond!
About connecting nature
Coordinated by Trinity College Dublin, Connecting Nature is a consortium of 30 partners within 16 European countries, and hubs in Brazil, China, Korea & The Caucasus (Georgia and Armenia). We are co-working with local authorities, communities, industry partners, NGOs, and academics who are investing in the large-scale implementation of nature-based projects in urban settings. We are measuring the impact of these initiatives on climate change adaptation, health and well-being, social cohesion, and sustainable economic development in these cities. We are also developing a diversity of innovative actions to nurture the start-up and growth of commercial and social enterprises active in producing nature-based solutions and products. Connecting Nature is funded under the Horizon 2020 program (call SCC-02-2016-2017; Grant Agreement 730222) and includes 29 partners and 5 self-funded partners.
DRIFT’s team is coordinating the co-production of a new planning cycle with the involved cities and academic partners based on state-of-the-art knowledge about co-production and reflexive monitoring. This planning cycle is for city planners and policymakers that will connect experimentation and lessons to ongoing policy and market needs. It includes operational mechanisms to accelerate the scaling of nature-based solutions as well as guiding principles for turning socio-economic and institutional barriers into opportunities. This is achieved by close interaction between the academic and city partners; to learn by doing and to iteratively reflect upon the steps that are being taken in ongoing nature-based solution projects.
Marleen Lodder graduated MSc Architectural Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology with honours in 2010 and worked as a Ph.D. candidate (October 2011-2015) at DRIFT, Erasmus University. Her research focuses on how urban area development in the Netherlands can become beneficial, by generating economic, ecologic, and social cultural values.
Dr Paula Vandergert is a Senior Research Fellow in the Sustainability Research Institute, University of East London. She works with local authorities, strategic development organisations and local community groups on adaptive governance methods for sustainable and resilient communities and places.
Kato Allaert is a green urbanist, currently based in the Netherlands. In her work, sustainable cities with happy citizens are the focal point. To achieve this, Kato links the spatial perspective with the social, economic and ecological aspects of cities. Kato has around 10 years of work experience in different contexts - from academic research to urban design practice and the public sector - and in different countries - the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Belgium.
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