The power of the natural world to energise creativity has of course long been understood by artists, philosophers, composers and poets. Science is catching up.
Regular readers of TNOC will be familiar with the biophilia hypothesis, which supposes an innate emotional link between humans and the natural world that positively impacts our psychological wellbeing. In other words, we feel most at home in naturalistic surroundings, as this is where we evolved and have spent the majority of human history. The concept has subsequently been applied to the design of workplaces (and other urban settings), where integrating elements of the natural environment is thought to result in improved employee health and happiness, thereby positively influencing business outcomes.
Apple’s new mothership campus. Credit: Apple
Biophilic design principles are believed to be behind Apple’s new Mothership headquarters in Cupertino, California. The Mothership is said to have the world’s largest piece of curved glass, an egalitarian design affording a panoramic view of the newly landscaped and biodiverse 71ha campus (including 9,000 trees) to all of its 12,000-member workforce, rather than just the bosses. In keeping with the biophilia hypothesis, Apple contends that such exposure to greenery and nature improves employee wellbeing, and, in turn, productivity and creativity.
But not everyone is convinced. In a recent edition of the BBC’s World Service Business Daily programme, esteemed Financial Times correspondent, Lucy Kellaway, confidently asserted to the international audience that such attempts to justify Apple’s substantial expenditure on the landscape were “hokum” and that “many of the world’s finest inventions seem to have been built in garden sheds”. Shareholders, she contends, should be concerned by such notions.
While Lucy Kellaway did not proffer an empirically-based critique of the concept, in my experience her scepticism is shared by many in masterplanning, who glaze over at the mention of seemingly woolly biophilic concepts, particularly where such ideas challenge the legibility of their wide, paved, plaza dominated designs (N.B. legibility refers to the ease with which people understand and negotiate the layout of a place; the concept is sometimes lazily and wrongly given as an excuse for excluding biophilic elements, which in fact should, with creativity, form an important part of a coherent set of sensory design cues).
To be fair, others have put forward more reasoned arguments against the concept of biophilia. Yannick Joye and Andreas De Block’s thoughtful review of the hypothesis, critiques (among other things) the ‘sloppiness’ of the terminology; the evolutionary psychological basis for the savanna hypothesis (biophilia proponents assert that humans have a hardwired preference for savanna-like environments); and the supposed adaptive function of people’s biophilic tendencies more generally. With respect to defining biophilia, the seemingly disproportionate emphasis on our positive emotional connection with nature contrasted with our opposing biophobic responses is highlighted. Regarding the latter two concerns, it is certainly true that not all biological characteristics are evolutionary adaptations.
Solaris Tower in in the Singapore’s Central Business District (‘Best Tall Building Asia & Australasia Finalist’ in the 2012 Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats Awards). image courtesy of T. R. Hamzah & Yeang Sdn. Bhd
Regardless of such objections, an increasing body of scientific research is identifying the neurological mechanisms behind the hedonic effects that exposure to natural stimuli seems to engender, and also the reverse that comes from an increasing disconnect from such influences, i.e. nature-deficit disorder, to use an expression first coined by Richard Louv. The relationships being discovered are no longer simply statistical correlations between self-reported mood scores or worker productivity and the environmental characteristics of workplaces (recall, statistical correlation does not prove cause and effect). Rather, multiple physiological parameters are also increasingly being measured in people in biophilic and non-biophilic settings, providing a much stronger scientific basis for the concept.
Interestingly, much research appears to be coming out of South Korea, a nation that has achieved spectacularly rapid economic growth over recent decades but whose workers toil longer hours than any other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nation, and are consequently said to be experiencing peak stress. One study led by Bum Jin Park found that subjects exposed to natural settings had lower cortisol levels (the stress hormone), blood pressure and heart rate compared with those exposed to urban settings. Another study led by Gwang-Won Kim showed that subjects exposed to natural settings experienced increased activation of the insular cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex in the brain that are linked with happiness, insight and free-thinking, whereas urban settings activated the amygdala, which registers fear and anxiety. Similarly Gregory Bratman’s team at Stanford have recently found that exposure to nature reduces neural activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with rumination, a self-defeating thought pattern linked with mental illnesses.
Selas Cano office im Madrid. Photo: iwan Baan
As for the assertion that the greatest minds only need garden sheds for inspiration, the power of the natural world to energise creativity has of course long been understood by artists, philosophers, composers and poets. Great scientists such as Darwin and Einstein are also said to have sought inspiration while walking in nature. Darwin regularly walked in his garden at Down House and in the surrounding Kent countryside, not so much for physical exercise but rather as an exercise in problem solving or “hard thinking”, to quote his son Francis. Ruth Atchley and colleagues have been attempting to quantify these cognitive advantages and have found that immersion in nature, and a corresponding disconnect from multi-media and technology, boosted scores on creativity and problem-solving tasks by an amazing 50 percent. They suggest that natural stimuli activate brain areas associated with restful introspection and mind wandering, which in turn sparks creativity, whereas exposure to attention-demanding technology necessitates regularly responding to sudden events and shifting between tasks, inhibiting the positive effects of divergent thinking.
Even tech moguls in Silicon Valley have been looking towards the great outdoors for revelation. The biophilic Mothership is said to have been the brainchild of Steve Jobs. According to his biographers, Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, Jobs “needed to be refreshed by the primal rhythms of the natural world—the land, the hills, the oaks, the orchards. California’s spirit of newness invigorated him …. such natural grandeur was the perfect setting for big thinking”. Jobs was also well known for conducting meetings while walking outdoors, as is Mark Zuckerberg who is said to present his pitch to top-talent he is seeking to hire while walking in the woods and hills around Palo Alto. Nature is good for us, but walking in nature is even better. The added cognitive advantage of walking, while doubtless intuitive to many readers, is also increasingly supported by hard science. Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz (again at Stanford) found that the creative output of their subjects rose by staggering 60 percent while walking.
The restorative and healing capacity of nature isn’t of course new to the medical profession, which has a number of projects underway developing green prescriptions, aiming to provide us with our Vitamin N, nature fix and nature diet, to quote Richard Louv, Florence Williams and Tim Beatley respectively.
We seem, therefore, to be progressively moving towards identifying positive causative correlations between biophilic designed working environments (and other urban settings) and psychological health and cognitive function in employees, which are of course important ingredients for successful businesses. Clearly though, much more research is required to tease out the particular elements of landscape and built form design that appear to be having the most beneficial biophilic effect in our brains so that this information can better inform urban planning policy and landscape/architectural design. As an ecologist I have in this respect been particularly encouraged by the research of Richard Fuller and colleagues, which suggests we respond more positively the greater the ecological richness incorporated into greenspaces.
Many readers will be thinking that the positive link between biophilic design principles and our emotional state, inventiveness and productivity is self-evident. Haven’t we known all of this since the time of Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth and Henry Thoreau, and indeed probably long before? While the connection does indeed seem intuitive, we must also continue to collate the hard scientific rationale required to quell the cries of “hokum” that will continue to come our way.
Atchley RA, Strayer DL & Atchley P (2012). Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings. PLoS ONE, 7, e51474. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051474
Beatley T (2016). Handbook of Biophilic City Planning and Design. Island Press, Washington DC.
BBC (2017). World Service Business Daily: Billion Dollar Headquarters. BBC World Service. 21 Aug 2017. 08:32.
Bratman GN, Hamilton JP, Hahn KS, Daily GC & Grossc JJ (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112, 8567–8572.
Joye Y & De Block A (2011). ‘Nature and I are Two’: A Critical Examination of the Biophilia Hypothesis. Environmental Values, 20, 189-215.
Kim GW, Jeong GW, Kim TH, Baek HS, Oh SK, Kang HK, Lee SG, Kim YS, Song JK (2010). Functional Neuroanatomy Associated with Natural and Urban Scenic Views in the Human Brain: 3.0T Functional MR Imaging. Korean Journal Radiology, 11, 507–513.
Louv R (2017). Vitamin N: The Essential Guide to a Nature-Rich Life. Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill.
Oppezzo M & Schwartz DL (2014). Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40, 1142–1152.
Park BJ, Tsunetsugu Y, Kasetani T, Kagawa T, Miyazaki Y. (2010). The physiological effects of Shinrin-yoku (taking in the forest atmosphere or forest bathing): evidence from field experiments in 24 forests across Japan. Environmental Health Preventative Medicine, 15, 18–26.
Schlender B & Tetzeli R (2015). Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader. Penguin Random House, New York.
Williams F. (2017). The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative. W.W. Norton & Company, New York.
Young D (2014). How to Think About Exercise. Macmillan, London.
As our cities expand and densify simultaneously, there is a need to design places to connect people to nature. If we are not careful, our commute and daily experience within the city will be nothing more than glass, steel, and concrete. This post articulates the need for biophilic interventions in urban places, offers good examples found in NYC, and suggests easy solutions you can take now to help.
Urban acupuncture is intended to produce small-scale but socially catalytic interventions in the urban fabric. No needles necessary.
Our access to wild places and “nature” is shrinking, and so is our will to get to those places. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 80 percent of Americans took at least a week-long vacation in 1977. Compare that to less than 60 percent of Americans taking a week-long vacation in 2014. Additionally, trips to our National Park system have also been in decline. The Journal of Leisure Research published a report in 2014 that shows per capita visitation to our National Park system has declined 19 percent since 1997. If we are trending towards getting “out into nature” less, we need to actively design our cities to bring nature in. As we continue to select urban places to live, the impetus to embed nature, and specifically urban biophilic acupuncture, is paramount.
Biophiliais humankind’s innate biological connection with nature. It helps explain why crackling fire and crashing waves captivate us; why a garden view can enhance our creativity; why shadows and height instill fascination and fear; and why animal companionship and strolling through a park have restorative, healing effects. Terrapin Bright Green has published two extensive reports on the subject of biophilia, The Economics of Biophilia and 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design.
Urban Acupuncture is a socio-environmental theory that combines contemporary urban design with traditional Chinese acupuncture, using small-scale interventions to transform the larger urban context. Just as the practice of acupuncture is aimed at relieving stress in the human body, the goal of urban acupuncture is to relieve stress in the built environment. Urban acupuncture is intended to produce small-scale but socially catalytic interventions in the urban fabric. No needles necessary.
Biophilic Urban Acupuncture (BUA) is the theory that threads and nodes of biophilic interventions in specific urban places can help improve people’s moods, connect people to place, and help improve mental health. Biophilic urban acupuncture blends two very important design concepts: biophilia and urban acupuncture.
BUA has higher levels of effectiveness in dense cities versus suburban places due to the ease of pedestrian mobility. A resident that lives in a dense city will spend at least some time each day outside because they will be walking to transit, walking to work, or walking to get a meal. Even though BUA is likely needed in more suburban places, the auto-centric street design and sprawled land-use typically does not lend itself to high quality biophilic opportunities.
Threads and Nodes
Smaller BUA interventions should be placed in locations throughout the city in a web-like structure, allowing users with different destinations to engage in biophilic experiences no matter where they are traveling. These smaller biophilic interventions do not need to be grand in scale to have an impression. Positive impacts on self-esteem and mood have been shown to occur in the first five minutes of experiencing nature (Barton &Pretty, 2010). Daily, unintentional exposure should be a priority when planning a BUA intervention. The intervention should be placed in a location that receives a large number of users but is embedded into an everyday habitat or commute.
The larger biophilic experience should be placed in an area of the city that can serve a larger amount of the population and should include as many biophilic patterns as possible. These are typically parks, such as the Olmsted-designed Central Park in New York City or the Tommaso Francini-designed Luxembourg Garden in Paris. Large parks that are centrally located within a city and connected by good transit will provide a robust BUA experience to a greater number of residents than parks located in the periphery.
BUA Examples
THE FOUNTAINS AND WATER FEATURES OF NYC
A space with a good Presence of Water condition feels compelling and captivating. Fluidity, sound, lighting, proximity, and accessibility each contribute to whether a space is stimulating, calming, or both.
In the urban environment, there are two ways to capitalize on the multi-sensory attributes of water to enhance the experience of a place. First, simulating or constructing water features (water walls, fountains, or falls; aquaria; water imagery) in the built environment—indoors and out—creates positive effects for inhabitants, though, it is worth mentioning that water and energy-intensive installments may create other issues. Second, it is possible to amplify the presence of naturally occurring water (lakes and ponds; streams, creeks, and rivers; rainfall; arroyos) to help inhabitants become increasingly aware of the surrounding environment.
A space with a good Visual Connection with Nature feels whole; it grabs one’s attention and can be stimulating or calming. It can convey a sense of time, weather, and other living things.
MillionTrees NYC is a citywide, public-private program that has planted one million new trees across the City’s five boroughs over the past decade. Beyond the numerous ecological benefits, strengthening New York City’s urban forest plays a positive role in helping inhabitants reduce stress and bolster self-esteem, mood, and parasympathetic activity.
PopUp Forest: Times Square is emulating the pop-up restaurant experience by transforming a public plaza in Times Square into a large-scale, temporary urban forest installation. The goal is to foster a movement to re-define cities with nature in mind and to create an urban oasis for wildlife while helping New Yorkers get more familiar with nearby nature.
Biomorphic Forms & Patterns are symbolic references to contoured, patterned, textured, or numerical arrangements that persist in nature. A space with good Biomorphic Forms & Patterns feels interesting and comfortable, possibly captivating, contemplative or even absorptive.
Biomorphic subway art illustrates how this concept has been implemented in New York City subway stations. The passageway between 42nd Street and 5th Avenue includes artistic depictions of natural systems such as tree roots and animal burrows, and the Jay Street/Metro Tech Station depicts glass mosaic art with various animal species, including starlings, sparrows, lion fish, parrots, tiger beetles, and koi fish.
A space with a good Connection with Natural Systems evokes a relationship to a greater whole, making one aware of seasonality and the cycles of life. The experience is often relaxing, nostalgic, profound or enlightening, and frequently anticipated.
The tidal wetlands at the recently expanded Brooklyn Bridge Park offer a prime example of connecting an urban landscape with the local ecosystem. The wetlands heighten awareness of natural properties of the East River and may promote environmental stewardship of the Park and surrounding area.
Biophilic Urban Acupuncture does not need to hinge on large budgets or city agencies to have dramatic impact. You can play a role in integrating BUA elements in your neighborhood now. Here are a few strategies to help you get started:
Seed bombs are balls made from volcanic red clay or compressed soil containing different varieties of native species’ seeds; they can fit in the palm. Usually, other additives are included in the ball, such as compost or humus to provide microbial inoculants. They can be dropped or tossed onto vacant lots or public places that are in need of beauty and vegetation. Seeds that support pollinators, such as honeybees or butterflies, are better as they will reinforce the Visual Connection to Nature and Connection to Natural Systems biophilic patterns.
WHERE: Seed bombs work well in places that have exposed soil and in places that are difficult to access.
HOW: Although it was once strictly a DIY project, seed bombs can now be purchased online, in stores, or even from vending machines.
Tree pits are areas around urban trees that provide a small pervious surface for the roots to breath and absorb water. These can be transformed from small, often neglected patches of soil into strong BUA interventions. If done with care, you can plant flowers or root bulbs in the pits. Additional interventions could include placing small benches around the tree pit, which will create a reason for people to linger under the tree, reinforcing the biophilic response.
WHERE: Most trees that are located in public right-of-way are the responsibility of the community to take care of. Check with your neighbors about which tree pits are available to improve.
HOW: Using a hand cultivator, loosen the topsoil, as this is usually compacted. Spreading a thin layer of mulch will help the tree absorb water and reduce evaporation. Plant in-season flowers and enjoy!
Guerilla gardening is the act of planting vegetation in spaces that gardeners do not have the legal rights to use. These sites are typically abandoned or areas that are substantially neglected. BUA can have large impacts in these neglected areas via guerilla gardening because the intervention is typically noticed and appreciated by the community, regardless of who did it, and is taken care of for years. This intervention supports the Connection with Natural Systems, Visual Connection with Nature, and Non-Visual Connection with Nature biophilic patterns
WHERE: Typically, guerrilla gardening occurs in spaces that are vacant or underutilized spaces. This intervention originated in NYC in the 1970s with residents throwing balloons filled with local seeds, water, and fertilizer into empty lots.
HOW: This BUA intervention is best done with a group of neighbors and/or friends. Locate a site that is in need of a garden and make a plan for the plantings and improvements. Pre-planting site work may need to be done, such as cleaning up junk, trash, and debris.
We know that cities will continue to morph. We also know that we enjoy listening to a water fountain, seeing a butterfly, or watching leaves shake with the help of a slight breeze. Let’s work to ensure that Biophilic Urban Acupuncture is part of the toolkit we use to help shape the places where we want to live.
In his essay published on The Nature of Cities in 2013, Keitaro Ito asked what seems at first to be a simple question: “Where will children learn about nature?” Yet it is actually an incredibly complex question, caught up in adult ideas that romanticize both childhood and nature. Children’s understanding and experiences of the world have a diverse set of influences from birth, including parents, siblings, caregivers, playmates, media, school, religion and material spaces. Research in the field of childhood studies (psychology, education, sociology, neurosciences) has shown that not only is the socialisation of children complex, it is also impossible to determine what behaviours are innate and which are learned (Aitken, 2001; James et al., 1998; Taylor, 2013).
Why is this important for those of us concerned about environmental issues and the future of the planet? Because the ways in which we represent, talk about, and produce natures for children perpetuate the assumption that children are innately connected to nature. Yet just as children are socialised in gender roles, so too are they socialised to understand and interact in ways that reproduce dominant society-nature relations: human as external to nature, urban as antithesis to nature, and women and children as closer to nature than men because of biology and age. The essays on The Nature of Cities challenge these perspectives, but prevailing ideas about society and nature persist. Mainstream media, in particular, plays a critical role in reproducing these dominant ideas.
In this article, I am concerned with how popular children’s media represents natures. I want to make connections between popular TV shows aimed specifically at boys or girls and a particular event that took place in my home in Montréal. Media plays a large role in shaping children’s knowledge of natures, and therefore how they interact and play in ‘natures’. The ways in which nature is represented in and interacted with in children’s TV shows can be powerful. TV shows create affective atmospheres(Anderson, 2009); that is, they create an ambiance that is both real (material—the TV show itself) and emotional (feeling —how the TV show makes one feel about certain things). An atmosphere is ephemeral, affecting one’s life by enveloping it without a person really feeling it or being completely aware of the process. In this way, affective atmospheres create collective effects and emotional responses. And emotional responses are a key way that we produce and comprehend knowledge. Affective atmospheres are ubiquitous, but some are more powerful than others. At present, mainstream media is one of the most powerful affective atmospheres because of its pervasiveness.
Affective atmospheres in children’s media landscapes (film, TV, internet) now form an intimate part of a child’s everyday life-world, in some cases starting at birth. The children’s media landscape is much more complex and diverse than in previous decades, and now consists of multiple media platforms such that stories are told across different forms of media (Vossen, Piotrowski & Valkenburg, 2014). The affective atmospheres in children’s media reproduce and perpetuate all sorts of binaries—rural-urban, female-male, emotion-rational, culture-nature—and the persistence of these binaries makes it difficult for those of us seeking to rethink natures (urban and beyond). In this post, I explore the affective atmospheres in two children’s TV shows—My Little Pony: Friendship is Magicand Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles(2012 to current series)—and make links to a real life event involving birds, squirrels, and two children.
A house, some birds, a squirrel, and two kids
During the summer of 2013, the side and back of my home (a duplex in Montréal) was covered with ivy, which served as the habitat of at least a dozen birds. There were also two children living in the duplex: a four-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy. The girl (my daughter), Chloe, lived in the upper duplex and the boy, Antoine, lived with his family in the lower duplex. The vines and birds fascinated Chloe. She would sit on the deck and watch the birds fly in and out, using binoculars to find their nests in the vines. One day Chloe commented that it was very cool to have bird apartments on the building. The co-habitation with these birds became lessons for learning not only about ecology, but also about difference. The new baby birds enthralled Chloe, and she had a desire to identify with them. She would put special bowls of seeds out for them and get frustrated by their inability to share with each other. Chloe quizzed me about birds: did they have families; did the baby birds attend day care and kindergarten; did they fly to the park to play like she did; do they tell stories at bedtime; what time did they go to bed; why did they get up so early; etc.? While exasperating, her questions were important for her to understand interspecies difference and similarities. From the start she identified, to a certain extent, with the birds–they lived in the same house! And she wanted to find more ways that she and the birds were the same.
Unfortunately, at the end of the summer, the owner of our building (Antoine’s father, who lived in the ground floor of the duplex) decided that he was tired of the bird poop on the basement stairs and flowerbeds. So one weekend he and Antoine started cutting down the vines at the base. The son was very excited; he cheered his dad on, yelling for the birds to go back to the trees where they belong. Chloe watched in horror as the birds fled very quickly from the vine. She did not yell at the owner to stop, but stood on our balcony shocked. He was destroying the bird’s home. Then a flurry of questions: Where would they go? Can they live with us? Can we plant vines in our kitchen? She was confused because she thought the bird poo was good for the plants below (I told about the usefulness of bird poo (guano) as fertilizer and how people at one time had fought over it), so why did the landlord think it was bad? We spent the afternoon figuring out how best to explain concepts of private property, a desire for particular aesthetics, and nature as ‘out of place’ in cities.
Later that week, Chloe approached Antoine and asked him directly why he destroyed the bird’s home and didn’t he know that they need homes too. Indeed, she continued, bird poo is really good for plants. Antoine replied equally directly that birds can find another home in trees were they belong, not on human buildings. Anyway, he sneered, birds are girly. The exchange prompted even more questions, now around whether certain animals were for girls and others for boys. It also brought into this ‘event’ another co-inhabitant: Chippy (as named by Chloe), the squirrel who inhabits two trees, one in the front yard of the duplex and the other in the neighbour’s front yard. Chippy travels between his/her two homes via the telephone and electric cables. If birds were girly, Chloe wondered, what about squirrels?
Chloe’s questions and the conversation between her and Antoine illustrate the complex culture-nature questions at the heart of dwelling in the city. The story also points to the ways in which dwelling and assembling are gendered. Moreover, paying attention to their emotional reactions to the bird apartment and its destruction helps to make sense of Chloe and Antoine’s experiences of dwelling with birds, squirrels, and many other urban natures. Chloe’s feelings of anger and confusion generated a new set of questions about nature, gender, and dwelling. Her query as to whether nature really was gendered—is there really a boy nature and a girl nature— gives rise to further questions around why and how Antoine assumed birds and squirrels are for the girls?
Media landscapes, children, and nature
Children’s understanding and experiences of nature are shaped by a variety of influences. Media is one influence. As many media scholars have noted, the pervasiveness of media in children and youth’s everyday lives affords it power (Holtzman & Sharpe, 2014; Singer & Singer, 2012). Portrayals of human-nature relations in films, TV shows, and literature can be very powerful in shaping children’s understanding of nature. The influence of Disney and other media franchises on the socialization of children has been well studied since the 1960s. Cultural theorist Whitely (2012) explores the different ways that Disney portrays wild nature and humans in their films. He stresses that more than just representing nature, Disney films create feelings; their “stock in trade”, he suggests, “is emotion”. Whitely argues that sentimentality in such films needs to be better understood. The feelings and ideas we have about the nature, humans, etc. shape our relationship with the world; engagement with the world through sentiment needs to be given more importance. What we need to pay attention to, therefore, is the affective atmosphere that films and TV shows create.
I want to turn now to My Little Pony and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—shows that Chloe and Antoine watched that summer—to explore how nature is portrayed differently in animated TV shows aimed at girls and boys (separately), and the different emotions they elicit in viewers. I consider the environment and aesthetic modalities of the shows. The environment includes: whether the setting is urban or rural, day or night, and the presence of nature and how it is represented. Aesthetic modalities in this chapter refer to the visuals (such as colour), language, character interactions with the environment, and sound elements that create the world in the cartoons. Both of these work together to create affective atmospheres.
Environment and aesthetic modalities in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (MLP) is a show that is marketed directly towards young girls, from preschool to around age 10, although the fan base is much more diverse than this and includes men in their twenties (Delano Robertson, 2014). According to Creative Director Lauren Faust (2010) the aim of the show is to illustrate the diversity and complexity of being a girl. MLP itself epitomizes the urban/rural divide. It takes place in a small rural village called Ponyland, and the surrounding forests and farmlands, all of which are in the land of Equestria. However, there is one large city in Equestria—Manehatten— in which a few episodes are set. There are clear distinctions made between the metropolitan city of Manehatten (fashioned after the island of Manhattan) and the rural landscape of Ponyville (see the images below).
Manehatten is considered the centre of high society, where ponies go for culture (theatre) and consumption (clothes shopping—although the ponies hardly ever wear clothes). Depending on the pony’s traits and special talents, they either feel out of place or inspired and excited while in Manehatten. For example, Apple Blossom, a young pony from the apple orchard near Ponyville, visits her urban cousin and feels very much out of place with the rules of etiquette, pressures of being ‘in style’, and the closed-in landscape of the city (‘The Cutie Mark Chronicle’, season one); she longs for the peace, quiet and freedom of Ponyville. In contrast, Rarity—a pony whose special talent is fashion design—travels to Manehatten to participate in fashion week. Rarity is excited and energized by city life. However, during the episode, she transforms into a stereotypical, competition-driven, ‘every pony for herself’ urbanite. Eventually she realizes that life in Ponyville is better because it revolves around community and friendship.
Rural landscape of Ponyville (above) and urban landscape of Manehattan (below) in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Images: http://mlp.wikia.com
Nature figures prominently in the rural landscape of Ponyville, as the above image illustrates. Scenes always contain plants, trees, animals, and even flying insects. The soundscape often includes birds chirping. The pony’s houses are frequently populated by small animals, especially the Fluttershy’s home, where she lives with numerous animals that she cares for. In contrast to Ponyville, the setting of Manehattan leaves out street trees and the sounds of birds. The urban scenes are louder with more background noise, such as talking and cars. MLP takes nature out of the urban to make the contrast with the rural idyllic more drastic. The visuals of each landscape, however, are similar in terms of animation technique: bright colours, light, and soft images.
The ponies also interact differently with the urban and rural landscapes. In episodes set in Manehattan, ponies from Ponyville are often more tense, get frustrated easily, and long for the calm and quiet of the rural. The ponies also take on stereotypical urban characteristics, such as the example of Rarity above. When she participates in the fashion show, she becomes more competitive and treats her friends like workers. Back in Ponyville, the ponies’ main role is to make sure that nature is kept in balance—they each have a role to play in caring for and maintaining nature. Along with caring for friends, caring for nature is the key task in MLP.
Environment and aesthetics in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
TNMT Sewer Lair. Image: turtlepedia.wikia.com
The world in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) is radically different from MLP. TMNT takes place in an urban landscape, yet like MLP’s Manehattan, it is also a fictitious New York City. The four teenage turtles and their father figure and sensei, Master Splinter, live below the city in the storm sewers. They only emerge onto the surface at night, as they are trained to be shadows and to hide from humans. Because the show takes place below the city and at night, the visuals are very dark; the shades used in the animation are gloomy, with only splashes of colour (figures above and below). The sewer lair is lit from above by what seems to be the subway system, and by dim lights placed near the walls. In the aboveground landscape of New York City, there are no street trees or plants visible. Nor are there any bird sounds, even on the rare occasions when the Ninja Turtles leave the sewers during the day. While there is no ‘green’ nature displayed in the above ground cityscape, neither are there any natures that run through the storm sewers; that is, it never seems to rain while the turtles are in their lair, even though they live in storm sewers.
Typical nighttime urban landscape of New York City. Image: tmnt2012series.wikia.com
The visual and sound landscapes change dramatically when the Ninja Turtles and two friends need to leave New York City and drive to a farmhouse several hours away. Leaving the city in a VW van, the turtles go to recuperate and energise in the country. In the rural setting of the farm, the animation because much lighter and colourful (figure below). The setting here is, of course, full of nature; the farmhouse is surrounding by forest and the Ninja Turtles have to learn how to be in ‘Nature’, including interacting with animals such as chickens and deer. Indeed, Michelangelo becomes attached to the farm animals, tearing up when he has to say goodbye. In the rural landscape, the turtles fight different ‘bad guys,’ many if which draw on mythical tales. For example, Bigfoot appears in one episode.
The rural landscape of the O’Neill Farmhouse (TNMT season three). Image: tmnt2012series.wikia.com
Experiencing nature at the farmhouse becomes pivotal in the Ninja Turtles’ journey to becoming better masters of Ninjitsu, which involves deeper concentration and balance. In this way, the idealisation of a balanced nature is directly linked to inner peace and focus within the turtles. This connection is clearly portrayed in season three, episode eight, when the turtles leave the farmhouse to camp in the forest. Their task is to practice Ninjitsu, to meditate, and to be at one with nature. After having a vision of Master Splinter, the turtles embark on individual journeys, each of which is linked to a goal and to an element of nature. Raphael is represented by fire and needs to find focus; Leonardo follows the wind to become an exemplary leader; Donatello has to find more power in the mountains; and Michelangelo is too distracted and needs to find calm in the forest/woods. At the end of their journeys, the turtles emerge from the forest triumphant, each bearing a banner with their newfound nature element and ready to return to New York City to fight the colonizing alien species, the Kraang (figure below). There are little emotional affinities towards protecting nature in TNMT. Rather, nature serves as a source of power and strength. It is rejuvenating and energising.
TMNT emerging from the forest after their vision quests with their new banners symbolizing different elements in nature (from left to right: fire, wind, mountain and woods/forest). Image: turtlepedia.wikia.com
Affective atmospheres, media landscapes, children and nature
Both MLP and TNMT exemplify a dominant and romanticized understanding of nature: nature is outside cities and is ‘othered’. Moreover, nature is portrayed stereotypically as something important to protect and to dominate as well as an idealised escape from the urban, which is calming and energising. MLP—a show aimed at girls—very obviously generates feelings of care and protection for nature. It is a key element in the show. Indeed, nature in MLP is in a pastoral setting and is venerated. Nature is calming, healing, in balance, in need of protection, and outside of cities.
This is also the case in TNMT, but only in four episodes; the majority of episodes take place in a city devoid of nature. The feelings both shows produce about nature do nothing to challenge dominant understandings of nature for children. But the presence of nature in MLP makes it clear that girls should take care of nature while in TMNT, boys fight off imaginary bad guys in cities and go to the rural areas to rejuvenate in nature. Here we have the too-easy association of male-culture and female-nature; we might further map male-rational-urban, female-emotional-rural onto these stereotypes, It is difficult to extract the exact emotions these shows generate in children since each child interacts and interprets differently based on his or her experiences and geography (e.g. urban or rural). But these shows most certainly play a part in shaping understandings of nature (and spaces).
In the everyday lives of Chloe and Antoine, we can consider the TV shows they watch as affective atmospheres in their lives. The shows they watch affect their feelings, emotions, and understanding of nature. It is almost too simple to draw connections between the representations and feelings of nature (and the urban/rural divide) in both shows to the reactions of Chloe and Antoine to the “bird apartments.” However, pointing to the obvious similarities between the shows that Chloe and Antoine watched during this time and their respective reactions illustrates how media shapes our spatialised relations with nature. Chloe was very much attached to the figure of Fluttershy in MLP, and she loved Fluttershy’s house (figure below).
Fluttershy’s cottage in the woodland just outside Ponyville. Image: mlp.wikia.com
The bird apartment on Chloe’s house most likely reminded her of Fluttershy’s house, although Chloe did not express this verbally. For her, that her house was located in an urban setting did not matter; what was important was that the house was shared with animals. Just as Fluttershy’s home in MLP was always more-than-human (and not just because the main characters are ponies—they are, after all, anthropomorphized). Fluttershy’s home is inhabited by all sorts of creatures because it is in the rural forest and is part of creating balance. This is not, as I point out above, unproblematic. Chloe felt as though she need to take care of the birds and was curious how they could survive without someone (such as humans) to help them. Antoine, in contrast, felt little in common with the birds and other animals dwelling with him. For Antoine, the birds belonged in the country and not in the city. That his house was urban was an important element in whether the animals belonged because, in his favourite show, TNMT, urban New York does not have trees or animals.
It is difficult to imagine how these media landscapes—the affective atmospheres of children’s media—cannot influence how children feel about the material socio-natural spaces they inhabit. As Whitely notes, the feelings about nature that are created through animated films have very real material affects. Almost a century of Disney’s influence in shaping feelings and understandings of human-nature relations in N. America, Europe, and beyond cannot be underestimated. Analysing how media portrays nature and human-nature relations is necessary, but there also needs to be more focus on showing how ideas and emotions regarding nature in media transfer to everyday ways of interacting with nature.
Richard Louv’s ‘Children and Nature Movement’ and similar campaigns tend to eschew media as an evil technology; in many ways, they are justified given the ways in which nature is portrayed by the media. However, even for children who are exposed to few hours of media (such as my daughter, who is allowed to watch no more than 2 hours/week), media is powerful because these children interact with other children who are exposed to films and TV shows every day (and we cannot ignore the power of literature as well!). Yet while the ‘Children and Nature Movement’ and similar movements critique the ubiquity of media, they tend to recreate the same ideas that are generated by the media. Such movements seek to reconnect children to nature. The argument is that children are being distanced from their natural (innate) connection to nature, what Louv diagnoses as ‘nature deficit disorder’. While such movements have the potential to be very beneficial efforts for children, there is little critical reflection on how children’s relationship to nature is socially constructed as gendered, culturally specific, and spatially fixed (authentic nature is outside the city).
Scholars and others have pointed out the ways in which girls and boys interact with and play in nature differently, but few analyse such gendered play in nature as socially constructed. Movements to reconnect children seem not to be concerned with reproducing (problematic) gender stereotypes. They also tend to reinforce the spatial divide of urban-culture and rural-nature by privileging the natures outside of cities, such ‘wild’ natures, which are depicted as more therapeutic and authentic. By not recognizing gendered and spatial differences in children’s relation with nature, such movements implicitly naturalise gendered relations and fail to challenge the dominant and problematic understandings of nature. If we are to reshape children’s relations to and understandings of nature, then engaging with work in media on representations of nature and human-nature relations is critical—especially if we want to avoid reinforcing and perpetuating problematic, romantic, idealized human-nature relations.
What do we do to counteract media that reifies problematic human-nature relations? How do we create media and urban spaces that enable Chloe and Antoine to produce different notions about nature (or that emphasise nature’s diversity and dynamism) and open their minds to different notions about what it means to be a boy, a girl, or something else? My family has since relocated to Costa Rica, so Chloe and Antoine have not been able to revisit their dialogue about birds, squirrels, and gender. But Chloe has moved on from MLP to the Magic School Bus and Spongebob Squarepants, both of which are slightly less problematic. The Magic School Bus uses a scientific perspective to explore different natures (from the human body to insects to ocean ecosystems). And Spongebob Squarepants….well, I am still not sure how to anlayse this show. Perhaps, in some ways, Spongebob illustrates how a completely fantastical world that does not seek to imitate or teach reality opens up possibilities for thinking differently about nature-society relations.
This article is adapted and shortened from a forthcoming chapter entitled ‘Birds are for the girls: children’s media landscape and the emotional geographies of urban natures’ in Skelton, T., Dwyer, C., & Worth, N. (eds). Geographies of Children and Young People: Volume 4: Geographies of Identities and Subjectivities, Springer Reference.
The names in the Chloe and Antoine story have been changed.
Works cited
Aitken, S. (2001) The Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity. Routledge, New York and London.
Anderson, B. (2009) Affective Atmospheres, Emotion, Space and Society 2: 77–81.
Delano Robertson, V.L. (2014) Of ponies and men: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and the Brony fandom, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 17(1): 21-37.
Holtzman, L., & Sharpe, L. (2014). Media messages: What film, television, and popular music teach us about race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Second edition. New York: ME Sharpe.
James, A., C. Jenks, and A. Prout (1998) Theorizing Childhood. Polity Press, Cambridge.
Singer, G. & Singer, J.L. (2012). Handbook of children and the media. Second edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Taylor, A. (2013) Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. Routledge, New York.
Vossen, H., Piotrowski, J.T. & Valkenburg, P.M. (2014). Media use and effects in childhood. In Nussbaum, J.F. (Ed) The handbook of lifespan communication (pp. 93-112). New York: Peter Land Publishing.
Whitley, D. S. (2012). The idea of nature in Disney animation. Second edition. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing.
Among the many lessons learned over my decades-long career in urban conservation is that iconography matters. Icons have proven to be powerful catalysts in the conservation arena, particularly in the urban context.
Chinook Salmon. Photo: Michael Wilhelm, Wilhelm Photography
Salmon, for example, are the quintessential representative of the natural world throughout the Pacific Northwest in both urban and rural areas. Salmon are especially central to the life ways of indigenous peoples; constitute the basis for much of the region’s cuisine; and are a keystone species for watersheds ranging from the vast Columbia River to the smallest urban waterway in cities like Seattle and Portland.
Camas (Camassia quamash) and Oregon white oak are both indicators of the now imperiled oak savannah habitat that once dominated the pre-settlement Willamette Valley in Oregon, a habitat maintained by active management of native tribes. Both the salmon and oak savannah are the focus of much of the ecosystem restoration efforts throughout the Pacific Northwest for reasons that go beyond their formal status as threatened or endangered, owing to their cultural significance.
Camas. Photo: Mike HouckCamassia Nature Conservancy Preserve, oak savannah. Photo: Mike HouckGreat Blue Heron. Photo: Mike Houck
The Great Blue Heron: Urban Nature Icon
When I assumed the title of Urban Naturalist in Portland in the early 1980s, taking a cue from the attention given salmon and oak savannah, I wondered if we might establish an icon from the natural world to rally urban nature conservation in the Portland metropolitan region. I had read that around sunrise on March 15th of every year since 1957 Hinckley, Ohio celebrated the concurrent return of spring and the Turkey Vulture to the “Buzzards’ Roost” at the Hinckley Reservation, part of the Cleveland’s Metroparks system. That tradition, initiated by Hinckley’s “official buzzard spotter”, Dr. Bob Hinkle who was a naturalist ranger for the park district, was even taken up by the Cleveland rock station—WMMS refers to itself as “The Buzzard”—and more recently by the local Chamber of Commerce, which hosts an official Facebook page complete with Buzzard Day Countdown.
Hinckley Ohio Buzzard Days. Source: the Internet
Berkeley, California also has a city bird, the Barn Owl, which instigator Lisa Owens Viani says was inspired by Portland’s heron. Her passion for Barn Owls began soon after moving to Berkeley in 2003. As she and a friend strolled around their neighborhood they heard a hissing noise that sounded like, what she describes as a respirator. On closer inspection the sound emanated from a palm tree. Unfortunately, not everyone in the neighborhood shared Lisa’s passion for the owl and the palm was shortly thereafter felled.
Her concern for Barn Owl habitat and the fact that the owls predate on unwanted mammals led her to led her to the The Hungry Owl Project in Marin County and Raptors Are The Solution. She was surprised to learn that a dozen pair of owls nested in Berkeley, most in the Canary Island palm trees, such as the one in which she saw her first Berkeley owl. In what she describes as “the least controversial Berkeley Council resolution ever”, the Barn Owl was designated at the city’s official city bird. For more information check out Keep Barn Owls in Berkeley.
Barn Owl. Photo: Bob Lewis
Threatened Portland heron colony
As with Berkeley’s Barn Owls, the plight of a Great Blue Heron nesting colony that lay in the path of a proposed roadway realignment sparked a pitched battle against a roadway that would have been routed through several acres of wetlands and within a short distance of a public golf course. I got to wondering if elevating the heron’s status in Portland might draw attention to loss of habitat generally and at the golf course specifically. We had already engaged in a heron related land use issue in the late 1970s involving a sand and gravel operation at Ross Island on the Willamette River in downtown Portland. It seemed to me that herons were likely to remain in the cross-hairs of proposed developments for years to come and perhaps the time had come to enlist the bird in a public relations campaign.
Great Blue Heron Colony, Ross Island. Photo: Mike Houck
The Great Blue Heron, it seemed to me, was the perfect icon, being one of our most charismatic megafauna. They’re impossible to miss, standing over three feet tall, with a wingspan over six feet. No animal, save the salmon, is so representative of Portland’s urban nature scene. Its image is everywhere: blue heron cheese, blue heron condominiums, blue heron bowling lanes, even blue heron music festivals. They live year-round in the Pacific Northwest and can be found virtually anywhere there is water, from the smallest tributary to the Willamette and Columbia Rivers.
Herondipity
Portland’s former mayor, Bud Clark noted for many eccentricities, including being a political novice tavern owner having deposed one of Portland’s most right-wing politicians, wearing Lederhosen and yelling “whoop, whoop” on late night TV, and his daily commute city hall in his suit and on his tricked-out bike. But, he was and still is an advocate for nature in the city. In the spring of 1986 Clark was asked to give the welcoming address at the downtown Hilton ballroom to a conference of Western fish and wildlife managers. Bud was also an avid canoeist and duck hunter. During his presentation he gave impassioned descriptions of observing great blue herons from his canoe and as they glided by downtown skyscrapers.
Portland Mayor Bud Clark with Great Blue Heron
Voila, I thought! Given Bud’s impulsive nature, love of nature, and mayoral authority, I grabbed him by the arm as he exited the Hilton and suggested he declare the heron Portland’s official city bird. A few “Whoop, whoops” and two weeks later he issued a proclamation before City Council declaring the Great Blue Heron Portland’s official bird. The golf course, by the way, was renamed from West Delta Golf Course to Heron lakes Golf Course. Ironically, the eighteen holes adjacent to the heronry was named Greenback after what was then called the Green-backed Heron and the second 18 holes were Great Blue.
LEFT: City of Portland official proclamation,courtesy City of Portland) RIGHT: Flyer for Portland’s City BirdThe author (with Heron) with the Portland City Council and Bob Sallinger (with proclamation), of the Audubon Society of Portland, 2011
Leveraging icons
While adopting an official city bird may sound frivolous, the process of establishing an official city bird when combined with an annual celebration and mayoral proclamation provides a great opportunity to encourage local elected officials to “re-up” their commitment to ensuring that symbol of the city’s environmental quality. In Portland we have celebrated Great Blue Heron Week the last week of May and first week of June every year since 1986. Portland’s mayor reads, and the city council adopts, a new proclamation with numerous clauses establishing why Portland cares that herons live in our midst. The annual proclamation ends with city commitments to undertake habitat acquisition, restoration, and management during the coming year to protect and improve heron habitat and, by extension, fish and wildlife habitat generally throughout the city.
And, then of course, depending how creative and expansive you want to get, there are always leveraging opportunities. Having just returned from city hall after the first proclamation to one of our favorite watering holes, Bridgeport Brewpub, the brew master walked by and asked how our urban conservation efforts were going. I recounted the fact that we’d just adopted a city bird and he responded he’d just brewed a new ale which he had not yet named. Blue Heron Ale was launched that afternoon. Again, what may sound frivolous to some turned out to be a significant “oiling the gears” of urban conservation. Bridgeport became the gathering place for elected officials, agency naturalists, and park advocates where relationships were spawned and plans were hatched for increasing the region’s system of parks, trails, and natural areas and creating healthier watersheds and urban ecosystems.
Great Blue Heron Ale label. Photo Mike HouckOregon City mayor with Blue Heron Ale. Photo: Mike Houck
Five years after the heron became our city bird I approached a muralist who agreed to create a seventy-foot high, fifty-foot wide heron mural on a mausoleum overlooking one of the city’s most beloved wetlands, 160-acre Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. Twenty years later we collaborated to expand the original mural with a 55,000 square foot wetland motif to draw the public’s attention to the Bottoms, hoping to accelerate public support for its care and restoration.
Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. Photo: Mike HouckPortland Memorial Mausoleum and mural.Oregon Poet Laureate, William Stafford original hand written poem, Spirit of Place
Berkeley’s Joe Eaton, in Keep Barn Owls in Berkeley, reports other examples of city’s having adopted official city birds, including San Francisco (California Quail; Seattle (also the Great Blue Heron);Chicago (Peregrine Falcon); and Port Aransas, Texas (Roseate Spoonbill).
Internationally Eaton reports the following cities and their official bird: Seoul, South Korea (Magpie); Xiamen, China (Egret); Keelung, Taiwan (Eagle); and in Japan Hamamatsu’s Swallow; Morioka’s Wagtail, and Chiba’s Little Tern. There apparently quite a few other Japanese cities with city birds as well.
As we prepare for this May’s Great Blue Heron Week and our annual trek to Portland City Council, I have been re-reading William Stafford’s Spirit of Place poem, which I asked him to write for the first heron week while he was still Oregon’s poet laureate, twenty-nine years ago. With all of the toasting of Blue Heron Ale, countless city proclamations, and other events, nothing comes close to capturing the intent of creating an iconic representative of the natural world that informs our efforts to create a livable, lovable, and ecologically sustainable city as Stafford’s, Spirit of Place.
Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron
Out of their loneliness for each other two reeds, or maybe two shadows, lurch forward and become suddenly a life lifted from dawn or the rain. It is the wilderness come back again, a lagoon with our city reflected in its eye. We live by faith in such presences. It is a test for us, that thin but real, undulating figure that promises, “If you keep faith I will exist at the edge, where your vision joins the sunlight and the rain: heads in the light, feet that go down in the mud where the truth is.”
—William Stafford, 1986
I have an affection for cities in transition. I like when I visit a city for the first time and get an immediate sense that things are changing, that there is a blurring between what’s old and what’s new.
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan was one of those cities.
Raushanna Sarkeyeva, a Bishkek community organizer, is aiming to increase transparency of planning initiatives in his native city.
When I first arrived in this Central Asian capital last spring to collect onward visas for our walking journey, an expat from the U.S. said something that stuck with me. Bishkek, he said, and had been told by others who had lived in the city for many years, has “old bones,” meaning that the Soviets designed it well and its core urban planning concept was well conceived.
Today, Bishkek is trying to shake off its outdated image of utilitarian buildings and factories, and, as a result, there is mish-mosh of new things happening. There is a sense that it is still defining what it wants to be now, and what it will offer the world.
New building construction marks many of Bishkek’s neighborhoods. Photo: Jenn Baljko
For me, it’s a city of contrasts. It’s modernizing itself while holding on to traditional ways. There’s plenty of new construction underway, but quite a number of individual apartments look empty. There are fancy Lexus, Mercedes, and SUVs parked any which way alongside workhorse Russian Ladas. There are high-end coffee shops, big-box supermarkets, and brightly lit commercial centers next to mom and pop shops with mysteriously darkened windows and thick metal doors. Locals stroll through beautiful green pedestrian zones and well-manicured parks and then turn a corner and stumble over unpaved streets, broken sidewalks, and potholes.
Starting a movement
I was curious about this Central Asian city, so when I returned to Bishkek a few months back for another extended stopover along our route, I asked locals for an insider’s perspective.
One person I spoke with—Bishkek native Raushanna Sarkeyeva, founder of the city’s Urban Initiatives Foundation and a former business analyst who previously worked and studied change management in the Netherlands—had some interesting things to say about city planning, urban development initiatives, and citizen advocacy.
On a high level, creating a sense of ownership is one of the biggest challenges Bishkek urbanists are tackling.
Faced with the hangover of a Soviet, top-down way of doing things, groups such as Sarkeyeva’s Urban Initiatives Foundation are encouraging people to participate in urban planning, to form tighter-knit communities, and to reclaim and take care of public spaces that are not well maintained by city agencies or that are being doled out to private developers.
Commercial centers and big-box supermarkets have found their place in Bishkek, and are usually found alongside mom-and-pop shops with mysteriously darkened windows and heavy metal doors. Photo: Jenn Baljko
The group’s initial project focuses on working on a neighborhood level to renovate municipal libraries and encourage their use as open spaces where residents can meet and do more than borrow books.
Other priorities include building a grassroots movement around urban development; reviewing near-term zoning plans and better matching planning ideas with the needs of citizens; and fostering more open dialog among all urban development stakeholders.
Here are a few transcribed excerpts from our conversation (It has been edited for length).
Jenn: What is the history of Bishkek? What was the Soviet-era vision for the city, and what are some of the development challenges the city now faces?
Raushanna: Bishkek was a planned city, and was planned quite well in terms of urban design and the design of public spaces. It also went through a period of rapid growth after World War II, and there was a plan to build a new city with more social housing for people working in the plants and coming for here for different industrial enterprises. Then—20, 30 years ago, and we have this vision from people who have nostalgia—Bishkek was thought to be a green city. It was a friendly city, a livable city, a nice place to walk.
Now, Bishkek is, I must say, still quite livable, when you look at other cities in the world. In Bishkek, you still have this idea of “human scale” that has stayed with the city. It’s a vibrant city with a good street design, and this environment creates personal contact and accessibility.
The bad side of development that we now see is all these fences; they are everywhere. It’s for security, but it is also a sign of people saying, “This is my private ownership. I own this land. And, I don’t want to see people I don’t want to see right now.” … With all these fences, the city is becoming more closed on itself.
Jenn: So the city is becoming more exclusive and less inclusive?
Raushanna: Yes, there is that. And the interest in the private and public spaces is changing; that’s becoming more evident. Our public spaces are now in transition from being super planned…with wide avenues (a demonstration of Soviet power) and vibrant centers to now being lost to private development. To some degree, we also need it. It’s a good sign of investment and interest in Bishkek, and I believe entrepreneurs are one of the major actors in changing and improving the city. But we also have bad examples of the city losing public spaces to private developers. For example, green zones and public parks were given for construction of high-rise development.
Residents of Bishkek have their choice of pedestrian green ways, parks, and public squares thanks to Soviet urban design and planning. Now, however, many green zones are threatened by private development. Photos: Jenn Baljko
Jenn: I was surprised to see so many high-rise buildings under construction in Bishkek. It’s something I noticed right away. Is this coming at the price of sacrificing green spaces? How are zoning and planning regulations controlling this? Is there a long-term city plan that balances development and open spaces?
Raushanna: The urban planning side is an endless story. I could talk about this for hours! This is my third year doing this, and I’m still digging into this issue and trying to understand different problems, collisions, and conflicts in this field. Right now, we do have a so-called general plan that is like a master plan, but slightly different from how master plans in the West are understood. But, we do not have zoning, and that is a big problem we face.
This is a paradox. There are 14 small and medium size towns in our country that do have zoning. They have legal zoning. This means they have a good base for transparency and for negotiating and integrating public and private interests. It’s also a key for local self-governance and for communities to express their priorities and defend its interests.
In Bishkek, no; we don’t have this. You see too much commercial interest here, and the stakes are higher here in Bishkek. In 2005, the process to bring that here started but, under lots of excuses, it was closed.
That said, the extent of civic engagement in our country, compared to other Central Asian countries, is higher. We have had good experiences with building democracy and defending our rights. But, surprisingly, in Bishkek, people—they do not have sense of ownership. That’s why, quite often, they are not using their right for information and their right to inquire about the quality of construction. They are not appealing to development or planning agencies, and the construction industry is generally quite closed and acting in its own interests.
Our group is seeking out interviews with these developers and different stakeholders. In Bishkek, though, we do not have a powerful mechanism or tool that we can use to defend our rights. But, we do now have a few activists, who, for example, help citizens of high-rise buildings build a community and fight for their rights.
One problem is that people find out about new development very late, after the developer has been granted permission to build. Usually only when the trees have been cut, an area demolished, a fence erected, and construction started does the public learn that there is new development happening. By then, it’s already too late to do anything.
Jenn: There’s no notification process, no zoning board meetings where the public can comment, no interaction with the community? These projects are rubber-stamped with approval but the community doesn’t know about them? That’s a big issue to fix, isn’t it?
Raushanna: This is one of our organization’s initiatives. One of our projects is to put procedures in place and have a system to help notify people. For example, we see the Bishkek city architecture department has this and this application, and the committee of the city is scheduled to approve this and this construction site; we would like to see something that says, “Starting from this date, you have 30 days to study the project, to make an appeal, to comment on it.”
Bishkek native Raushanna Sarkeyeva (fourth from left), her team at Urban Initiatives Foundation, and other urban planning activists are creating a grassroots movement to increase awareness, encourage public participation, and widen conversations around urban growth. Photo: Jenn Baljko
Jenn: Is there an interest from the public to have this information?
Raushanna: I think now it is emerging. Now, compared to what was happening in the public discourse five years ago, people are more aware, and yes, we have this interest.
Jenn: It’s good to see that the idea of urban development is beginning to take hold and conversations are creating more awareness and involvement. How, then, does this link to the idea of creating Bishkek as a city of opportunity? How can you drive more accessibility and accountability in a sustainable way? What’s Bishkek’s biggest opportunity?
Raushanna: One opportunity now is to work on the small and medium level, on the neighborhood level, and try to start something from the bottom up. But the biggest opportunity is for the people to build a cooperative city that works for the community, for the officials, for the entrepreneurs, for the academia. It’s an opportunity to learn how to work together for the common interest. It may also be our biggest challenge. But, if you have this multi-sided partnership, that could be a key to a lot of change.
Protecting remnant swathes of nature is not easy, and may often require concerted, vigorous community efforts. There are many threats: the most common of which seem to be highways and development, which are often backed by considerable financial resources and lots of momentum. So one takes notice when something unusual happens and a community effectively and doggedly organizes itself to protect something dear, and actually succeeds in doing so.
The power of urban nature is an important point of hope in this story. The protest campaign was a massive awareness raising exercise, an epiphany for many about the beauty and wildness close by, and the ability to engage in a process of standing up in defense something dear.
I became aware of one inspiring example of a community coming together to save a remnant piece of bush from colleague Peter Newman, at Curtin University, in Perth, Western Australia. There, over several years, a conservative state government and premier (Colin Barnett), sought to push through a highway expansion and new freight link connection to the Fremantle port. Ill-conceived and costly from the beginning, this project seemed unfortunate and unnecessary. And standing in the way, inconveniently for the Barnett administration, were remnant bushlands, remnant swaths of banksia hardwoods, and some very rare wetlands. The highway would have eliminated most of this land.
I had the glorious chance last month to visit and spend time in these remaining bushlands, and to interview and film some of the key players in this urban conservation drama. With Peter Newman and filmmaker Linda Blagg, and my daughter Carolena (whose photographic essay to follow below conveys some of the magic quality of this nature), we have together been making a documentary film that tells this story. It is a saga that takes place over several years. Partly battled in the courts, it is mostly a story of how a community rallied, that never gave up, involved thousands of residents, many of who put their personal safety at risk, many were arrested. Two of the most important voices were Kate Kelly who ran the group Save Beeliar Wetlands, and Kim Dravnieks, of Rethink the Link. It has been noted that the majority of the leaders of this campaign were women, and Kate and Kim were two of the most steadfast and passionate in this campaign.
Photo: Perth Now
We had the chance to see first-hand the majesty of these surviving bushlands when we interviewed Kate Kelly. She spoke of her experiences leading people through these spaces, giving tours and watching how the land affected them. She spoke of majesty of these trees and wetlands, that to her has become her church. She speaks of the many guided walks she has given and magical effects the wetlands and woodlands have on people. People “soften and they talk slowly and they engage more carefully in their relationships”. These spaces, in short, help to make us better citizens and people.
The Perth region is a biodiversity “hotspot”, with remarkable variety of endemics, especially plants. Much of it is found even in these small remnants, from orchids to bandicoots and blue-tongue lizards, and of course the majesty of the trees—paperbarks and swamp banksias where we filmed Kate Kelly. And the bird and animal life here is wonderful. As I walk through the bush on one visit I see and hear rainbow lorikeets, red wattles, New Holland honeyeaters, Australian ravens (one of my favorite sounds). If you are lucky you will be treated to the raucous sounds of black cockatoos, the Carnaby’s is especially rare as a result of the gradual loss of these important habitats and served as a compelling image and mascot for the campaign.
In the end, through a long, multi-year community campaign the highway and freight link were beaten back, the remaining bush saved, and a new state administration in power. However, in the months running up to the election the premier accelerated land clearance, tragically resulting in the loss of some half of these ancient woodlands. The Western Australian state government’s response to what was a peaceful protest was vigorous, and some would say mean spirited, starting with the decision to accelerate bush clearance in the face of clear community voices to the otherwise. Police on horseback treated the protesters harshly, and many were arrested, raising unresolved questions about the legal and ethical extent of peaceful protest, and when those rights should ever be thwarted.
The campaign was a lesson-book in the many creative tools and strategies available for peaceful protest. Many of these strategies were remarkably creative. There were the supporters dressed up in black cockatoo costumes, and at many points humor became a powerful weapon of resistance. There was music, and musicians, often onsite (and even a CD of music written and recorded on behalf of the bushlands), and there was poetry written and recited.
There were many community forums and many guided walks through the bush, to allow people to see first-hand what was about to be lost. There were marches where protesters carried beautiful color photos of the bushlands. One campaigner used a drone to capture a birds-eye view of what was at risk, providing an unusually powerful vantage on the beauty and extent of these bushlands and the extent of deforestation about to take place.
Kim Dravnieks spoke of the philosophy of “non-violent direct action”. In so many ways, she says, people “stepped out of their comfort zones,” and did whatever was necessary to help. Hundreds would appear on site to protest, often alerted by text messages late the night before. One day there was a call to show up in the garb or your profession or job—doctors came with stethoscopes around their necks. Young people came and occupied trees for days.
Humor played a key role, something that Dravnieks says “really resonated with a lot of people”. There were the protesters dressed up in black cockatoo costumes, one who approached the premiere in a shopping center asking “which way to my offsets” (a reference to absurd idea that the state government could in fact “replace” or compensate for these irreplaceable lands). And the protesters in bikinis who cozying up the premiere on a beach cleverly displayed protest messages written down their arms, something the premiere did not notice but photographers did.
“This has been the whole campaign. People would just come up with ideas and do things.” One of the most creative was an hour-long “silent stand”. A thousand people showed up in downtown Perth to protest in silence. One person had the idea of small patches of blue fabric that would symbolize the remnant bushlands, and these became a common sight pinned on clothing. Even today many supporters continue to wear these small pieces of blue fabric, pinned to their shirts or coats, showing solidarity and meant to indicate the value of saving “remnant pieces” of bushland.
Dravnieks speaks about the longer legacy of protesting, and of a community that learned the virtues and values of collectively standing up for something strongly believed in. “It showed people that civil disobedience is today”, it’s not just something suffragettes had to engage in a hundred years ago. And she speaks of the sense of being able to do something, to stand up and oppose something profoundly wrong, and the pride she saw from taking a stand. “I watched children who were so very proud of their parents for the stand that they were taking.”
The power of nature, especially in a city, is an important point of hope in this story. The protest campaign was in the end a massive awareness raising exercise, an epiphany for many about the beauty and wildness close by, and the ability to engage in a process of standing up in defense something dear. It was a chance to cultivate a spirit of concern for a larger world, beyond short-term thinking, and beyond personal self-interest.
The clearance that occurred were moments of shared violence, as many watched bulldozers in minutes knock down trees hundreds of years old. Residents and protesters witnessed firsthand when Bandicoots and Frogmouth Owls and other animals were displaced or killed by the deforestation. Most often the pain and suffering of wild fauna is not experienced or seen. Professor Hugh Finn, of the Curtin Law School, who has also been involved in the Roe 8 campaign, has studied with others the magnitude of these impacts and refers to them as “the invisible harm,” in a recent article in Wildlife Research. He estimates (with Nahiid Stephens) that deforestation in Queensland and New South Wales, likely results in more than 50 million animals being killed each year (Finn and Stephens, 2017).
It remains to be seen what the long-term implication of the Beeliar campaign and victory will be. There is now an especially well-informed constituency, emboldened by this political victory, and perhaps a force for future conservation good. It will be interesting (and maybe a good research project) to monitor how the cultivating of this stronger civic environmentalism plays out and shapes conflicts and planning the future. And one wonders how the emotional connections with, and deep caring for nature might be harnessed on behalf of larger global threats of deforestation and habitat destruction. Could Save the Beeliar Wetlands become a force for stopping land clearance in Borneo or Sub-Saharan Africa, or perhaps even in other parts of Australia? There is little doubt in my own mind that cultivating awareness and practicing conservation activism can (and must) carry over to over places, though the precise mechanism and processes to allow this to happen are unclear.
There are some important post-campaign tasks, including formal transfer of these bushlands from ownership by the state roads department to its parks department. And there is major restoration and revegetation work to be done for those areas that had been cleared, much of which has already begun. Sadly, some off-road vehicle use has already trammeled newly sprouting vegetation, but in the longer run the prospect for regeneration is quite good.
There is also a lot of momentum around the idea of connecting these remnant bushlands into a larger ecological corridor—a concept being called “Wetlands to Waves,” as the corridor will extend from the Beeliar Wetlands site all the way to the coast. This is a promising initiative, though one wonders whether an even larger ecological concept could weave together parks and greenspaces of various kinds into a much larger “bushland green grid,” and one that might extend well into the Indian ocean, perhaps more fully encompassing marine protection and nature as well.
I found one the most powerful voices to be Noel Nannup, an Noongar elder. We interviewed him at a most hopeful site—Telegraph Hill, a park in Fremantle that has itself gone through regeneration, though it took 120 years from the time is was denuded. Nannup spoke of the aboriginal heritage and deep history of the bushland sites in jeopardy and how the government ignored this heritage (and structured the project in a way that allowed them to ignore or skirt the requirements of the Aboriginal Heritage Act). “They pushed us aside…treated us with contempt.” For the Noongar people, these sites were sacred; and continuously visited and occupied, likely for more than 60,000 years. “There’s a spiritual energy line, a flow through there that our people have followed for thousands of years. Our people are buried along it. A lot of people were born along it, and lived their complete lives traveling around in a 6-season cycle. Being born there every year you went back to visit your birth site.”
Despite the tragedy of half of these sacred lands succumbing to the bulldozer, Nannup remains optimistic. It was the spirit at work, through people, that saved the land. And he sees the key to the future as continuing what he calls this “social investment in the environment.” For the Noongar people this is a natural thing and the result of long-standing traditions that foster deep social and emotional investment in the natural world.
“So for us our social investment is that for millennia our people have buried placentas under certain trees,” Nannup says. “So our DNA is in our trees. So when we say ‘that tree is me and I am that tree,” we mean it.” That unity with environment, that sense of oneness is perhaps the best way to guard against its destruction. How we fully cultivate that in the non-aboriginal world, though, remains an open question.
The Perth story is a hopeful one for campaigners and organizations in other cities and countries where highway projects threatened nature. Perth shows it is possible to mount a compelling campaign to bring the community together around a different vision of the future, and to win elections and change direction. And there are other planning and policy dimensions as well.
From the violence of bushland clearance and pursuit of a flawed highway, is a renewed sense of the shared value these bushlands have in the lives of Western Australian, and the special role they play, indeed must play, in urban life. That is one of the hopeful messages. “Never Again,” is the title of a forthcoming book about the campaign, written by a group of professors (they called themselves “the Angry Academics”), edited by Peter Newman. There is the sense that the broader community will simply not allow a similar loss to take place in the future. Without land transfer in the case of the Roe 8 lands, and better, stronger environmental laws and land protection standards more generally, it’s not entirely clear that this collective-admonition will stand up; but I certainly hope it will.
While ultimately a hopeful story of how a community can successfully oppose a project like this, and can come to the defense of nature, there are many cautionary bits to this story. One is just how flimsy the legal protections were (and are) for such lands, and how pliable the existing environmental laws and regulations were. The highway was allowed to move forward in part as a result of the providing of compensatory “offsets” for the habitats that would be lost, yet almost all agreed these bushlands, and especially the wetlands, were simply irreplaceable.
I asked Nannup whether he saw any chance that the non-indigenous population of Western Australians might learn from and embrace some of the deep connections to nature and place held by the Noongar people. Indeed, the larger world would benefit. Nannup described the sense of “oneness” with the bush the Noongar’s have, something that would make the kind of destruction set in motion by the state government pretty unimaginable.
One Noongar practice that I’m especially fond of and believe might have some practical conservation effect is that adopting of one or more totem. As Nannup explained, this is deep tradition, and he explained the importance of the bronzewing pigeon, his own particular totem. As Nannup explained, when you were given a totem, you were expected to learn everything you could about that animal or plant. He went on to explain, in remarkable detail, how the bronzewing pigeon cools itself, and how it digs small holes that later become important receptacles for wattle tree seeds.
I have been thinking a lot about what ought to be my own totem. In my recent time in Perth there are many different plants or animals that fascinate me. Shortly after arriving we were visited by a pair of black cockatoos, who hung around to watch us. I’ve been enamored of black cockatoos, and had the pleasure of seeing flocks of them at several points on this recent visit. I don’t know enough, but will endeavor to learn more, and since my own deep home is Virginia, I will be selecting some local totems more appropriate to where I live.
Tim Beatley (With a photo essay by Carolena Bastian-Beatley)
Charlottesville
By appropriately designing and carefully applying nature-based solutions and urban green infrastructure strategies we can provide functioning ecosystems in urban areas for the rich range of natural communities on which we depend, rather than just a select few.
Ecological gentrification (Dooling, 2009) is a negative social process in which ecological improvements to neighbourhoods lead to gentrification and displacement of the neighbourhood’s original inhabitants. There is an analogous process of ecological gentrification at the level of ecological communities: many vulnerable ecological communities that persist (and in some cases, thrive) in urban areas are being displaced or extirpated by greening approaches that impose “standard” global designs. Whilst nature-based solutions (NBS) and urban green infrastructure (UGI) strategies have great potential to solve real urban challenges; they must be appropriately designed and delivered if they are to simultaneously provide ecological, environmental, social and economic benefits in urban areas. When reflexively or generically applied, they risk erasing key and valuable local ecological elements.
Displacement of urban biodiversity through “blandscaping”
Historically, aesthetics and recreation have been the overriding drivers for urban green space (UGS) design and management. This has led to the simplification of habitats through frequent mowing, pruning of trees and shrubs, removal of dead wood and mulching (Aronson et al., 2017). Human-mediated planting choices motivated by visual impact or ease of management have typically favoured horticultural cultivars over native species. These actions can diminish the value of UGS for biodiversity as it becomes characterised by a small range of introduced, frequently non-native species that can tolerate the anthropogenic conditions (McKinney, 2006 & 2008). These practices have created structurally and functionally similar urban ecosystems across bioregions, which are distinct from local native ecosystems, but are close in character to each other—a phenomenon called urban biotic homogenisation (McKinney, 2006; Groffman et al., 2014).
This generic approach to urban greening constitutes “blandscaping”—landscaping that uses the same designs, and often the same species, has become a “best practice” model that has been shared and used across different urban regions nationally and globally. Whilst the current paradigm of maximising the multifunctionality of UGS should address the shortcomings of blandscaping, all too often designs focused on narrow anthropogenic ecosystem service needs (e.g., aesthetics, stormwater management, etc.) have perpetuated this approach. There is still a prevailing assumption that UGI and NBS will automatically support biodiversity conservation goals by virtue of being green. In our experience of surveying such landscapes, this is not the case. Homogenisation and simplification of habitats through blandscaping has segregated natural communities, enabling urban exploiters/generalists to proliferate and marginalising habitat specialists (urban avoiders) that tend to inhabit more natural sites within the urban matrix (Blair, 1996).
Invertebrates (a vital but all too often overlooked group) are particularly prone to the loss of natural habitat in urban areas. Whilst studies have linked the use of exotic planting choices with benefits for certain pollinators (Salisbury et al., 2015), the use of horticultural cultivars over native flower species has also been linked to a reduction in the forage value for native pollinators generally (Bates et al. 2011; Salisbury et al., 2015). This manifests in considerably (40-50 percent) fewer visits to exotic flowering plants, compared to native and near-native species, with even the more generalist groups such as honeybees and short-tongued bumblebees favouring native over exotic plantings (Salisbury et al., 2015). The urban story, however, is not as simple as merely providing native plants as part of UGS design. Structural complexity and, crucially, the juxtaposition of all of a species’ complex life cycle requirements over suitable spatial scales is also critical. Once the fragmentation between these habitat features becomes too great within a landscape, these species are no longer able to persist (Glaum et al. 2017). This pattern has repeatedly been demonstrated in urban areas. Urban gardens have been found to sustain only large populations of a small group of ubiquitous and generalist butterfly and bumblebee species, with specialist species being confined to less disturbed semi-natural habitats (Cameron et al., 2012). A study of butterfly species richness in ruderal sites and traditional and semi-natural parks found local habitat quality was more important than patch size (Öckinger et al., 2009). Overall, patterns from such studies have revealed that more specialist species with more complex habitat requirements are more likely to show a negative response to urbanization (Bates et al., 2011).
Creating “inclusive” urban green space—mimicry of habitat mosaics
So, should we assume that these specialist communities cannot persist in urban areas and focus our conservation efforts on urban exploiters/adapters? Quite the opposite. If suitable quality habitat is available, urban areas can provide an oasis for many of these specialist species that are being squeezed out of the rural hinterlands by intensive agricultural practices that have degraded and simplified swathes of non-urban habitat (Baldock et al. 2015). In fact, because most UGS is not subjected to the intensive levels of management and pesticides used on farmland, urban areas can support locally, nationally and even internationally important biodiversity that is struggling to persist in the wider countryside.
Cities and Biodiversity Outlook presents an interesting global overview of the rich biodiversity that can occur in cities (SCBD 2012). From a more local perspective, post-industrial sites in the urban fabric of London and the Thames Corridor region of the UK exemplify this potential. Despite being labelled as “wasteland” (implying a barren or vacant area of little value), post-industrial “brownfield” sites represent a uniquely urban form of “wilderness”, with the capacity to support diverse natural communities of great value for nature conservation (Gilbert, 1989). The term brownfield refers to previously-developed land that has been abandoned or become unused, and many of these sites are spontaneously inhabited by natural communities. In contrast to traditional green spaces, lack of regular management allows flower-rich, structurally diverse habitats to establish supporting abundant biodiversity. Brownfield sites with heterogeneous edaphic conditions can develop unique habitat mosaics. This mosaic can provide the juxtaposition of “microhabitats” so valuable for many invertebrates (Gibson, 1998; Bodsworth et al., 2005). The microhabitats within brownfield sites have been found to function as analogues of natural/semi-natural habitats such as meadows, saltmarsh and chalk grassland that are declining or have become degraded in the wider landscape (Gemmell & Connell, 1984; Eversham et al., 1996; Eyre et al., 2003). Widespread depletion of natural habitats has forced many of the species that inhabited them to relocate to avoid extinction. Whilst the surrounding landscape can offer a variety of opportunities for generalists, many of the specialist species of natural habitats can only find suitable homes within these urban brownfield mosaic analogues. An example is the ground beetle Scybalicus oblongiusculus, which historically inhabited specialist coastal habitats, but is now critically endangered in the UK and is confined to brownfield sites in the East Thames Corridor region that offer analogous conditions.
Despite recognition of the importance of brownfield sites for these increasingly marginalised, conservation priority communities, planning policy in the UK targets brownfield for redevelopment to house growing human urban communities (Harvey, 2000; Roberts et al., 2006; DCLG, 2012; Robins et al., 2012). A chief justification for this approach lies in this perception of brownfields as “waste” land; as brownfield sites are often a legacy of the deindustrialisation of an area, their presence may be inextricably linked to socio-economic problems such as unemployment, deprivation, and degeneration, and they are often perceived as a blight on the urban landscape. Their redevelopment, therefore, is seen as an opportunity for urban regeneration and renewal but, if not carefully planned, this process can perpetuate gentrification by acting as a catalyst for increasing property prices (Bryson, 2012), displacing vulnerable low-income residents. A parallel ecological gentrification also occurs to biodiversity associated with these sites. When brownfields are redeveloped, typical mitigation comprises ornamental or structurally simple landscapes and generic green roofs, with the only species able to persist in these environments being the urban exploiters/generalists.
Similar to the pitfalls of socio-ecological gentrification, this process of converting urban “wild space” containing complex mosaic habitats into urban blandscaping is also often underpinned by the espousing of an environmental ethic and a belief that green (of any type) is good for biodiversity. In reality, such development, with little regard for the ecological functionality of greenspace design, could be said to represent a type of “ecological cleansing”—removing species/guilds from landscapes by removing the habitat heterogeneity that provides the range of niches and resources needed to support diverse communities (MacArthur & MacArthur, 1961).
The ecological value of post-industrial sites in the urban fabric has been recorded elsewhere internationally (Dolnŷ and Harabiŝ, 2012; Kratochwil and Klatt, 1989), but these are certainly not the only urban habitats to have such value. We need to learn from these urban examples that are so rich in biodiversity and embed that learning into UGS design through a process of mimicry. By doing so, it might be possible to avoid imposing the analogy of human socio-ecological gentrification on our urban biodiversity.
Developing effective measures to recreate biodiversity-rich habitat mosaics within urban green space has the potential to deliver significant gains for biodiversity and nature conservation. Ecomimicry (locally-contextualised mimicry) of important elements of biodiversity-rich habitat mosaics could emulate their key function as anthropogenic analogues of natural/semi-natural habitats. As with natural ecosystems, the communities that develop on UGI will be a function of the niches that are created by their design. Such a habitat mosaic approach could positively contribute to the heterogeneity-diversity relationship, even at small spatial scales (Lundholm, 2009).
Although they are often described as artificial habitats, or even a novel ecosystem, high-quality brownfield sites can teach us much about how to design our green space to provide the juxtaposition of habitat features that much of nature needs to thrive. Embedding such knowledge into UGS design in balance with art, ecology, aesthetics, and multifunctionality is now the great challenge facing NBS innovators. Pioneering approaches to this challenge can provide a vital step towards combating ecological gentrification. Increasingly, innovators are rising to this challenge with emerging techniques that deserve to be promoted and replicated more broadly.
Emerging approaches to habitat mimicry in UGS design
i. Building breeding sites for bees—Aculeate Hymenoptera nesting planters
Nectar and pollen provision through floral planting is a key resource for pollinators and schemes to boost floral availability have become popular. However, unless suitable nesting habitat is provided over appropriate spatial scales to be energy efficient for foragers, then many species are unable to exploit this resource. Cavity-nesting provision through the construction of ‘bug hotels’ is becoming increasingly common in urban landscaping. These designs typically follow a generic template, with the outcome often being unsuitable for target insects. But UGS design innovator, John Little, has been developing new ways to embed these features effectively into the design of multifunctional greenspace for high-density urban areas. This has included creating aculeate nest ‘posts’ for local schools (Figure 1) and embedding nesting cavities into the construction of small-scale green roofs to cover bicycle racks and bin covers. Examples of this can be seen as part of the Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) Pocket Park at Derbyshire St in East London, UK (Figure 2).
Only a proportion of aculeate Hymenoptera are cavity nesters though, with a substantial proportion being ground-nesting species. Many of these species require specific ground conditions for nesting including varied preferences for particle size, compaction, and slope angle (Srba and Heneberg 2012). There has been very little focus on nesting habitat provision for these species in proximity to ‘wildflowers for pollinators’ initiatives and suitable features are not typically provided by blandscaping approaches. These are, however, the types of habitats that typically occur on brownfield sites and make them such rich habitats for aculeate Hymenoptera. John has been pioneering a solution to this challenge, inspired by the brownfield habitats in the area where he lives and his experience of working with UGS in cities. His nesting planters combine nectar and pollen sources with nesting opportunities to provide a neat solution that can be incorporated into any urban area (Figure 3). Results from trials at his home have demonstrated that a number of ground-nesting species will utilise the horizontal and vertical sand surfaces for nesting, including the Red Data Book 3 species Gorytes laticinctus. The planters are now being rolled out more widely.
ii. The Beetle Bump—habitat design for a single species that benefits many
An example of embedding species-led learning into landscaping innovation emerged from a mitigation project to rescue one of the UK’s rarest insects from extinction. Associated with brownfield sites in the London Docklands area of the East Thames Corridor, the last known site of the streaked bombardier beetle (Brachinus sclopeta) was due to be demolished for a new development. With no appropriate mitigation planned, this scenario represented a classic example of a specialist species being subjected to ecological cleansing through site redevelopment. A rescue attempt by Buglife (the Invertebrate Conservation Trust) and the University of East London, led to the creation of the Beetle Bump (Figure 4) on the University’s Docklands Campus. The Beetle Bump is a small brownfield pocket nature reserve forming part of the landscaping of the new Sports Dock development. The Beetle Bump was designed to mimic the habitat features associated with the last site on which the beetle was found. It was created using a blend of low-nutrient, recycled aggregates sown with wildflowers typical of the region’s brownfield sites (Connop 2012). Streaked bombardier beetles rescued from the development site were transferred onto the Beetle Bump. Surveys on the Bump in subsequent years revealed that not only was the streaked bombardier able to persist on the site in the short-term, but a rich community including other conservation priority species was also utilising the habitat. The contrast with the depauperate biodiversity found on nearby traditionally blandscaped areas of the campus was stark (Figure 5).
iii. Barking Riverside Brownfield Landscaping—brownfield mimicry in urban landscaping
Another example of taking inspiration from brownfield habitat for UGS design was the brownfield landscaping experiment at Barking Riverside, UK. Barking Riverside is a large brownfield site currently being developed for housing. The site was recognised as supporting valuable biodiversity prior to development. This included vulnerable invertebrate communities that have been displaced from their native fluvial grassland habitat due to intensive farming and development, and now rely on brownfield mosaics for a home (Harvey 2000). As part of the mitigation for the Barking Riverside development, there was a requirement to try to conserve these important communities through a combination of landscape design and biodiverse green roofs (Nash 2017). To ensure that the new landscaping supported the rich array of communities associated with the brownfield site, an assessment was made of the key habitat associations of the invertebrates found on the site pre-development. These features were embedded into an area of innovative office landscaping on site which was designed by landscape architects DF Clark. This novel landscaping approach included a mosaic of habitat pockets comprising key brownfield features such as south-facing sand banks (Figure 6), deadwood piles and standing deadwood, wildflower meadows, and rubble, concrete, and metal design features (Figure 7). The landscaping was designed to marry together elements of traditional landscape design with ecologically important brownfield mosaic features.
The locally-attuned landscaping developed into a mosaic habitat of tall and short herbs, with bare ground, rubble, and deadwood niches. Monitoring recorded 148 plant species in just 0.5 ha of landscaping, many of which were characteristic of the region’s high-quality brownfield sites (Connop et al. 2014). Comparison with more-traditionally blandscaped areas of the development revealed a much richer floral and invertebrate communities on the brownfield landscaped areas (Nash 2017). This included some nationally rare and scarce species associated with the specialist habitat conditions found on brownfield sites in the region.
Summary
It is clear that UGI and NBS implementation has the potential to affect the demography of both human and natural urban communities. Similarly to human communities, natural communities are not equally at risk to human-led urban landscape change. When greening strategies fail to prioritise inclusiveness, they can end up exploited by the privileged few, but sensitively designed urban green space could potentially benefit diverse social and ecological communities. The examples presented here demonstrate what can be achieved for specialist species if we apply ecologically-informed design principles to urban green space creation.
If an ecosystem service approach should have taught us anything, it is that biodiversity has innate value beyond what we can easily understand, quantify, monetise or model (TNOC blog). NBS and UGI represent amazing opportunities to ensure that we are providing functioning ecosystems in urban areas for the rich range of natural communities on which we depend, rather than a selected elite. A number of new EU Horizon 2020 NBS projects like CONNECTING Nature are providing a mechanism for ensuring that these innovative solutions are rolled out on a scale to affect real change in our cities. The great challenge now for NBS innovators is to seize these opportunities to design scalable pioneering solutions that balance art, ecology, amenity, and multifunctionality. For us urban ecologists, the great challenge is to ensure that this innovation is underpinned by a deeper understanding of locally-appropriate, functioning ecosystems in an urban context, and how a mosaic approach to UGS creation can support the habitat requirements of the many, not the few.
Caroline is a Research Assistant in the Sustainability Research Institute at University of East London, working primarily on biodiversity and urban green infrastructure design
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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.
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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.
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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.
While we are increasingly a planet of cities, we must not forget that we live and share space on the blue planet. We rarely put these two realms (or words) together, but we must begin to. By some estimates, two-thirds of our global population lies within 400 kilometers of a shoreline. As oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer, Sylvia Earle, wrote in her important book, The World is Blue, “Everyone, everywhere is inextricably connected to and utterly dependent upon the existence of the sea” (Earle, 2010).
There are dangers associated with rising sea levels, of course, presenting a need to grow and plan cities in ways that better respect these increasingly dynamic edges. But we are drawn to water, to the sights, sounds, smells of marine environments, and there is a deep biophilic impulse and need at work here that visiting the seashore starts to satisfy. There is at once calmness and intensity and a mysterious world just beyond our reach. Research by Michael DePledge and his team at Exeter University demonstrates what we have always known, which is that we enjoy visual and physical proximity to water and that these settings deliver immense emotional and therapeutic benefit (DePledge and Bird, 2009; Wheeler, et al 2012).
Our human fate here on the blue planet is, not surprisingly, intimately tied to ocean health. And oceans are suffering in many ways—acidification and other impacts of global warming, industrial over-harvesting of fish and seafood, the accumulation of the immense detritus and pollution of modern life, from plastics to chemicals to crude oil.
Is there a chance that growing cities can muster their wealth, creativity and political influence to come to the aid of oceans? The vision of Blue Urbanism (the subject of my new book) suggests yes! From the redesign of coastal edges and the promise of blue urban design, to new approaches of promoting sustainable, local seafood, to a variety of ways to build new emotional connections to the sea, there is much that cities can do.
At the heart of an urban-ocean agenda is the belief that cities, and the people who inhabit them, can and must exert the leadership needed to protect, conserve and care for the marine world. It is in our self-interest to do so, of course, but there is a broader ethical duty to the immense marine life found there and to all the life on the planet that depends on healthy oceans.
How then, and in what ways, can cities be profoundly ocean-friendly? What does a deep blue urbanism suggest about the ways in which we occupy space near oceans and the many different ways in which urban consumption and lifestyle impact the ocean world? Oceans, moreover, harbor immense amounts of biodiversity, and hold the promise of stoking our collective sense of wonder and enhancing in important ways the quality and meaning of our lives.
How to foster emotional bonds and connectedness between urbanites and oceans is a challenge. For many cities, from Seattle to San Francisco to Singapore, ocean nature is a big part of the nearby nature, and there are many wonderful opportunities to educate and also enhance quality of life and meaning in these cities. Whether through citizen science programs or public education efforts, there is much that can be done and is being done already. Beach Naturalists in Seattle are helping visitors learn about the marine organisms they see at low tide, amateur scuba divers are monitoring and helping to restore kelp forests off the coast of Los Angeles, and citizens along many coastlines are monitoring water quality through the Surfrider Foundation’s Blue Water Task Force.
Images of the Taputeranga Marine Reserve, on the south coast of Wellington, New Zealand, and some of the marine life there. Photos: Tim Beatley
“Out of Sight, Out of Mind” might be one way to describe why we give less priority to oceans. We simply lack the daily imagination to fully appreciate the nature that lies beneath and around when we only have modest glimpses into the water world when a harbor seal or whale provides a glimpse of the mystery there.
One way ocean-friendly cities can help is by supporting research that uncovers and sheds new knowledge on and appreciation for the marine biodiversity and nature around it. Singapore, a Partner City in the Biophilic Cities Project, is the midst of a comprehensive marine biodiversity survey that has already resulted in identification of 14 species of marine life that are likely new to science. This marine inventory is wonderfully described by Lena Chan in a recent Nature of Cities post. Other cities have taken similar steps. Wellington, New Zealand, another partner city, sponsored the world’s first Marine BioBlitz in 2007, which took place over the course of a month and also discovered new species.
New technologies make it possible for cities to participate directly in the collection of important ocean data. A company called Liquid Robotics now sells a kind of sea-faring surf board, called Wave Glider, which can be set off on months-long journeys. Propelled forward using the power of waves, the Glider collects a variety of data which could be sent back to and displayed in prominent places (such as city hall? elementary school classrooms?). Cities rarely see themselves as co-generators of knowledge, but could begin to, by helping to drive the push to wire, and better understand, the ocean realm in important ways.
Could coastal cities (especially) begin to understand that part of their mission is the advancement of knowledge about the marine realms on which they are perched? Similar to establishing the position of municipal archeologist (not uncommon these days), cities could expand their roles to include marine research and scientific data collection. Perhaps a “hard sell” to make in times of limited budgets, but I can imagine forward-looking cities investing in their own research vessel, ROV (or remotely-operated vehicle, essentially a tethered submersible), a smart buoy, or a Benthic Lander (that sits on the sea floor and collects sediment and other data).
There are other ways to foster ocean connections, for instance through art in the city. For several months, we had the pleasure of living in Fremantle, the port city in Western Australia. It is a city alive with the images and shapes and forms of the marine world, integrated into the design of buildings, bus stop waiting structures, even cemented into sidewalks. The floor of the city hall boasts a most impressive tile mosaic that features a stingray and hammerhead shark. It is possible also that we might be able to create creative real time visual and aural connections to underwater environments, such as the windows at the Ballard Locks in Seattle, which allow visitors to see migrating salmon, or the underwater dive-cam at a ship wreck near Albany, Western Australia, that provides a 24-hour window onto this world.
I like the idea of harnessing the power of our now-ubiquitous hand-held technology to foster new connections, such as through smartphone applications like Whale Alert and Shark Net. In the case of the latter, one can select and follow a specific tagged shark, monitoring their movements over time (the brainchild of Stanford marine biologist Barbara Block).
In the port city of Fremantle, in Western Australia, images of the marine world are found everywhere, even on the floor of the lobby of city hall (left image). Photos: Tim Beatley)
A major challenge, and a necessary step towards blue urbanism, is to re-define the spatial bounds and borders of cities. In many cases, city governments will have limited jurisdictional authority, with state and federal levels having the lion’s share of control, for instance over establishing new marine parks and protected areas. Nevertheless, cities can again assume leadership and begin to re-define the spatial bounds of their planning, taking into account the immense natural majesty and marine biodiversity, often just a few meters away from shore’s edge. Depicting this marine nature in some form on planning maps and diagrams would be a helpful step, as well as a variety of other steps that would acknowledge, celebrate and otherwise make visible this urban nature.
Fostering a pride of place about marine nature is an essential step. I had the chance to interview Brian Meux, Marine Program Manager for LA Waterkeeper. “My dream,” he told me, “is that people here [in Los Angeles] are as proud of our kelp forests as Hawaiians are of their coral reefs.” Pride about, indeed even basic knowledge of, the marine nature near to where many city residents live is limited and the chance to develop that pride of place has been limited as well.
Despite these limitations, there is immense ocean nature near many coastal cities. There are the near shore environments, and many biologically diverse and unique habitats are only a boat ride away. Along the mid-Atlantic US coast, for instance, there are a series of major submarine canyons, often taking the names of the nearest city. The Norfolk Canyon, for instance, is one of the largest—and about 60 miles offshore from Tidewater Virginia. Known to deep sea fishers, few residents of the city of Norfolk probably even know of its existence, nevertheless the nature it harbors (though there is some information on display at the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center and a local brewing company O’Connor Brewing that produces a Norfolk Canyon Pale Ale!). This submarine canyon is home to a great quantity and diversity of organisms and habitats (from Blackbelly Rosefish to Bubblegum Coral to Bobtail Squid).
The spatial planning vision a city holds and promotes is important as well, and here there are a handful of cities beginning to extend their visions to include the aquatic and marine worlds. Wellington, New Zealand has had a Town Belt dating back to the founding of the city in the mid-1800’s and in more recent years has developed an extensive network of greenbelts that surround this city. Impressively, the city has begun to expand this vision to include the Blue Belt, encompassing the harbor, and other offshore ocean habitats, as well as ocean-flowing creeks and streams, in this peninsular-shaped city. Precisely what the Blue Belt will mean in practice, what implications it will have for planning and what specific actions will flow from it are still a bit unclear. But as an expanded new vision of the nature and spatial planning boundaries of this city, it is quite powerful. The mayor of Wellington, Celia Wade-Brown, is herself a diver and so it is perhaps not a surprise that Wellington would be a pioneer in this approach.
In a film made as part of our Biophilic Cities Project, Mayor Wade-Brown speaks passionately about the importance of this connection to the ocean realm to Wellingtonians:
When I visited Wellington in August 2013, I had the chance to see firsthand the efforts in this city to educate about and foster connections with the ocean environment. On the south coast of the city sits the Taputeranga Marine Reserve, a 9 square kilometer protected area, only a short distance from the center of Wellington. A biologically rich area, its location includes overlap of three major currents. The diversity of life here is amazing, with some 400 different species of seaweed. There are many different ways to enjoy this nature, including through a “snorkel trail,” where one might see starfish or limpets or anemone. Or, through “rock pooling,” exploring the shallow and deep rock pools along the edge of the shore.
I had the chance to visit the City’s Marine Education Centre located there, and to see the ways in which visiting children, many quite young, were enjoying the Centre’s touch tanks. There were volunteers on hand to allay fears about touching things and to convey to kids some of the fascinating organisms they were seeing and experiencing. The overall feeling that day was one of elation and joy and you could see in the faces of these kids an innate glee and delight at experiencing a little part of the mysterious marine world in which their city and home were embedded. There has been a strong effort over the years to integrate the center and reserve into the education of Wellington children. Staff of the Education Centre regularly visit Wellington schools, as well as host visitors at the center.
The touch tanks at the Island Bay Marine Education Centre in Wellington, where kids can experience marine life up close. Photos: Tim Beatley
What else could blue cities do?
Some ideas include:
— Speak out for ocean conservation and marine organisms and habitats; find ways to provide urban leadership for ocean conservation
— Cut greenhouse gas emissions and develop and implement an aggressive climate change action plan
— Reduce nonpoint and other pollutants and their impacts on coastal waters
— Sponsor research of the marine biodiversity and ecosystems, nearby and not-so-nearby
— Develop green ports and green port/marina facilities and practices
— Support and subsidize the development of Community Supported Fisheries (CSF’s, that build connections between consumers and local fishermen) and closed-loop, aquaponic systems that have the potential to reduce some of the pressures on global fisheries
— Create and subsidize programs that make it easier and more affordable to sail, scuba dive, and otherwise enjoy the marine environment
— Teach students in schools about oceans, and help all citizens reach a minimum “oceans literacy”
— Work to understand the many ways that local consumption and lifestyle choices impact oceans and seek new ways to reduce these impacts;
One of my favorite ideas, though admittedly a bit unusual, is the notion of a city establishing one or more “ocean sister cities.” It might be a seamount or canyon, or a coral reef community, but adopting and embracing one or more specific spots on the ocean, getting to know it intimately, visiting and studying it, if possible, might build bonds of caring and friendship, in ways similar to conventional sister cities.
There are many things that cities, both coastal and inland, can do to educate and raise awareness about the marine world, and to exert leadership on its behalf. These are but a few ideas.
What else could cities do to further deepen their commitments to the blue? What is your city already doing that makes it ocean-friendly?
“Civilisation; it’s all about knives and forks.” —David Byrne
As a child I was not nature-deprived. I lived in small towns and villages in rural Somerset in England, and enjoyed nature study in primary school but I know that I’ve never seen or experienced anything truly wild. I never will, and as a civilised ape I’m really grateful for that.
Left to our own devices most of us couldn’t survive in the wilderness, not even in what passes for wilderness in its degraded form. Yet we need the wild, we evolved there, and as we can’t experience it for real anymore we make do with controlled, vicarious ‘wildness’, most of which involves getting scared in some way—roller-coasters, horror movies, going face-to-face with tigers in a zoo…
For those with nihilistic tendencies it isn’t hard to argue that there is no longer any such thing as wilderness. If you define wilderness as natural environment untainted by human intervention and manipulation, then there isn’t any because the damaging reach of industrial civilisation is literally global—DDT contaminates Antarctic penguins and the PCB contamination of oceanic particulate matter in Antarctic waters is similar to the level of contamination in the North Sea .
Real forests are wild. They are places where one can both be lost and wish to escape from. But are ‘urban forests’ truly wild? For all the talk of ‘wild’, the wildlife experience is no longer defined by lived experience, because the definition of ‘wild’ has escaped into the thickets of a wholly urban civilisation. ‘Wild’ is behind bars, ‘wild’ is on a screen, ‘wild’ is not something that most of the human race ever experiences any more. ‘Wild’ is vicarious. It’s seductive and dangerous—but not in the way that wild used to be, it’s dangerous because it’s encapsulated. Packaged in media. Mediated by packaging. The danger is in mistaking this domesticated product for authentic experience. Its teeth have been taken out, its claws are manicured and its hooves are muffled. The roar of the wild has been reduced to whatever you’ve set the volume control to on the remote.
If a million people can see a buffalo on TV, why would you need a million buffalo?
Not enough animals in the frame? Photoshop a few more to fill up the space.
Wild with a remote. Credit: Paul DowntonWhich one is real?
Virtual reality is rapidly becoming more interesting than reality—it already is for many. The landscapes in Avatar may have some passing resemblance to Earthly places, but they are much more fantastical. Much more fun to look at.
We’re clever creatures. Thanks to computer-generated imagery even the most run-of-the-mill children’s animated feature movie can contain astonishingly convincing pictures of landscapes, plants and creatures. Imaginary landscapes have become routinely realistic, and for that we have to thank Benoit Mandelbrot and his discovery that the apparent disorder of chaos can be mathematically described by the sublime patterns of fractals. He sought a way to define the geometry of trees and clouds and was successful. Now filmmakers can build mountains and fly clouds that are mathematically correct and we find ourselves unable to avoid falling for what is, after all, a scientifically sound illusion of authenticity.
These experiences are literally unreal, and whilst they may teach us something about nature’s fractals, they also disconnect us from the real world.
Moving and shaking
At the scale of the planet, the disconnect between humans and the natural world is becoming more complete (and complex) by the day. Which is to say that if we fail to treat the biosphere’s natural processes with respect then those processes won’t ‘respect’ we humans. Our disruption of ecosystems is profound and getting worse, but we don’t really know what we’re doing. We can measure the increasing pollution of the atmosphere and track some of the changes in global systems that result, we can make an informed estimate of the number of invertebrates in the world compared with 40 years ago and establish that the population has almost halved, and we can pretty much count how many trees and fish we haven’t got compared with, say, 50 years ago.
We can point to all this data and tell corporate leaders, politicians and decision-makers ‘hey! something’s happening here!’ but it means diddley-squat to most of them. Every day the world news services and financial gurus are exalted or depressed by a point or two shifting on the Dow Jones, the FTSE or the Hang Seng. Every day, these measures of economic health can trigger excited speculation on global progress towards either boom or bust or nothing much. Meanwhile, the inexorable decline of every indicator that describes the state of the natural world goes without comment because it doesn’t mean anything to most of the movers, shakers and commentators of sound-bite capitalism.
At the scale of the city, the disconnect is at its worst. Apart from the wind, rain, snow and smoggy sunlight that might still have a directly experiential effect on their daily lives, most urban dwellers have no idea what ‘nature’ is. When nature is given acknowledgement in the media that acts as the average citizen’s eyes and ears to the world, it’s invariably sensationalistic—floods, blizzards and heat-waves make the headlines. Nature looms up as something to fear and therefore something to control, to put back in its box, tidy up and get out of the way.
But at the scale of the city we can make a difference. At the scale of the city we can design for connection of daily life with the rhythms of the planet. Although they might not produce true wildness (or wilderness) we can include urban forests and woodlands, street trees, parks and reserves to the mix of place and experience for all citizens. As many writers for TNOC have explained—most recently Janice Astbury in TNOC 7 September 2014—there are many small ways to bring nature into the city and, crucially, bring people into the making of that nature. All of this is important, but there is a problem with the big picture; it’s a problem that runs deep in modern culture: it is modern culture, or, more precisely, the culture of modernism.
Modernism, greenery and the dark arts
Yet the legacy of modernism is mostly one of liberation. Modernism freed us from the shackles of stale thought and feudal relationships. It promised a new, more efficient society in which form followed function rather than moribund fashion and it tried to articulate a cultural framework that was simultaneously progressive and egalitarian.
But like all kinds of revolutionism it had trouble distinguishing babies from bathwater and its followers tended to distill subtle ideas into slogans and often seemed to get the wrong end of the stick. Whereas progressive modernist architects like the inimitable Frank Lloyd Wright laid stress on working with nature to shape, inform and become integrated with architecture others, particularly those in the thrall of Le Corbusier’s ideology, saw beauty and purpose in the machine regardless of context. For the many modernists and neo-modernists who carry the flame of Le Corbusier’s aesthetic dogma, nature remains something to be trammelled and tamed, something to be denatured; and the city is their canvas and playground.
The penchant of the modern modernist for covering buildings with greenery can be understood once you realise that the greenery they favour has been reduced to a product, delivered in industrially produced, neatly stackable plastic boxes. The gorgeous walls of manicured plant life that are now beginning to show as bold new brush strokes on the urban canvas present a beautiful illusion of nature in the city, but they are as far from ‘wild’ (and just as aesthetically precious) as the brutalist concrete that was the contemporary modernist fashion a short few decades ago.
Don’t get me wrong; green walls are wonderful and I’m an advocate for them and for green roofs, but bringing nature into the city has to run deeper. It has to engage people in ways that are not entirely predictable or a result of following maintenance manuals for vertical gardening planters (e.g., the roof garden I designed at Christie Walk was installed and is truly ‘gardened’ by the residents).
Christie Walk roof garden photographed against the backdrop of neighbouring buildings…‘green’ but not wild…Photo: Paul Downto
But cities demand a lot of command and control. They are the antithesis of wildness. Regimentation and regulation is second nature to city-making. The great adventure of civilisation was all to do with making human settlement stay in one place. Once you no longer move on when the seasons change or the water dries up or the food runs out or the excrement piles too high, you have to get organised in very particular ways. The dark arts of accountancy and bureaucracy are needed to measure out and distribute resources, allocate activities, keep track of individuals and avoid disorder. In order to protect the accrued grains, brains and wealth of the settlement, standing armies have to replace roving warriors. Farmers replace hunters and gatherers; gardeners and maintenance crews learn the discipline of eternal vigilance against the incursion of weeds—those persistent front-line troops of the unfettered wildness that continually threaten to reclaim the city in the manner quite accurately portrayed in ‘I Am Legend’.
Readers of this blog would all most likely agree that a meaningful connection with nature is vital to human well-being but is that something that cities can really deliver? Parklands and green public spaces do introduce something of that connection—wildflower meadows more than manicured lawns, perhaps—but a prohibition against too many people stepping on the grass becomes an essential part of the management strategy when population numbers and density begin to rise. The scale of the city is key.
Small is…wilder?
The historical city was much, much smaller than what we call cities today. Until fossil fuelishness blew them open and drove the machines that tried to kill them, most cities were, by today’s standards, and in all cultures, tiny. The biggest cities were then, as now, the centres of empires, in Medieval times cities like Baghdad and Beijing were the world’s largest with populations of just one million. Most cities held populations of only tens of thousands, they were dependent on somatically powered transport and could be traversed in little more than 15-20 minutes. Rather than sprawling suburbs, they were ringed closely by agricultural land woven into a matrix with whatever landscape was indigenous to the region. The city was set within a framework of nature that would have been obvious to all of its inhabitants, not in a consciously aesthetic way but simply as a fact of life.
The modern reality is that the pre-industrial framework and setting has been reversed and nature, such as it is, often in a remnant or degraded form, is contained by cities and, by extension, their industrial landscapes. Enabling people to connect with nature is no longer about reaching out to nature but creating facsimiles of natural environments within urban systems that people can somehow reach into. Plunging desk-bound hands into soil can take place at the scale of a balcony flowerpot or a community garden. That the fuzzy-edged messiness of community gardens shows a tolerance for trial and error is part of their beauty. But can the city ever really embrace the wild?
Regardless of the inverted morphology of the modern city-nature relationship, the key to any engagement by citizens with nature is distance. Wherever and however they live, any connection with nature should take place within a 5 to 10 minute walk. This was the distance from old city centres to their nature-girdled periphery and anything further becomes a journey rather than a stroll. There’s something ‘natural’ about it. In the pre-industrial past, it wasn’t much further to where the wild things were. I’ve written before (here and here) about George Monbiot’s lucid proposal for rewilding—giving nature the opportunity to restore landscapes by letting them evolve without the prejudices of human culture (TNOC, 21 August 2013).
Any attempts to free nature from the city run the risk of further alienating citizens from nature. Making cities compact and small so that they are embedded in nature, rather than vice versa, offers a strategy of sorts for enabling the return of the wild, but its realisation would be more than a little challenging at this stage of our evolutionary trajectory. Placing cities within sealed or semi-sealed structures such as giant domes (like Bucky Fuller’s proposal for Manhattan) might conceivably allow nature to be wilder, thriving outside the city limits, but that much separation of the city from nature has its own peculiar dangers.
One thinks of the denizens of the Domed City in the 1976 movie version of ‘Logan’s Run’ who believed the ‘outside world’ to be barren and poisonous. For many city dwellers today the wilderness is already almost that alien and threatening. We need our children to grow up around natural history so that nature is not seen as alien or as Jennifer Frazer wrote “When kids do not grow up around natural history, they become adults who are not only ignorant of natural history, but who do not care about nature and view it as disposable and unimportant.”
“You need a mess of help to stand alone.” —Brian Wilson & Jack Rieley
The city is a collective creation. It can only exist because of a high level of co-operation between individuals. It requires society—as does that most basic unit of human organisation, the tribe. (Families don’t require society in the same way, they arise as an emergent characteristic from the demands of procreation and give few, if any, pointers as to how to organise collective effort.) The idea that individuals are, or should be, at constant war with one another in a battle for survival simply doesn’t fit the observed reality of civilisation and its evolution from tribal roots. The scale of co-operation has grown rather than diminished. Published in 1902, Kropotkin’s ‘Mutual Aid’ made an early and eloquent claim for the inherently tribal, rather than familial, nature of human society and its imperative to favour co-operative behaviour rather than the ‘red in tooth and claw’ interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
That view was avidly promoted in support of laissez-fair Victorian capitalism by Thomas Huxley, in a kind of late 19th century precursor of late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s nihilistic assertion that ‘there is no such thing as society’. She might as well have said ‘we don’t need cities’, but that’s another political assertion that doesn’t bear analysis. Even as the craggiest, most individualistic survivalist packs his trunk with AK-47s and BPA-free cans of baked beans and powers off into the mountains in his military-surplus Hummer, he remains tied to the wheels of civilisation with umbilical cords of dependency that tangle their way through great, heaving masses of industrial infrastructure. None of that infrastructure would exist but for the invention of the city. The survivalist could not begin to reach the wilderness without a city to take him there.
Botanical gardens (BGs) are places where people like to be. They provide not only amenities and relaxation for the visitors but opportunities to learn about plants and their environment. In many cases they represent one of the few opportunities for city dwellers to connect with nature. At the same time provide an exceptional introduction to conservation issues.
From their early days in which botanical gardens grew medicinal plants, to the time in which they created extensive botantical collections, and until now, BGs have been appreciated as places of wonder. However, as centers of species introduction BGs also contributed to the introduction of invasive plants with subsequent negative impact in many ecosystems. Most invaders have been introduced for horticultural use by nurseries, botanical gardens, and individuals (Reichard and White 2001).
With the increase of ecological consciousness beginning in the 1970s and the extraordinary increase of the urban population all over the world, BGs have assumed a strong role in protection of species in their original habitats and restoration programs, maintaining nature reserves and, in some cases conserving large fragments of natural vegetation in urban centers. In so doing BGs have become key actors in the implementation of International Agendas, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Framework Convention on Climatic Change, and Agenda 21. This is the reason why today they are a blend of attractive urban green and key actors for environmental education that allows people to recognize the value of nature and promoting an adequate environmental behavior.
In this blog I want to share some experiences carried out in Latin American and Caribbean BGs showing the shift in understanding toward an holistic vision of biodiversity, which focuses not only on plants but on different kinds of communities and environmental activities.
During the last century many cities in Latin American and Caribbean have ignored the green elements of their urban designs, the ecological and scenic potential offered by their natural surroundings and the value of the native flora. Immigrants brought with them the gardening traditions and plant preferences of their countries, and so most cities have prototypes of design styles and planting choices from Europe. Only few landscape architects, such as like Burle Marx or Carlos Thays, were fascinated by the majestic native flora and included native trees with outstanding flowers, stems or foliage in their projects.
Today Latin American and Caribbean BGs are leading the reconnection of people with the local nature. As a result many BGs have programs preserving germplasm of threatened species, and carry out rehabilitation and restoration projects. Thus, the role of BGs has expanded.
Tania Sampaio Pereira and colleagues in Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden, Brazil are working on in situ and ex situ conservation specifically for the regeneration and restoration of the Atlantic forest, which is one of the most endangered ecosystems in Brazil. They are restoring the forest inside the BG and also along some riverbanks in the metropolitan area. Pinheiro, in Sao Paulo, Brazil showed the importance of municipal botanical gardens for the in situ conservation of the flora of the regions where they are located.
A similar project for the restoration of dry forest was implemented by the BG of San Carlos Centro in Santa Fe, Argentina. The main objective of this work is to stop the loss of genetic diversity of species by the advance of industrial activities or urbanization — that the native forest surveyed 60 years ago has been reduced to only 20% of its total. Many actions have been launched with the participation of the local community (e.g., seed collection, creation of a gene bank, restoration).
The BG of the Argentine Museum of Natural Science, in Buenos Aires, is dedicated to the enjoyment and conservation of the flora and vegetation of the Pampa region. The small (0,5 ha) garden in the middle of the city is a network of paths winding through grasslands and forests and has an educational program to call people’s attention to the importance of the local flora. The staff is involved in a participatory restoration project on the riverbanks of the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, helping the city administration to make ecologically sound decisions in vegetation management. At the same time they are investigating how people experience and perceive urban green spaces. Such knowledge of the value that people place on urbn greencan be used by the city administration in designing sounded spaces as the valuation that people have of urban green matters. It brings to mind deep emotions and can mobilize strong attitudes towards a sustainable use.
Many BGs are involved in programs concerning street trees. While in Santo Domingo endangered and endemic native trees are planted, in the Brasilia BG many orchids from the Cerrado Biome are propagated by in vitro culture, propagated and placed on trees along the streetscapes. In Ecuador BGs have been advising the municipal administration on local and regional reforestation, promoting the use of native species. They have been also key actors concerning care, rehabilitation and release of wild animals promoting public awareness about the preservation of wildlife.
The examples described above show that Latin American and the Caribbean BGs are working on an integrated model of multiple dimensions and generate an urban landmark able to create synergies between the exurban and urban environment. Among the dimensions that BGs address should be mentioned the promotion of culture, including environmental rehabilitation of urban and architectural heritage of their buildings, the conservation and management of biodiversity, the generation and transfer of environmental knowledge and policies for social and economic development as inevitable companions of all dimensions. In so doing they have adopted a partnership approach at both the local and national level between actors of different natures, which explains the possibility of taking action with relatively small budgets.
Why have BGs been successful? They are icons central to the city with high social recognition combining at the same time research, agronomic practice and good connection with the community.
Never before on the Earth or in the entire history of the human condition has something like a megacity been possible, until Tokyo and Mexico City appeared in 1950. Typically defined as a metropolis with 10 million residents or more, projections by the 2009 Edition of UN World Urbanization Prospects suggest there could be as many as thirty megacities by 2025. Over half the world’s population is living in cities and megapolitan regions according to the UN Edition of 2010. As populations migrated from rural areas to cities, megacities and mega regions became more powerful and influential than the nations and countries they inhabit. For instance, the international influence of Malaysia lies in the great commercial hubs of Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.
Endless DFW. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio
The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (an urban agglomeration referred to as DFW) is becoming a megacity. While New York City, Hong Kong or Shanghai are delirious concentrations of skyscrapers, DFW is a textbook example of a twentieth century city of nodes in an agglomeration that is almost entirely suburban. In downtown Dallas and Fort Worth, originally two separate cities, the nodes are building clusters. Once freestanding courthouse towns and county seats, the downtowns now exist as bi-nuclear centers in a vast and sparse geography. Other nodes have formed around cloverleaves and in the former town centers and municipalities that were assimilated by the mega growth.
The Branch Waters Network is a concept to use the entire waterway system in metropolitan Dallas–Fort Worth as an attraction to structure a metropolitan urbanism.
The net effect of seventy years of market-driven proliferation is a city that is dominated by shapeless open space and experienced periscopically, through the windshields of cars. Of greater concern is the fact that DFW, and other suburban megacities like it in North America, are statistically impossible to densify.
DFW is the fourth largest metropolitan region in the United States with a population of 6,450,000 residents settled on 5,950,000 acres of incorporated infrastructure. In order to preserve the economic investment of the entire infrastructure by increasing the average density of 1.1 persons per acre to match the 5.5 person per acre density of Portland, Oregon, it would take more than the population of Canada—(5.5 x 6 million approximate acres = 33 million people )—to settle the new, denser, urban footprint. The future of cities—such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston and Atlanta—that generally share the same pattern, density, and math, is potentially vulnerable to social, economic and environmental problems that could particularly affect the areas that are thinly settled.
Architecture and planning are generally without tested theoretical models to retroactively reconfigure vast urban geographies. Daniel Burnham’s overused imprecation to “Make no small plans” sidesteps a stupefying problem, namely that any “big plan” for a mega region will have to criss-cross municipalities, established communities and political structures, none of which are equipped to sustain complex projects that could take decades.
Main Street USA, Dallas West Village. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio
Moreover, planning as a potential solution quickly descends into a conundrum, considering that the great planning models and pattern books of the 19th century arose to develop cities and an urban form, not to retrofit vast geographies where the land is already atomized into private ownership and sliced apart by a fully realized infrastructure. The so-called New Urbanism, while honorable in intention, attached its sympathies to the myth of the small town and a nostalgic association with traditional architecture. America has not been a network of small towns since the 1800s.
During a March 2013 lecture at the Dallas Museum of Art, Professor Kenneth Frampton of Columbia University poignantly recalled a phrase that someone had written onto a rendering of a 1950s utopian city while it was on display at the New York Museum of Modern Art in the late 1980s.
“There are no cities anymore.
We are incapable of making cities anymore.
The machine is incapable of making cities anymore.
We’ll have to get used to living in the jungle.”
—Unknown
Image courtesy OMA / AMO Dallas Connected City Challenge
The image of a jungle city—a confused and chaotic mechanical landscape—is provocative and dramatic. Short of accepting that a blighted “jungle” of abandoned and depopulated geographies is statistically pre-ordained for the future of a suburban megacity, perhaps Frampton’s use of the word “jungle” isn’t only a metaphor, but rather a clue that the landscape and natural waterway network of a city could inform and drive an urban solution.
Where planning or pie-in-the-sky abstractions might present a challenge to the rugged individualism of American culture, the same culture seems to understand and generally appreciate nature and the value that it offers—qualitatively and economically. In lieu of conventional notions for planning, it may be more possible to develop a strategy—a game of nature driven rules for individual projects—that, taken together, could lead sprawling populations toward an orderly rearrangement and a new and unprecedented urban form that is connected by a living fabric.
Rendering of DFW Branch Waters. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio, Vince Hunter AIA Renderer
Part two: the Dallas-Fort Worth Branch Waters Network
The Branch Waters Network is a concept to use the entire waterway system in metropolitan Dallas–Fort Worth as an attraction to structure a metropolitan urbanism.
Seizing upon the familiarity of nature and how North American culture typically assigns value to it, the ribbon like strands of shade, water and continuity of the DFW system, have the capacity to retroactively re-form a future urbanism into living filaments that attract density, transit systems and reconstituted ecological systems. Segments of the DFW Branch Waters Network are already complete.
The seven-mile long Turtle Creek corridor in Dallas is the only part of a 1912 comprehensive plan prepared by George Edward Kessler, a German-born education planner. Kessler’s vision transformed an otherwise featureless ravine into a city walk for education in art, architecture, history, nature and citizenship, by adding a set of parks, sports fields and passive activities to the linear corridor, as well as a chain of lakes, weirs, trails and bridges. Turtle Creek Boulevard ties it all together.
Turtle Creek Dallas. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio
From 1950 to 1980, the location and natural beauty of Turtle Creek gave rise to several condominium towers along the edges as well as a theater designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. As evidence and a demonstration of the urbanizing potential of nature, the concentration of civility and density along Turtle Creek is an exception to the cultural raison d’être in Texas, that luxury and the good life typically means an estate lot or a sprawling Southfork-like ranch. Considering that DFW is on the same latitude as North Africa and frequently one of the hottest places in the U.S. during summer, the 100-year old example of Turtle Creek is a model for a landscape-driven DFW and a useful case study for other metropolitan cities.
White Rock Lake Dallas. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio
Contemporary with Kessler’s Dallas Plan, the 1911 construction of a lake and park on White Rock Creek in East Dallas produced DFW’s closest example of an Olmstedian park. White Rock Lake is a 1,200-acre reservoir set within a 1,600-acre public park that includes the Dallas Arboretum, two boating and sailing marinas, passive recreation areas and the Boathouse Cultural Center, circumnavigated by a continuous bike and pedestrian trail and the continuous tree cover of White Rock Lake Park extending to the Trinity, which is the river that established Dallas and Fort Worth.
DFW Branch Waters Aerial, 2015. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio / Google Earth Pro
When observed in satellite view, the waterway branches of forested creeks, ravines and rivers within the metropolitan area look like the veins of a leaf or a colossal tree that has been flattened and espaliered onto the Blackland Prairie. The water branches traverse an urban geography that is 60 to 70 miles wide east to west, 40 to 50 miles wide north to south.
Image: Kevin Sloan Studio
When the most obvious branches are mapped, there are over 300 potential miles of water branches that would double the real estate value along each side, considering each branch has two outside edges. In Dallas County alone—which is one of eleven that comprise the DFW metropolitan area—over 90 percent of the natural drainageways are intact and unimproved.
Vitruvian Park, phase one. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio, Craig Blackman FAIA
Vitruvian Park in North Dallas (Addison) configures a high-density mixed-use urban enclave on 112-acres that is organized by a 17-acre spring fed park. Completed in 2008 and master planned by my studio, Kevin Sloan Studio, the urban blocks of the five and 11-story fabric present a conventional street wall urbanism to the avenues and a contrasting, modernist repetition of residential wings to the park so that the outdoor courtyards between seamlessly key into the preserved vegetation of the public park.
Vitruvian Park amphitheater. Image: UDR Inc.
The seventeen-acre park, also designed by Kevin Sloan Studio, is fed by Farmers Branch Creek, which is also part of a vast network of sheet springs that exist throughout the Blackland Prairie region. In lieu of the dramatic artesian springs of the Texas Hill country near Austin, North Texas springs move slowly and laterally over a continuous limestone shelf until the erosion of a ravine daylights and receives the water.
In order to raise the southeast corner of the master plan out of the flood plain, the excavation at Vitruvian Park was a logical extension of a natural process of day-lighting the sheet flow for an urban park that would naturally gather density. Vitruvian Park also demonstrates that nature and landscape are effective tools that can overcome suburban suspicions of density by offering an urban-like enclave that isn’t in a downtown center.
Views of Urban Reserve. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio, Charles Smith AIA, Photographer.
For enthusiasts of modern architecture, the Dallas Urban Reserve is an example that combines water branch urbanism with low impact development to form a residential enclave of 50 lots. Urban Edge Developers in Dallas funded and developed the project on a 12-acre site that was abused for 55 years as an illegal landfill, as contractors opportunistically dumped Sheetrock, pipe, shingles and other debris in creating what amounted to an industrial earthwork.
Although houses by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien have been constructed and others by Hanrahan Meyers Architects of New York and Kieran Timberlake of Philadelphia were proposed, the subdivision is prevented from dissolving into an architectural expo because of the vigorous and visually cohesive landscape of a continuous bio-filtration street. Sloping asymmetrically to convey storm water into a system of repetitive filtration beds planted with bald cypress, pond cypress and horsetail reeds, a single two-way street connects an existing 1950s subdivision at the entrance into an existing water branch that is White Rock Creek Greenway.
Aerial map of Urban Reserve. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio / Google Earth Pro
The project was awarded a 2011 ASLA Award of Excellence and has been nationally and internationally recognized by journals such as Topos and Eco-Structure. Kevin Sloan Studio conceptualized the bio-filtration street, designed the landscape architecture and collaborated on the development planning with DSGN Architects of Dallas.
Green ribbon urbanism
Nested along any branch waterway, mixed-use edges and building enclaves would offer the forest and nature on one side and the civility of streets, squares, and neighborhoods on the other. Turtle Creek and the addition of the Katy Trail in the last fifteen years—a rail-to-trail conversion into a shaded promenade—are contemporary examples that further support the urban potential of building the entire drainage network in DFW into an urban system.
Trinity River / Connected City Challenge. Image courtesy OMA / AMO Dallas Connected City Challenge
While other projects throughout DFW are currently in development along various sections and unrelated segments of the metropolitan branch waters, they are typically seen as railway conversions into hike and bike trails, or as stand alone mega-visions such as the great Trinity River projects in the downtown environs of Fort Worth and Dallas.
No larger vision yet exists to see the common thread of all of these separate projects as stepping-stones that could produce a new and unprecedented ribbon-like urbanism tracing the shaded and continuous corridors. Considering how the sprawling low density urbanism of DFW is typical to North American cities and the perimeter rings of European and Asian centers, the Branch Water network could also be seen as a paradigm and potentially a palliative to provide connection, cohesion and a memorable character to a largely generic pattern.
Branch variety
The Branch Waters concept does not presume that the English landscape of fine lawns, azaleas and towers of Turtle Creek should proliferate throughout the entire DFW drainage network. The existing characteristics of the riverines and their potential are as numerous and varied as are the landscape types that could be added. Ultimately, communities along the network should develop a program that fits the distinctive needs of their respective branch.
View of bayou branches. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio, Charles Smith AIA, Photographer
In the lowest and flattest geography of the waterway system, fragments of the former Trinity River in Dallas, known as The Meanders, now operate as flood sumps. In their current condition, they are more akin to the static waters of a bayou than a creek with a current. A project known as the Trinity Strand has taken steps to add a pedestrian and bike trail above the high water mark of a particular piece that courses through the Dallas Design District.
View of creek branches. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio, Charles Smith, AIA, Photographer
Creeks and ravines that slope to the natural Trinity floodplain often convey a brook-like flow of water that, over eons, has cut ravines through the soft limestone and caliche geology. Many of them are sheet springs and numerous street names are clues, such as Kidd Springs, Spring Valley, and Marsh Lane. Most are protected by the Army Corps of Engineers, but the third branch category typically cradles an ecology of hardwoods that established over time in the deep topsoil that accumulated in a valley or ravine. Many of these exist along the West Dallas escarpment or in north and south Oak Cliff and seasonal rains create intermittent flows.
Circumventing red tape
In addition to the cultural, environmental and economic merits of the concept, the Branch Waters has a built-in potential to avoid problems and bureaucratic red tape that often stymies typical plans and/or grand urban visions.
Given how the waterway system in DFW is largely intact and continuous—as it typically is in most cities—no additional land acquisitions, eminent domain takings, bond programs, or the usual gauntlet of political approvals are needed to incrementally accomplish the urbanism, one project at a time. Rather, it might only need a simple set of guidelines to construct spatial relationships between the new urbanism and any water branch.
Summary: resilience or irrelevance
The Branch Waters Network also has the potential to address two significant economic and environmental questions that Dallas-Fort Worth and other Endless cities are facing, especially in the U.S. Southwest. “World leaders now understand that the future of any nation will be disproportionately delivered by megacities and metropolitan regions,” notes Bruce Katz, economist and geostrategist with the Brookings Institute. In order to sustain their relevance on the world stage, any metro must attract talent, retain talent, generate and export their own unique economy, and flourish into a culture that can compete with other world cities. Where baby boomers would move to a city after getting a job, millenials and Gen-X generations do the opposite—they move to a cities that offer walkability, parks, nature and a quality of life they desire, then they find a job.
In so-called “business-friendly” cities, such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, Houston and Atlanta, that offer income potential and tax incentives, the sprawling geography was constructed in haste and left out the kind of urban, environmental and cultural qualities that are now a first priority for individuals, families and even corporations.
After a highly publicized national competition, the Boeing Company elected to relocate their Seattle corporate offices to Chicago in 2001, alluding to Dallas-Fort Worths’s “lack of cultural amenities.” The sting of the loss set into motion an array of civic project that included the Wyly Multi-form theater by OMA, The Winspear Opera by Foster & Partners, the City Theater by SOM, an addition to the Booker T. Washington Arts Magnate School by Allied Works, and a downtown parks master plan by Margreaves and Associates in 2003 that identified 19 park sites in downtown. The Branch Waters Network can be seen as a logical extension of the downtown projects applied to the entire geography of Dallas-Fort Worth that would develop a more appealing urban form by drawing new urban densities to the edges of the metropolitan waterway network.
The environmental questions may be even more stupefying. Studies issued in February 2015 by Cornell and Columbia Universities aligned with other environmental studies that indicate a 50 to 80 percent chance that Texas and the American Southwest may experience a 35-year long drought—a mega-drought—sometime before 2100. Such an event would be catastrophic to DFW or any metro, potentially forcing the de-population of the city, the abandonment of entire parts of the city, public parks and certainly any irrigated landscape or use in order to conserve water.
The existing natural waterway system in DFW is where the region’s longevity might be secured. It is where the mature trees, water and any environmental quality currently exist. Gathering urbanism along the edges of the network would anticipate the mega-drought and forestall the potential for individuals and companies to flee the metropolitan area, while also generating an orderly rearrangement of the unsustainably suburban pattern into a form that would be more resistant to calamities and natural disasters.
Trinity River through Downtown Dallas. Image: Kevin Sloan Studio, Ting Lun, Photographer
The potential for a mega-drought and the eye opening realization that the generic pattern cannot be statistically urbanized potentially belies a much larger economic rationale to support the formation of the Branch Waters Network in DFW and other cities where a similar natural system exists.
World and national leaders understand that megacities and metropolitan regions will disproportionately deliver the future for any nation. For metros to be relevant and competitive on the world stage, they must retain talent, attract new talent, generate and export their own unique economic production, and flourish into a culture that can compete successfully, in both domestic and world markets.
Image: Kevin Sloan Studio, Wenyan Ji, Renderer
Every city currently competing on the world stage has one or more features that cannot be copied by another metro. By logical extension, the qualities of a city are now part of a broader strategy for a megacity or region to remain relevant on the world stage. The Branch Waters Network and the ribbon-like urbanism it could form may be the physical, spatial and environmental distinction Dallas-Fort Worth needs to endure.
A new energy is emerging around the importance and relevance of connecting urban dwellers with nearby nature to realize a full range of human and environmental benefits. In this sense, there is a real willingness among park professionals and supporters to try new approaches, to learn from each other, and to forge a stronger relationship between cities and nature. This openness was reflected in the diversity of presentations on this subject at the recent 2015 George Wright Society conference in Oakland, California.
The George Wright Society (GWS) is an international non-profit association composed of researchers, resource managers, educators, administrators, and activists working in parks, other types of protected areas, and cultural and historic sites. Founded in 1980, the goal of the GWS is to advance protected area stewardship by bringing practitioners together to share their expertise. One of the ways the GWS does this is by organizing a bi-annual interdisciplinary conference dedicated to advancing thought and practice in natural and cultural resource management, research, protection, and interpretation. The conference attracts practitioners from across the entire spectrum of disciplines and activities that are necessary for successful protected areas management.
From March 29-April 3, 2015, the GWS held its 18th bi-annual conference in Oakland, California (GWS2015). Entitled “Engagement, Education & Expectations—The Future of Parks & Protected Areas”, this year’s conference attracted more than 700 participants representing land management agencies in the USA and Canada, affiliated non-profit organizations, academia, recipients of the GWS Indigenous Participant Travel Grant Program and George Melendez Wright Student Travel Scholarships, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA).
From my perspective, the GWS2015 conference was highly successful. Of particular interest to me was the strong emphasis on urban nature conservation and initiatives. This is an emerging direction for GWS conferences, which have traditionally focused more on federal land management agencies. Also, the conference’s location in the San Francisco Bay Area was a big advantage because it enabled a number of local agencies and organizations to showcase the innovative work they are doing to conserve nature and connect diverse urban populations to that nature. This blog looks at some of the highlights of the GWS2015 conference from these two perspectives.
The Plenary Sessions
The conference opened with an outstanding plenary session on “Parks as a Key to Preventive Healthcare: The Power of Partnerships between Park and Health Professionals” (available on YouTube). Led by Mariajose Alcantara and Fatima Colindres, Interpretive Park Rangers at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area; Raymond Baxter, Kaiser Permanente’s senior vice president for Community Benefit, Research and Health Policy; Jonathan Jarvis, Director of the National Park Service; and Kristin Wheeler, Program Director at the Institute at the Golden Gate, the presentation showcased the innovative work being done in the Bay Area to improve health outcomes among people of all backgrounds and abilities by using local parks as a low or no-cost preventative health choice. Although much work has been done in this regard through the Healthy Parks Healthy People movement, what is especially exciting in the Bay Area is how the medical profession has been embracing this concept through the Parks Prescription Program.
In this example, the Parks Rx Program provides resources and support for medical doctors to prescribe spending time outdoors in nature as a way to improve health outcomes with the help of locally specific and culturally relevant outreach materials. Parks prescriptions are tracked, improvements to patient health monitored, and new users to parks in the community observed. This exciting approach builds on a partnership started in 2013 between more than a dozen Bay Area health departments and parks agencies from six Bay Area counties that sought to improve health outcomes for communities with high health needs.
Dr. Kathleen Moore
The second GWS2015 plenary focused on a problem which seems to be growing with each new generation—that of the sliding ecological baseline. Presented by Kathleen Dean Moore, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Oregon State University, the talk, titled “Watching the World Go Away: Sliding Baselines, Diminished Expectations, and the Future of Protected Places” (available on YouTube), presented a sobering look at how unrelenting pressures on the natural world over many generations is also resulting in a sliding moral baseline—where, in the words of Dr. Moore, “we ask so little of ourselves, caught up in an astonishing disregard for the quietly vanishing creatures and landscapes. But who can grieve the loss of what they never knew?” This, in turn, shifts into a sliding baseline of the imagination, where Dr. Moore asks “who can imagine a truly healthy ecosystem, who lives in a landscape of loss and no longer notices? Even our sense of possibility has been strip-mined.” Through Dr. Moore’s powerful, moving, lyrical, and yet hopeful words, she asks each of us to live as witnesses and activists, standing up for the earth and safeguarding our irreplaceable common natural heritage.
During this plenary, Ernesto Enkerlin Hoeflich, Chair IUCN WCPA and Alan Latourelle, Chief Executive Officer, Parks Canada Agency, both spoke eloquently about the future of parks and protected areas in North America, and they urged everyone to continue working towards the realization of the Promise of Sydney. They also spoke of the critical importance of a strong voice in support of parks and protected areas at the WCC. They noted this can only happen if people get involved with helping to set the agenda for the WCC. These agenda-setting meetings are starting to take place around the world this year. A good way to connect to the WCC is by joining the WCPA and bringing your perspectives to the forefront of the discussions.
From wilderness to city edge: the role of urban protected areas in metropolitan regions and protected area systems
Although it is not the intent of this blog to review all the presentations that focused on urban nature at GWS2015, what follows are highlights of a few of the presentations that represent a global to local perspective of the role and growing importance of urban protected areas. The presentations focus on various aspects of urban protected areas including human health, environmental protection, governance, public policy, changing values, strategic and land use planning, stewardship and partnerships, and changing demographics.
The session “Urban protected areas: A global perspective” by Ted Trzyna, Chair, Urban Specialist Group, IUCN WCPA, focused on the newly released (2014) IUCN volume Urban Protected Areas. This volume is a significant contribution to the field of urban protected areas studies, providing context and concepts of urban nature protection and explaining their importance. According to Ted, “protected areas situated in or at the edge of metropolitan areas have a crucial role that sets them apart from other protected areas. They provide opportunities for large numbers of urban people to experience nature, including many people who may not be able to visit more remote places.” He explained that regular contact with nature is good for people, and that urban people are crucial for nature conservation, nationally and globally, because of the support they provide for nature through their votes, donations, and their communications. And yet, he explained, people living in cities tend to have diminishing contact with nature. The Urban Protected Areas volume tries to address this through its thirty best practice guidelines that demonstrate how to promote, create, and improve urban protected areas, as well as improve the connections between urban protected areas and people, places, and institutions.
One of the Urban Protected Areas profiles: Golden Gate National Recreation Area, San Francisco, California, USA.Mike Walton (left) and Jeff Ward (right) surveying a regional park wilderness landscape next to Victoria, BC.
Mike Walton, Senior Manager of the Capital Regional District, Regional Parks Department, in Victoria, British Columbia, made a presentation on “Near wilderness and its relevancy to our nations’ park systems.” Mike pointed out that in Canada and the United States, wilderness has long been a symbol of national identity, but that today, “meaningful wilderness can’t be only distant and vast—it needs to be nearby and familiar.” He stated that this challenges the foundation of what inspired nations to designate lands as wilderness areas. In this sense, nearby wilderness has the opportunity to connect people of all ages and abilities with the natural world, helping to improve mental and physical health, and creating engaged citizens who understand that “all things are connected.” However, competing interests and political priorities can conspire to divest people from parks and protected areas. The task is to make protected (wilderness) areas real for urban citizens, which can require shared power and decision-making.
Designing governance structures to achieve this requires difficult changes in the powers conferred upon park agencies. Mike’s presentation contributed to the idea that near wilderness—its establishment and management—contributes to shared decision-making so that wilderness around the world might be protected.
Where is wilderness today? For many, it is just outside our doors, within walking, running, or cycling distance.
I gave a presentation on “Achieving regional metropolitan area nature conservation: ingredients for success.” I talked about how urban areas are rapidly expanding as a growing percentage of the world’s population is choosing to live in cities, and how this rapid expansion has resulted in significant negative environmental and human health impacts as formerly wild and natural areas have become fragmented, degraded, or developed. This process has resulted in a growing global recognition that focused attention needs to be paid to nature conservation in urban areas. One aspect of this effort is to develop strategies and best practices for conserving nature in metropolitan environments. I posited that four key attributes have become evident as necessary ingredients for successful urban nature conservation:
Presence of a regional vision for nature conservation
Political commitment to that vision
Organizational capacity to achieve the vision
Consensus-building capacity to build support for the vision
The Chicago Wilderness vision to protect 1.9 million acres of land connected to people and place.
I then introduced the idea that the Collective Impact model was one successful approach to achieving these four attributes for regional nature conservation, especially as implemented by the members of the Metropolitan Greenspaces Alliance (MGA). I highlighted two MGA members, Chicago Wilderness and the Intertwine Alliance (Portland, Oregon) for their truly significant achievements in creating outstanding regional protected areas systems and for successfully involving people with those areas. Chicago Wilderness is especially notable for their aspirational vision of protecting, connecting, and restoring 1.9 million acres of greenspace in and around the Chicago metropolitan area, while the Intertwine Alliance has excelled at building support for nature conservation and restoration by successfully tapping into the consciousness and self-image of Portland area residents and visitors through innovative and fun marketing and branding strategies.
The Intertwine Alliance has produced a number of outstanding communications pieces that build a strong public identity with the local environment and emphasize the accessibility and fun of being out in nature.A satellite view of the San Francisco Bay Area with its 1.4 million acres of protected lands.
Annie Burke, Deputy Director of the Bay Area Open Space Council, gave a very interesting presentation on “The Bay Area’s protected lands and changing demographics.” A member of the Metropolitan Greenspaces Alliance, the Bay Area Open Space Council is a network of 65 NGOs and public agencies that conserve, steward and connect people to the Bay Area’s system of world-class parks, trails, and working lands. With nearly 1.4 million acres of protected land and 1 million acres of publicly accessible parks and trails ranging from the 70,000 acres of wilderness around Mount Diablo, the Presidio of San Francisco, working ranches, and the strawberry fields along the San Mateo coast, many opportunities exist for engaging city dwellers in the movement to protect these natural areas for the benefit of all.
Bay Area youth enjoying a hike in a protected open space near the city.
As Annie pointed out, “the Bay Area is a fascinating study in the connection of land and people. There’s a long history of a strong environmental ethic in the region that is undergoing a major shift. As the demographics change, so are the people interested in protecting our natural areas.” Annie’s presentation highlighted several new leaders and innovative initiatives that are now contributing to the ongoing protection of “this biodiversity hotspot, world famous travel destination, and place we call home.”
The Capital Regional District is on southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.
Jeff Ward, Regional Parks Manager of Planning, Resource Management and Development for the Capital Regional District, Victoria, British Columbia, presented another view of regional nature conservation in his talk, “Planning for a system of regional protected areas in the Capital Region of British Columbia.” Jeff explained that the Capital Regional District (CRD) is the second most populated metropolitan area in British Columbia and is a very desirable place to live. The region’s population is expected to increase over the next 25 years by approximately 110,000; from 365,000 to 475,000. This increasing regionalfootprint is putting more pressure on existing protected areas and is resulting in the unrelenting conversion of natural area to settlement areas.
The CRD Regional Parks Strategic Plan sets out a vision of protecting regionally significant natural areas and providing opportunities for people to sustainably enjoy these areas.
Jeff explained that the idea of establishing a system of regional protected areas in the CRD dates back to the 1950s, and that through successive regional parks strategic planning initiatives, the CRD has addressed the need for establishing a connected system of protected areas in this growing metropolitan region. Through CRD Regional Parks, the region has taken action to plan for a system of protected areas and acquire land before it is lost forever. CRD Regional Parks currently manages 33 regional parks and trails on over 13,000 hectares on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, and the department has a land acquisition fund that generates approximately $3.4 million a year through 2019.
Public response to the question: “At least 50% of the Growth Management Planning Area land and water base is managed and connected for the conservation of nature?”
A significant initiative for CRD Regional Parks, as articulated in its Strategic Plan, is promoting the concept of “Nature Needs Half”—or the protection and management of at least fifty percent of the CRD’s land base for the conservation of nature. This concept has been taken up by CRD Regional Planning in its provincially mandated regional growth strategy (renamed the Regional Sustainability Strategy [RSS]), where a recent public poll found overwhelming support for the concept.
Jeff’s presentation also highlighted key lessons learned about protected area planning in a metropolitan region, which include:
Have a vision —have a clear idea and “expression of purpose.”
Be patient — the system will develop over decades.
Planning matters — it requires ongoing planning with community involvement.
Connect with your colleagues —work across disciplines and with all levels of government and non-government organizations.
Citizens experience and learn — protected areas become part of their daily life.
Finally, Robert Doyle, General Manager, East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD), made a presentation on “Using park partnerships to keep parks relevant to urban communities.” Robert explained that the EBRPD is the nation’s largest and oldest urban regional park system. Established in 1934 to buy and protect natural lands and provide a system of regional parks, the District now manages 118,000 acres in 65 diverse parks and operates a 1,200 mile trail system with an interconnected urban bike trail system. With an annual budget of over $200,000,000 a year, it has 1,000 employees (it is one of the largest employers of youth in the Bay Area) and receives 22,000,000 visitors a year.
Important land acquisition in the Concord Hills made possible through conservation partnerships.
The EBRPD completed its Master Plan update in 2013 and it now has a renewed emphasis on natural resource protection through adaptive management, environmental education, outreach to underserved populations, youth engagement, public health, and access for everyone. Robert emphasized that the EBRPD continues to prioritize open space protection, safe and well maintained parks, and creative partnerships. Robert highlighted specific examples for remaining relevant to the populations the EBRPD serves in a changing urban and natural environment. These include:
Public outreach through ethnic media and environmental and recreation programming;
Unique partnerships for promoting healthy parks and healthy people;
Adapting to climate change through urban shoreline restoration projects;
Involvement in multi-agency endangered species habitat acquisitions;
Management agreements with state and federal agencies; and
Partnering with transportation agencies to create an urban bicycle system that serves both transportation and recreation.
Summary
The GWS2015 offered a wide range of topics relating to urban and regional nature conservation, only some of which have been covered here. All of the conference presenters were engaged, knowledgeable and eager to share their experiences and perspectives on how to design, manage, and generate support for regional metropolitan area parks and protected areas. They emphasized the importance of such systems for the health and wellbeing of local residents and visitors, as well as contributing to broader social, economic, and environmental goals.
An edited Conference Proceedings will be published by the George Wright Society as a record of the conference. The Proceedings will be published as a PDF e-book on the GWS website. Certain papers from the conference will also be published in the GWS’s journal, The George Wright Forum. Check the GWS website for availability of these documents later in 2015.
There was a definite call among many participants to become more active in promoting the value and necessity of nature protection, and to not back down on the need to protect significant environmental features and landscapes before they are lost to development pressures forever. The idea of protecting at least fifty percent of the global land base for the conservation of nature (Nature Needs Half) was repeatedly heard—this is in sharp contrast to the usual 12% to 15% protected area target that has been accepted by many governments around the world. There seems to be a sense of urgency and activism in the air that is growing stronger among participants who anticipate what is likely coming if we don’t take strong action now to protect and connect people with nature, especially in our urban cores.
So, although I am surely talking to the already converted, I still encourage each of us to do what we can to actively defend, promote, and champion a greener future for our urban areas and for our planet. Perhaps consider supporting the George Wright Society and sharing your work at the next conference (GSW2017). Also, think about joining the WCPA and try to influence the agenda for the upcoming World Conservation Congress to include a strong emphasis on urban nature. And, think about actually participating in the WCC in Honolulu, Hawaii in 2016. These global events are often life-changing, and wouldn’t it be great for a whole contingent of urban nature activists to be there? Together we could advance the incorporation of abundant and easily accessible nature into each of our cities as a solution to pressing global environmental and development challenges. I hope to see you there!
Panoramic view from Makapuu, Oahu, Hawaii. Honolulu, Hawaii will be the site of the 2016 World Conservation Congress which is being hosted by the United States for the first time in the WCC’s 66-year history.
Recently Buenos Aires, the capital city of Argentina, has begun a transformation to reduce the urban processes that have negative effects on biodiversity.
The city has an area of 202 square kilometers and a population of 2.9 million. Every day up to four million people enter in the city from the metropolitan area to work. During the last century the urban development contributed to the degradation of the natural environment that creates a rupture in the continuity of the natural ecosystem.
To mitigate this situation some strategies have been developed to strengthen and recover the relation between the city and its green and blue natural capital. The revitalization of the waterfront, squares, parks and green woodland connectors has been implemented to expand and regenerate permeable urban surface, creating healthier environments for biodiversity. Policies at metropolitan scale propose to rehabilitate biocorridors along watercourses (Fig.1).
Fig. 1 Proposed green connectors and corridors. An interconnected network of tree- lined streets, boulevards, alleys and riparian remnant vegetation. Source: Buenos Aires Verge. SSPlan, MDU, 2011
But what is the reality behind this strategy? So far, the implemented measures connecting green areas through a structure of wooded corridors are aimed to improve public space, especially for citizens’ satisfaction. Up to now, little has been done for an ecological rehabilitation that puts priority on the local flora and fauna, restoring the living environment to sustainable conditions over time.
Birds are charismatic components of urban nature and we can rejoice in their singing and presence in our day to day lives. They are also well known as bioindicators. Because urbanisation’s effects and patterns can be effective environmental filters, driving many sensitive birds out of town, many articles around the world have analyzed the complex factors affecting species richness, composition and abundance. As metropolitan areas expand into the surrounding natural remnants and rural zones, native habitats significant for the avifauna become progressively altered, fragmented or substituted with managed systems. The rule of thumb is that in the city sensitive birds are replaced by generalists — especially opportunists such as doves and sparrows (Fig. 2) — and overall avian richness is lower than in the surrounding areas. In general, the larger the cities are, the greater the negative effects on biodiversity. In addition, bird communities can be shaped directly by on site-specific land cover variables within urban habitats, and by overall features of the surrounding landscape including the proximity of large forested areas and developed areas.
Fig. 2 In Buenos Aires city native (Zenaida auriculata) and exotic doves (Columba livia) are very abundant in compacted build areas with higher population density. They dominate (see brown areas) especially in neighborhoods with lower presence of parks (see green areas).
Factors affecting birds are multidimensional, so local and regional-scale applied ecological research is needed to understand which features can favor bird communities. Finally, we need information to improve urban planning and design with ecologically informed suggestions to policy-makers.
In the pampa ecoregion where I live, many cities are located near water bodies comprising riparian habitats. These productive lowlands — composed of grasslands, marsh vegetation, wet woodland and vegetated water cover — are significant biocorridors. They provide habitat, refuge and food sources in relatively unmanaged ecosystems supporting higher bird diversity than other urban environments. One wonders to what extent different assemblages of land cover — such as the surface area of vegetated water bodies, native and exotic tree canopy cover, grasslands, paved paths, buildings, parking lots, mowed grass and fallow field, pasture or shrubs — impacts the diversity of birds along riparian cities of quite diverse size. Surveys carried out in nine cities with diverse population density (28-5700 inhabitants/km2) along 252 km riparian gradient captured up to 49 bird species, representing 63% more than the richness recorded in Buenos Aires metropolitan watercourses (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3 Analyzed cities using the urban-exurban gradient bird sampling method along the riparian coast.
Analyses of data show that 20 common species were found in every city, preferring the riparian sites near the city centers, while grassland and forests birds were city avoiders and significantly linked to natural patches with heterogeneity of habitats. Our results suggest that pampean avian communities along the riparian corridors are shaped more by site-specific land cover variables than overall landscape context and that bird richness was not so much linked to city size and density.
Based on the conclusions of the analysis, municipalities in this region — including small towns — should consider, from a variety of ecological perspectives, that restoring a riparian corridor is more effective than foresting the city. The riparian zone, because of its structural and compositional complexity, is a supplier of nutrients and sediments to the channel, of microhabitats for vegetation and animals, as well and an important climate regulator.
Corridor projects should not miss design opportunities to improve wild life habitat quality by:
a) limiting paved trails and surfaces that impede infiltration, so reducing surface runoff and removing pollutants (Fig. 4).
(b) reducing the exotic tree cover and amount of highly managed grass area;
(c) creating and sustaining more structurally diverse native vegetation patches within and surrounding all water bodies (Fig. 5). This can directly affect the characteristic of streams regulating waterflow and erosion, nutrient balance and the formation of microhabitats relevant to vertebrates and invertebrates. In doing so, they should remember that as streams change over time pioneer and longer lived plants should be used;
e) implementing monitoring and adaptive management.
But these recommendations are not quite new and we should ask ourselves why they are not put into practice? This brings us to the hackneyed discussion of the disconnection between those who investigate environmental issues and planners.
Programs that try to preserve, rehabilitate or restore biodiversity along river corridors should consider their complexity from the earliest stages of the project. Generally these areas are shared between different municipalities, which makes necessary a joint work that brings together various authorities and bodies in harmony.
Those who manage urban territory usually respond more to political mandates following particular agendas with action times narrower than an ecological rehabilitation project requires. In addition,such managers often lack the technical knowledge that the project requires, while the specialists are working in other areas (universities, institutes). There is often mutual distrust between them.
Designing successful projects means breaking this vicious circle fed by political and personal interests seeking ways to work together to provide greater flexibility in the actions.
Post-industrial cities in the United States and elsewhere are implementing brownfields to brightfields programs that help develop local economies, generate clean energy and manage pollution. Brownfields are former industrial sites or landfills with contaminated soil. These sites pose both environmental and social challenges, as contamination must be remediated prior to redevelopment. Slow redevelopment processes can lead to or reinforce cycles of community disinvestment in neighborhoods already suffering from job and population losses. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency provides resources for remediating brownfield sites, and encourages the development of “brightfields”—solar power production on vacant lands—as one way of converting contaminated land for productive use. Renewable energy projects like solar can provide a way to bring additional financial resources to remediation projects and other underutilized urban properties, while at the same time mitigating climate change and fostering energy independence.
Holistic approaches for brown-to-brightfield programs can couple solar with other strategies to meet multiple goals on the same site.
However, depending on the way solar projects are designed and whether communities lack input in their design, energy projects in inner-city residential communities can be contentious. To date, most large solar projects are encircled in unsightly barbed wire—a design choice that few residents are likely to embrace in their neighborhoods and one which prevents integration with other community activities. These projects can also raise questions about the potential for alternative uses and competing goals, especially since communities in which vacant lands dominate the landscape often confront a multiplicity of economic and environmental challenges. Moreover, post-industrial cities face additional challenges related to infrastructure age and post-industrial disinvestment—including combined sewer overflows, substandard housing, soil contamination and lack of parks and open space. Holistic approaches for brown-to-brightfield programs can couple solar with other strategies to meet multiple goals on the same site.
Students at the University at Buffalo recently initiated the task of exploring such multifunctional redevelopment possibilities. Their efforts are part of the University’s initiative to produce 100 megawatts of locally generated solar power by 2020. The project—entitled Localizing Buffalo’s Renewable Energy Future—aims to advance clean energy in New York State by increasing the use of solar energy in the City of Buffalo and on university campuses. The initiative is working to demonstrate the viability of coordinating multiple property owners (including the University, City, other intuitions of higher education, and potentially residents) in the negotiation of a solar Purchase Power Agreement (PPA), thereby leveraging the benefits of a large-scale solar PPA in the implementation of many smaller-scale solar PV installations. Through pedagogy and research, University faculty, students, and staff at New York State colleges and universities are building clean energy literacy and development while also working to advance multi-use solar projects within the urban core. This University effort is part of Governor Cuomo’s statewide “Reforming the Energy Vision” program, which is designed to prepare for and mitigate the impacts of climate change by expanding renewable energy and modernizing energy infrastructure to withstand disruption. The Reforming the Energy Vision Campus Challengepromotes clean energy efforts by recognizing and supporting NYS colleges and universities that implement clean energy projects and principles on campus, in the classroom, and in surrounding communities. As part of a Master’s Studio in Environmental Planning, students developed multi-dimensional goals associated with the potential for vacant land in Buffalo to create more resilient communities, and assessed the potential of more than 17,000 vacant parcels to meet these goals.
Local Waterfront Revitalization Area (LWRA), Buffalo Green Code. Map: Andrew Abbey
In Buffalo, small parcels of vacant land are strongly concentrated in the residential east side, while large formerly industrial sites are located along waterways and railroad corridors. Residential east side communities have high populations of racial and ethnic minorities, with high poverty and unemployment rates. Low to moderate-income households bear disproportionate energy costs—not only because energy comprises a disproportionate amount of their income, but also because many occupy older, less energy-efficient housing. Moreover, renters in these communities may have little control over their housing quality, including energy efficiency features. Solar projects designed to support additional on-site community uses could be part of renewable energy programs that help lower residential electric bills. The large, non-residential vacant land in former industrial sites along the city’s waterfront and rail corridors tend to be ecologically sensitive areas that serve (or could better serve) important ecosystem functions such as storm water purification and bird habitat. However, they also have the potential to generate large amounts of energy as solar farms. In both cases of residential and non-residential vacant land, considering important tradeoffs and synergies with other ecological and community needs is key.
Vacant Land Density. Map: Dhwani Shah
As students analyzed the potential for these more than 17,000 vacant lots to produce solar energy—by considering site suitability characteristics such as slope, potential solar insolation, brownfield status, ownership, and proximity to existing electrical infrastructure—they also investigated the potential for vacant lots to provide ecological habitat and public access to community spaces. Vacant lots near existing bird habitat and shorelines are crucial for enabling ecological processes, while lots in neighborhoods that lack access to parks could potentially serve as public spaces. Moving beyond a single-objective approach, students considered the potential for sites to meet public access, ecological and energy objectives at once.
Solar Strand, University at Buffalo. Photo: Will Siegner
How could multiple uses take place on the same site? Are ecosystems, social systems and energy infrastructure systems in conflict with one another, or are they synergistic? Intuitively, ecological landscapes may conflict with solar power generation because trees shade the photovoltaic panels and inhibit solar energy. Residential and community uses may conflict with solar infrastructure if sites are unattractive or if vandalism occurs on sites for which there is public access. Although these are valid concerns, we argue that depending on site design, management and community participation in the design of such multifunctional sites, these uses could complement rather than conflict with one another. For instance, integrating solar arrays with low herbaceous vegetation could create habitat diversity and enable more efficient photovoltaic output, as we have witnessed at the University at Buffalo Solar Strand. By providing partial shade habitat for shade-loving plants in an otherwise open sunny landscape, the solar array supports more biodiversity. On hot summer days when heat reduces the energy output of photovoltaics, plants can help to moderate temperatures around solar arrays.
Let’s call these synergistic integrated solar-ecosystems brightgreenfields. Integrated solar-community projects such as the Sol Cinema in Kent, UK—a mobile outdoor theatre powered entirely by solar panels, and the Solar Kitchen in Auroville, India provide examples of solar’s potential for creating community spaces. Imagine an outdoor community theater powered by a brightgreenfield, or a solar incubator kitchen sited next to an urban farm. Co-locating such sites could enable entrepreneur chefs to sustainably access fresh produce and energy while developing small business enterprises.
Not all integrated designs may work in all places. However, if we are to adapt to a changing climate, the process of adaptation must involve experimentation with regenerative design that “consciously repair[s] a degraded environment and actively improv[es] the biosphere whilst providing for the integration of urban systems that provide for human needs” (Thomson and Newman, 2016). We must take bold, holistic and integrative approaches that promote diverse green, grey and social infrastructure.
McPherson was named the University at Buffalo’s first Chief Sustainability Officer. In his role as the CSO, Ryan connects people across the university with information, innovation, and tools to reduce UB’s footprint on the future and enhance quality of life by improving environmental stewardship, increasing economic efficiency and augmenting cultural values and awareness.
This essay is adapted from Marina Alberti Cities as Hybrid Ecosystems(Forthcoming) and from Marina Alberti “Anthropocene City”, forthcoming in The Anthropocene Project by the Deutsche Museum Special Exhibit 2014-1015
Cities face an important challenge: they must rethink themselves in the context of planetary change. What role do cities play in the evolution of Earth? From a planetary perspective, the emergence and rapid expansion of cities across the globe may represent another turning point in the life of our planet. Earth’s atmosphere, on which we all depend, emerged from the metabolic process of vast numbers of single-celled algae and bacteria living in the seas 2.3 billion years ago. These organisms transformed the environment into a place where human life could develop. Adam Frank, an Astrophysicist at the University of Rochesters, reminds us that the evolution of life has completely changed big important characteristics of the planet (NPR 13.7: Cosmos & Culture, 2012). Can humans now change the course of Earth’s evolution? Can the way we build cities determine the probability of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt change on a planetary scale (Rockström et al 2009)?
For most of its history, Earth has been relatively stable, and dominated primarily by negative feedbacks that have kept it from getting into extreme states (Lenton and Williams 2013). Rarely has the earth experienced planetary-scale tipping points or system shifts. But the recent increase in positive feedback (i.e., climate change), and the emergence of evolutionary innovations (i.e. novel metabolisms), could trigger transformations on the scale of the Great Oxidation (Lenton and Williams 2013). Will we drive Earth’s ecosystems to unintentional collapse? Or will we consciously steer the Earth towards a resilient new era?
In my forthcoming book, Cities as Hybrid Ecosystems, I propose a co-evolutionary paradigm for building a science of cities that “think like planets” (see the Note at the bottom)— a view that focuses both on unpredictable dynamics and experimental learning and innovation in urban ecosystems. In the book I elaborate on some concepts and principles of design and planning that can emerge from such a perspective: self-organization, heterogeneity, modularity, feedback, and transformation.
How can thinking on a planetary scale help us understand the place of humans in the evolution of Earth and guide us in building a human habitat of the “long now”?
Planetary Scales
Humans make decisions simultaneously at multiple time and spatial scales, depending on the perceived scale of a given problem and scale of influence of their decision. Yet it is unlikely that this scale extends beyond one generation or includes the entire globe. The human experience of space and time has profound implications for our understanding of world phenomena and for making long- and short-term decisions. In his book What time is this place, Kevin Lynch (1972) eloquently told us that time is embedded in the physical world that we inhabit and build. Cities reflect our experience of time, and the way we experience time affects the way we view and change the environment. Thus our experience of time plays a crucial role in whether we succeed in managing environmental change. If we are to think like a planet, the challenge will be to deal with scales and events far removed from everyday human experience. Earth is 4.6 billion years old. That’s a big number to conceptualize and account for in our individual and collective decisions.
Thinking like a planet implies expanding the time and spatial scales of city design and planning, but not simply from local to global and from a few decades to a few centuries. Instead, we will have to include the scales of the geological and biological processes on which our planet operates. Thinking on a planetary scale implies expanding the idea of change. Lynch (1972) reminds us that “the arguments of planning all come down to the management of change.” But what is change?
Human experience of change is often confined to fluctuations within a relatively stable domain. However Planet Earth has displayed rare but abrupt changes and regime shifts in the past. Human experience of abrupt change is limited to marked changes in regional system dynamics, such as altered fire regimes, and extinctions of species. Yet, since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been pushing the planet outside a stability domain. Will human activities trigger such a global event? We can’t answer that, as we don’t understand enough about how regime shifts propagate across scales, but emerging evidence does suggest that if we continue to disrupt ecosystems and climate we face an increasing risk of crossing those thresholds that keep the earth in a relatively stable domain. Until recently our individual behaviors and collective institutions have been shaped primarily by change that we can envision relatively easily on a human time scale. Our behaviors are not tuned to the slow and imperceptible but systematic changes that can drive dramatic shifts in Earth’s systems.
Planetary shifts can be rapid: the glaciation of the Younger Dryas (abrupt climatic change resulting in severe cold and drought) occurred roughly 11,500 years ago, apparently over only a few decades. Or, it can unfold slowly: the Himalayas took over a million years to form. Shifts can emerge as the results of extreme events like volcanic eruptions, or relatively slow processes, like the movement of tectonic plates. Though we still don’t completely understand the subtle relationship between local and global stability in complex systems, several scientists hypothesize that the increasing complexity and interdependence of socio-economic networks can produce ‘tipping cascades’ and ‘domino dynamics’ in the Earth’s system, leading to unexpected regime shifts (Helbing 2013, Hughes et al 2013).
Planetary Challenges and Opportunities
A planetary perspective for envisioning and building cities that we would like to live in—cities that are livable, resilient, and exciting—provides many challenges and opportunities. To begin, it requires that we expand the spectrum of imaginary archetypes. Current archetypes reflect skewed and often extreme simplifications of how the universe works, ranging from biological determinism to techno-scientific optimism. At best they represent accurate but incomplete accounts of how the world works. How can we reconcile the messages contained in the catastrophic versus optimistic views of the future of Earth? And, how can we hold divergent explanations and arguments as plausibly true? Can we imagine a place where humans have co-evolved with natural systems? What does that world look like? How can we create that place in the face of limited knowledge and uncertainty, holding all these possible futures as plausible options?
The concept of “planetary boundaries” offers a framework for humanity to operate safely on a planetary scale. Rockström et al (2009) developed the concept of planetary boundaries to inform us about the levels of anthropogenic change that can be sustained so we can avoid potential planetary regime shifts that would dramatically affect human wellbeing. The concept does not imply, and neither rules out, planetary-scale tipping points associated with human drivers. Hughes et al (2013) do address some the misconception surrounding planetary-scale tipping points that confuses a system’s rate of change with the presence or absence of a tipping point. To avoid the potential consequences of unpredictable planetary-scale regime shifts we will have to shift our attention towards the drivers and feedbacks rather than focus exclusively on the detectable system responses. Rockström et al (2009) identify nine areas that are most in need of set planetary boundaries: climate change; biodiversity loss; input of nitrogen and phosphorus in soils and waters; stratospheric ozone depletion; ocean acidification; global consumption of freshwater; changes in land use for agriculture; air pollution; and chemical pollution.
A different emphasis is proposed by those scientists who have advanced the concept of planetary opportunities: solution-oriented research to provide realistic, context-specific pathways to a sustainable future (DeFries et al. 2012). The idea is to shift our attention to how human ingenuity can expand the ability to enhance human wellbeing (i.e. food security, human health), while minimizing and reversing environmental impacts. The concept is grounded in human innovation and the human capacity to develop alternative technologies, implement “green” infrastructure, and reconfigure institutional frameworks. The potential opportunities to explore solution-oriented research and policy strategies are amplified in an urbanizing planet, where such solutions can be replicated and can transform the way we build and inhabit the Earth.
Imagining a Resilient Urban Planet
While these different images of the future are both plausible and informative, they speak about the present more than the future. They all represent an extension of the current trajectory as if the future would unfold along the path of our current way of asking questions, and our way of understanding and solving problems. Yes, these perspectives do account for uncertainty but it is defined by the confidence intervals around this trajectory. Both stories are grounded in the inevitable dichotomies of humans and nature, and technology vs. ecology. These views are at best an incomplete account of what is possible: they reflect a limited ability to imagine the future beyond such archetypes. Why can we imagine smart technologies and not smart behaviors, smart institutions, and smart societies? Why think only of technology and not of humans and their societies that co-evolve with Earth?
Understanding the co-evolution of human and natural systems is key to build a resilient society and transform our habitat. One of the greatest questions in biology today is whether natural selection is the only process driving evolution and what the other potential forces might be. To understand how evolution constructs the mechanisms of life, molecular biologists would argue that we also need to understand the self-organization of genes governing the evolution of cellular processes and influencing evolutionary change (Johnson and Kwan Lam 2010).
To function, life on Earth depends on the close cooperation of multiple elements. Biologists are curious about the properties of complex networks that supply resources, process waste, and regulate the system’s functioning at various scales of biological organization. West et al. (2005) propose that natural selection solved this problem by evolving hierarchical fractal-like branching. Other characteristics of evolvable systems are flexibility (i.e. phenotypic plasticity), and novelty. This capacity for innovation is an essential precondition for any system to function. Gunderson and Holling (2002) have noted that if systems lack the capacity for innovation and novelty, they may become over-connected and dynamically locked, unable to adapt. To be resilient and evolve, they must create new structures and undergo dynamic change. Differentiation, modularity, and cross-scale interactions of organizational structures have been described as key characteristics of systems that are capable of simultaneously adapting and innovating (Allen and Holling 2010).
To understand coevolution of human-natural systems will require advancement in the evolution and social theories that explain how complex societies and cooperation have evolved. What role does human ingenuity play? In Cities as Hybrid Ecosystems I propose that coupled human-natural systems are not governed only by either natural selection or human ingenuity alone, but by hybrid processes and mechanisms. It is their hybrid nature that makes them unstable and at the same time able to innovate. This novelty of hybrid systems is key to reorganization and renewal. Urbanization modifies the spatial and temporal variability of resources, creates new disturbances, and generates novel competitive interactions among species. This is particularly important because the distribution of ecological functions within and across scales is key to the system being able to regenerate and renew itself (Peterson et al. 1998).
The city that thinks like a planet: What does it look like?
In this blog article I have ventured to pose this question, but I will not venture to provide an answer. In fact no single individual can do that. The answer resides in the collective imagination and evolving behaviors of people of diverse cultures who inhabit a diversity of places on the planet. Humanity has the capacity to think in the long term. Indeed, throughout history, people in societies faced with the prospect of deforestation, or other environmental changes, have successfully engaged in long-term thinking, as Jared Diamond (2005) reminds us: consider Tokugawa shoguns, Inca emperors, New Guinea highlanders, or 16th-century German landowners. Or, more recently, the Chinese. Many countries in Europe, and the United States, have dramatically reduced their air pollution and meanwhile increased their use of energy and combustion of fossil fuels. Humans have the intellectual and moral capacity to do even more when tuned into challenging problems and engaged in solving them.
A city that thinks like a planet is not built on already set design solutions or planning strategies. Nor can we assume that the best solution would work equally well across the world regardless of place and time. Instead, such a city will be built on principles that expand its drawing board and collaborative action to include planetary processes and scales, to position humanity in the evolution of Earth. Such a view acknowledges the history of the planet in every element or building block of the urban fabric, from the building to the sidewalk, from the back yard to the park, from the residential street to the highway. It is a view that is curious about understanding who we are and about taking advantage of the novel patterns, processes, and feedbacks that emerge from human and natural interactions. It is a city grounded in the here and the now and simultaneously in the different time and spatial scales of human and natural processes that govern the Earth. A city that thinks like a planet is simultaneously resilient and able to change.
How can such a perspective guide decisions in practice? Urban planners and decision makers, making strategic decisions and investments in public infrastructure, want to know whether certain generic properties or qualities of a city’s architecture and governance could predict its capacity to adapt and transform itself. Can such a shift in perspective provide a new lens, a new way to interpret the evolution of human settlements, and to support humans in successfully adapting to change? Evidence emerging from the study of complex systems points to their key properties that expand adaptation capacity while enabling them to change: self organization, heterogeneity, modularity, redundancy, and cross-scale interactions.
A co-evolutionary perspective shifts the focus of planning towards human-natural interactions, adaptive feedback mechanisms, and flexible institutional settings. Instead of predefining “solutions,” that communities must implement, such perspective focuses on understanding the ‘rules of the game’, to facilitate self-organization and careful balance top-down and bottom-up managements strategies (Helbing 2013). Planning will then rely on principles that expand heterogeneity of forms and functions in urban structures and infrastructures that support the city. They support modularity (selected as opposed to generalized connectivity) to create interdependent decentralized systems with some level of autonomy to evolve.
In cities across the world, people are setting great examples that will allow for testing such hypotheses. Human perception of time and experience of change is an emerging key in the shift to a new perspective for building cities. We must develop reverse experiments to explore what works, what shifts the time scale of individual and collective behaviors. Several Northern European cities have adopted successful strategies to cut greenhouse gases, and combined them with innovative approaches that will allow them to adapt to the inevitable consequences of climate change. One example is the Copenhagen 2025 Climate Plan. It lays out a path for the city to become the first carbon-neutral city by 2025 through efficient zero-carbon mobility and building. The city is building a subway project that will place 85 percent of its inhabitants within 650 yards of a Metro station. Nearly three-quarters of the emissions reductions will come as people transition to less carbon-intensive ways of producing heat and electricity through a diverse supply of clean energy: biomass, wind, geothermal, and solar. Copenhagen is also one of the first cities to adopt a climate adaptation plan to reduce its vulnerability to the extreme storm events and rising seas expected in the next 100 years.
In the Netherlands, alternative strategies are being explored to allow people to live with the inevitable floods. These strategies involve building on water to develop floating communities and engineering and implementing adaptive beach protections that take advantage of natural processes. The experimental Sand Motor project uses a combination of wind, waves, tides, and sand to replenish the eroded coasts. The Dutch Rijkswaterstaat and the South Holland provincial authority placed a large amount of sand in an artificial 1 km long and 2 km wide peninsula into the sea, allowing for the wave and currents to redistribute it and build sand dunes and beaches to protect the coast over time.
New York is setting an example for long-term planning by combining adaptation and transformation strategies into its plan to build a resilient city, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg has outlined a $19.5 billion plan to defend the city against rising seas. In many rapidly growing cities of the Global South, similar leadership is emerging. For example, Johannesburg which adopted one of the first climate change adaptation plan, and so have Durban and Cape Town, in South Africa and Quito, Equador, along with Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam, where a partnership with the City of Rotterdam Netherlands has been established to develop a resilience strategy.
To think like a planet and explore what is possible we may need to reframe our questions. Instead of asking what is good for the planet, we must ask what is good for a planet inhabited by people. What is a good human habitat on Earth? And instead of seeking optimal solutions, we should identify principles that will inform the diverse communities across the world. The best choices may be temporary, since we do not fully understand the mechanisms of life, nor can we predict the consequences of human action. They may very well vary with place and depend on their own histories. But human action may constrain the choices available for life on earth.
Scenario Planning
Scenario planning offers a systematic and creative approach to thinking about the future by letting scientists and practitioners expand old mindsets of ecological sciences and decision making. It provides a tool we can use to deal with the limited predictability of changes on the planetary scale and to support decision-making under uncertainty. Scenarios help bring the future into present decisions (Schwartz 1996). They broaden perspectives, prompt new questions, and expose the possibilities for surprise.
Scenarios have several great features. We expect that they can shift people’s attention toward resilience, redefine decision frameworks, expand the boundaries of predictive models, highlight the risks and opportunities of alternative future conditions, monitor early warning signals, and identify robust strategies (Alberti et al 2013)
A fundamental objective of scenario planning is to explore the interactions among uncertain trajectories that would otherwise be overlooked. Scenarios highlight the risks and opportunities of plausible future conditions. The hypothesis is that if planners and decision makers look at multiple divergent scenarios, they will engage in a more creative process for imagining solutions that would be invisible otherwise. Scenarios are narratives of plausible futures; they are not predictions. But they are extremely powerful when combined with predictive modeling. They help expand boundary conditions and provide a systematic approach we can use to deal with intractable uncertainties and assess alternative strategic actions. Scenarios can help us modify model assumptions and assess the sensitivities of model outcomes. Building scenarios can help us highlight gaps in our knowledge and identify the data we need to assess future trajectories.
Scenarios can also shine spotlights on warning signals, allowing decision makers to anticipate unexpected regime shifts and to act in a timely and effective way. They can support decision making in uncertain conditions by providing us a systematic way to assess the robustness of alternative strategies under a set of plausible future conditions. Although we do not know the probable impacts of uncertain futures, scenarios will provide us the basis to assess critical sensitivities, and identify both potential thresholds and irreversible impacts so we can maximize the wellbeing of both humans and our environment.
A new ethic for a hybrid planet
More than half a century ago, Aldo Leopold (1949) introduced the concept of “thinking like a mountain”: he wanted to expand the spatial and temporal scale of land conservation by incorporating the dynamics of the mountain. Defining a Land Ethic was a first step in acknowledging that we are all part of larger community hat include soils, waters, plants, and animals, and all the components and processes that govern the land, including the prey and predators. Now, along the same lines, Paul Hirsch and Bryan Norton in Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future, (2012, MIT Press) articulate a new environmental ethics by suggesting that we “think like a planet.” Building on Hirsch and Norton’s idea, we need to expand the dimensional space of our mental models of urban design and planning to the planetary scale.
Every year, new scientific advances indicate life is more interwoven than we ever imagined. From recent reports that reveal the cascading effects of wolves’ reintroduction to Wyoming to current studies that track the dire impact of Washington dams on the decreasing nutrient loads in Montana forests, evidence builds of a tightly entwined biosphere. As we gain ecological understanding, the dream of engineering a new home from scratch seems more and more unrealistic. How could we construct a replacement to an interdependent system so complex that we don’t fully comprehend it?
While our awareness increases of the services we gain from healthy and intact ecosystems, so does the call to preserve landscapes and repair those that have deteriorated or been completely lost. When the built environment expands, human development replaces the habitat that is performing life-sustaining services. Those services performed include water and air purification, climate regulation, carbon sequestration, waste decomposition, detoxification, and pest and disease control among many others. It becomes more and more apparent that our quality of life is tied to the health of the broader environment and that we need to prioritize habitats, all of which sustain the climate.
As the population increases and we take up more area with the built environment, the remaining ecosystems are struggling to perform enough services to support us. Therefore, it has become our responsibility as practitioners who control the built environment to ensure our development contributes to ecological health by performing the same services of the habitat it replaced. We can do this in two primary ways, through ecological incorporation and biomimicry.
Ecological incorporation
Ecological incorporation is making space to include new habitats within our built environment. I have been struck by the recent innovation in this area as well as the development of traditional approaches. Designers and planners are increasingly devising ingenious ways of blending habitats with buildings.
Among the most common habitat-integrating technologies is the use of green roofs. Although the strategy goes back thousands of years in some cultures, green roofs are gaining wide acceptance now, and numerous companies specialize in making the equipment or installing and maintaining these elevated habitats. When Chicago started their green roof initiative in 2006, they aimed to improve the heat island effect of the city, clean water and air, and reduce the load on the sewage system by retaining storm water. Although the total benefits of the program are not fully calculated, by 2010, around 5.5 million square feet of green roofs had been planted, and the city is claiming benefits on all fronts. A 2011 study by Arup engineers for United States General Services Administration calculated that each square foot of an extensive green roof would provide $38 in public services. For Chicago, a rough estimate would be that by 2010, the city’s green roofs were producing $200 million in public services.
Traditional building in Iceland. Courtesy of Whitney Hopkins.
Living in the concrete jungle of New York, I am often struck by the amount of hardscape covering the ground and dream of streets that are literally greener. In 2011, Seattle started a pilot project called Street Edge Alternatives (SEA) to do just that. The program provides drainage through landscaped areas that mimic natural ecological drainage rather than building traditional piped systems. The SEA streets reduced impervious surfaces by 11% compared to typical streets by adding landscaping containing bioswales and many new trees and shrubs. After two years of close monitoring, Seattle found that the storm water leaving the streets had been reduced by 99% and many other ecological services increased, although not measured.
On a project I have been working on in Aspen, Colorado, the city forester has been working with the design team on the landscaping and green roof to insure the design meets the broader ecological goals of the town and will provide the project with specially crafted seed mixes of native plants that are both beautiful and contribute to the local biodiversity. This type of ecological landscape design is spreading beyond public spaces to private ones as well. Sunset magazine, focused on the westerner U.S., recently featured various do-it-yourself strategies for homeowners to create beautiful and desirable xeriscaping to replace their water-hogging and ecologically useless green lawns.
Beyond just landscaping, I have been seeing more and more innovative plans that include habitats as a central aspect to urban development. SCAPE, a New York-based landscape architecture firm, recently proposed a few ecologically ambitious plans for New York and other cities including “Oyster-techture“, which was shown in MOMA’s Rising Currents exhibition. The project proposed growing oyster beds in Brooklyn’s Red Hook and Gowanus Canal to anchor a new reef of various species that will clean New York’s polluted waterways and attenuate waves, reducing damage from large storms like Hurricane Sandy.
To the population’s great delight, New York City has been adding new ecological landscapes throughout the city at a great rate. One of my favorites, and the favorites of many others, is the Highline. Now an ecological string park on top of a former elevated train track, the Highline contains plants that were chosen for their diversity as well as their beauty and smell. They were arranged to maintain the ecological character of the original colonizing plants. Beyond being wildly popular, the park has added valuable habitat for insects and birds as well as retaining stormwater and reducing local temperatures.
Highline in New York City. Photo courtesy of Whitney Hopkins.
One of the more progressive and ambitious plans I am aware of is Bio Milano, a six-part plan for Milan, Italy that aims to form symbiotic relationships between natural and built environments. A portion of the plan, Bosco Verticale, proposed two towers that ambitiously combine a vertical forest with residential housing. The diverse trees and plants will equal 10,000 square meters of uninterrupted forest and will house many species in the city, including birds and insects.
The Center for Architecture Science and Ecology in New York led a team that produced an innovative prototype for a vertical hydroponic wall called the active modular phytoremediation system. The system, which is mounted to a wall, is made of modular pods that contain hydroponic plants and will be installed and tested in a Bronx emergency response center in 2015. This design greatly impresses me with its beauty and intricate geometry, as well as incorporating plants in a powerful vertical building element.
These diverse strategies all improve the ecological contribution of the built environment by providing room for new habitat that can deliver some of the ecological services provided by the original landscape. With passing time, these newly crafted urban habitats will become established, and we can hope that they will act as semi-substitutes for the originally intact ecosystems that fully sustained the region. Furthermore, as designers and planners, we can be inspired by the great variety of ways we can incorporate habitats into the built environment that are both productive and beautiful.
Biomimicry
Biomimicry uses a different, yet compatible, strategy to ecological incorporation. Rather than utilizing biological organisms, biomimicry relies on human innovation and technology imitating biological solutions. I first learned about Biomimicry in 2003, shortly after Janine Benyus wrote her seminal book on the topic, and was so inspired by the potential captured in biomimicry that I chose to pursue a career in design, rather than in field ecology.
According to the definition given by the consulting group, Biomimicry 3.8, “biomimicry is learning from and then emulating natural forms, processes, and ecosystems to create more sustainable designs”. Instead of using newly constructed habitats to replace the functioning of prior disturbed ones, biomimicry allows us to push our buildings and structures to contribute additional ecological services through the building itself, as I’ll illustrate in the following examples.
In the middle of Zimbabwe, the Eastgate Center commercial facility uses minimal energy to maintain a comfortable temperature despite its hot climate because the building utilizes strategies gleaned from the termite mound. Termites construct mounds that preserve a constant internal temperature of 87° F, in spite of outside temperatures ranging from 35°F – 104°F, by using structure to passively manipulate environmental factors. The mounds rely on their great thermal mass to steady internal temperature variations and then further cool themselves when needed with narrowing shafts that accelerate the exit of warm internal air, drawing in cooler air at the base. By emulating these principles, the Eastgate Center only uses 35% of the energy for temperature regulation as compared to conventional office buildings. The unique African feel the architecture that resulted strikes me, hinting that the building truly grew from its unique place in the world.
Working with contractors to achieve sustainable designs, much of our conversation revolves around the creation of waste. However nature has no concept of waste—everything is just a resource. Much like a forest where the resources circulate through the system, various processing companies participate in industrial symbiosis in the harbor town of Kalundborg, Denmark. All the participants exploit each other’s by-products mutually, a co-operation that comprises of some 20 projects. One company’s by-product becomes an important resource to several of the other companies. The outcome has reduced consumption of resources and environmental strain and made communities around the world question their concept of urban waste disposal.
LEFT: Quaking Aspen forest. Courtesy of Whitney Hopkins. RIGHT: Industrial area of Kalundbork, Denmark. Photographer Unknown. License: PD – Public Domain
One of the most innovative urban biomimicry examples I know is from Lima, Peru, bordering the Atacama Desert, where water is scarce. The regional rainfall is almost nothing, and so as many as 700,000 people in the area have no access to clean drinking water. But recently the University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Peru installed a water-generating billboard for the people. This billboard implements a technology similar to and inspired by the Namibian Beetle. The beetle lives in one of the driest deserts in the world in Africa, but captures all of the water it needs from ocean fog using a unique hydrophobic/hydrophilic structure of its back. Water droplets materialize on its back from fog. UTEC’s billboard is similarly structured, creating a waterspout in the air to satiate the population’s thirst. This is development providing a clear ecosystem service—clean water generation.
LEFT: Namib desert beetle. Photographer: Moongateclimber. License: Gnu Free Document License. RIGHT: UTEC’s water-generating billboard. Photographer: Mayo Draft.
The most comprehensive urban example yet is Lavasa, a city development in India that is the first settlement to use standards based on biomimicry. When construction is complete in 2020, Lavasa will be a collection of five cities that implement local biological strategies to cope with conditions in a sustainable manner. The cities strive to be self-sufficient and restore a depleted forest-ecosystem that once stood at it location. HOK’s master plan rejuvenates deforested areas and drives future landscape performance by implementing reforestation, bioswales, rainwater harvesting and environmentally sensitive construction practices. The plan is, as was the prior habitat, complex, which is exactly what is required in detailed, urban biomimicry projects. I cannot attest to the success of the Lavasa design, but I do know a few people who worked on the project and was impressed by the thought and thoroughness of their planning based on biomimicry principles.
LEFT: Costa Rican rain forest. Courtesy of Whitney Hopkins. RIGHT: A lake city near Pune, India. Lavasa. Photographer: Mayur239. License: Creative Commons Attribution
More than anything else, Biomimicry gives us the ability to imagine net-positive design. Rather than striving to minimize the damage our buildings and structures cause, we can now endeavor to design urban areas that are life-supporting. We can aim to be a positive influence on our ecosystem, which is encouraging. Plus, the more I learn about the amazing solutions nature has developed, the more I am energized and inspired to create great and sustainable spaces for people to enjoy.
Replaced landscapes, replaced services
As the population of the world nears 8 billion, our resources are becoming more and more strapped. No longer can we afford to be so wasteful and polluting, nor can we claim ignorance. If engineering an equally capable and sustaining place is out of the question, our best strategy going forward as we replace the natural environment with built environment, is to conserve, restore, and replicate. This is why both ecological inclusion and biomimicry will be crucial urban design strategies as we move forward to a more sustainable future. I look forward to seeing the new innovations and developments in both areas as we move forward toward more ecological building processes.
Often, city forest fragments and tree canopies are overlooked by city planners and developers as important bird habitat. More often than not, people only regard large patches as beneficial. The message from conservationists is that we want to avoid fragmentation and to conserve large forested areas. While this goal is important, the message tends to negate any thoughts by developers and city planners towards conserving individual mature trees and small forest fragments.
“Building for Birds”, a design tool, allows decision-makers to manipulate amounts of forest fragments and tree canopy to determine the best designs for conserving bird habitat.
To design around individual trees and small forest fragments, it takes a good deal of planning and, in some cases, extra costs. Roads have to be realigned, homes on lots have to be sited to protect trees, and a considerable amount of construction management has to be implemented to prevent earthwork machines from damaging conserved trees and forest areas. From an engineering/construction perspective, it is sometimes easier to wipe out all vegetation and start from scratch. The tool described in this essay helps city decision-makers evaluate how different development designs benefit or do not benefit different bird species.
Empirical studies have demonstrated that small forest fragments and trees in residential areas can provide good breeding, stopover, and wintering habitat for a variety of birds. There is value in these small forest fragments and individual trees for many different species of forest birds. But how to evaluate which conservation designs impact which species of birds?
New York City’s Central Park—a city habitat patch that is used by birds. Photo credit: Sergey Semenov
The goal of the “Building for Birds” online tool is to provide decision-makers with a way to evaluate different development scenarios and how they affect habitat for different species of forest birds that use fragmented areas. This tool allows decision-makers to manipulate amounts of forest fragments and tree canopy (in built areas) and determine the best designs for conserving bird habitat. This evaluation tool is most useful for developments in already fragmented landscapes, where decision-makers are trying to decide which tree patches or tree canopies to conserve.
The online tool calculates scores for three separate habitat categories: 1) breeding/wintering habitat, 2) stopover habitat during migration, and 3) as breeding or stopover habitat in residential areas with trees. Scoring is based on the amount of conserved forest fragments and tree canopy cover kept intact for a particular development design. For example, each acre of intact forest gets one point in some situations. However, these points increase or decrease (for each acre) depending on the season. To determine bird habitat scores that result from different development designs, one simply enters the amount of conserved forest fragments and conserved tree canopy cover in residential areas. Using these inputs, the tool generates a report for a particular scenario, containing a score for each of the bird habitat categories and a list of birds that could be found in each of these habitats. These scores help to evaluate a design’s potential for bird habitat. The tool can be found at http://wec.ifas.ufl.edu/buildingforbirds/web/home.html. Below, we explain each of the three habitat score categories.
Habitat score 1: forest birds breeding and wintering in urban forest fragments
Figure 1. Forest- and tree-dwelling birds, such as the red-bellied woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus, left photo) and the tufted titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor, right photo), can often be found in forest fragments during the summer and winter. Photo credits: Audubon, www.audubon.org
A variety of forest birds will use fragmented forests as breeding sites during the summer and as foraging/shelter sites during the winter (Figure 1). This is the first bird habitat score that the tool calculates: breeding/wintering in forest fragments habitat score. For the purposes of evaluating different development scenarios, we restrict the analysis to forest birds in the order Passeriformes (i.e., perching birds) and woodpeckers in order Piciformes. Woodpeckers are primary cavity nesters, often creating their own nesting cavities in trees. Secondary cavity nesters, such as the tufted titmouse, use natural holes in trees or cavities made by woodpeckers. Other species, such as the northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis), make open-cup nests in the branches of trees and bushes. Fragmented forests provide food for many species of birds, which consume vast amounts of insects, fruits, tree sap, nectar, and seeds. Forest bird species prefer woodlots and forests to open rangeland and open bodies of water. Trees are important habitat for forest birds year-round during both the breeding and non-breeding seasons.
However, some birds, such as several species of Neotropical migrants (e.g., Cerulean Warbler, Setophaga cerulea), are sensitive to forest fragmentation and typically only breed successfully in large patches of forest (e.g., greater than 125 acres). Birds that primarily breed in large forest patches are called interior forest specialists. These species are thought to be vulnerable in fragmented landscapes because they are area sensitive, typically build open-cup nests on or near the ground, lay relatively few eggs, and often do not nest again if a nest fails. In fragmented landscapes containing agriculture and urban areas, a variety of nest predators and brood parasites are more abundant along the edges of forests. Nest predators include mammals and birds, such as raccoons, cats, skunks, blue jays, and crows. The main brood parasite is the brown-headed cowbird. This species lays eggs in a Neotropical migrant’s nest, tricking the migrant bird parents into feeding and raising the cowbird chick instead of their own. Cowbirds and nest predators thrive in fragmented forest landscapes containing agriculture fields, pastures, and residential development.
Some interior forest specialists (e.g., Canada Warbler, Cardellina canadensis) breed in dense understory growth in the openings of large forests and use regenerating vegetation (caused by windfalls, fires, and clearcutting). Although they technically breed along edges, they do so in large forest patches, and they are thought to be vulnerable to the increased predation and cowbird parasitism common in forest edges found in fragmented landscapes where urban and agricultural areas are nearby. Overall, interior forest specialists are vulnerable to forest fragmentation; many populations of these species are declining and are in danger of extinction due to human modifications of the landscape. Thus, this habitat category targets species that only use smaller forest fragments for breeding.
Scoring: For breeding scores, we elected to award more points to conserved late successional forest fragments (1.5 points) and fewer points to conserved early successional forest fragments (1 point). Early successional forest fragments (Figure 2) are defined here as 1) shrublands composed primarily of shrubs with some scattering of trees and grassland patches, and 2) very young forests primarily composed of planted pine saplings and/or pioneer species such as black cherry (Prunus sp.), with trees that are 0–15 years old, and where tree height is typically less than 30 ft. In late successional forest fragments (Figure 3), most of the trees that form the canopy are over 30 ft tall, including both relatively young forests with trees 15–50 years old and mature forests with trees 50 years old or older. To be considered a forest fragment, the minimum size is 1 acre of forest. Any groupings of trees less than 1 acre do not count as forest fragments.
The rationale for the scoring difference between late and early successional forests is that in early successional forest, very few large trees would be available for nesting cavities to support primary and secondary cavity nesters (e.g., woodpeckers). More mature forest fragments have both early successional habitat (along the edge) and mature trees, which together support a greater diversity of birds. However, in certain regions of the United States, large fragments of shrublands may be relatively desired and highly valued; in these cases, early successional forest fragments may warrant a score that is equal to or greater than the score of late successional forest fragments.
Figure 2. Shrubland/early successional forest example from Vermont. Note that there are very few large trees and there is very little tree canopy. Photo credit: http://lindenlandgroup.com Figure 3. Late successional forest example. This is a Florida hammock. Note the dominance of large trees and a closed tree canopy. Photo credit: http://floridahikes.com
Habitat score 2: migrant birds that use urban forest fragments as stopover sites
Figure 4. Neotropical migrants, such as the Yellow Warbler (Setophaga petechia, right photo) and Yellow-throated Vireo (Vireo flavifrons, left photo), migrate during the spring and fall. Forest fragments could be used as stopover sites during migration. Photo credits: Audubon, www.audubon.org
In and around urban areas, forest fragments could be used by an important group of long-distance migrants called Neotropical birds (Figure 4). This is the second bird habitat score that the tool calculates: a habitat score for migrating birds that use forest fragments as stopover sites. Migrating birds typically breed during the summer in the U.S. and Canada and migrate south to spend the winter months in Mexico, the Caribbean islands, Central America, and South America. Migrating species make the return trip in the spring back to their breeding grounds. Along the migration route, forest fragments in urban areas can serve as stopover sites where migrants rest and forage for food. These stopover sites are critical, as the birds need to rest and forage in these sites in order to make their long journeys.
Scoring: From our literature review of stopover habitat, we found that many migrating birds—both migrants that breed in the interior of large forests and migrants that breed in small forest patches and open woodlands—use small forest fragments as stopover sites. Thus, small forest fragments may not be appropriate as breeding habitat for many interior forest Neotropical migrant species, but could serve as stopover habitat. Short/medium-distance migrants also use forest fragments as stopover sites. Some studies have indicated that Neotropical and short-distance migrants were found in early and late successional forest fragments. Therefore, we count both early and late successional forest patches as stopover habitat. To be considered a forest fragment, the minimum size is 1 acre. Any groupings of trees less than 1 acre do not count as a forest fragment. Based on studies, larger forest fragments received more points because larger patches tended to have more migrating species and more individuals.
Habitat score 3: birds that use trees in residential areas as breeding/wintering and stopover habitat
Figure 5. Birds that use bushes and trees in built areas, such as the Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis, left photo) and the Carolina Chickadee (Poecile carolinensis, right photo) can often be found in residential areas throughout the year. Photo credits: Audubon, www.audubon.org
A variety of forest birds will use trees and shrubs in built areas (i.e., urban residential and commercial areas) as breeding sites (during the summer) and as foraging/shelter sites during the winter and spring/fall migration seasons (Figure 5). This is the third bird habitat score that the tool calculates: breeding and/or stopover sites in built areas habitat score. This habitat score should primarily be used to evaluate the relative worth of a built area for more urban-adapted species. There is value for many different species of forest birds. Built areas with extensive tree canopy cover can serve as breeding, wintering, and stopover habitat for a variety of species.
Scoring: From our review of bird studies in residential areas, we gave points when trees (and their tree canopy) were conserved during the construction process. Built areas with trees and associated vegetation provide important habitat during breeding, migrating, and winter seasons. In fact, during the migration season, interior forest specialists can use trees in built areas as stopover sites. Essentially, one looks within areas that are to be built and estimates the amount of tree canopy cover (in acres) that will remain after construction. Each acre of tree canopy conserved received 1 point.
Species list and scoring example
The tool is based on a thorough, systematic review of the literature and it is limited to studies conducted in the United States and Canada. One useful summary of our findings is a bird species list that indicates whether a particular species can breed or stopover (during migration) in city forest fragments and in residential areas with trees. It can be found here (http://wec.ifas.ufl.edu/buildingforbirds/web/birdlists/masterlist.pdf). Below, we briefly describe a scoring result for a hypothetical 100 acre site (for more detail, see Fact Sheets at http://wec.ifas.ufl.edu/buildingforbirds/web/home.html).
Figure 6. Hypothetical habitat scores for a 100-acre development project based on conserved acres of forest fragments and tree canopy (in residential areas). The overall habitat scores (70, 70, and 10) are indications of how much habitat has been conserved, but they are only relevant when you compare one development design to the next for the same site.
The graphical display (Figure 6) is useful when you compare one development scenario versus another for the same site. The evaluation tool allows you to manipulate the amount of forest fragments conserved; the scores will change depending on the design. The inputs all exist online and using the tool is a 5 step process (see http://wec.ifas.ufl.edu/buildingforbirds/web/tools.html ). With this tool, a developer can manipulate different designs and determine how they could maximize breeding and stopover habitat for birds.
Summary
This is the first design tool (that we know of) where decision-makers can manipulate amounts of forest fragments and tree canopy (in built areas) and determine the best designs for conserving bird habitat. In particular, the master bird list we have compiled has translated data from many scientific studies into a format that allows people to see which birds are most likely to use urban areas. The take home message for people using this tool is that small forest fragments—and even individual trees—are important for a whole variety of forest birds.
Having lost 27 of our colleagues mostly doctors, clinical officers, and nurses to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is so painful, yet our government seems not perturbed how do we continue putting our lives at risk. the answer could be online therapy services.
As the COVID-19 pandemic accelerates and the prevalence escalates, global health care systems become overwhelmed with patients who are either confirmed or suspected to be suffering from the disease (Chen et al., 2020). Frontline health care workers (HCWs) are required to work for long and irregular hours, with heavy workloads that contribute to increased levels of stress and ultimately precipitate burnout (Ho, Chee, & Ho, 2020; Lai et al., 2020). Consequently, HCWs in the frontline experience enormous physical and psychological pressure that subsequently exposes them to mental health problems (Chen et al., 2020; Lai et al., 2020; Petzold, Plag, & Ströhle, 2020).
HCWs have also expressed the heavy workload and redeployment to unfamiliar clinical areas (Hopman, Allegranzi, & Mehtar, 2020; Newman, 2020). These conditions heighten fears of the HCWs who now perceive the health administrators as unsupportive and unsympathetic (Hopman et al., 2020). Psychological impacts affect the HCWs’ well-being and interfere with their ability to provide the much-needed care thus hindering the fight against the pandemic (Chen et al., 2020; Ho et al., 2020; Lai et al., 2020; Petzold et al., 2020). Moreover, psychological impacts have negative long-term effects on the overall health of the HCWs and contribute to a shortage of human resources for health (Ho et al., 2020; Lai et al., 2020).
In Kenya, the frontline HCWs seem to be working in conditions that have been associated with a high prevalence of the psychological impacts (Anadolu Agency, 2020). For example, HCWs in Kenya have complained severely in the media about inadequate and substandard PPEs that are exposing them to COVID-19 in the line of duty (Anadolu Agency, 2020; Daily Nation, 2020). Additionally, HCWs have expressed dissatisfaction with the treatment given to their colleagues who have contracted COVID-19. Nairobi has the highest burden of COVID-19 cases reported in the country with over 13,953 confirmed cases (MOH Kenya, 2020). The health care workers are underequipped despite numerous pleas to get proper PPE as the government lacks enough resources to provide them. This is causing unprecedented stress; therefore frontline healthcare workers need to be heard and supported during these anxious and stressful times. The providers also need up to date capacity building sessions for both mental health and psychosocial support during this time, infused with COVID-19 and epidemic preparedness responses.
INSPIRE study, University of Nairobi
Our innovation
The Nairobi City County Department of Psychological Services sprang into action and, being cognizant of the threat COVID-19, would pose to the health care workers especially when using the traditional methods of offering Psychological First Aid (PFA) and debriefs. The psychologists agreed to venture into the online space and introduce an e-platform where health care workers would still interact and support each other with online therapy services.
Having agreed that the services would be offered online, a biweekly supervision program was developed where a senior clinical psychologist was identified and engaged as the clinical supervisor offering online supervision infused with one hour of Yoga and meditation sessions for the mental health practitioners offering PFA and therapy to the HCWs.
The team then contacted and partnered with an information technology specialist who set up a call center platform based on the Session Initiation Protocol standards (Shacham, Schulzrinne, Thakolsri, & Kellerer, 2009). The platform enables extensions to make calls via public switched telephone network or voice over internet protocol, and also offers communication bundles which include voice, chats messaging, and video conferencing facilities for group meetings and therapy sessions.
The team through the national COVID-19 response unit received the approved national protocols and guidelines that had been developed on the standard operating procedures on Tele counseling and Telepsychiatry (Ministry of Health, 2020)and daily activity register (DAR) for data collecting and reporting.
The platform was then officially launched by the County Director of Health and declared a health workers practitioner’s mental health and psychosocial support services hotline. The information technology team embarked on social marketing through various whats App groups by using e –posters to reach as many health care workers as possible and sensitize them on the existence of the service. Daily support messaging was relayed to the health care workers as a way of support and encouragement during these times.
Steps taken to develop support structures and training for healthcare workers
1.
Needs identification of possible mental issues arising from frontline workers’ engagement with COVID-19 response
2.
Identification of mental health specialists to offer the services
3.
Formation of a whats App group for the ease of communication
4.
Training of the psychologists on the current COVID-19 pandemic in emergency support and PFA
5.
Identification and pilot testing of the social media platform to use
(Phone calls, talk chats, video conferencing tested)
6.
Testing an integrated platform that can accommodate multiple ways of reaching out to others
7.
Setting up clinical supervision structures for the mental health specialists
8.
Development of reporting tools
9.
Development of the call center roster for the specialists
10.
Creation of the referral, and linkage pathways for the health care workers with preexisting mental health conditions and those newly diagnosed
11.
Training of the psychologists in G-IPT for COVID-19 emergencies
INSPIRE study, University of Nairobi
Preliminary results and learnings
Over 8 months, the center has been able to attend to 3,560 frontline workers (staff and their families), requiring PFA out of which 1,590 are HCWs exposed to COVID-19 and who were placed under mandatory quarantine.
We have received and returned 2,002 calls mostly from HCWs in quarantine sites and health facilities across the city requiring PFA. We have held 120 video conferences over (Zoom and Google Connect) consisting of between 20-30 HCWs each mainly from different health facilities in the city offering them psychological support; -pretest counseling before they undergo mass COVID-19 tests and post-test Counselling after they receive their results. These sessions have been very helpful to the staff as they get an opportunity to talk about their collective and personal experiences with colleagues. Through these sessions, we have been able to identify 20 colleagues who tested COVID-19 positive and after recovery, they have subsequently developed mental health conditions (namely anxiety disorders, posttraumatic stress disorders, Depression, substance use disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorders). The center has linked these HCWs to therapists for in-person meetings in our designated facilities and they are receiving support. This continuous pipeline of care has been made possible by our partnership with the University of Nairobi Department of Psychiatry through whom we have 30 psychologists trained virtually on Interpersonal therapy (IPT). IPT is a technique that we are incorporating in the long-term management of the health care workers, especially those developing depression and related distress signs. We have also been able to hold 18 online supportive supervisions of which six were infused with yoga and mindfulness sessions, focusing on guided meditation and Yoga by a trained yoga instructor from New York. These sessions have been very helpful for the therapists. Below are some of their testimonies.
“Great sessions was really tired, I feel better, as clinical psychologists we need more of this, it is really helping me in quarantine sites as I work with children” 34 years old Male Clinical psychologist.
“It is helping me a lot especially guided meditation, practice makes perfect, as for yoga it is great that we are starting off with easier poses progressively” 32 years old female Clinical psychologist
“Thanks for the session they have helped me reduce a lot of psychological pain and weight that I go through every day as I strive to help our colleagues and clients I attend to in the quarantine centers” 38 years old male Clinical psychologist.
Some of the issues raised by the HCWs and addressed through PFA include lack of adequate information on COVID 19, fear of being infected by patients, anxiety, and panic due to uncertainties caused by the pandemic especially now that we are in the second wave of the pandemic; substandard and inadequate supplies of PPEs provided at the facilities and lack of comprehensive insurance scheme for the HCWs (The New York Times, 2020). Many of the HCWs experience stigma from colleagues at work when one tests positive for COVID19; or is suspected to have been exposed to patients with COVID-19; or working in a reported facility with COVID-19 positive patients or quarantine center. The stigma is extended to their family members by the community members within the communities where they reside. Some HCWs have reported feeling stigmatized by their own families as they are seen as potential threats of spreading the virus to the family members. Those with school-going children express concern that homeschooling is so stressful now that the children at home following the Government directive to close schools since March 2020 (BBC News, 2020). According to them, having children at home is adding to the work-related stress, and feel they should just stay at work. Stigma from neighbors and fellow health care workers if one is suspected to have been exposed to COVID 19 patients or tested COVID 19 positive is so overwhelming to an extent that some health care workers have been labeled as COVID -19 victims hence being forced to move houses because of the isolation and discrimination they are subjected to. Some health care workers had been forced to separate from their families, especially those working directly with COVID-19 positive patients for fear of infecting or passing the virus to their families.
“My spouse is a frontline worker attached to the quarantine center, where he interacts daily with those on quarantine recently they reported many cases of COVID positive clients in that center and I am afraid to tell him to stay away from us because he may be infected and pass it on to us this is stressing me out,” 36 years old female HCW.
“I feel my health is at risk and the seniors give patients more priority than us the healthcare workers. There are not enough PPEs being that I serve a special population. I feel neglected and not well facilitated,” 34 years old male HCW.
“I feel my dignity and honor has been lost, I took the test voluntarily, someone called me from the lab and just told me you are positive for COVID-19 and we are coming to pick you to be taken to quarantine centre. All this was communicated to me without any prior preparation for a positive result. Before I could comprehend my status the ambulance was outside my gate with sirens blaring” 40 years old female HCW.
“It is ironical and painful how we are recognized by the government as frontline workers, we are expected to intervene in the COVID- 19 wards yet no PPEs, no recognition, and no compensation, instead we are referred back to our professional bodies to fight for our rights” 43 years old female HCW.
“Having lost 27 of our colleagues mostly doctors, clinical officers, and nurses to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is so painful, yet our government seems not perturbed how do we continue putting our lives at risk? The government should know health care workers lives matter” 37 years old male HCW.
Discussion
Health care workers have taken up the intervention positively, as they are able to get it anywhere and anytime, with their privacy and confidentiality being maintained, and at the same time their risk to further exposure being minimized considerably as there is no physical contact. The therapists are now more relaxed as they are able to attend to more clients online while still maintaining their privacy and confidentiality, their risk of exposure to COVID-19 has also reduced significantly as there is no physical encounter. They are able to use various tools available on social media to interact with their patients anywhere and anytime without worrying about missed appointments.
The Nairobi City County government has embraced the initiative and is currently exploring ways of sustaining the initiative as it is proving to be helpful. Overall, COVID-19 National and County response teams are encouraging online support services as it is the easiest, yet effective way, to offer PFA to those in need of it as they all have access to internet-enabled mobile phones. Other neighboring counties have visited the city-county to benchmark so that they can set up a similar platform in their respective counties.
While our efforts are very basic in comparison to formalized actions by countries and more advanced systems, we feel that a timely development of services for health care providers generally and a special focus on those on the front lines of COVID-19 clinical care is pertinent. We want to use this opportunity of building Kenyan health systems’ response towards this pandemic. In the Kenyan context, stigma and discrimination around infectious diseases and mental health have been priority public health action areas (Mahajan et al., 2008; Mutiso et al., 2018; Turan et al., 2011). Our work is also focusing on providing HCWs with tools and resources to protect their clients as well as protect themselves and their families when under stress and uncertainty.
It is worth noting that we are not re-inventing the wheel but using established frameworks and guidelines such as improvising International Federation of the Red Cross/World Health Organization endorsed PFA (Vernberg et al., 2008), basic psychotherapy including some focus on interpersonal psychotherapy and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy to address stress, loss, and grief, coping during lockdown, as well as providing information, referrals for those with higher levels of distress and or mental disorders that need specialist management (Pekevski, 2013; Vernberg et al., 2008; WHO, 2013). As shown in previous response efforts such as during the Ebola outbreak, collaboration amongst different stakeholders and preparedness around prevention and mitigation strategies will be very critical for the success of this intervention (Coltart, Lindsey, Ghinai, Johnson, & Heymann, 2017; Gates, 2015; Jacobsen et al., 2016). As a coordination center, we will continue to mobilize as many HCWs including lay and non-specialist health workers to help build psychosocial and mental health systems and services to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and other future pandemics.
In the future, we aim to harness digital technology to put a spotlight on health care providers and youth. We feel if we reached these two groups we would be addressing broader social determinants of health and making a real impact in the lives of people (Heyman, Kelly, Reback, & Blumenstock, 2018; Viner et al., 2012). Keeping a human-centered or user-centered design in prioritizing the two groups has a unique advantage of developing newer methodologies and approaches toward strengthening health systems as well as providing care during pandemics. Digital platforms should be integrated with usual care and help reach out the message of Universal Health coverage and equity in health care by providing acceptable, affordable, and effective psychosocial care.
Next steps
i. Strengthen the online therapy platform post-COVID-19 pandemic for continued mental health psychological support.
Once the pandemic is over and its impact withered, the centre will continue to offer online platform services to support mental health services for vulnerable populations such as the youth, people living with HIV, substance dependence, LGBTI groups, sex workers, and pregnant and parenting adolescents who can easily get forgotten and marginalized in the mainstream care. We also want the health care workers supporting this group to benefit from continuous professional education and professional support through the same platform where support groups for staff, counseling in case of need, and mentoring forums can be offered.
ii. Develop an integrated mental health app to move the initiative higher and finds ways of integrating our existing health systems for health system strengthening.
Whilst this is ambitious given our stage of development, we will endeavor to develop multiple apps streamlined under a common platform for delivering psychosocial support and mental health care. Keeping a patient-centered and provider psychosocial support focus, we hope in the future to be able to integrate this app as part of routine services. We opine this may be of value, not only to more vulnerable populations as mentioned above, but also be useful to deliver mental health care embedded within essential services at primary care settings in rural and more remote clinics. We do also see the potential of scaling up in clinics that may be very busy offering support in real-time. Such services may be particularly useful to young people.
Conclusion
Online psychosocial support for health workers has the potential to be adopted as the alternative method of supporting health workers during these times. In SSA and LMIC settings, the earlier such efforts are made, the better it is for health systems health. We know that the pandemic will expose health care workers to additional challenges and such innovations will go a long way in supporting them.
Gitonga Isaiah is a mental health researcher and programmer. His researcher interests are community integration of mental health and psycho-oncology. Gitonga holds a postgraduate degree in Public Health (MPH) from University of Nairobi, Kenya and is currently a doctoral researcher in the department of psychology, Maynooth University, Ireland.
Manasi Kumar lectures at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. She works on disparities in health systems in lower and middle income countries with a focus on mental health systems strengthening and maternal, child and adolescent mental health research.
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The New Urban Agenda, being adopted at Habitat III, requires a coherent and legible global urban scientific community to provide expertise to direct and assess progress on urban sustainability transformations. As we have commented in Nature’s special section on Habitat III, the urban research community is currently institutionally marginalized and poorly prepared to interact effectively with global urban science policy platforms. We have five specific recommendations for the urban scientific community to support the global urban agenda and successfully implement this New Urban Agenda, or NUA, after Habitat III.
The battle for sustainability will be won or lost in cities (NUA, 2016). Every twenty years, the UN convenes a major cities conference. The third, Habitat III—addressed in various places elsewhere on TNOC—opens in mid-October in Quito, Ecuador, to adopt a global framework for transforming cities toward sustainability—the so-called New Urban Agenda (or NUA). This is significant because it is the first major international convening following the 2015 UNFCCC COP21 Paris Agreement on climate, the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction and, critically, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the associated Sustainable Development Goals (or SDGs). The success of these multilateral agreements rests on catalyzing complex transformative change across the global system of cities—a tall order for international processes.
Unlike the aforementioned global policy processes, where the views from science were central to making the case for change, the voices of experts in Habitat III have been largely disregarded. One explanation is that, throughout the drafting process, the role of science was organizationally subsumed by that of civil society as part of the Global Alliance of Partners (or GAP). Also, during the penultimate drafting of the NUA in Surabaya in late July, negotiators dropped the proposed Multi-Stakeholder Panel, which would have included scientists, as a formal mechanism for implementing the NUA (NUA 2016). However, the urban research community itself may bear some responsibility for its marginalization in Habitat III. We are often a disparate “community” lacking the level of international coordination of, say, the climate or ecological research communities, which have developed over decades thanks to strong professional networks.
We argue that the case for a powerful and independent urban science policy interaction rests on the dire implications of failing to understand or respond to scientific evidence of the cumulative and accelerating pace of increasingly urban-driven development processes and consequent global environmental change. This change, the Great Urban Acceleration, lies at the heart of the sustainable development opportunity. It is also well understood by the drafters of the NUA, as is a general awareness that this is a critical window of opportunity to make cities pathways for transitions towards sustainable development (Revi & Rosenzweig 2013).
The product of consensual politics, the Habitat III agenda espouses a welcome and important holistic perspective. It is also, however, both hugely ambitious and too vague to be of immediate practical value: the mechanisms for catalyzing rapid transformation in individual cities or city systems are entirely absent (Cohen, 2016). Rapidly shifting urban conditions and the catalytic role of cities in sustainability mean that over the 20-year policy cycle of Habitat III, some review and recalibration will be imperative. Habitat III attendees are actively engaging with the challenges of linking scientific knowledge to participatory solutions via an innovative science-policy interface, but much work will need to follow the conference itself. We argue that if the NUA fails to establish a satisfactory science policy interface through the Habitat III process, an alternative means must be found for ensuring urban goals are informed by scientific knowledge.
The Great Urban Acceleration: global sustainability hinges on urban sustainability
Urban development pathways will continue to dominate global change (Grimm et al., 2008). In the next 30 years, there will be more urban areas built—largely in Africa and Asia—than in the whole of history combined, driving demand for urban infrastructure, roads, pipes and mobile technology, food, energy, water, and housing, and shifting the burden of disease (UN 2014). Urban sprawl, the least sustainable of all growth strategies, is evident across all the major regions of the world (Seto et al. 2011). Settlement expansion puts tremendous pressure on immediate and displaced biophysical environments to sustainably supply services critical to urban livelihoods (Elmqvist et al. 2013).
Cities are significant sites of resource depletion and climate-induced risk. For example, recent flood disasters in the United States (2005, 2008, 2012), the Philippines (2012, 2013), and Britain (2014) have demonstrated increasing vulnerability of coastal and riparian cities to storm surge flooding, with US$ trillions of assets at stake (Aerts et al. 2014). At the same time, simply meeting the demand for urbanization will exhaust any reasonable chance of success of staying within the 2015 Paris Agreement’s carbon budget.
Many of these upward trends are accelerating, including climate change in cities, infrastructural investment, land use and land cover change, inequality in health and income, and urban population expansion (Figure 1). While any one of these challenges alone requires ambitious action that must begin immediately to reduce risk, as well as to improve urban livelihoods and environmental sustainability, the challenges also intersect and influence each other, requiring a more complex urban system approach to cities to elucidate scientifically validated pathways for more desirable urban futures. Yet, cities are often engines of innovation (Glasser 2011); to date, the most progress is being made on climate change (Revi et al. 2014, Seto et al., 2014, Rosenzweig et al. 2010) and other sustainability goals (UNEP 2016, Kanuri et al. 2016) in cities.
Figure 1: Cities and urban areas will house nearly all of the world’s net population growth over the next two decades, with 1.4 million people added to urban areas each week (UN 2014), equal to roughly the population of Stockholm. Cities are engines of national and global growth, accounting for 80 percent of global economic output. In China, four city-clusters account for nearly half of China’s GDP (Shao et al. 2006). Cities are also key drivers of global energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for around 70 percent of both (IEA 2008). Meanwhile, urban land area could triple globally from 2000 to 2030 (Seto et al. 2012). This is equivalent to adding an area larger than Manhattan every day. Accelerating urban development boosts private consumption (Dobbs et al. 2008) and requires significant infrastructure, including carbon intensive manufacturing and construction, which consume massive quantities of concrete and steel, particularly in early phases of urbanization (Güneralp 2016; Wang 2007).
Rapid urbanization represents one of the biggest social transformations in human history (e.g., Bai et al. 2014). Cities display emergent properties, have dynamics that are nonlinear and often far from equilibrium, have a rapacious appetite for energy (Batty 2008), and are thus difficult to plan, manage, and govern. Drawing on the evidence from diverse conditions around the world, the essentially urban characteristics of sustainability are, however, increasingly understood (OECD, 2016; Simon 2016). Developing an urban science with methods and tools that, while sensitive to context, can address the social, ecological, and technical infrastructural complexity of urban systems is key to advancing the goals of improving urban sustainability, livability, social equity, and resilience, especially at the global scale (McPhearson et al. 2016).
The New Urban Agenda
The NUA negotiations reveal the difficulty of the UN in accommodating inputs from non-state actors, including the research community. The Habitat III preparatory process drew on a system of expert panels and a General Assembly of Partners, and early drafts of the NUA made provision for a Multi-Stakeholder Panel (or MSP) for ongoing extra-state engagement with UN structures. It seems that the MSP, the only possible placeholder for a more formal science-policy engagement in the NUA, was cut because European Union members and other high-income countries were concerned at the cost of funding such a broad mechanism, while there were wider concerns about the precise mandate of the MSP in monitoring and evaluation. Science was not the only casualty of the excision of the MSP in Surabaya and the latest drafts of the NUA still lack clarity on how local governments—absolutely critical stakeholders in the sustainability transition—will engage the global urban agenda.
Meaningful implementation, monitoring, evaluation, and revision of the NUA and related SDGs will require coordinated and sustained research evidence from the scientific community (including natural scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, practitioner scholars, and professionals). Implementation also requires the urban scientific community be organized, representative, and seen as legitimate if it is to provide necessary input to any emergent science-policy platform.
The development of a coherent global urban scientific community is therefore one of the most critical, and currently missing, components of achieving the NUA. Habitat III must demand that the urban scientific community organize itself to meet the needs of the NUA and ensure its integration into the wider global urban agenda.
Lack of a coherent urban science
Despite having played a critical role in articulating the need for a global urban policy agenda in the SDGs and the development of the NUA, the urban scientific community is not coherent, organized, or legible (Parnell, Crankshaw and Acuto 2016). This lack of coherence makes it currently impossible for there to be inclusive scientific input into any global science-policy platform for achieving the goals of the NUA and related SDGs. This lack of disciplinary and methodological coherence is compounded by the context-specific nature of urban research and solutions. For example, African urbanization trajectories can be very different from those in Asia or in the Americas (Bloom et al. 2008). Most urban scientific research and academic institutions are located in the Global North and/or large cities, while some of the most pressing urban challenges are in the Global South and in small- to medium-sized cities. Additionally, cities are a growing locus for scientific research and have enormous influence on one another, especially at regional (but also global) scales. Beyond Europe, where the regional urban system is fairly well understood, scientists have so far mostly failed to address cities at the regional scale.
Given the geographical diversity of cities and the complexity of issues encompassed by the urban question, it is unsurprising that there has been a proliferation of scholarly communities engaging in sustainable urban development. Taken as a whole, urban science is mostly not inter- or trans-disciplinary in theory, method, or data, and existing resources are not aligned with areas of the greatest need.
In brief, the research community, located both within and outside of academia, is heterogeneous and unevenly distributed worldwide in terms of depth, resourcing, and especially in interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary experience. The skills of drawing together and synthesizing the multiple sources of urban knowledge that must inform global urban policy are in short supply, but are essential in view of the complexity of urban processes and phenomena. Paradoxically, experience in working with complexity is commensurately greater in countries of the Global South than in the North, where academic institutional practices and research evaluation processes frequently reinforce disciplinary barriers on the ground, and foster narrow specialization that is antithetical to addressing complex urban problems across sectors and scales.
A new urban science
Achieving the SDGs and the NUA requires that the global urban scientific community come together to develop a new urban science, including new institutions, new funding mechanisms, and new research agendas to support fresh knowledge generation on the urban transition. Scientists must expand primary research in little studied and rapidly changing urban contexts, as well as developing a new urban systems science aligning and responding to emerging, evidence-based policy needs. Setting aside the self-evident imperative of the need for a fundamental expansion of Southern urban research capacity and funding, which will take time and considerable resources to resolve, reforms for building an inclusive global urban scientific community and developing a new urban science could be achieved more rapidly and would have immediate and positive impact for policymakers. Several approaches for attaining these aims have been considered.
One model advocated during NUA negotiations is an urban equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC), designed to lend independence and authority by weighing the accumulated evidence in recent scientific and grey literatures. However, the intergovernmental nature of the IPCC has proved burdensome in recent years, with cumbersome processes and arrangements, increased difficulty in ensuring integration between the Working Groups, and escalating workloads and travel for Working Group members.
The sustainable urban development agenda is broad and, while focused on the NUA, also cuts across the entire UN system. Urban scientists don’t necessarily agree on the most important research questions, which limits the possibilities of an IPCC-like body to advise global and local policymaking. For example, the IPCC began with clear aims to establish the magnitude and impact of climate change, and to understand the drivers and the response strategies. Urban system challenges require a much more complex and interrelated set of questions about equity, justice, climate resiliency, economic opportunity, infrastructure development, ecological restoration, and more.
One strength of the IPCC is that it has helped focus a strong, internationally coordinated research community. IPCC findings, however, require clearance by member governments—an assessment of cities may require an even more torturous, sub-national clearance level, and may generate political tensions from opposition-run Councils. Crucially, too, the IPCC does not undertake new research, but rather collates and assesses the existing literature. Given the paucity of published scholarship on the cities of the Global South, adoption of the IPCC process might inadvertently reinforce current distortions and further encourage inappropriate interventions. We believe, moreover, that an IPCC-like model will probably move too slowly to address the urgency of urban social and environmental challenges, and would limit the need for fundamentally new urban system research.
The NUA and related SDGs require new research that is more credible both thematically and geographically. The researchers, therefore, will need to be on the ground in different locales for differing durations, often working collaboratively and integratively with local, regional, and national governments (Simon et al. 2016), and coordinating with the practitioner scholars within these levels of government to maximize the benefits of their research—none of which lends itself to an IPCC-like mechanism.
Beyond city limits
We propose 5 key steps for science to support the global urban agenda, including implementation of the NUA:
1. Build global urban science. The urgency of urban growth issues demands the building of a new urban science and a rapid change in research and institutional organization. As a starting point, we recommend that a global urban scientific body be formed to address issues of science pertaining to the urban question in the post 2030 agenda. This could take the form of an urban scientific network of networks based on (or amalgamate of) existing global networks with a strong science policy commitment. These existing networks include urban clusters with the IPCC, IPBES, UN-Habitat, the United Nations Environment Programme, the Future Earth Cities Knowledge Action Network (KAN), and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. The final form of a new, coordinated, and legible global urban scientific community should be developed in consultation with scientists, professional societies, and urban knowledge holders at all levels. This will take time but can start with scientific leaders within existing institutions as a pragmatic initial step. Governance of this body should be planned inclusively and could be based on the polycentric model developed within Future Earth, allowing distributed regional hubs with ability to be responsive to different research needs locally and regionally.
2. Map knowledge and institutions globally. Inclusivity and diversity across geographic regions and scientific domains is key to legitimacy and legibility. Most research is in the North, yet most need is in the South. We need major investment in academic institutes at the nexus of urban research-policy-practice in rapidly urbanizing cities. Mapping knowledge and institutions would help to uncover key geographic and thematic gaps in knowledge and scientific research capacity.
3. Boost urban research and funding mechanisms. Truly global sources of research funding are needed to allow cross-comparison studies of cities and regions. These sources should be set up with support from national governments, development banks and private foundations. This would require significantly large sums, which is one of the reasons the MSP was taken out of the final NUA draft. Still, scientific funding issues must be addressed if we are to make real progress on the global urban agenda.
4. Support trans-disciplinary research synthesis. It is crucial that scientists and other communities of practice with relevant knowledge have a significant seat at the table to generate policy to guide urban development over the short- and long-terms. Transdisciplinary research must be not only supported through new urban science funding and organization, but also be a centerpiece of synthesizing existing knowledge and new knowledge generation for input to policymaking at global, regional, and local levels.
5. Improve access to science policy arenas. Urban scientists must have a clear role within emerging science-policy platforms in the New Urban Agenda and the wider multilateral system, such as the links forming between the urban SDGs and the Future Earth Cities KAN. As a start, the role of independent urban experts including multiple types of knowledge holders across multiple disciplines must be made clear within the New Urban Agenda and its implementation stage through development of a strong, diverse, and inclusive science-policy interface to achieve the NUA and related SDGs.
We must deal seriously with the complexity of urban systems and overcome institutional reticence to understand the emergent behavior and properties of urban systems as they evolve and change. The imperative of scaling up urban research and fostering a global scientific research leadership that is able to direct and critique global urban policymaking and implementation cannot be underestimated.
Timon McPhearson, Susan Parnell, David Simon, Owen Gaffney, Thomas Elmqvist, Xuemei BAI, Aromar Revi, Debra Roberts
New York City, Cape Town, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Stockholm, Canberra, Bangalore, and Durban
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Professor Sue Parnell is an urban geographer in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences at the University of Cape Town and is a founding member of the African Centre for Cities there.
David Simon is Professor of Development Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and until December 2019 was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, an international research centre on sustainable cities based at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Science writer and journalist Owen Gaffney is a communications consultant for Future Earth and director of international media and strategy at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Thomas Elmqvist is a professor in Natural Resource Management at Stockholm University and Theme Leader at the Stockholm Resilience Center. His research is on ecosystem services, land use change, natural disturbances and components of resilience including the role of social institutions.
Aromar Revi is Director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. He is an international practitioner, consultant, researcher, and educator with 30 years of interdisciplinary experience in public policy & governance, political economy of reform, development, technology, sustainability, and human settlements.
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