A review of Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable World, Edited by Jared Green. 2015. ISBN: 161689300. Princeton Architectural Press. 176 pages. Buy the book.
In the last several years our culture has taken a dystopian turn. Movies broadcasting bleak futures, such as TheHunger Games series and Snowpiercer, have enjoyed box office success. More darkly, movements advocating self- sufficiency, like preppers, have moved out of the fringe and into the mainstream.
At its best, this book brings together small projects centered on community-level planning and the informal. While focusing on the practical, it posits the need for thinking big again.
We are, it seems, more than ready to accept cataclysmic climate change and social unraveling as inevitable—one only needs to figure out where to stash the gold and guns. This is in stark contrast to decades past, when confidence and a can-do spirit were the norm. How did we move to a culture of apocalyptic expectation? Where’s the hope to be found in a world marked by migration, strife, and ecological distress?
It turns out that not everyone is going to roll over and accept the worst as our lot. Designed for the Future, an edited collection of micro-interviews compiled by Jared Green, looks for bright spots in a gloomy sky. Green, a journalist focused on design and urbanism, asked prominents in the field what we can do to bring forth a better future.
The authorbegins by taking us through his process: he located people with stature in the fields of policy, planning, and architecture (just to name a few), and asked them to identify a project (not their own) that gives them hope for the years that lie ahead. These segments read, at times, like program notes for the Aspen Ideas Festival. The anecdotes are fragmentary—like something overheard at a dinner party—but they are also relatively direct, theory-less, and straightforward: use green spaces to capture stormwater, build hospitals with gardens, transform industrial wastelands into parks, build libraries in poor areas, and the list goes on…
If the book’s cheerful eco-urbanism starts to feel grating, it also reminds us of how damn cynical we have become (myself included). This transformation seems to have happened almost overnight. Solutions-talk has become outré; instead, we prefer to move quickly from outrage to apathy. In the design world, we often put on an haute snark, pointing at problems while doing very little to ameliorate them. Much of our architectural and visual culture encourages this, and it ist a relief to see practitioners showcased in this book who still insist on envisioning workable solutions to today’s most pressing problems.
These practical interventions, as the title suggests, are mostly modest in scale and eminently do-able. They aim to: create play spaces with recycled materials, incorporate agriculture into our urban fabric, and liberate parking spaces for human—not car—use. These are things being done by progressive planners, landscape architects, urban designers, and others with very little money and a whole lot of love. These projects deserve to be amplified and more widely adopted. Hopefully, books like Designed for the Future will encourage the shapers of the built environment to see the potential in ground-up projects that take sustainability and community needs as the their starting points.
The book is especially good when it takes on landscape architecture and the power of demonstration in city-building. The High Line is a great example of what designers can do. This elevated railbed was once a route for moving animals to meatpacking warehouses on Manhattan’s West Side. Long disused—it was at one point slated for demolition—the structure was converted to a linear urban park starting in the early 2000s. Jeff Shumaker, the chief urban designer for New York City’s Department of City Planning, notes that what today seems so natural a choice was anything but a sure thing. That the project has been wildly successful, or that it has become an engine for luxury development sprouting up around it, should not count as a strikes against it. Future gentrification isn’t a reason not to build nice things. Designers need to be sensitive to the needs of communities, and the botched history of grand projects, but they also need to have an aesthetic vision.
NYC’s High Line during development. Photo courtesy of Sam Holleran.
Nor can designers do it alone:, they need policy and politicians to support them, and projects—even the best designed—need vigilant maintenance and stewardship (as the High Line has shown). That takes both time and money. What separates design and architecture from art is that it must engage with the crude forces of capital and the whims of politics to get projects built and then taken care of over time. In assessing Olmsted’s Central Park for the book, Naomi Sachs—founder of the Therapeutic Landscapes Network, aptly notes that the 778-acre park has existed for over 150 years. That it has remained in a city obsessed with renewal illustrates that it has become equally beloved by succeeding generations of New Yorkers. This reminds us that when we create projects, we must imagine a future public, and make sure that subsequent generations will fall in love with the places and things we create. Somewhere down the road, we hope all of the decisions we’ve made will appear manifestly necessary.
Using design as a lens for imagining our future does come with some built-in problems. Too many of the people interviewed see design as an inherently good thing—it slices through bureaucracy, it saves the day, it spans jurisdictional boundaries and unifies all! Sadly, design isn’t our white knight. It’s a way of looking at the world, and it can be good and bad. There is some implied violence in design processes. Designers are not always in it for the betterment of the world. Even when projects have good intentions—like urban renewal plans built on utopian aims—they can trigger disastrous effects. MoMA curator Paola Antonelli’s Design and Violenceproject, a compendium of objects and ideas that manifest power in subtle and overt ways, clearly shows this. Included in the collection one finds: Mikhail Kalashnikov’s groundbreaking automatic rifle, border walls, computer viruses, and arcade games. Designed for the Future fails to acknowledge design’s ugly side, and in so doing loses a great deal of perspective. This is a clear blind spot.
The worst fear, then, is that our best designs will also prove our most ill-considered. T.S. Eliot quipped that “most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions”. This is still up for debate, but stories of best laid plans gone awry are all too familiar. Snowpiercer, the 2013 South Korean science fiction film,offers up a vision of a bleak and frozen planet caused by geoengineering gone wrongbad. Instead of fixing global warming, the ‘hack’ renders the earth’s crust an arctic tundra. The confident promise of creative solutions is perhaps not just cause for hope, but for a little well-founded fear, too. When we consider design, the future, and envelope-pushing ideas, we also need to address the real concerns that spring up when we talk about altering our built environment and modifying our natural world. The fear isn’t just that we will get something totally wrong, but also that we will only get things partly right, that we might craft a positive future, but only for a limited number of people.
Dystopian futures often have “saved spaces”—oases in the wreckage. In Octavia E. Butler’sParable novels, these spaces are Earthseed, a string of egalitarian multi-racial communities set against the backdrop of an unraveling America ruled by a dystopic president (whose motto is, incidentally, “Make America Great Again”). In The Hunger Games novels, the haven is District 13, an underground labyrinth from which a new, benevolent society will be brought forth. Both spaces have limited membership, and they are geographically and financially constrained to a lucky few. Today, many may feel that a better world is being made—but not for them.
Some of the ideas in Green’s book suggest how to scale the benefits previously available only to the select few so that they are available to a great many more. Nicolas Buchoud, of Renaissance Urbaine in France, looks at ways to extend the good living of central Paris to the suburban banlieues through a regional plan; Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, looks at how the U.S. and China can develop wind energy projects together; and Maria Aiolova refreshes Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map to imagine a global flow of thermal energy.
Copenhagen’s coast, one of the models held up in Green’s book. Photo courtesy of Sam Holleran.Tempelhof Field, Berlin’s freewheeling public space. Photo courtesy of Sam Holleran.Photo courtesy of Sam Holleran
These are big ideas that aim to change the lives of millions of people, and there is certainly the possibility that design could overstep. In North America, failed mega investments in urban renewal, suburban roadways, and water-intensive agriculture have soured citizens to large-scale intervention in the built environment and, more broadly, the role of “big government.” These attitudes have implications for the design professions—with their implied arrogance and structural violence—and for the role of government in shaping the physical world of its citizens. But will timidity address the very real and urgent problems we’ve been saddled with? This is something I found myself turning over when reading Green’s book: how do we press forward, temperately? Can we design with self-awareness, a grounding in social justice, and a healthy dose of skepticism?
Faced with a looming ecological collapse and humanitarian crises left and right, don’t we need big, new ideas? At its best, this book brings together small projects centered on community-level planning and the informal, with bigger currents and some fabulously out-there ideas managinge to sneak themselves in. While focusing on the practical, it posits the need for thinking big again.
Walking is not just about moving from one place to another. It also engages our senses. Such an experience forges affective bonds between pedestrians and their city by immersing them in urban ambiances. Ambiances are shared by any city inhabitant: they are a common treasure upon which urbanity takes root.
Sometimes — for a day, a week, or a month — Paris turns into the very kingdom of walkers. That is, during transit strikes, when subway trains and buses stop running. Millions of walkers flood the streets, as the Métro and bus network release the load of crowded bodies it usually carries.
Walking becomes then an immersive and collective experience. On such occasions, you simultaneously “never walk alone” and “take a walk on the wild side”. What a bargain! Beyond all the mayhem these strikes create, it is paradoxically a rather joyful adventure. Total strangers that usually stay distant from one another — not to say never speak to one another — suddenly share the same ordeal, the same adventure. These moments are enchanted interludes aside daily routine. They give room to rediscover the city’s atmosphere and look into the eyes of all these people they walk alongside: time for unexpectedly nice encounters.
“You’ll never walk alone” – Paris rue de Rivoli. Credit: Wikimedia commons
What can we learn from this? When walking becomes the only solution to move across the city, urbanity comes back. What do we call urbanity here? Urbanity is not just a synonym for urban life, but also for kindness and civility. The fact is that the walkability of a city is primordial to foster urbanity. Indeed, it is in Europe at the end of the 18th that the notion of “urbanity” began to be used. It was associated with the custom of the promenade: people got out and walked synchronously along specifically designed boulevards, avenues, or linear parks often themselves as promenades at a specific moment — usually in the evening or on Sundays, in order to be seen and considered part of society.
A promenade at the beginning of the 20th century, brrrr! Credit: Wikimedia commons
Many well-known historical promenades remain like the Ramblas in Barcelona, the Tuileries in Paris, many Corsos in Italy, etc. The custom itself goes under many names such as paseo in Spanish-speaking countries. Today, the habit of promenade has become less formal, and less massive. But still, periodically the urge remains to immerse oneself in the city, engage in conversation with other people, breathe some fresh air, and eventually see and be seen.
The only difference being that today it is less about social control and compliance with social standards than about the pleasure of hanging out or just chilling out with friends or family, or alone.
A promenade today – Las Ramblas de Barcelona. Credit: Wikimedia commons
Alberto Giacometti’s bronze sculpture known as L’homme qui marche (The Walking Man) is a symbol of both fragility and strong determination.
“L’ homme qui marche”; (the walking man), A. Giacometti. Credit: Wikiart.com
It was described by the artist as the image of an ordinary man that embodies humankind. He comes from somewhere and is on his way to elsewhere, to discover the world. The fact is that, since the dawn of humanity, we are walkers.
Indeed, when we cannot walk life becomes unbearable. Just remember COVID-19 lockdown. This long period during which we were supposed to stay at home. Any occasion to go out and walk a bit was a feast: even running errands or taking the dog out. Chores that usually were so tedious suddenly became so attractive. Some people walked 1000 times over around their bed or their room on a daily basis, in order not to get nuts. Others walked frenetically up and down the staircase of their building. Underground car parks became places to stroll around. Do you recall? It should still be fresh in your mind.
And why is walking so important? Because walking is not just about moving from one place to another. It also engages our senses. We are transformed by what we perceive from our environment while strolling. It means that walking is an aesthetic experience that stimulates perception, insight, and representation of our close environment: both a source of knowledge on oneself, the areas crossed, and the people one passes by. Such an experience forges affective bonds between pedestrians and their city, by immersing them in urban ambiances. Ambiances are shared by any city inhabitant: they are a common treasure upon which urbanity takes root.
Ambiances. Credit: Wikimedia commons
Since walking fosters an intimate relationship between the walker and the city, it also prompts him to take ownership of the place. Unfortunately, taking ownership often goes hand in hand with increasing use conflicts and territorial disputes. The more we walk, the less we are prone to walk with just anyone. Yes, walking also entails countless potential conflicts for space (crowded streets where people collide, long queuing, benches, and café terraces spilling out in the streets and places with static clusters of people to bypass, etc.). Everyone observes and adjusts to how the others behave, in a kind of huge open-air theater where we rub shoulders.
How is it different from other mammals’ territorial marking? Variations in the form of greeting when coming across an acquaintance or a complete stranger, are a subtle way to recognize and approve —or not— his presence and the place he takes in the public space. The fact is that public space materializes a political arena, as it shows people making bonds and alliances or distancing themselves from other residents: streets, places, staircases, lanes, gardens, and parks are locations where discussions and arguments take place, where gangs of teens meet, where elders sit together and chat, where people demonstrate, where placards and graffiti pop up the walls, etc. Therefore, walking can be seen as quite paradoxical activity: generating urbanity but also segregation and fragmentation.
Residents complain about supposed nuisances (noise, odors, filth, aggressive behavior) due to who they pejoratively call “bums, hobos, or homeless people”. In areas undergoing gentrification wealthy newcomers complain about the use of public space by poor locals that lived already there (children playing outside, people staying in the streets and discussing loudly at any hour, poorly maintained buildings, etc.). The objective is obvious in all these cases and for all these groups: to control their neighborhood so as to banish anything that does not comply with their standards in the matter of quality of life. As beautifully put by Jan Gehl, the value of streets and more generally of public spaces is the result of a confrontation between different groups of users. In fact, it rather is a political issue, an answer to the following question: Who and what vision should take priority? If one user group wins — by designing a new urban arrangement — another group may lose. Thus, designing the city (pavement, traffic lights, benches, streetlights, vegetalization, etc.) is not just a technical issue but also a social and moral one.
This applies to new urban furniture, the main function of is to prevent people — “vagrants” and homeless, but not only — from hanging out in the streets. They also make walking way less fluid and urban spaces more hostile. Eventually, they endanger the quality of life they were initially supposed to preserve. Usually, they are installed on the demand of local residents. The bench is the most noteworthy example of such an evolution — or should I say such a regression. Traditional urban benches were first installed in 19th-century European cities as a free service dedicated to resting. But recently, neighbors started complaining about homeless, “vagrants”, and teen gangs that used them. As a result, new types of benches were designed to make long stretch sitting uncomfortable and lying down almost impossible: single seating separated by armrests placed on top of the benches, shortened benches, perch-type benches, etc.
Therefore, no one sits on these benches anymore. So-called “troublemakers” have been evicted, but also have been the elders, couples, or just strollers. Urban life has been destroyed and these benches look like useless stranded whales. They turned into mere obstacles to bypass.
Street furniture that prevents people from lying down. Credit: Wikimedia commonsStreet furniture that discourages sitting or lying down.. Credit: Wikimedia commonsA post in Paris. Credit: Wikimedia commons
The same goes with the many posts — distant offspring of medieval stone pillars and modern bollards — installed to separate the sidewalk from pavement.
They are intended to prevent cars to invade, park or get around on the sidewalk. There are over 355,000 such posts in Paris. And they are effective in this task, indeed. But their presence also reduces the space available on the sidewalk, making walking rather uncomfortable. Besides, these posts are the symptom of local authorities’ preference for physical constraint when addressing space use conflicts. Would it not be better to try to build trust between the different groups of street users, through participatory design or tactical urbanism for instance?
Such devices encourage urban fragmentation (neighborhood watch, de facto privatization of public space, etc.). Outdoor use conflicts generate micro-divides that eventually disrupt the urban fabric. Strolling becomes almost impossible when traditional labyrinthine networks made of small streets, lanes, and alleyways are inaccessible. Even promenades along nice avenues become an ordeal when one must zigzag between constraining urban arrangements. As already mentioned, all this makes the city more hostile. Access to public space for everyone is endangered. Groups of residents stake a claim to their homogeneous neighborhood, with the aim of creating a stable and protective environment by excluding those considered non-desirable people. There is a contradiction between urbanity and such a coercive approach, whereas both result from conflicting views about what the place of walking in the city should be.
Having come so far, it is time for a quick recap. In a nutshell, walking is all at once: the more direct way to foster urbanity and quality of life through an immersive experience; a way to take ownership of the place we live in by restoring sensitive links between the walker and the city; but then also the spark that ignites conflicts and territorial disputes that entails segregation and urban fragmentation. Can it also become an instrument for reconciling these two seemingly contradictory aspects? May it help bring together under one roof the divergent needs and practices of microlocal communities?
Attempting to reunite such antagonistic visions means no less than making city inhabitants answer the following question: what do we really have in common? Addressing such a challenge is a clear case for the involvement of everyone in the co-construction of urban policies. And indeed, how can we take possession of our immediate environment, if not by walking? How is it possible to discuss with our neighbor — be he inimical or not — without going to meet him, which is usually easier on foot? Which also means being able to wander through the city and transgress the many barriers and edges that fragment it. Whether physically or through vision, audition, olfaction, or any other sense, one should be able to reach out to private areas and traverse urban hurdles.
Such a city is usually called “porous”. What is porosity here? It entails a capillary network of paths and streets, which penetrates the smallest nooks and crannies of the urban fabric, as well as open courtyards and open ground floors, plazas, accessible kitchens and community gardens, accessible terraces, etc. Designing a porous city is anything but obvious. Difficulties can be technical since characteristics of the actual urban fabric can make capillarity puzzling. But the greatest difficulty lies in territorial conflicts, avoidance behavior, and path dependency from the city’s inhabitants that we’re precisely trying to circumvent.
One solution may lie in tactical urbanism. For the record, tactical urbanism — also known as Do-it-yourself Urbanism, Urban Acupuncture, or Urban Prototyping — is a citizen-led approach based on temporary, low-cost, and local actions, to improve neighborhoods’ urban arrangements. Since these experiments are supposed to be scalable, tactical urbanism also aims at catalyzing long-term change of the global social and urban fabric. Guerrilla gardening (cultivating land that the gardeners do not have the legal rights to use) or de-fencing (removing unnecessary fences to break down barriers between neighbors and encourage community building) are two examples of such citizen-led actions. Recently tactical urbanism is being more and more institutionalized by local authorities. Paris-Plages (“Paris Beaches “) is a scheme developed by Paris city hall that may be related to tactical urbanism.
Paris Plage. Credit: Wikimedia commons
Every July and August, roadways on the banks of the Seine and along Bassin de la Villette are closed off, and temporary artificial beaches are created, including sand, palm trees, and various activities, including sandy beaches and palm trees. Ciclovia (cycleway) also named Open streets is another tactical urbanism type initiative established by local authorities. This initiative consists in closing temporarily certain streets to car traffic to give room to cyclists and pedestrians. These Open streets are regularly converted into permanent paths when a consensus rise amongst the residents and users of the street. First developed in Bogota Colombia, it is now a widespread initiative: you can find ciclovias in cities of countries as diverse as Australia, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, India, Indonesia, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, the United States. A driving force of tactical urbanism when developed by local authorities is to urge individuals to assume responsibility for creating sustainable buildings, streets, and neighborhoods.
“Eppure si muove cammina”;: if it walks, it works
It is long overdue to explicitly make walkability the cornerstone of urban design. Walking is a habit shared worldwide by everyone since the dawn of humanity. But since it is so natural to walk, urban policies conventionally considered that walking should find its place in the city without any regulatory intervention. Alongside the invisible hand of the market, comes the invisible foot of urban policies. This must change: walkability is paramount to make cities friendly places where life is good, and urbanity central. And to do so, city residents are called upon to become city makers.
By the way, do you know how we say “it works” in French? The answer is “ça marche”. And do you know what it means literally? It means “it walks”. Yes, the only way to make things work, is to make people walk.
A review of Can a City Be Sustainable?By Gary Gardner, Tom Prugh, and Michael Renner. 2016. Island Press. Buy the book.
This compact volume is an ambitious portmanteau of information on sustainable urbanism that covers an impressive range of issues and amply demonstrates how many of the essential initiatives needed to make sustainable cities are demonstrably achievable, with actions that can proceed immediately. Although the meaning of “sustainable” is assumed, rather than defined, by page 45 Gary Gardner, one of its key authors, answers the question posed in the book’s title with a one sentence encapsulation of the sustainable city vision:
A sustainable city is a vibrant human settlement that provides ample opportunities, in harmony with the natural environment, to create dignified lives for all citizens.
It’s hard to argue with that, although it doesn’t really pin down what “sustainable” means.
For the authors, a sustainable city “treats squirrels and robins, streams and trees, as neighbours rather than artifacts”.
The book begins with big picture descriptions of the city and is followed by numerous chapters dealing with the specifics of making cities work and their potential for sustainability, interspersed with vignettes from individual cities that provide positive examples of trying to deliver on that potential. The project directors of this Worldwatch publication acknowledge the “variability” of approaches to sustainability and, sensibly, do not attempt to prescribe a single path to the sustainable city.
Chapter one in this book is “imagining a sustainable city”, but it curiously fails to mention that much of the early and current literature on the topic describes “ecological” cities. If I came to this book without much of a background in the topic, I could read it from cover to cover (and gain a lot of useful information) but remain unaware of the breadth and depth of the international ecocity movement and the various manifestations of ecocity ideas that have contributed to shaping and informing sustainable city initiatives for over three decades. Ecocities is a term that has been used to describe municipal programs that aim to make a city sustainable, to make claims of urban ascendancy based on sustainability, and as a label for visionary ideas about what the ultimate sustainable city might be like.
A brief exposition of the similarities or differences between eco and sustainable cities might have helped introduce newcomers to the range of literature that exists on this rapidly evolving and sometimes contentious topic. Likewise, “green cities” aren’t mentioned, although there is mention of a “Green City Index”. Yet every green city program or idea I’ve ever come across would readily, if not rather obviously, fit into any comprehensive discourse about sustainable cities.
The book covers many strategies for sustainable city making that aren’t always covered in the literature, such as remunicipalization (return to public ownership at a local level) of power utilities (notably in Germany). Gardner’s chapter on “Cities in the Arc of Human History: A Materials Perspective” is an excellent exposition of the inter-relationship between energy flows, materials and socio-economic change. Although not mentioned in the book, some of the pioneering work on energy use in cities (Newman and Kenworthy) comes from Australia. Australian researcher Stephen Boyden was responsible for the first published study (in 1981) of a city (Hong Kong) as an ecosystem. He has written compellingly on the biological history of civilisation and developed theory about the metabolic stages of civlisation. His “4 ecological phases of human existence” correlate strongly with the fourth socio-metabolic regime identified in the “Cities in the Arc of Human History” chapter and, although Boyden isn’t cited in this book, I’d recommend his work (here, here, and here) for those wanting to read more about the relationship between society, human development, cities and metabolism
The reality of making cities is prosaic and managerial. One part inspiration, nine parts perspiration. The book’s structure reflects this with the one part inspiration of the vision followed by the nine parts of perspiration chapters that describe the nuts and bolts of managing ideas on the ground. Given the variety of material covered in this compact volume the editors have done well to maintain the book’s overall character and focus.
This is not a book by or for designers (TNOC writer Tim Beatley’s concept of biophilic cities is described, for instance, but biophilia and biophilic design are not). It is pitched much more at municipalities, planners and people with a general interest in cities and sustainability. It is very much a book about existing cities and how they’re tackling, most of all, climate change. It’s a prosaic approach, but curiously inspiring. It will take you to the well of the vision but only provides an occasional sip—to slake your thirst you’ll need other tomes, sources that bubble out from the cracks in the homogeneity of modern culture. People like Soleri, Register, and Magnaghi (also here).
It is understandable that more recent and relatively untried concepts such as regenerative design aren’t dealt with in the text, but resilience is an increasingly influential concept that is strongly embraced by many advocates of urban sustainability. As a newly arrived denizen of the Melburnian metropolitan region, I was pleased to see Melbourne as one of the ten City View chapters, and mention of its participation in the 100 Resilient Cities Challenge, with “Australia’s first Chief Resilience Officer appointed to lead the development of a resilience strategy on behalf of the 31 local government areas that comprise metropolitan Melbourne”. The cautionary note here is that I didn’t know this until I read this book, which is a small measure of the communication gap that exists between the informed, considered actions of urban systems managers and the rest of the population! There are some problematic issues in relating resilience to sustainability (something explored in depth by Brenda Vale and Emilio Garcia in their new book Unravelling Sustainability and Resilience in the Built Environment) but it deserves wider consideration and, again, it would have been good to see some references and links to make it easier for readers to follow up and further explore key information.
Many times whilst reading this fascinating book, a fact would jump out at me. For example: “If food waste were a country, it would rank third in carbon emissions after the United States and China”.
In China, thanks to decades of advocacy by people like the late Professor Rusong Wang (National People’s Congress of China and Chinese Academy of Sciences), the idea of the ecocity became a meme for transforming the nation’s approach to development so that hundreds of municipalities were encouraged, by policy and fiscal incentive, to adopt ecocity characteristics in new development as a priority. It is not always easy to see the ‘eco’ in the explosion of urbanism that included these initiatives (Tianjin Ecocity is a notable exception) but the very idea has generated new strands of ideological DNA in the Chinese urban planning systems, which will likely have systemic impacts for decades to come. This is alluded to in the City View chapter on Shanghai, where the Dongtan Eco-city project gets a mention as a “notable failure”. One is left with a sense that urban environmental concerns get short shrift in China, but a more generous analysis suggests that, although China does often take a step backwards, it takes many more steps forward. Without gross inequities you can’t get to “sustainable” without passing through a certain level of development and the unprecedented urbanisation that has been taking place across China has delivered sewage treatment, reticulated water supply and electricity to millions of people who had no such amenities before. Anyone who has seen the state of villages and waterways in China prior to the recent urbanisation push is likely to share my opinion that there has been real environmental progress over the last decade or so. Interestingly, much of Peter Calthorpe’s chapter on “Urbanism and Global Sprawl” reads as an indictment of China’s explosive urban development and its inherent failings thanks to high-density urban sprawl.
Towards the end of the book, chapters on the “The Inclusive City” and “Urbanization, Inclusion and Social Justice” make the point strongly that social justice has to be integral to the concept of sustainable city. The challenge of achieving anything remotely like sustainability in modern cities is hugely dependent on having healthy, happy citizens and a reasonably equitable society, but as the conclusion of the chapter on “The Inclusive City” tells us: “Socioeconomic polarization and spatial segregation have become prevailing trends in cities worldwide”. In a world where the combined wealth of just eight individuals is equal to that of the 3.6 billion people who are the poorest half of the entire planet’s population, the chances of political will overcoming the problem of systemic inequality and exploitation (of both people and nature) appear slim. Whilst the general failure of national and state governments to address the core problems of climate change, ecological destruction and gross inequality suggests that city governments are now our last hope, the chapter on “Urbanization, Inclusion and Social Justice” cautions that “local governments rarely have self-sufficient power and knowledge to create or adequately manage city planning frameworks that safeguard citizens and assets for the long term”.
Curitiba, in Brazil, is one of those cities that has had that kind of self-sufficiency. It is, famously, the first city to have the hubris to call itself an ecocity, and is in many ways the poster child of the sustainable cities movement. Amongst other things it pioneered BRT (Bus Rapid Transit), kicked the car out of major inner-city streets, and introduced innovative garbage-for-credits tied to educational programs to reduce waste and help the urban poor—all achieved during the quarter century of mayoral leadership provided by Jaime Lerner. Given that the book acknowledges the importance of mayors worldwide in shaping and acting on the sustainability agenda, it is surprising that Lerner doesn’t rate a mention. Lerner recently produced a great little handbook on Urban Acupuncture (reviewed for TNOC) that has become a go-to reference for urbanists around the world. The inclusion of references and links to such material would have added to the usefulness of Can a City Be Sustainable?
In the chapter “Towards a Vision of Sustainable Cities”, Gardner identifies seven key principles that summarise “the broad spectrum of areas relevant to sustainability”:
Reduced, Circulating, and Clean Flows of Materials
A Prominent Place for Nature
Compact and Connected Patterns of Development
Creative Placemaking
Centers of Well-being
People-centred Development
Participatory Governance
The essential ethos of an ecological city places cities firmly in the frame of needing to fit natural processes. That relationship with nature has to be central to achieving any kind of genuine sustainability, so I find Gardner’s principle 2—“A prominent Place for Nature”—falls short of what is needed. Cities are anthropocentric by necessity, but their long-term future is a chimera unless there is a powerful shift to a biocentric view of human settlement. This demands more than just “a prominent place”. Likewise, his “concise vision of urban sustainability” is a soft vision that seems calculated to avoid offending rather than inspire the conceptual and cultural shifts of the kind that are needed to get us beyond making cities merely less bad and begin addressing the real challenge of repairing the damage created by consumption, industrialisation, environmental mayhem and fossil-fuelled growth. When Gardner writes “In a sustainable city, nature is no longer an urban afterthought”, I couldn’t agree more, and in the chapter “The Vital Role of Biodiversity in Urban Sustainability” authors Juncà, Zaragoza and Guelar suggest that, used as one of the central measures of urban sustainability, biodiversity makes it possible “to promote and assess urban biodiversity, the ecosystem services that it provides, and broader ecological functions in cities”. But I think that many TNOC readers would appreciate seeing a much stronger call for nature to be central to any strategy for sustainable urbanism.
The book is full of useful and informative graphs, diagrams, tables and snippets of information—the chapter on “Supporting Sustainable Transportation” being noteworthy in this regard, and there are plenty of raw, hard-to-digest facts in this book. In the chapter on “Source reduction and Recycling of Waste”, for instance, we read that “Global waste flows show no sign of abating” whilst “waste-to-energy initiatives are predicated on an unabated continuation of waste flows”. 2.3 billion people—40% of the planet’s population—don’t have access to a toilet and there are nearly as many people without access to electricity and clean water as there were people on the entire planet when I was a child, so the prospect of achieving global sustainability seems as likely as keeping global warming to 1.5˚C. In that light, the proposition that the world’s cities can be made sustainable before the end of the century is even more preposterous, but what else can we do but try?
While I want to shout this stuff across the rooftops, the authors of this very well put together book might prefer a quiet and reasonable conversation. Both are necessary. Whether one chooses to shout about it or mention it in quiet asides to your local councillor, Can a City Be Sustainable? provides facts, figures and examples that help carry the argument for radical change in our urban environment.
In such a comprehensive and wide-ranging volume it is churlish to point out what is missing, so perhaps the best thing to say is that virtually every aspect of what it takes to get serious about sustainable cities is covered in this modest volume. With its numerous authors and viewpoints, this book is best read for its parts rather than as a whole, and would have benefited from a concluding chapter to bookend the content and tie the parts together. Overall, for all my own impatience (and tendency to nit-pick), and despite my reservations about the limited range of references and failure to make links to the rich history of knowledge and ideas in the ecocity movement, I have to say that Can a City Be Sustainable? is an excellent book that raises—and points toward the answers to—most of the many questions that are coiled up inside the disarmingly simple question posed in its title.
And, notwithstanding its northern hemisphere bias, my favourite sentence in Gardner’s chapter “Toward a Vision of Sustainable Cities” provides a lovely one-liner that I think I’ll be quoting for years. He writes that a sustainable city:
…treats squirrels and robins, streams and trees, as neighbours rather than artifacts.
“the knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, and can thus only develop in combination with others.”
— Donna Haraway in Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, p586
I grew up in Singapore. I heard stories from my father about when he was a child and how it used to be in the kampungs—Malay for traditional villages. He would go out with a net to hunt for frogs early mornings before dawn and scurry down drains to catch tadpoles and small fishes. Amidst many other kampung stories, that version of Singapore feels like a whole other world—the experience of living on the land here, has shifted drastically within a short span of a generation. Today, Singapore can be seen as a notable example of rapid urbanisation whilst attempting to ensure urban greening proliferates in the city.
The use of resin casts to present a part of the collected plants in an immortalized, encapsulated form echoes the routine of separating ourselves when observing what is around us.
Despite being known as a “Green City”, however, I often catch myself questioning the arranged biodiversity of these ecological entities surrounding me. How many of these are native to the land? Is the diversity human-imposed? Questions like this were the beginning of a blurred understanding between urban greening and ecological landscapes.
How can we come to be aware, know, and acknowledge both empowerments and limitations of the different ways we come to sense make and understand the world around us? Is it possible to step out from the place of human agency to sense make? Looking for ways to cultivate awareness of co-influencement of all living organisms, creating art provides a space to question my human-centred perspective of the world and a starting point was to explore my understanding of what is “Natural” and “Unnatural”.
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Attempts to engage the inside-outside division
Section of blanket bog at Forsinard, October 2017. Photo: Audrey Yeo.
During a field trip to Forsinard, in the Highland area of Scotland, I stood between the fences which formed the boundary between a section of untouched peatland and a section of pine trees that were introduced onto the landscape by man. The breeze was picking up. I closed my eyes. It was distinct—I could hear the manifestation of fences in the landscape.
Detached drawn and painted in Tent Gallery, November 2017. Credits: Audrey Yeo.
I interpreted the fences in the landscape as an analogy to the inside-outside division of how we categorize and order the world around us. Through Detached, the process of physical line drawings of the map-perceived boundaries within the landscapes of Caithness and Sutherland, I was further imposing on the separation that comes from categorising “nature” as a matter which exists outside of my body.
Close ups of Detached. Credits: Audrey Yeo
The use of the gallery wall as canvas was an attempt to undo the single momentary impression of the impermanent and ever-changing landscape that I had taken. I wanted to find comfort in the process of returning the wall space to its original condition as a metaphor for (re-)entering into another state of mind. Perhaps one day, we are able to embrace a state of being that does not drive the inside-outside division. Perhaps the division can be dissolved from finding the balance between trust of our sensorium and reliance on our cognitive abilities.
Do other living organisms struggle in finding this balance, or engage with the inside-outside division? How can we begin to understand the reality of other organisms? Would it help to experience reality from another perspective?
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Stepping out and in and out and…
…exploring reality with new perspectives through interactions with those coming from different disciplines, specifically the sciences.
Crossing disciplines proves to be stimulating and engaging, leading to more questions than answers. We rely on our cognitive abilities. Are the majority of us trapped within a frame of mind shaped by perspectives that are enabled only via western science? Has this led to the separation of us from the ecology of living organisms?
In Western tradition, the tendency to recognize human beings at the top of the hierarchy of beings is perhaps the seed of the capitalistic approach we take towards living. What would happen if we were able to experience the animacy—i.e. aliveness—of the world and give equivalence to all living organisms?
“The language is the heart of the culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world”.
— Great grandmother quoted by Robin Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, p50
One of the indigenous languages of the Americas, Potawatomi, an Anishinaabe language, is a predominantly verb-based language and holds most naturally occurring objects as animate beings—rocks, bays, apples, trees and the list goes on. Items that are man-made are inanimate, for example, a chair. In every sentence, it allows us to incorporate respect to the animacy of the world and reminds us of our kinship with the animate world around us. Imagine, relating to the world in this light instead of separating anything non-human, as an “it”.
I grew up with shadows of eastern beliefs and practices such as the teachings of Confucius, and herbal remedies for illnesses from the practice of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Coming from a family with ancestry line from China, paired with rapid westernization in our social culture producesa difficult reconciliation, which creates tension.
Drawing upon this tension as an analogy for the narrow perspective we hold of understanding ecology and other living organisms around us gave rise to another piece of work, a botanical glimpse.
“There was a time where I teetered precariously with an awkward foot in each of the two worlds—the scientific and the indigenous. But then I learned to fly. Or at least I try. It was the bees that showed me how to move between different flowers—to drink the nectar and gather pollen from both. It is this dance of cross-pollination that can produce a new species of knowledge, a new way of being in the world.”
—Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, p47
Viewers in “a botanical glimpse”, May 2019. Credit: Audrey Yeo
“Taxonomy, i.e. the classification of the natural world whilst a useful tool, is a system of order imposed by man and not an objective reflection of nature. Its categories are actively applied and contain the assumptions, values and associations of human society” —Mark Dion in Theatre of the natural world
a botanical glimpse attempted to reconcile and put to question the outcome of such an approach—i.e. western scientific methods—and the role of cultural institutions in our perception and relationship to the world around us. Through the use of a theatrical setting of a botanical collection which viewers enter into, it lends itself to the embodiment of authenticity as a way to validate the models of knowledge we have come to rely upon—familiar yet circumscribed.
The sampled area for the botanical collection was determined via a process of walking through a nearby urban ecological landscape with botanist, Dr. Heather McHaffie from Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh. The choice of area intended to draw attention to our entwined co-existence with often overlooked living organisms. That the biodiversity found exists within such a small sampled area—0.07m2—further highlights the ease with which such organisms are overlooked.
Wall painting of locality of sampled area. Credits: Audrey YeoVideo still of sampled area. Credit: Audrey Yeo
Through the process of creating a botanical glimpse, I participated in the beginning phase of a knowledge creation process—in a systemically and scientifically acknowledgeable way—by ensuring the methodology I engaged in is sound.
1 out of 13 of the collected samples’ label. Create: Audrey YeoStandard tools used in for collecting and preserving botanical samples including hand fork, GPS, silica gel, plastic bags and paper labels. CreditL Audrey Yeo
Aware that I have no formal training in such scientific methods reflects the process of reiterating our ways of creating knowledge; it is based on a human-centric belief system. In this way, I placed myself in the role as a creator of knowledge as an attempt to understand the way we come to know and perceive knowledge.
The isolation of each species found within the field sample area brings attention to and serves as an analogy of how within knowledge creation today, where we place significant emphasis in looking at things in parts—broken down to the molecular level—in the attempt to understand and sense-make of the world around us. Furthermore, the use of resin casts to present a part of the collected plants in an immortalized, encapsulated form echoes the routine of separating ourselves when observing what is around us.
Part of the exhibit “a botanical glimpse”: samples displayed in resin. Credits: Audrey Yeo
* * *
Have I come closer to stepping out from the place of human agency and encountering the co-influence of all living organisms? In the end, creating art neither answers nor knows, instead poses more questions about what it might mean to be a living organism. Perhaps the only certainty we can hold for ourselves is the gap between how the world appears to us, and the world as such. We owe it to ourselves to keep trying, to experience and close this gap by repeatedly re-knowing ourselves, each time, closer to nature.
Truly addressing the climate crisis in cities may require embracing the mindset of a 16-year old climate activist who is not afraid to challenge every one of our assumptions about life as we know it.
On the last week of September millions of people participated in climate strike marches around the world, protesting against global inaction on climate change. Led by teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, the youth climate strike movement and other social movements such as the Sunrise Movement in the U.S. and Extinction Rebellion in the U.K. are effectively reshaping the discourse on climate change. Over the course of one year, these activists have become a powerful agent of change by offering a nuanced balance between fear and hope and the candidness of young people who are not afraid to call out politicians or businesspeople that fail to act.
Climate march, New York City, 20 September 2019. Photo; Roy (Flickr)
For the most part the millions joining the climate strike marches in September did so in cities, filling the streets of 1,000 cities in 185 countries. While the urban landscape of cities around the world became an inseparable part of the climate protests, it also brought up questions about the role of cities in changing the course of action on climate change. If we accept Greta Thunberg’s narrative that “our house is on fire”, then a key question is what role cities take on themselves?
For cities, this is a burning question. Cities are at the forefront of dealing with the impacts of climate change, including extreme weather events, sea level rise, food and water shortages, arrival of climate refugees and health issues.
While some cities have been at the forefront of climate action (see many examples at C40 and ICLEI), recent studies suggest that most cities respond poorly to the challenge, in terms of both mitigation and adaptation. Moreover, cities with higher poverty rates seem less prepared to address climate impacts. This is not good news given that climate change operates as a threat multiplier exacerbating existing food security, health and other social problems. The stark reality is that nothing we have done so far has managed to move the needle in the right direction on climate action.
The current state of affairs, where cities worldwide (with some cities doing more than others) respond inadequately to the climate crisis, makes it clear that cities, similar to countries, address climate change incrementally and within the confines of the current system. Unlike climate activists, cities, in general, are not interested to “blow up the system”, at least not when it comes to climate change. This inability an/or unwillingness to challenge the status quo is a losing proposition for cities and the majority of the world population living in them.
To change this trajectory cities will need to pursue a different model of action, stepping away from incremental changes in favor of societal-level systemic change. Cities, which have been the driver of technological, cultural and political change for centuries need to figure out quickly how to step up to the challenge. For this, cities need to activate their inner rebel. But, what is the mindset of a rebel activist city? We think it may start with a few critical conceptual and perceptual shifts:
Overcome the red zone/green zone gap.First and foremost what climate activists all over the world are pressing for today is urgency. We have been sleepwalking the climate debate for decades and time is up. Cities can play a critical role in closing the perception gap. On the one hand we have the IPCC reports and overwhelming scientific evidence that suggest climate change is a threat requiring immediate and bold response. On the other hand, most people living in cities still live in a non-emergency state, where the day-to-day is not affected by climate change. If we think of it in terms of color coding scale, scientists suggest we are in the red zone (i.e. severe risk), while most people feel as if they are in the green zone (i.e. low risk). This gap is critical because it means that for the most part, even with growing climate impacts, many people still consider climate change as a distant threat, or what Michael Lewis calls a ‘fifth risk’: “The existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk”.
Cities can change this. Out of all levels of governments, city governments have the most direct relationship with their population. Local elected officials are steeped in their communities. They should use this power to make climate change more prominent on everyone’s agenda. This is true both in terms of the challenges and the opportunities around climate change. Cities can help redesign their communications to convey a sense of urgency. Some important actions include declaring climate emergency, and continuously informing residents on current and future climate change impacts, using all communication channels available. At the same time, through planning and action, and by placing climate change at the center of every discussion, cities can help their residents imagine what a zero-carbon life would look like. Sam Knights of Extinction Rebellion writes in the book “This Is Not A Drill”: “We need to rewild the world. That much is obvious. But first we need to rewild the imagination. We must all learn how to dream again, and we have to learn that together. To break down the old ways of thinking and to move beyond our current conception of what is and what is not possible.” Cities are best positioned to be the places where we rewild our imagination, experimenting and demonstrating what the relationships with technology, nature and one another may look like in a post-fossil fuel reality that prioritizes values above value creation.
Focus on equity and wellbeing. Income inequality is bad for happiness and “trickle down economics” doesn’t work. Cities can and are getting richer without, for the most part, having these riches spread out across the city’s population. Cities with the highest income levels in the world can and have deep poverty, homelessness and health issues. Cities with the most advanced technological industries do not automatically reap the benefits for their citizens. Put simply, if the purpose of city government is to provide services that allow well being for all its population, then equity has to be the central pillar of any city policy. Equity will not just happen along the way and is difficult to be addressed after the fact. City governments should place equity at the center of their strategies with regards to all aspects of their operations.
When using precious urban land for new development, city government should consider who stands to benefit, who is sitting at the discussion table, how the new development might impact current residents, and whether that development is in line with the social, economic and environmental goals of the city. It is absolutely okay (and necessary) for cities to reject Amazon, Walmart, or any other company pursuing development if those companies are not committed to contributing their fair share towards the social, economic and environmental goals of the city. Similarly, when developing new sustainability and resilience plans, cities should consider the equitable distribution of resources, the spatial distribution of hazards and amenities and the spillover, downstream and teleconnection impacts of their plans.
New technologies for the common good. New developments in smart city technologies, Internet of Things (IoT) and social media are happening at a dizzying rate. Cities have a responsibility to ensure that these technological developments first and foremost help us understand, control and manage the transportation systems, materials and energy flows more efficiently, thus help support our core values and goals while protecting our safety and personal information. Allowing technology companies and corporations to introduce technologies that are not oriented towards these goals can be discouraged. Companies that produce disservices to our communities such as Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber, should be intensely regulated, taxed, or banned.
Many useful solutions are here and some cities already use smart technology and IoT for public transportation and traffic management, waste collection, street lighting, and energy efficiency. Cities have an important role in incentivizing these and other technologies that produce social-ecological benefits. Large scale implementation of green stormwater management, water and air quality, all have meaningful implications for urban sustainability and resilience that are not yet realized. Finally, cities should embrace initiatives and ideas utilizing technology to offer new visions for the production-consumption system that are based on decentralization, localization, open source and circularity, such as Fab City, platform coops, and local time banks.
Build humble infrastructure. As we toil in repairing highways and bridges (or tear them down), or play catch up with the implications of wastewater systems that are designed to send our waste down stream and into bottlenecks that are bound to overflow and pollute, coupled with growing stormwater flows over ever increasing paved surfaces, cities need to quickly learn to build humble infrastructure. We cannot afford another round of infrastructure that will lock us into one path of development for 300+ years. Cities must accept that we cannot know the totality of future consequences of what we build today. New infrastructure projects should take that into account, by investing in infrastructure with the least harmful environmental/sustainability/resilience effects (think trains and bike lanes vs. highways roads; solar panels vs. coal and nuclear power). Infrastructure design and engineering are some of the most rigid disciplines we have. Expanding the capacity to incorporate flexibility and build processes that take into account and leave space for change is their “be a Greta” task for the 21stcentury.
The climate emergency is a threat to almost every city on earth. To address this crisis effectively cities need to start thinking differently, and that may require embracing a mindset of a 16-year old climate activist that is not afraid to challenge every one of our assumptions about life as we know it. While it may feel uncomfortable doing so, dealing with the consequences of inaction will be much more uncomfortable. It’s time for cities’ leadership to decide if they are ready to step up their game and embrace an activist mindset, or they are afraid to do what it takes and prefer to remain a landscape in the protests of young people demanding change.
Raz Godelnik is an Associate Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons School of Design - The New School in New York, where he served for the past 3 years as the Co-Director of the graduate program in Strategic Design and Management.
Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Katherine Baldock, BristolCities can play an important role in helping pollinators, but we need to know more about habitat requirements for individual species.
Alison Benjamin, LondonBees can save cities by making them more attractive, healthier, and resilient places for us to live in through the social and eco benefits they bring.
Sarah Bergmann, SeattleWe need to think a great deal more about relationships between systems, and a great deal less about certain species or even several species.
Mark Goddard, NewcastleIf we lose pollinators from cities, we don’t just lose a pollination service, we also lose the psychological benefits that we gain from urban biodiversity.
Damon Hall, St. LouisHumans can inhabit urban landscapes in a manner that can actually support the conservation of insect pollinators
Tina Harrison, New BrunswickAlthough urban pollinator conservation has many local benefits, the extent to which cities contribute to regional pollinator diversity is unknown.
Scott MacIvor, TorontoSocioeconomic factors and their influence on patterns in urban bees could partially explain some patterns in global urban bee diversity.
Denise Mouga, JoinvilleThe goal of offering more floral resources for bees in urban areas can be achieved by encouraging the growing of ornamental bee plants.
Matt Shardlow, PeterboroughEngaging local people is key to delivering successful bee habitats. Passing on knowledge will enable them to manage flower rich bee friendly areas into the future, and they will learn for themselves that bee habitats have much wider benefits.
Caragh Threlfall, MelbourneCities can set the stage for science-practice partnerships that foster research, engagement and policy on urban pollinators.
David loves urban spaces and nature. He loves creativity and collaboration. He loves theatre and music. In his life and work he has practiced in all of these as, in various moments, a scientist, a climate change researcher, a land steward, an ecological practitioner, composer, a playwright, a musician, an actor, and a theatre director.
Bees and pollinators have always been a part of the city landscape. Parks, private and community gardens, and green roofs all contribute to habitat for a diverse pollinator fauna in cities. Indeed, there is some evidence that cities might be refugia for some bee species.
But with increasing interest in urban-based conservation, agriculture and gardens, their presence has become more noticeable—and more important. Furthermore, bee and pollinator conservation is a key concern outside of cities, with habitat loss, indiscriminant insecticide use and other issues threatening bee species and pollinators generally.
What role can cities play in bee and conservation, perhaps through policy encouraging green space with appropriate plantings and a reduction in the use of pesticides?
How can this role be supported, by both public and private actors?
And how can story of urban pollinators be better told to propel the conversation about urban pollinator conservation and their critical services?
Katherine Baldock is a researcher based at the University of Bristol, with an interest in pollinator communities, ecological networks and urban conservation.
Land use change from natural habitats to human-managed landscapes is generally perceived as having a negative impact on wildlife. Yet recent research indicates that towns and cities can provide suitable habitat for at least some groups of insect pollinators, particularly bees.
Compared to agricultural landscapes, urban areas are smaller in size (e.g. approximately 70 percent of U.K. land is managed for agriculture, whereas 7 percent is classified as ‘urban’); therefore, conserving pollinators requires action by both rural and urban land managers. Yet urban areas are home to over half of the global human population and, with urbanisation predicted to increase to accommodate an increasing global population, cities are likely to be increasingly important locations for wildlife conservation.
Despite the knowledge gaps we need to address, there are steps we can take to ensure that urban habitats provide for pollinators and thus aid in their conservation.
Several recent studies have shown that towns and cities can contain high pollinator diversity, and that bee diversity can be as high as, or even greater than, in nearby rural areas. This suggests that urban areas can provide suitable food and nesting resources for at least some native bee species. Gardens comprise approximately 25 percent of the urban landscape in the U.K. and gardening is a popular activity, so gardens are likely to provide important floral resources throughout the year in towns and cities. It is important to remember, though, that bee species vary in their habitat requirements and urban living may not suit them all. There are more than 270 bee species in the U.K. and approximately 20,000 species worldwide. Bees vary in their nesting habits, floral preferences and the time of year at which they are active, all of which are likely to affect their survival in urban habitats. Generalist species, including many of the bumble bees, can forage on a wide range of plant species and may be more suited to urban areas. Indeed, research has shown that bumblebee colony growth rate and nest density in suburban gardens can exceed that found in the countryside. In contrast, several studies have found floral specialists to be rare in cities.
What about the other pollinators? In temperate northern Europe, other pollinator groups include beetles, wasps, butterflies, moths and flies. These insects vary in their efficacy as pollinators, though recent research shows that non-bee insects are globally important crop pollinators. To support a population of a particular species, all of the species’ resources (e.g. larval food plant, nesting substrate, overwintering sites) must be available.
So can cities save pollinators? Research has shown that at least some species are able to use urban habitats. The bottom line, though, is that there is still much we don’t know about the habitat requirements for many pollinator groups and we need a lot more research to find out which pollinators use urban habitats worldwide.
Despite the knowledge gaps we need to address, there are steps we can take to ensure that urban habitats provide for pollinators and thus aid in their conservation. All pollinators feed on flowers, so increasing the numbers of flowers that provide good sources of nectar and pollen is essential. We need to plant a variety of flowers (different pollinators feed on different plants), to make sure nectar and pollen are available throughout the year and also to consider location. Creating corridors of favourable habitat will enable movement and dispersal of pollinators both within urban landscapes and between urban and adjacent rural habitats, thus increasing habitat connectivity and helping to maintain healthy pollinator populations at regional and national levels. Projects such as the Buglife-led B-Lines are seeking to create large-scale habitat corridors to achieve just this. It’s not just about the flowers, though: efforts to maintain and create pollinator habitat must consider other resource needs, including nesting sites.
How do we make this happen? The number of people and organisations involved in managing urban habitats is both a challenge and an opportunity. Local authorities must be on board to ensure that public land is favourably managed, but essentially anyone with access to land can do their bit, as well as encouraging neighbours, employers, local businesses and schools to take action. Recognition by and support from governments in the form of national pollinator strategies or action plans, as is the case in England, Ireland and the U.S., among others, is important in uniting stakeholders in both rural and urban areas to achieve shared goals.
Cities, and the people in them, can play an important role in helping pollinators. Managing our urban areas better for wildlife as a whole is part of the solution, but we must also ensure that we conserve natural habitats wherever possible.
Alison Benjamin is co-founder of Urban Bees, which works with communities, companies and charities to help bees in cities by raising awareness about their role, improving forage and habitat for wild bees, and teaching responsible urban beekeeping.
Since becoming a beekeeper a decade ago, I have been on a journey that has opened my eyes to what cities can offer bees in terms of forage and habitat, and how that could be vastly improved by transforming flower beds in our parks and gardens with nectar and pollen-rich varieties (instead of colourful but sterile annual displays), planting up roof tops with trees and shrubs that supply year-round bee forage, and leaving areas undisturbed where wild bees can safely nest.
I now see cities in a completely different light. A tree-lined street has become an aisle in a bee supermarket, fully stocked for a short time during the year, and completely empty at others; a park is like a larder full of bee-friendly free ingredients; and the grey expanse of roofs that cover our cities are deserts where no food grows.
What we need to ask is not what cities can do for bees, but what bees can do for cities to make them better, more resilient places for all of us?
In London alone, we are currently paving or decking over gardens and losing the equivalent of two and a half Hyde Parks every year which, in addition to wiping out potential bee forage, exacerbates problems such as flooding, air pollution and rising temperatures caused by the heat island effect. If we ditch the decking and turn our cities into a vast bed and breakfast for bees, we not only feed and house bees, we also make cities more resilient for us to live in, too. Trees, as well as often providing the most abundant source of food for bees in cities and habitat for myriad species, soak up rainwater, store carbon, remove pollution and provide cooling canopy cover for us.
This week, I’m helping to plant new trees in a local inner London square. The trees have been chosen by myself in conjunction with the local council’s arboricultural officer to extend the foraging season for bees: a white cherry for early nectar and a Japanese pagoda for forage in late summer.
But the event will do much more than feed bees. It will bring the community together, making us all feel good for helping bees, making the square so much more attractive at different times of the year—from the blossom in spring to the leaves’ autumnal colour—and allow us urbanites to reconnect with nature and one another; in summary, it will increase our sense of wellbeing.
For this reason, it’s become clear to me that what we need to ask is not what cities can do for bees, but what bees can do for cities to make them better, more resilient places for all of us?
By pollinating plants, from the fruit trees in our backyards to the vegetables on our allotments, bees are increasing the yield of fresh, locally produced food we can eat in towns and cities. And their pollination services are providing much-needed fruits and berries for the wildlife we share our cities with, from songbirds to small mammals, as well as allowing flowers and plants to propagate in even the most barren looking wastelands.
In addition to the hugely important role bees play in promoting biodiversity in our urban eco-system, they also play a much undervalued role in reconnecting city dwellers with nature and, in so doing, improve our mental state. Most of us live in cities and, by 2050, 75 percent of the human population will live in urban centers. Nature deficit disorder—a term coined to describe the negative impact of a disconnect with the natural environment—can exacerbate behavioural problems in children and add to stress levels in adults. Research shows that nature has restorative and therapeutic powers. But if we sit in offices all day, oblivious to the changing seasons and natural world around us, how do we benefit from this eco-healing?
Bees, that’s how. By having a hive and learning about how honeybees work, or planting bee-friendly flowers in a window box, or making a DIY bee hotel where cavity-nesting solitary bees can check in to lay their eggs, people—from school children to alienated young people and even busy adults—in cities are learning about the nature on their doorstep. What’s more, they are getting to know work colleagues or neighbours in the process and breaking down the social isolation that blights urban existence.
So by making cities more bee-friendly, we are actually making them much more human-friendly places for us to live and work.
Sarah Bergmann is a design thinker working across ecology, design, planning and culture. She is the founder of the Pollinator Pathway, a living essay in landscape that responds to humanity’s influence as an ecosystem.
Eight years ago, I began developing a project called the Pollinator Pathway. The project is both a vision for an international system of design to connect cities, farms and wilderness, and a living essay on nature in the age of humanity. The project has ignited global conversation and is considered a massive cultural success, attracting scientists, curators, planners, architects and designers alike. Through this project, I’m investing what will ultimately be ten years into exploring history, botany, urbanism, social systems, environmental thought and systems of real estate—all with the question of how we might best build new systems and paradigms in the coming hundreds of years.
I think we should eliminate the entire concept of saving species. Therefore, I have a counter question: how can cities be better participants in a global ecology?
We are in the midst of a global transformation of landscape, from wild and biologically diverse to agrarian and urban dotted by fragmented green spaces, and with it, an increasingly globalizing ecology. We are essentially designing landscapes of cosmopolitan species—those species and ecosystems that can thrive globally, often in the systems we create (and the honeybee is one such species).
I think to answer any of these questions about cities, we need to think a great deal more about relationships between systems, and a great deal less about certain species or even several species. In fact, I think we should eliminate the entire concept of saving species. Therefore, I have a counter question: how can cities be better participants in a global ecology?
I think some of the most logical ways that cities can contribute to the ecology of the planet—to become active participants in the biosphere, so to speak—is through (at minimum) only using underused space in ecology projects, very definitely not adding more honeybees to our landscapes, connecting landscapes—and, above everything, developing policy and funding mechanisms that pair the development within cities with support for the connectivity of landscape outside cities.
Then—however rudimentary a level it may be—we’re beginning to make a real system of exchange, and thinking more like an ecosystem.
While urban habitats will never be a panacea for pollinator conservation, there are two important reasons why insect pollinator ecologists are increasingly turning their attention to towns and cities. First, urban habitats could be acting as refugia from some of the threats facing wild pollinators in agricultural landscapes. The rather limited data we have on pollinators (which is based on haphazardly collected records rather than systematic monitoring programmes), suggests that most pollinator species are in decline. The causes for bee declines appear to be multi-faceted and include parasites, pesticides and a lack of flowers. Although urbanisation is an important cause of habitat loss globally, the majority of these threats to pollinators appear to be primarily occurring in non-urban land. Second, and especially in the developed global north, the majority of people live in cities. Pollinators, especially bees and butterflies, are charismatic and apparent emblems of biodiversity that people enjoy sharing their parks and gardens with. If we lose pollinators from cities, we don’t just lose a pollination service, we also lose the psychological benefits that we gain from urban biodiversity.
The majority of the public remains ignorant to the true diversity of wild pollinators.
Although research on urban pollinators has been increasing, most of the studies to date have been relatively small in scale, often focusing on a few urban habitats in a single city. However, a notable exception was a recent nationwide study that asked ‘Where is the U.K.’s pollinator biodiversity?’ By systematically surveying pollinators in 12 urban areas and comparing these urban pollinator communities with those of nearby farmland and nature reserves, Katherine Baldock and colleagues on the Urban Pollinators Project were able to show that towns and cities were just about as good for pollinators as farms and nature reserves. Moreover, when just looking at the bee species, urban areas were significantly more species-rich than farmland.
So, taken as a whole, it appears that cities can compare favourably to other habitats. But urban environments are notoriously heterogeneous, ranging from car parks and industrial estates to gardens and nature reserves. The second part of the Urban Pollinators Project sought to discover the urban pollinator ‘hot spots’ by comparing pollinator communities in nine different urban habitats across four U.K. cities. This work was followed up by a U.K.-wide experiment to investigate how best to enhance urban green spaces for pollinators. In partnership with local councils, schools and seed companies, members of the Project created 60 flower meadows across the U.K., including perennial meadows with only native species, and annual meadows containing mostly non-native species.
As the results emerge from the Urban Pollinators Project, we will certainly learn more about the value of towns and cities for pollinating insects and what we can do to make them better. But there is still a great deal more research required. By surveying insects visiting flowers, the Urban Pollinators Project was able to produce plant-pollinator networks for urban areas, but food (nectar and pollen) is not all that pollinators need to survive. Pollinators could also be nest-site limited in cities, and the popularity of ‘insect hotels’ (at least for cavity-nesting solitary bees) suggests that, for some wild pollinators, this is a real possibility. We also don’t know much about pesticide use in urban areas and its impact on pollinators, while other urban hazards such as pollution (e.g. diesel fumes) and vehicle collisions may well be having detrimental effects on urban pollinators. If cities are really to make a meaningful contribution to pollinator conservation, then an interesting question is whether they might act as a source habitat from which pollinators ‘spill over’ into surrounding non-urban land. There is some limited evidence that urban-rural spill-over can happen, but not enough to draw any firm conclusions.
At the heart of these various projects is the fact that people, at least on one level, ‘get’ urban pollinator conservation. Scientists have been broadly successful in communicating the message that pollinators are declining and people can readily understand the benefit of planting flowers in their own backyard or local park to do their bit to help the bees. But it’s not quite that simple. The majority of the public remains ignorant to the true diversity of wild pollinators. Many are only aware of bees and many of those think that bees are only one species—the domesticated honeybee. But of the thousands of insects sampled during the Urban Pollinators Project, bees comprised up to a third of records and honeybees just 7 percent. Most urban pollinators are flies, and most of the bees are bumblebees and solitary bees. Maybe it doesn’t matter that 93 percent of urban pollinators remain mysterious to many of us, but ask the schoolchild who’s just seen a live colony of bumblebees for the first time or the mother of the inner city child overwhelmed by an urban flower meadow and they will tell you a story of pollinator conservation that truly brings the city alive.
Research on insect pollinators is changing how we view the biological value and ecological importance of cities.
Photo: Damon Hall
We know that insect pollinators are in decline globally due to a combination of human-caused and natural factors (habitat loss, intensification of agriculture, pesticides, disease, etc.) [1]. This problem has been characterized as a “pollinator health crisis” where health refers to pollinator species diversity and abundance [2, 3].
In an urbanizing world, the “pollinator health crisis” is one problem that an individual urban dweller can truly do something about.
In the midst of this problem, what has been surprising is that researchers are finding diverse species of bees in cities all over the world, such as Berlin, Germany [4]; Cardiff and London in the U.K. [5–7]; Melbourne, Australia [8]; Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica [9]; Vancouver, Canada [10]; Chicago, IL [11]; New York City, NY [12,13]; Phoenix, AZ [14]; and San Francisco, CA in the U.S. [15]. In several cases, bee species diversity and abundance in cities is greater than in surrounding rural areas [6, 7, 12, 14].
A diversity of people in the world’s cities plant a diversity of flowering plants. Cultural norms, municipal codes, and aesthetic preferences shape the diversity of cultivated plants that provide forage for insect pollinators. Managed (and unmanaged) urban public and private greenspaces offer places to nest. Although the restoration and conservation of natural landscapes are important for insect pollinators, urban landscapes do play a role in species conservation.
Photo: Damon Hall
Studies of insect pollinator health consistently show the primary driver of pollinator health is the presence and availability of flowers [7]. The message is simple: planting more flowers in cities can have a positive impact on improving bee diversity and abundance. Further, when urban bee populations are healthy, a spill-over effect can occur where bees re-inhabit rural lands [16]. This could be meaningful while governing organizations (e.g., in the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency) investigate agricultural and horticultural chemicals. Until these fundamental questions about land-management practices are satisfactorily addressed in rural areas, cities could serve as a haven for insect pollinators.
Residential lawns, community greenspaces, and commercial properties can provide valuable habitat for urban bees. The small size and range of bees enables individuals who manage these lands to serve essential roles. For example, for smaller bee species that forage and nest within 500 meters, a few neighboring homeowners planting high-nectar flowers can contribute significantly to the quality of these bees’ habitat. Individuals with relatively small spaces can design these spaces to support the functional needs of bees.
It is true that urban development and sprawl is responsible for habitat loss and the extinction of many species [17]. However, urban ecology research on bee species diversity and abundance reveals that humans can inhabit urban landscapes in a manner that does not always degrade habitat and can actually support the conservation of insect pollinators. Considering the amount of bee-pollinated foods in the human diet, this is of vital importance. In an urbanizing world riddled by seemingly insurmountable human and environmental problems, the “pollinator health crisis” is one problem that an individual urban dweller can truly do something about.
This post stems from a collaboration with Dr. Gerardo Camilo (Biology) supported by Saint Louis University’s Presidents’ Research Fellowship and Beaumont Development Awards.
References
Potts SG, Biesmeijer JC, Kremen C, Neumann P, Schweiger O, Junin WE. 2010. Global pollinator declines: trends, impacts and drivers. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 25(6):345–353.
Goulson D, Nicholls E, Botias C, Rotheray EL. 2015. Bee declines driven by combined stress from parasites, pesticides, and lack of flowers. Science 347(6229). doi: 10.1126/science.1255957.
Saure C, Burger F, Dathe HH. 1998. Die bienenarten von Brandenburg und Berlin (Hym. Apidae). Entomologische Nachrichten und Berichte 42(3):155–166.
Goulson D, Lye GC, Darvill B. 2008. Decline and conservation of bumble bees. Annual Review of Entomology 53:191–208.
Baldock KCR, Goddard MA, Hicks DM, Kunin WE, Mitschunas N, Osgathorpe LM, et al. 2015. Where is the UK’s pollinator biodiversity? The importance of urban areas for flower-visiting insects. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 282(1803). doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.2849.
Sirohi M, Jackson JI, Edwards M, Ollerton J. 2015. Diversity and abundance of solitary and primitively eusocial bee in an urban centre: a case study from Northampton, U.K. Journal of Insect Conservation 19:487–500.
Threlfall CG, Walker K, Williams NSG, Hahs AK, Mata I, Stork N, et al. 2015. The conservation value of urban green space habitats for Australian native bee communities. Biological Conservation 187:240–248.
Frankie GW, Vinson SB, Rizzardi MA, Griswold TL, Coville RE, Grayum MH, et al. 2013. Relationships of bees to host ornamental and weedy flowers in urban 226 northwestern Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. Journal of Kansas Entomological Society 84(4): 325–351.
Tommasi D, Miro A, Higo HA, Winston ML. 2004. Bee diversity and abundance in an urban setting. The Canadian Entomologist 136(06):851–869.
Tonietto R, Fant J, Ascher J, Ellis K, Larkin D. 2011. A comparison of bee communities of Chicago green roofs, parks and prairies. Landscape and Urban Planning 103(1):102–108.
Matteson KC, Ascher JS, Langellotto GA. 2008. Bee richness and abundance in New York city urban gardens. Annals of the Entomological Society of America 101(1):140–150.
Tina Harrison is a Ph.D. student in Dr. Rachael Winfree’s lab at Rutgers University. She investigates biotic homogenization of bee communities in disturbed landscapes.
Cities often support high local diversities of pollinators, particularly bees. At the same time, cities support a subset of the pollinator species in a surrounding region. Do these urban pollinator communities contribute to the total diversity of pollinators in a region? Is it possible—or practical—to increase a city’s contribution to regional pollinator diversity by restoring species that are currently missing from the urban pollinator community? The answers depend on characteristics of the species themselves.
In my own collections, I have found some native bee species almost exclusively in towns and small cities, and rarely in nearby agriculture and forest habitat.
Pollinators that are successful in cities are often very common in other habitats in the surrounding region. These species may provide great value within the city by pollinating urban crops, for example. It is possible that supporting regional abundance of common species has unappreciated long-term importance for regional biodiversity. However, when weighed against the immediate needs of uncommon, vulnerable species, conserving habitats that support mostly common species does not help regional pollinator diversity.
On the other hand, cities can supportregionally rare pollinators. Some pollinators may be dependent on urban habitat because habitats outside cities are degraded, destroyed or otherwise unavailable. In my own collections, I have found somenative bee species almost exclusively in towns and small cities, and rarely in nearby agriculture and forest habitat. Why? Habitats outside the towns are certainly altered from a “natural” state, but still support florishing communities of other native bees. Without knowing their specific habitat needs, all I can say is that urban habitats appear to be important in keeping these native bees abundant in the regional species pool.
Of the pollinator species that are missing from an urban area, I imagine two groups that are practical to restore. The first group includes species that are able to thrive in cities, but are generally uncommon and unlikely to be detected at sites with low numbers of individuals. These species can be restored by adding commonly limiting resources like flowers, which raise overall abundance of pollinators at a site. The second group may also thrive in cities, but commonly lacks one or two key resources. An example may be a habitat generalist/flower specialist like Peponapis pruinosa, which appears on squash and cucumber blossoms in community gardens in New York City. We can encourage these species to colonize urban habitats simply by adding the specific missing resource. Restoring either uncommon or specialist species in urban habitat is likely helpful for conserving regional diversity.
Many other pollinators are sensitive to a complex of environmental changes associated with urbanization that cannot be redressed by adding flowers. These include many habitat specialist pollinators that are consistently missing from urban pollinator surveys, such as spring Andrena bees associated with mature forest. Habitat specialists are priority species for conserving regional diversity, and mostly benefit from conservation efforts outside of the city. Nevertheless, we can support some of these species by protecting fragments of natural habitat within cities. And in some cases, it may be practical to widely integrate natural habitat into urban land use without loss of value to humans. For example, in the southwestern U.S., xeric backyard gardens that replicate native desert habitat appear to support much of the native desert bee community. If habitats outside of cities are extremely degraded, for example by intensive agriculture, then conserving regional pollinator diversity will require using these strategies to maximize the proportion of regional species that can survive within urban boundaries.
I suspect that natural and agricultural habitats still support the lion’s share of regional pollinator diversity. With respect to this important conservation goal, the benefits of urban pollinator conservation are probably outweighed by opportunity costs to conservation efforts outside the city. But since pollinator conservation within cities serves other goals, making it count towards regional diversity conservation should be pursued as a positive bonus.
Socioeconomic factors and mainstreaming urban bee conservation
Cities can help bees, but like many things—it depends. For instance, studies have shown which flowers to plant and where, how big gardens need to be and that proximity to larger ‘green space’ matters for bee conservation. Even novel—and really cool—artificial habitat, such as bee hotels, appear to encourage bees and simultaneously to send a message to citizens that there are ‘more than just honey bees’ that need our help. Since the majority of people live in cities, most of our experiences with wildlife occur in an urban context, so promoting these practices will help urban bees directly, and encourage care and concern for bees beyond our cities.
Linking cultural diversity and socioeconomic factors to bee conservation and pollination services could provide new ways to mainstream action on urban bee conservation.
In terms of how urban habitats can be made to serve pollinator conservation, I’m interested in considering how city and neighbourhood age, development history, and diverse cultural perspectives might add new ways to propel local (and global) action. Cities and neighbourhoods can be further defined by a myriad of socioeconomic factors not commonly considered in analyses of urban bee diversity, including educational levels, lifestyle and social status, and other economic differences. Socioeconomic factors and their influence on patterns in urban bees have been entirely neglected in the literature, but could partially explain some of the emerging contrasting patterns seen in global urban bee diversity.
A spontaneous community garden replaces an abandoned gas station in a 1960s Toronto suburban neighbourhood. Legacy effects and neighbourhood cultural identity might dictate which plants are tended, how intensely, how many and where. These decisions will have ramifications for local pollinators searching for foraging and nesting resources. Photo: J. Scott MacIvor
Cities expand in multiple ways and even neighbourhoods in the same city might expand differently and in different directions. Human population density similarly expands in non-linear ways. Growing cities bring together people of diverse cultures and socioecological values. Acknowledging these assets could add synergy to the who, what, when, where, why and how of urban bee conservation. In Toronto, a ‘city of neighbourhoods,’ with one of the most culturally diverse populations in the world, my colleagues and I recently completed a checklist of the bees of the city and the surrounding region and recorded 364 species! Linking cultural diversity and socioeconomic factors to bee conservation and pollination services could provide new ways to mainstream action on urban bee conservation by conveying their needs to the public through connection to everyday life factors not normally considered in promotion and management.
In my own study, from 2011 to 2013, I surveyed 200 community and home gardens, urban parks, and green roofs in Toronto using bee hotels and a large citizen science collective. Among many interesting findings, bee species richness increased with household income, and bee abundance increased with certain landscape factors, including the amount of open (e.g. non-forested) urban green space. Other studies have recorded an increase in plant diversity with household income, and coined this as the ‘luxury effect.’ Human preference for certain landscape conditions can remove resources for some species but increase them for others. Where finances permit, people can increase or decrease plant diversity through specific gardening techniques that would support bees, but these effects are generally unlikely to be conscious. The link between income and homeowner participation in activities to enhance native bees is not well researched, and participation is likely driven more by lifestyle choices, social status, and other forms of identity. More studies are needed to elucidate how standard (and freely available) socioeconomic and demographic data might impact patterns in pollinator diversity and the important services they provide.
Dr. Denise Mouga is a researcher with 20 years of experience working on bees and pollinators' interactions with natural resources. She works in Brazil.
The potential consequences of pollinator decline on the preservation of biodiversity and stability of food crop yields should guide the policies of pollinator conservation.
Even though urbanisation has a negative effect on insect fauna, wild bees are found in urban environments. Urban bees are those that lived in an area prior to urbanization and were able to adapt to anthropogenic alterations to the environment besides the exotic species that have become naturalized in there.
The goal of offering more floral resources for bees in urban areas can be achieved by encouraging the growing of ornamental bee plants.
Natural areas are shrinking worldwide due to human interventions in the environment and it has been observed that urban areas have been progressively occupied by populations of non-domesticated species, thus turning into havens for wildlife. So, we find native bees living spontaneously in natural areas but also in urban areas where they exploit existing open spaces (gardens, orchards, squares, parks, sports fields, clubs, vacant lots, etc …) with flowering plants including ruderal plants, ornamental, fruit trees, vegetables, weeds and other species of varying sizes and habits.
Torenia fournieri (Linderniaceae). Photo: Enderlei Dec
Urban plants are usually intensively managed: watering, pruning and replanting produces floral resources that are more consistently available to pollinators, even in times of drought. In urban environments, the temperature is a little higher than outside the city and pesticides are of restricted use. Botanical species with different flowering periods are usually used in gardening in cities, which favors the ornamentation factor and, consequently, the supply of resources for pollinators is maintained throughout the seasons.
Thus, it becomes relevant, in urban areas, to have bee plants for maintaining the diversity of bees. The goal of offering more floral resources for bees in urban areas can be achieved by encouraging the growing of ornamental bee plants, in line with a gardening, landscaping and sustainability sensibility.
Plants defined as ornamental by the attractive shapes and colors of their leaves or flowers are part of numerous groups of cultivated and wild plants, including representatives of various plant families, and are often cosmopolitan, originating from different countries. They are aesthetically pleasing, suitable for gardening and landscaping, and can be used, in urban areas, as a draw and food resource for wild bees. We think such ornamental plants make it possible for ecologists, farmers, plant enthusiasts and gardeners to enhance the urban environment as a biological corridor, using them to connect nearby forest fragments. Ornamental bee plants can also be used as bee pasture species in urban beekeeping.
Ornamental plants are not often thought of as bee plants because they do not always offer conspicuous pollen or nectar resources. Moreover, frequent attributes of ornamental plants, such as double petals and a lack of stamens, nectar guides, and strong scents, among others characteristics, drive off bees. However, many of them are suitable for bees that visit them.
Matt is Chief Executive of Buglife – The Invertebrate Conservation Trust, the only organisation in Europe committed to saving all animals without backbones.
Bees and pollinators have always been a part of the city landscape, but outside cities modern agriculture has caused, and continues to cause, the destruction of bee habitat and the resulting declines in bumblebees, solitary bees, hoverflies, moths and butterflies. Cities have provided a relative sanctuary from the chemical and physical destruction of flower-rich meadows and indiscriminate insecticide use. Now there is increasing interest in urban-based conservation and wildlife gardening, so the presence of city bees amongst us has become more noticeable as well as more important.
Urban habitats can provide a fantastic range of varied pollinator resources. Existing wildflower sites, sometimes grasslands or railway banks and very often brownfield sites such as quarries or old mining spoil, can be protected and managed for their wildlife habitats. Roadside verges, playing fields, gardens, flat roofs, parks, even hanging baskets and green walls can be adapted to become flower rich bee havens.
France is leading the way, Paris has been pesticide free for over a decade and there are over 900 villes sans pesticides.
The choice of pollen and nectar sources is important, tailoring planting to key local pollinator species and assemblages will increase the functionality of the habitats. While many pollinators are generalists, others visit only certain types of flower or are dependent on the flowers of just one plant. For instance ivy, speedwells, yellow loosestrife, white bryony, ragwort and scabious flowers all have specialist bees in Britain. Fostering flowers that support specialist bee species has the potential to ensure that cities not only maintain boosted populations of the widespread and generalist pollinators, but are also a refuge to a wide variety of bee species.
More pollen and nectar is the primary objective for bee habitat improvements, but nesting sites are also limiting factor for several species. Bumblebees will benefit from areas with long vegetation and banks where mice and voles can create the burrows that the bees so often occupy. Solitary bees have very varied nesting requirements. Solitary bee nest boxes are effective for a number of groups of solitary bees, and the retention of deadwood provides a more natural source of holes and cavities in which the bees can nest. We can also create banks and bare ground in which burrowing solitary bees can nest. For instance, Buglife’s ‘Get Glasgow Buzzing’ project installed large patches of sand in municipal parks so that sand nesting solitary bees could construct nests.
One of my favourite stories of urban bee conservation relates to the Long-fringed mini-miner bee (Andrena nivealis). It is a rare bee found in very few localities in southern Britain where it specialises on brassica, cabbage family, flowers. In Bees of Surrey (2008) David Baldock relates that the bee was found in abundance on a small holding in Ewell, feeding on purple sprouting broccoli. A woman living in an adjacent house had noticed the bees and spent hours observing them foraging and nesting in bare ground. When the small holding stopped growing brassicas the woman used her garden to grow a variety of flowering brassicas so that the little bees would have a chance of survival.
Engaging local people is key to delivering successful bee habitats. Passing on knowledge will enable them to manage flower rich bee friendly areas into the future, and they will learn for themselves that bee habitats have much wider benefits; delivering ecotherapy and the health and wellbeing benefits that come with nature engagement. Bee habitats, foraging and nesting, provides benefits to other pollinators and wildlife, giving the potential for people to access and to experience a wide range of invertebrate, plant, bird and mammal life close to where they live.
There is much still to learn about conserving bees in cities. The Buglife project ‘Get Plymouth Buzzing’ worked with Plymouth Council to develop wildflower meadows on municipal grassland. A subsequent study found that the wildflower meadows had more than twice as many bees as areas that were still standard municipal grassland. Buglife’s current ‘Urban Buzz’ project will be turning eight cities across the UK into bee wonderlands. But the project will also attempt to get a better understanding of how we can provide the greatest benefit to our bee fauna, by, for instance, experimenting and researching innovative aerial homes for solitary bees.
Working with Local Authorities brings the potential to develop a strategic network of pollinator sites. Existing wildflower areas can be expanded and linked together and the targeting of action can improve the landscape connectivity for bees—promoting corridors of bee friendly open spaces, roofs, gardens and walls—as is being planned with the London B-Line.
Pesticides are a big issue for bees and other pollinators. Neonicotinoids attack the nervous system of wild bees, preventing them from foraging successfully, finding their nests and producing queens or the next generation, other insecticides such as pyrethroids are also toxic to bees, and herbicides impact bee health as well, either directly or through the destruction of flowering plants. The non-agricultural use of pesticides is usually cosmetic and unnecessary.
France is leading the way, Paris has been pesticide free for over a decade and there are over 900 villes sans pesticides. In 2014 Minister of Ecology and Energy, Ségolène Royal, called on mayors to stop using pesticides ”Pesticides are a health risk and today there are products that enable us to stop using pesticides and win back biodiversity, namely species such as butterflies that have at times completely vanished from certain communes.” Seattle, Copenhagen and Tokyo are among other cities that have kicked the pesticide habit.
Cites alone will not save all the bees. If we want to have a healthy and sustainable agricultural system with adequate pollination services then we will have to restore pollinators across the countryside, defining wide corridors and sprinkling them with fields of flowers, as set out in the B-Lines scheme, is probably the most cost effective way of achieving this. There are also many bees that have fussy habitat requirements, conditions only found on heathlands, sand dunes or chalk grassland for instance. These bees will not be adequately catered for by the amount of habitat in urban areas, and therefore need targeted conservation management.
While cities may not be the panacea for bee conservation, they can make a hugely important contribution to conserving many species of bee, and urban bee conservation work also enables people to learn about and love bees: knowledge and passion that will provide the ground swell of support for the conservation of all bee species.
Dr Caragh Threlfall's research is focussed on understanding the impact of urban form on biodiversity, measuring the services biodiversity provides across urban landscapes, and assessing the effectiveness of urban greening for biodiversity conservation.
Can cities save bees and assist in pollinator conservation more broadly? This is an interesting question, where it’s likely the answer will be country- and city-specific. Bees in urban areas have been most extensively studied in the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom. In Australia, we know much less about how many species of bees occur in our cities and what types of habitats are important to their conservation. We know that bees need food, nesting sites and water, and that these three key things often occur in urban areas. However, exactly how important Australian cities are for bee conservation is yet to be determined.
The jury is still out on exactly what role cities will play in the conservation of Australia’s unique bee fauna.
Australia is one of the world’s most urbanised countries, and it is predicted that 90 percent of Australians will live in a city by 2050. This high density of Australia’s population in cities poses an obvious threat to biodiversity, including our native bees. But, it could also present enormous opportunities for targeted research, citizen science, evidence-based conservation policy and genuine science-practice partnerships. Cities could form an excellent platform to set out to achieve these things. However, there are currently some challenges to this goal.
There are over 1,500 species of bees in Australia, with records of over 150 species in some of our capital cities. Despite this diversity, there is only one published paper examining habitat for bees in an Australian city. We do not yet know how many types of bees occur in our cities, what habitat they need or how to manage that habitat to serve pollinator conservation. My colleagues and I at The University of Melbourne and The University of Sydney have been collecting data to remedy this situation, and we have a good inkling that our cities harbour a large proportion of the countries bee biodiversity, but until more work is done, we just don’t know for sure.
Our second major stumbling block is that most of our 1,500 species are small and solitary. Australian bees, albeit charismatic, are not as well recognised as bumblebees are in other countries, and are commonly mistaken for flies by the general public. However, many municipal authorities are working very hard on fantastic community engagement programs to remedy this apparent underappreciation for urban invertebrates, including The City of Melbourne’s Urban BioBlitz—where hundreds of participants gathered in the city’s parks and gardens to survey the urban pollinator community, providing data for their upcoming urban biodiversity policy—Or the Ku-ring-gai Council’s native bee hive program, which is so popular they have residents on waiting lists eager to take home their very own native bee hive. However, these types of programs are by no means common practice, and many more programs like this are needed before the urban public can empathise with the plight of our urban bees.
Our last stumbling block to realising the potential of cities as avenues for pollinator conservation is the lack of urban biodiversity policy that currently mentions bees (or any invertebrate, for that matter). Current policy often focusses on the threatened or rare, and much of the habitat that our native bees would happily utilise—such as gardens, vacant lots and brownfields—are not traditionally viewed as valuable for biodiversity, and subsequently do not feature in urban biodiversity policy.
So how can cities save bees and assist in pollinator conservation? I think cities require new approaches to conservation, including genuine, long-term collaborative partnerships between scientists, practitioners and policy makers. These partnerships need to operate at multiple scales, from local municipalities through to national scales. And these partnerships need to act in concert so that research informs policy and policy needs inform research, with a focus on providing opportunities and stories to engage citizens along the way. We are well on our way to forging these paths in Australia; however, the jury is still out on exactly what role cities will play in the conservation of our unique bee fauna into the future.
Changes that cause major disruptions in human settlements, such as those triggered by earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, can give rise to new landscapes that reveal a natural cycle, which is part of the territory where cities grow and develop. These landscapes emerge particularly in cities exposed to recurrent natural disturbances, such as earthquakes, where the natural and human environments are modified. Newer landscapes evolve from geomorphologic, ecological and social changes, and are, at first, usually rejected by the population due to the extent of the disaster. However, over time these new landscapes can be appreciated as they create attractive environments with a strong local identity. This is the case of the city of Valdivia, Chile, where landscapes created after disasters have been safeguarded and properly planned, providing opportunities for human adaptation to disturbances and for the development of life styles integrated with nature, which, in turn, have lead to a more resilient community.
In recent years the study of the characteristics of these landscapes in Valdivia has provided the opportunity to understand how such new environments have been preserved through community and government efforts. These actions have raised awareness and increased education about the dynamics of the environment in which people live. In this manner, the origin of the Valdivian urban landscape has been revealed and linked to the social dynamics that emerged after natural disturbances.
Overall view of the city of Valdivia, where is possible to see the Valdivia River, the promenade and fluvial market, the city center with the cathedral, the coastal mountain at the right and the wetland areas at the far left. Photos: Paula Villagra
Valdivia is a rapidly growing medium-sized city of 154,097 inhabitants, located in the south of Chile at 39°48’30” S latitude and 73°14’30” W longitude. It has a temperate rainy climate, with rainfall reaching 2310 mm per year; indeed, 16% of its area (1235.8 hectares) is covered by wetlands. The evolution of the urban landscape of Valdivia is, without doubt, a unique case in Chile. The great number of disasters that have hit the city since 1575, have continuously altered the landscape. These include 13 general fires, at least 8 major earthquakes (over 8.0 Mw) and a waterspout that devastated the city in 1881. Human disturbances have been relevant as well, as these have triggered urban expansion processes, continuous land use change and high densification. However, there is an undeniable desire of the community to remain on this site, even though the initial regular grid of the city and its beautiful wetlands, populated by a diversity of birds, wildlife and flora, have been strongly modified over time, particularly after the 1960 earthquake.
The 1960 earthquake (Mw 9.5) is the largest in the history of humankind and in Valdivia it triggered the greatest physical and social changes to date. This earthquake generated processes of large-scale subsidence, landslides on riverbeds and subsequent floods in the city. It also forced the evacuation of the population to the southern outskirts, an area previously occupied by agricultural and natural land, causing a sudden integration between humans and nature. This process created new landscapes that emerged both, immediately after the earthquake and along the past four decades. The process of establishment of Valdivians in these new landscapes shed light on key initiatives on how to live in a changing environment, some of which are described below.
Location of Valdivia and wetland areas created after the 1960 earthquake
Integrating biodiversity in the city
At the time of the earthquake, the edges of the Cruces, Cau Cau and Valdivia rivers, which cross and surround the city, collapsed. The same process occurred in the surrounding arable land, causing significant geomorphologic changes. The land fell between 2 to 3 meters on average, forming new bodies of water, which have now become an integral part of the hydrological network of Valdivia. Following this, the Natural Sanctuary Carlos Anwandter (6.000 hectares) was created in the north of the city in 1981, as the first Ramsar site of the country. This sanctuary is recognized by ecologists for its high biodiversity. Similarly, the Valdivians value it for its recreational appeal, ease of accessibility and as a source of tourism. It is a beautiful landscape with an abundance of Black-necked Swans (Cygnus melancoryphus), Tagua chica (White-winged Coot)(Fulica leucoptera) and Tagua Común (Red-gartered Coot)(Fulica armillata), birds which mostly feed on the luchecillo (Braziliian Waterweed)(Egeria densa), which is predominantly found in the same wetland area.
Natural Sanctuary Carlos Anwandter. From left to right: Black-necked swans in the wetlands; flooded trees are evidence of the subsidence process; Local inhabitants enjoying the wetland. Photos: Paula Villagra
In the same way, new wetland areas emerged to the south of the city. Although these areas are briefly described in the literature in terms of their biodiversity, they have triggered scholars’ interest because of their effect on society. These wetland areas are highly valued by the community and the municipality, because they provide ecosystem services such as urban beautification, recreation and the regulation of temperatures and flooding.
South wetland areas. In these areas, nature and society interact in different manners (from left to right): Environmental education program facilities; the wetlands at the south of the city contribute to reduce the effect of floods; new suburbs use the natural slope to integrate the water system into the recreation areas. Photos: Paula Villagra
Safewarding wetland-neighborhoods
Immediately after the earthquake, nearly half the population of Valdivia (30,000 inhabitants) lost their property and were taken to the southern suburbs to settle in temporary shelters arranged by the national government. These were established in the same place where the new wetlands emerged, which provided water and free space. Over time, there has been a strong connection of the community to these places, and even today it is possible to observe how temporary shelters, placed between wetland areas in 1960, have been replaced by permanent houses, keeping the physical relation to wetlands. These houses have evolved into traditional neighborhoods, physically and emotionally rooted into the new urban landscape.
The Huachocopihue and Angachilla neighborhoods, for example, demonstrate a remarkable socio-ecological system. The neighbors have been actively engaged in taking actions to avoid the disappearance of wetlands, which are seen by real state agencies as available land for the construction of new suburbs. Within the last decade, residents have strongly contributed to protect the environment and through have ensured their participation in urban processes of Valdivia in the future. Indeed, the city of Valdivia has a socio-environmental network of 27 organizations engaged in increasing and improving existing interest, capacitates and actions for nature and society. Such a socio-ecological system was achieved by the constant encounter and rediscovery of nature.
Areas of Huachocopihue within the wetland network. From left to side: Houses are allocated next to more steady land; neighbors have created their own paths to circulate from their houses to the city through the tree areas of wetlands, hence, integrating daily activities with the natural system; the lower part of the wetland next to the neighborhood (houses at the back) collects rain water and drive it to the river. Photos: Paula Villagra
Rescuing memories
Another noteworthy event was the spontaneous response of the local community with regard to the imminent flooding of Lake Riñihue into the city. National and international engineers worked together with the community for two months to clear areas of the San Pedro River, because of which the lake was going to overflow and flood the town. Thus, the Valdivian community gathered in an historic process of managing nature, which is recalled today when they outline the urban landscape. Several small local business are named after “The Riñihuazo”, “The Riñihue” and “Earthquake”, among other names, which are shown in large signs outside the stores. These can be described as social earthquake traces, which constantly remind the community about both the catastrophe and opportunities triggered by a natural disturbance.
Creating new interpretation modes
The events mentioned above, among others, have been transformed into the 1960 Earthquake Museum of Valdivia, established in 2010. Besides, in 2013, a 1960 Earthquake Heritage Route was established by the Regional Department of the Ministry of the Environment supported by Trail of Chile Foundation and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). This route includes places where geomorphologic, ecologic and socio-economic changes can be interpreted.
Sights of the 1960 Earthquake Heritage Route including the west river promenade where it is possible to observe traces of subsidence; a boat trip including earthquake education; and a visit to the lower neighborhood areas where local factories were destroyed transforming the economy of inhabitants. Photos: Paula Villagra
Usually, the most known changes reported immediately after an earthquake include destroyed buildings, large cracks on the ground and streets covered by debris. Typically a community takes immediate and desperate measures to repair, clear and clean any visual trace, in order to restore normal life and to forget the memories of such a devastating event. The natural and social processes triggered by earthquakes are rarely highlighted, such as has occurred in Valdivia. Whether in a planned or spontaneous manner, and after the earthquake of 1960, new landscapes emerged and have prevailed over time. Their value is immeasurable, as they sustain cultural aspects of historical, ecological and social order, where the community, nature and natural dynamics coexist in an integrated manner.
Thus, it is remarkable how the urban landscapes of Valdivia have turned into a means of interpretation about the dynamics of nature. This highlights the importance of considering ecological and social aspects in urban planning after the disaster, in addition to the reconstruction of buildings only, particularly during the emergency and recovery periods after disaster. It is in these periods, when those aspects are commonly left aside in planning, by focusing the efforts into assisting the general public whose life and habitability is at risk.
However, it is the integrated approach which facilitates the adaptation of the urban dweller to the natural environment, and hence, community resilience. In Valdivia, this integrative approach has facilitated the development of an alternative city, and has successfully responded to challenges that are not commonly considered in urban planning, which in turn has reinforced the interrelations between city and nature.
Bibliography list used for this blog and for further reading:
Aldrich, D. (2011). The power of people: social capital’s role in recovery from the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Natural Hazards, 56, 595-611.
Coldinga, J., & Barthela, S. (2013). The potential of ‘Urban Green Commons’ in the resilience building of cities. Ecological Economics, 86(February), 156–166.
Grupo de Trabajo Terremoto (Cartographer). (2010). Plano Ciudad de Valdivia 1961
Guarda, G. (2001). Nueva Historia de Valdivia. Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile.
Guarda, G. (2009). Cuatro Siglos de Evolución Urbana Valdivia 1552-1910. Valdivia: Universidad Austral de Chile.
Hayashi, M. (2010). Water Revives Kobe Communities After the Great Hanshin Awaji Earthquake. Awaji: University of Hyogo, Awaji City, Japan.
Kirschbaum, J., & Sideroff, D. (2005). A Delayed Healing: Understanding the Fragmented Resilience of Gernika. In L. Vale & T. Campanella (Eds.), The Resilient City (pp. 159-180). New York: Oxford University Press.
Muñoz-Pedreros, A., Badilla, A., & Rivas, H. (1993). Evaluación del Paisaje en un Humedal del Sur de Chile: el caso del río Valdivia. Revista Chilena de Historia Natural, 66, 403-417.
Parker, L. H. (1960). La Epopeya del Riñihue. Ercilla: Sociedad Editora Ercilla Limitada, 1308(15 Junio), 16-17.
Pulso Consultores S. A. (2006). Anteproyecto memoria nuevo plan regulador comuna de Valdivia. In Estudio Actualización Plan Regulador Comunal de Valdivia (pp. 1-75. Available at: Santiago: Pulso Consultores S. A. http://www.munivaldivia.cl/regulador/doc/anteproy_memoria.pdf
República de Chile. (1960). Movimientos sísmicos de Mayo de 1960. Labor del gobierno en el período de emergencia. Santiago.
Rojas, C. (2010). Valdivia 1960: entre aguas y escombros. Valdivia: Ediciones Universidad Austral de Chile.
Skewes, J. C., Rehbein, R., & Mancilla, C. (2012). Ciudadanía y sustentabilidad ambiental en la ciudad: la recuperación del humedal Angachilla y la organización local en la Villa Claro de Luna, Valdivia, Chile. EURE, 38(113), 127-145. http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S0250-71612012000100006&script=sci_arttext
Villagra, P. (2012). Landscape change and urban resilience: the role of natural and urban landscapes in earthquake recovery of the city of Valdivia, Chile. Paper presented at the International Conference on Urban Sustainability and Resilience, London. ISSN 2051-1361
Watt, S. F. L., Pyle, D. M., & Mather, T. A. (2009). The influence of great earthquakes on volcanic eruption rate along the Chilean subduction zone. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 227, 399-407.
The prognosis for urbanization is challenging—in the next 40 years, urban population will double. Under the growing pressure of modern urban development, large parks are valued by people more than ever. From the beginning of city development, large parks have played a very special role; originally, they were sacred groves, places for royal residence and hunting activity in addition to acting as public parks. The first conference entirely dedicated to different aspects of large parks was initiated by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature in Sweden and the Association for Ekoparken, in Stockholm, with the support of leading Swedish universities and NGOs.
The first conference entirely dedicated to different aspects of large parks was initiated by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature in Sweden and the Association for Ekoparken, in Stockholm, with the support of leading Swedish universities and NGOs.
It is no coincidence that the initiators of this event were people engaged in the fight for Ekoparken (now named “The Royal National City Park”): Richard Murray and Henrik Waldenström. The Royal National City Park was inaugurated in 1995 by his majesty, Carl XVI Gustaf, the King of Sweden, and was declared the first national park in the world to have a special law protecting nature, culture and recreation values. This park is an important part of Stockholm’s blue-green infrastructure and covers an area of 27 square kilometers. It is a classic example of the transformation of a formal leisure and royal hunting park into a public facility, and one of the most famous and most visited park areas in Sweden, with rich biodiversity based, to a great extent, on a large number of old oaks and a range of unique historic landscapes.
Carl XVI Gustaf, the King of Sweden
Haga Park is the part of The Royal National City Park in Stockholm. Photo: Maria Ignatieva
Why were large parks chosen as a main emphasis of the conference? One of the keynote speakers, world famous American landscape ecologist, Richard Forman, clearly answered this question by emphasizing the importance of large parks (large patches of green) for preserving biodiversity, mitigating heat island effects and urban hydrology. Big parks are particularly treasured by most urban residents for recreation and are “a primary source of nature for human well-being in cities.” Large parks are the main “stepping” stones in urban green infrastructure and fulfill a variety of ecosystem services.
One of the big parks in Tokyo, Japan. Photo Maria Ignatieva
Large parks are an important basis for understanding cities’ natural and cultural histories, since some of them are oases left over from the original natural and semi-natural ecosystems. Big parks require particular attention and protection in developing countries, since they are the first green areas that are threatened to be reduced or even to completely disappear under the pressure of real estate prices. Thus, creating a network of people working with different aspects of large parks was also one of the main goals of the conference.
130 participants from 27 countries and six continents came to Stockholm. Presenters covered a wide range of visions for large parks in large cities, such as historical aspects, the role of such parks in the quality of urban life, creating sustainable green infrastructure and ecosystem services. Much attention was paid to the role of large parks in city planning and design and their relation to the European Landscape Convention.
The diversity and breadth of case studies of large parks around the world was striking. Some European cities, such as Stockholm and Moscow, are very lucky to have big national parks with wild nature within the city’s boundaries. Iranian, German, Colombian, Japanese and most U.S. cities are not so lucky—they tend to have “regular” public parks created in the 19th to early 20th centuries, in which tree groves and lawns are combined with water bodies and a wide range of recreational facilities. In some cases, in the absence of green resources in urban areas, such parks could include formal residential greens and even abandoned roads and railways.
Park Südgelände in Berlin is one of the most famous examples of including vegetation on abandoned railways in a public park. Photo Maria Ignatieva
It is also worth mentioning the role of Fedenatur, the European Association of Periurban Parks, where natural, fluvial and agricultural parks are located in metropolitan and peri-urban areas. Such parks can be found in Barcelona, Milan, Lyon and other cities in southern Europe.
Quite a few conference presenters discussed large parks in the broader context of urban green infrastructure. For example, Peter Clark pointed out that in 2009 in European cities, the proportion of green areas to total urban coverage ranged between 10 and 20 percent—a high proportion compared to 5 percent for Kuala Lumpur and 1.5 percent for Hong Kong, but less than Seoul’s 25 percent and Beijing’s 29 percent.
Park of the Summer Palace is an important part of Beijing’s green infrastructure. Photo: Maria Ignatieva
Clark expressed the importance of taking into consideration the multiplicity of economic, ecological, social and health impacts of urban green spaces. Today, not only big parks but wastelands, military exercising fields, old industrial sites, swamps, sport and recreation grounds, institutional gardens, private domestic gardens, allotment gardens, urban farms, boulevards, parkways, and roadside wedges should be re-valued. They can be “supporters” of as well as connectors to large urban parks.
In past centuries, when cities covered a rather small area, one could easily reach the nearest urban forest or pasture. With the growing congestion of industrial cities, fresh air, places for rest, berry picking and just walking in nature have started to become luxuries. In Stockholm, for example, the first public parks stemmed from formal royal parks, which were originally opened to the public from the middle of the 18th century (Kungsträdgården and Humlegården) under pressure from enlightenment actors. However, it took almost a hundred years for the city of Stockholm to plan and implement the first true public parks. In the late 19th century, two rather small parks, Strömparterren and Berzeli Park, were created. Djurgården, a former royal hunting ground, was situated just outside the built-up city and for many years compensated for the lack of public parks in central Stockholm.
Richard Murray, in his introductory presentation, demonstrated that in modern cities, land values vary a lot and even in very expensive places, such as New York, it is possible to find quite cheap pieces of land where green areas can be developed. If the costs and benefits of the ecosystem services that green areas provide were valued, developing green areas would be quite profitable.
The presentation by Mary Worrall and Sari Suomalainen on Birkenhead Park (U.K.) aroused particular interest among conference participants since it is the first publicly-funded park in the world to incorporate the concept of a park for people. This park was a catalyst and a model for the development of urban public parks in the U.S. and worldwide. The presenters’ analysis of social activities in this park uncovers the connection between the park’s history and today’s social use of the park.
Another European concept, the German “Volkspark” (People’s Park), flourished in the beginning of the 20th century. Such parks were based on natural landscapes and aimed to provide a wide range of recreational activities as well as to give work to unemployed people during the first years of WWI and the economic crises of the late 1920s.
A great example of a “Volkspark” is Amsterdamse Bos, which was developed in the 1920s and 30s with the help of 20,000 unemployed people. They turned empty agricultural land into a park full of diverse recreational facilities as well as amusing agricultural landscapes, such as a goat farm.
Parks and their role for biodiversity
In the densifying urbanized world, large parks are becoming special refuges for biodiversity. Thomas Elmquist, the guru of ecosystem services research from the Stockholm Resilience Center, discussed the importance of continuous green areas. The United Nations’ Ecosystem Millennium Assessment clearly demonstrated the value of large patches of urban greenery for biodiversity in general. Elmquist cited Ban Ki-Moon, secretary general of the United Nations, who said: “The principal message is that urban areas must offer better stewardship of the ecosystems on which they rely.” Elmquist provided recent costs of restoring waste lands, patches of urban forests and similar habitats and concluded that ecosystem services in big cities pay their costs of upkeep several times over.
Negative tendencies in large parks
Positive experiences from different case studies from around the world were overshadowed by sad stories of how great parks have lately been neglected and even ruined.
One such example is the Patte d’Oie Forest Reserve in Brazzaville, the Republic of the Congo. Benoit Fondu pointed out that rapid urbanization has “eaten” quite a big piece of this forest and has also resulted in unfavorable changes in fauna and flora. Benoit suggested ways to save the remnants of this treasured urban forest, including by creating a fence, and, most importantly, involving local communities in protection of the Reserve.
“Patte d’Oie Forest Reserve” in Brazzaville. Photo courtesy of Benoit Fondu
In the Iranian part of Kurdistan, in the city of Sanandaj, a large park called Deedgah has another kind of problem. A newly constructed highway has divided the park. The consequences are visible: there is now limited access, more noise and more inconvenience for the park’s visitors.
Deedgah and Mellat parks in Sandaj, Iran. Photo courtesy of Hooshmand Alizadeh
Similar problems are being experienced by the National Park, Losinij Ostrov, in Moscow, Russia. The Moscow Ring Road now passes through the National Park for 7.5 kilometers, fragmenting habitat and creating barriers for the park’s fauna.
However, there are solutions to mitigate such problems, such as ecoducts. Wildlife passages that have proven successful in Australia, the U.S., the Netherlands, Sweden and in other countries.
Ecoduct in Brisbane. Photo courtesy of Mel McGregor
Unfortunately, African countries seemed to be behind in solving the problems of large parks, especially in the fields of planning and design at the master plan level. Africa has the greatest national parks that are sources of pride for their respective nations, but urban parks urgently need care and awareness.
Nevertheless, there were some positive examples presented from Africa. A newly developed large park now exists in Ibadan, Nigeria. It was developed on a spot that previously had inaccessible, overgrown vegetation. Now, it is a popular spot for urban recreation. Another case study came from Beira, the second largest city of Mozambique, where a large, multifunctional city park, Parque Rio Chiveve, is being planned along the river. Here, unique White, Red and Black Mangrove ecosystems will be preserved and included in the park’s conceptual design.
Interestingly enough, a newly presented proposal—Medellin River Park in Colombia—has a similar aim: to restore the river’s ecosystem and bring it back to its citizens.
Human rights
Graham Fairclough brought up a very important point for discussion at this conference. He argued that urban parks should be seen not apart from the city, but as a part of the city. He asked: “Can a place be called a city if it has no parks?” His answer was: “Landscape is a culturally-enriched concept owned by everyone.” The Florence Charter and the European Landscape Convention are dealing with landscapes and proclaim that “landscape is an area as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” and further that “landscape is at the heart of sense of place and identity.” Thus, parks must be seen as an important part of human rights. Citizens, therefore, have rights to participate in and influence the development of and changes to urban green areas.
Diversity of large parks
During the conference, some 20 parks had their own presentations, and many more parks, either already in existance or under design, were mentioned in thematic presentations. The diversity of approaches in research as well as in existing design and management practices was addressed through presentations on such subjects as transforming royal European parks to important green areas; restoring and adjusting parks to modern use, such as in Pavlovsky Park, the biggest landscape park in St. Petersburg; evaluating old English parks in Wales; discussing the activities of the Pittsburgh Park Conservancy; designing and managing Tehran’s Laleh Park; readjusting old Moscow parks to modern green infrastructure; mitigating the heat island effect of built-up areas, and much more.
Pavlovsky Park in St. Petersburg. Photo: Maria Ignatieva
Laleh Park, Tehran. Photo courtesy of Sanaz Shobeiri
There were quite a few examples of recently designed public parks: Emscher Landscape Park in Germany, a series of large parks in the Netherlands, a new nature park in Copenhagen, and designs for parks as part of green wedges in Swedish Gothenburg, Silesi Park in Poland, Ataturk Culture Park in Antalya, Turkey, and Flushing Meadow-Vorona Park in New York City.
The breadth of this park research opened our eyes to such new aspects as social study on crime in urban parks in Malaysia, community response to environmental changes resulting from Yatsu-higata Park in Tokyo, or fauna passing between urban parks in Brisbane, Australia. Likewise, presentation on park arthropods helped in understanding the significance of new research and the connection of arthropods to practical issues for protection and maintenance of large park ecosystems.
An impressive example was presented by Carmela Canzonieri, who shared a design proposal for a large park in Mexico City. The proposed park would be developed on an abandoned airfield. Ambitious designers are dreaming of reintroducing waters that have been buried for centuries and of creating a multifunctional public space.
Julia Czerniak, the leading large parks researcher from the United States, gave a special contribution. She talked about recently implemented parks such as Fresh Kills (south of Manhattan in New York on Staten Island), as well as examples from Singapore and Qian Hai Water City in China. Czerniak emphasized the importance of an ecological design approach and the use of knowledge and principles of urban ecology in designing and planning large parks.
The practical output of the Stockholm conference on big parks was the suggestion to include a section for large urban parks within the newly created organization “World Urban Parks.”
Maria Ignatieva, Richard Murray and Henrik Waldenström Uppsala and Stockholm
Richard Murray, PhD in Economics from the University of Stockholm, is president of Ekoparken Association since 1993, initiated a local political “green” party in 1978, and is senior advisor to Global Utmaning (Global challenge).
If there is a take-home message that ecologists and conservationists need to shout louder and louder, it is this: Re-wild parts of your yard!
Interior-forest specialist birds are reported to primarily require large, undisturbed forest areas in which to breed (Archer et al. 2019). Why do these species need interior forest conditions? Conservationists and research suggest that these species are vulnerable to the increased predators that are found in fragmented areas. Also, the abundance of food (e.g., insects) is often reduced when fragmentation limits the amount of vegetation and there may not be enough resources to raise chicks. Conventional thinking is that they avoid urban areas because these areas contain fragmented forests.
Over the years, my students and I have been conducting research to determine those forest birds that do and do not breed in urban areas. For example, in a review paper by Archer et al. (2019), we classified 16 species of birds as interior-forest specialists. Three species, Norther Parulas (Setophaga americana), Pileated Woodpeckers (Dryocopus pileatus), and Summer Tanagers (Piranga rubra), were all categorized as interior-forest specialists (Figure 1). However, one thing we noticed right off is all of the studies that helped defined these three birds as interior-forest species were primarily conducted in the Northeast of the United States.
Living in Gainesville, Florida, I and others noticed that Northern Parulas, Pileated Woodpeckers, and Summer Tanagers were calling throughout the breeding summer in multiple neighborhoods in Gainesville. Granted, these neighborhoods are typically older and contain large trees, but this evidence was anecdotal. Perhaps these three species do breed in urban neighborhoods. Pileated woodpeckers are a non-migratory species that nest and roost in cavities that they excavate in large, dead trees. Summer Tanagers and Northern Parulas are Neotropical migrant songbirds that breed in the United States and migrate to Central or South America for the winter. To explore this question, graduate student Natalie Pegg and I measured whether older neighborhoods in Gainesville, FL, contain enough vegetation to allow these birds to breed. Our overall thought was that perhaps something is different for birds breeding in the Southeast versus the Northeast United States.
We selected two older residential neighborhoods in Gainesville, FL. These neighborhoods are characterized by significant tree canopy cover (about 43% tree canopy cover on average), small forest patches occupying about 15% of the total neighborhood area, and each yard was a bit different from another yard in terms of the amount of lawn, trees, and vertical heigh structure (Figure 2). We set up bird survey transects and asked: 1) Do these species consistently occur in residential areas throughout the breeding season, and 2) are there vegetative features that seemed to attract each of these species?
Figure 2. (B) Representative yards in West Hills neighborhoods. Credit: Natalie Pegg
Aside from striking up interesting conversations with local residents — imagine walking through neighborhoods early in the morning, peering in peoples’ yards with binoculars — we detected quite a few breeding individuals throughout the summer. Northern Parulas were the most numerous (660 detections), followed by Pileated Woodpeckers (77 detections), and Summer Tanagers (51 detections). These three species were seen consistently throughout the breeding season (May–August). We concluded that these species were indeed breeding in these neighborhoods. Now, some may argue that we did not determine whether they had successfully raised offspring, which we did determine. It is possible that the breeding success is less than in areas of contiguous forest. However, we did see small family groups of at the end of the season flying about. Also, because they were consistently found throughout the season (and anecdotally, they do come back year after year), we were confident that they were breeding with some success.
Now, which parts of the neighborhoods are they found most often? How do the designs of yards and neighborhoods provide suitable breeding/foraging habitats? We determined that all three species were primarily found when vertical height structure was most prevalent within 5 meters of where a bird was spotted. What is vertical height structure? When you look from the ground to the top of the trees, the vegetation in-between is called vertical height structure. All three species occurred most often in areas with lots of vertical height structures. Additionally, Pileated woodpeckers and Summer Tanagers were found most often when small forest patches were nearby. Pileated woodpeckers were also more common in areas with more tree snags. Snags are dead or dying trees that are foraging for nesting habitats for woodpeckers. Northern Parulas were more common in areas with more oaks and also in areas with Spanish moss hanging on the trees. Overall, it seems like all three species gravitated towards areas where there were essentially lots of trees and increased vertical height structures. For more details on the study, see https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/UW500.
Interestingly, Northern Parulas are known to nest in tree epiphytes such as Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides). In Gainesville, Spanish moss is everywhere and readily available as a nesting substrate, In the northeast, it does not occur, but beard moss (Usnea longissima) does (Moldenhauer and Regelski 2020). However, beard moss is a sensitive species that tends to be found primarily in undisturbed, old-growth forests (Wetmore 2002). Thus, a partial reason for Northern Parulas not breeding in northeast urban areas may be because of the lack of beard moss in these urban landscapes!
In conclusion, we do believe that with enough vegetation in a yard and neighborhood, these species will breed in or near your yard in cities located in the southeastern United States. Probably the limiting factor is the vertical height structure. Re-wild certain areas of your yard! You can do this by planting areas of trees and bushes and simply not mowing this area (eventually, succession takes over and you get lots of vertical height structure). I (Mark Hostetler) have always been curious about and advocating that urban habitats do matter! I have blogged about the importance of stopover habitat in urban areas for migrants and the creation of residential areas that conserve biodiversity. If there is a take-home message that ecologists and conservationists need to shout louder and louder, it is this: small bits matter!
Natalie is currently a graduate research assistant at Kansas State University studying the demography of mourning doves in Kansas. She received her master’s degree from the University of Florida in the spring of 2022. There, she studied the use of residential neighborhoods during the breeding season by three avian species generally classified as interior forest specialists. Her research interests include urban ecology, resource selection, and habitat conservation.
Archer, J. M. J., M. E. Hostetler, G. Acomb, and R. Blair. 2019. A Systematic Review of Forest Bird Occurrence in North American Forest Fragments and the Built Environment. Landscape and Urban Planning 185:1–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2019.01.005
Moldenhauer, R. R. and Regelski, D. J. (2020). Northern Parula (Setophaga americana), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A. F. Poole, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.norpar.01
Wetmore, C. (2002). Conservation assessment for Usnea longissima Ach. In the Upper Great Lakes national forests. United States Forest Service, Eastern Region, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Permaculture is a fascinating, humble, and endless exploration of natural sciences and it reconnects with Nature through a better understanding of the living world.
Like seeds planted in my brain
The first time I ever heard about permaculture was in 2016. I discovered this life philosophy in the French documentaries “The World of Tomorrow” (by Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent), and then in “A Quest for Meaning” (by Nathanaël Coste and Marc de la Ménardière). The latter explained the inefficiencies of our globalized socio-economic system, and how food sovereignty through natural farming methods can be part of the solution to the current environmental and socio-economic crisis. More than just producing food, permaculture is a collaboration between Humans and Nature that repairs soil, gives back pride to biodiversity, uses water carefully, builds the resilience of local economies, and nurtures people’s social existence.
From seeds to reality
I wanted this permaculture life to become part of my reality. However, I have always been living and working in a city and never had a short-term plan to move to peri-urban or rural areas. Instead of postponing to “one day”, I thought what about practicing permaculture in my current situation with what I had and where I was? After all, aren’t imperfection and incompleteness part of the authentic journey?
Curiosity as a first step
Ever since fall 2019, I transformed my Parisian apartment into a chaotic urban jungle. I started to plant “bio” fruits and vegetables’ stones or roots (instead of wasting them) in pots, and to observe the miracle of life. Plants were growing by themselves, I basically had so little to do.
Photo: Lamiaa Biaz
During the strict lockdown in 2020, I had even more time to take care of the plants and try to grow almost everything I could. I harvested tomatoes, potatoes, aromatic herbs, etc. that I joyfully cooked. I even tried to plant coffee seeds, but I obtained nothing and sprouted ginger that turned into a very nice exotic plant.
Photo: Lamiaa Biaz
Even if I practiced permaculture at a small scale, I learned a lot about the living world just by testing and observing: plants that can or can’t grow together — like us humans in society; soil that should be covered — like humus in forests; plants that thrive for life — like survivalists; and farm seeds that can infinitely reproduce – like all Nature species.
So simple and so complex
To go further in the journey, I attended a permaculture internship and visited a few farms. What struck me most was the duality: it looks so simple yet, in reality, it is so complex. Permaculture is a fascinating, humble, and endless exploration of natural sciences and it reconnects with Nature through a better understanding of the living world.
Photo: Lamiaa Biaz
From all I have learned, the permaculture theory that inspired me the most was the “Do Nothing” by the Japanese microbiologist Masanobu Fukuoka (1), who considers that Nature is abundant and inherently programmed to do its job very well. Almost no human intervention is needed. Under a simple appearance, he succeeded in developing a natural farming method, based on holistic natural sciences knowledge. This method uses no chemical fertilizer, no pesticide, no soil plow, no prepared compost, no machine, no fossil fuel, less water, and less work. Without polluting and degrading soils, his rice yields were as high as the most productive farms in Japan. In his book The One-straw Revolution, Masanobu Fukuoka claimed that the natural farming method he used “throws scientific knowledge and traditional farming craft right out the window”.
I couldn’t help thinking: if farm seeds are naturally available for free and can infinitely reproduce (2), if Nature is so abundant, and if Masanobu Fukuoka is right, then why do poverty and scarcity exist?
Life industrialization for a global chaos
I used to have a transactional and utilitarian relationship with everything. I used to be at the center of my own world, and I had a list of personal needs to fulfill. Since I started the permaculture journey, my perspective has changed. I now see plants, soils, and biodiversity as beings or living entities – as opposed to assets – and myself as part of Nature’s world. The moment we, Humans, are separated from Nature, we lose meaning.
Our current globalized system treats Humans and Nature as production factors creating value, the biggest part of which is captured by the top of the pyramid. The 85 richest people are as wealthy as the rest and poorest half of the world (3). The richest top 1% of the total population have more than twice as much as 6.9 billion people (4) and earned 82% of the wealth created in 2017(5). Half of humanity is living on less than $5.50 a day (4). 75% of terrestrial environments are severely altered by human actions. Of a total of 8 million species, almost a million are threatened with extinction within decades (6). Are we efficient?
When it comes to the globalized food production system, urbanization, industrialization, and infrastructure construction are cited as major factors of soils degradation (therefore of arable lands loss) (7). Agricultural expansion is responsible for 90% of deforestation worldwide (8). Industrial agriculture (based on fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides, monoculture, and genetical modifications) is responsible for the degradation of a third of earth soil (9). However, soil is a necessary condition for life and a nonrenewable resource relative to the human lifespan (10). Also, industrial agriculture “is among the leading causes of water pollution, especially in most high-income countries and many emerging economies” (11). Finally, 62% of species are imperiled by agricultural activity (12). Is this our legacy for future generations?
As for land use: one-third of global agricultural lands are used for cropland (including for human and animal food, energy production, and industrial use), two-thirds are used for grazing livestock (13). 33% of croplands are used for livestock feed production (14), while livestock supports nutrition for only 1.3 billion people (15). Images of farm animal cruelty are hard to witness. The food produced travels across continents which generates even more greenhouse gas emissions. Food waste accounts for around 30% of the total food produced (16), and every 5 seconds a child under 15 dies around the world (17) while s/he could have been fed. Is this humanity?
Aren’t natural and local the new beautiful?
Since 1974, when Bill Mollison and David Holmgren co-developed permaculture philosophy, the number of permaculturists flourished and so many of them succeeded in turning a desert into a meadow just by using natural farming methods and mimicking Nature. For example, in France, Pierre Rabhi envisioned decades ago agroforestry/permaculture as a new society model, and Perrine and Charles Hervé-Gruyer founded the famous farm “la ferme du Bec Hellouin”; in India, Vandhana Shiva led a farm seed revolution; in Zimbabwe, Allan Savory used livestock to reverse desertification; in Australia, Geoff Lawton pioneered permaculture in the seventies and developed programs in the Middle East to help poor populations to access food. Permaculture can be practiced in small areas (such as 1 hectare) and could yield 3 to 4 times as much as conventional agriculture (18).
In the middle of the current ecological collapse and worldwide socio-economic crisis, why not build resilience at local levels, in rural and urban areas, by reconnecting Humans with Nature? By giving people lands and letting them freely garden farm seeds, they could use natural farming methods, be actors of their own life, and produce a part of their own consumption. This would revive Nature in rural and urban areas, recreate biodiverse ecosystems, sequester carbon in soils, create massive jobs, feed people, and give them back autonomy, joy, and meaning.
Do they really care about us?
If permaculture, practiced by communities, can locally ensure food security, and recreate natural ecosystems, this would only represent a small fraction of 22% of global agricultural lands, which are used for human food (excluding meat and dairy products), energy production, and industrial needs (textile, cosmetics, medical, etc.) (19).
To have a global impact, and reduce negative environmental externalities of modern agriculture, industries will need to rely more on natural farming methods, including for livestock management. Also, to end farm animal cruelty and reduce industrial land use, the 1.3 billion people able to access meat and dairy products must change their diet and living standards. Most importantly, since minimizing environmental and social negative impacts goes against maximizing profits, governments who must regulate business practices might need to be separated from corporates to unlock the current political inertia.
The power to change sits within us
Individuals form the ultimate group that can make a difference. Only they own the power to make change happen. The journey starts with the awareness of the current ecological collapse and global socio-economic crisis and the development of a critical thinking mindset to avoid greenwashing traps. Then, the quest for meaning should be considered because it offers opportunities to garden the Self, find a “why”, and be part of communities creating positive solutions. Ultimately, the connection with Nature gives more meaning and perspective: realizing the magnificence of Nature forces us to cultivate humility and respect, and to understand that Nature is a condition for life. Our role is to sustain life, not our standards. Life.
(6) Figure produced by the latest Living Planet Index: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/
(7) “la perte de terres cultivables par les effets conjoints de l’industrialisation, de l’urbanisation, de la construction d’infrastructures de transports (routière, portuaire et aériennes) représente une cause souvent méconnue, persistante et considérable de perte de terres cultivables qui sont fréquemment de très haute fertilité » Extrait de les limites de la production alimentaire Ed. Dunod
(16) “globally, around 14 percent of food produced is lost between harvest and retail, while an estimated 17 percent of total global food production is wasted (11 percent in households, 5 percent in the food service and 2 percent in retail).” https://www.un.org/en/observances/end-food-waste-day
(17) The death causes are lack of access to water, sanitation, proper nutrition or basic health services: https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/child-under-15-dies-every-five-seconds-around-world-un-report
(18) According to Professor Olivier de Schueter in the French documentary “the world of tomorrow” by Cyril Dion
(19) Looking back at the figures cited (13) and (14), cropland, including human food, animal food, energy production and industrial use, account for 33% of global agricultural lands. 11% of agricultural lands are used to feed livestock, and the remaining 22% for human food (including unprocessed and processed food), industrial use (such as textile, medical products, cosmetics, etc.) and energy production.
Smart cities are coming. It is important that they be as much about nature, health, and wellbeing as traffic flows, crime detection, and evermore efficient provision of utilities.
As yet, there are no smart cities. I read of plenty of people and organisations working hard to create them. However, so far, we have had initiatives, policies, strategies, and some projects, but no examples of cities where it all comes together in a genuinely city-wide way. In addition, most of us are still wondering what is meant by the term “smart city”. When I read that Bill Gates was planning to build a smart city from scratch in Arizona[1] and that the global market for smart cities will be more than a trillion dollars per annum by 2022,[2] I thought I should find out more.
It is my understanding that smart cities will use internet-connected sensors to supply information that will make them more efficient. Sam Musa[3] defines the smart city as one that engages its citizens and connects with its infrastructure electronically—a process whereby the city becomes part of the Internet of Things (IoT), something for which the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has now agreed standards.[4] Most of the efforts to develop smart cities have involved the monitoring of transportation networks and power and water supplies, with other projects looking at waste management, crime, educational establishments, and hospitals. Stated aims are to reduce costs and resource consumption, with many cities interested in improving communications between officials, service providers, and citizens. There is much excitement over the possibility of cities monitoring activity in real time and being able to adjust service provision, in some cases immediately by remote-control. The hope is that the smart city will be able to adapt more effectively to climate perturbations, demographic changes and the budgetary cuts being made in most developed countries.
As I said in my opening remarks, although the smart city is still more of an aspiration than a reality, many cities have initiated programs and projects. The European Union has smart city projects under the auspices of the European Digital Agenda,[5] and there are similar initiatives in cities in North America, Asia, and the Middle East. According to Boyd Cohen,[6] the top ten smart cities are Vienna, Toronto, Paris, New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, and Barcelona. In North America, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver are said to be leading the way.
I will describe projects from some of these cities in order to provide an insight into current thinking and priorities. Since 2011, Vienna has been setting ambitious targets for the management and consumption of energy, with a strong emphasis on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.[7] Toronto is working with a Google company to create a community in the eastern waterfront that will use connected technology to provide self-driving vehicles and “climate-friendly energy systems”.[8] In 2014, the Innovation Path of Paris was launched.[9] This puts people at the heart of the initiative. It is looking for modernisation of the administration for better services and places great importance on ingenuity. Themes include better planning and transportation and more efficient resource consumption. Under the Ingenuity heading, resilience, revegetation and the circular economy get a mention. The authorities in Paris have recently attracted attention for their initiatives to promote urban greening (including the green roof law that turned out not to be a law).[10] However it is not clear how the smart city agenda is being integrated with urban greening initiatives.
In New York City, there has been much excitement over talking lamp posts. Street lamps send messages to smart phones. There is a serious aspect to this: ubiquitous street lamps, with their access to power, could become a useful way of bringing about a range of smart city projects.[11]
London has a congestion-charging system which uses vehicle license plate recognition software. Police in the United Kingdom use the same technology to operate a nation-wide vehicle tracking system. The companies behind these vehicle-tracking operations are also active in developing the sensors and software for the smart city, working with Urban Systems Engineers at Imperial College[12] and other institutions, who are looking for new opportunities to tackle urban problems. License-plate recognition is just the beginning – algorithms that allow computers to recognise things will become increasing important, speeding up the identification, mapping, and analysis of all kinds of objects, living and inert, static, and moving.
Tokyo, which will host the Olympic Games in 2020, has put energy security and efficiency and showcasing technology as the key objectives of its smart city program. One initiative involves the relocation of utilities below ground to allow more space for advertising, emergency information, hotspots and power outlets for pop-up businesses.[13]
Berlin sees the smart city as an interdisciplinary process which uses information and communication technologies to make the city more efficient, healthier, more sustainable, more livable and cleaner. Berlin’s smart city strategy[14] is comprehensive and refers to the need to maintain green space and unsealed surfaces and evaporation, as required by its urban climate plan. However, there is no mention of biodiversity in the city’s smart city strategy (I checked).
Hong Kong pioneered the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in smart cards. Hong Kong citizens access public transport and pay at convenience stores and fast-food restaurants with their Octopus smart cards, which were launched in 1997.[15] Hong Kong also pioneered the use of smart cards for use in libraries, buildings, car parks and other facilities.
The technology has spread to other cities in China and across the world.[16]
The smart city agenda has a strong green emphasis regarding reducing the production of carbon dioxide, through the operation of smart electricity supply grids, increasing efficiency and harnessing low-carbon energy supplies. Nature, however, in terms of soil, water, habitats and species, does not usually feature in smart city thinking. There are themes and initiatives which could bring nature into the planning and operation of smart cities, and I consider some of them here.
Thermal image of living wall, Rubens at the Palace Hotel, London. Smart cities could continuously monitor habitat and microclimate across the whole conurbation. Image: Courtesy of Victoria BID
We know that water, soil,and vegetation modifies urban microclimates. Studies by Akbari[17] and others since the 1990s have shown how shade and evapotranspiration provide summer cooling and winter wind-shielding. Now researchers are placing sensors beneath and upon green roofs and green walls to understand how buildings are protected from the extremes of weather. An example of this is the work in Vienna by Scharf and others on green walls.[18] The next step with this research will be to place temperature and humidity sensors and thermal cameras across whole precincts, to understand how the microclimates of whole neighbourhoods change through each day, through the seasons and extreme weather events.
The measurement of rainwater flows through downpipes, into tanks, and drains can also be added to this capability. City planners will be able to identify places where green infrastructure is urgently needed to improve microclimate and drainage, and the information will allow architects and urban designers and those planning, design and operating buildings and streets to be more sophisticated. Software that can monitor weather forecasts and remotely empty rainwater tanks in advance of downpours in order to avert flooding already exists.[19] Such systems could become city-wide, not only reducing flood risk, but also boosting irrigation rates of roof gardens and other irrigated plantings in advance of heatwaves.
Global positioning system (GPS) technology allows organisations to follow vehicles and equipment like cell phones, but these techniques are also being used by biologists to follow free-ranging and migratory animals.[20] Although there are policies that promote the creation city-wide ecological networks, the planning and enhancement of these networks tend to be based on theory rather than the observation of the movement of individuals of various species through the city. GPS technology could be applied to the study of the movement of wildlife through cities, helping planners to identify barriers to movement and where best to create new habitat.
Less intrusive than tags are cameras (including camera-traps)[21] and listening devices. The ultrasonic calls that bats make, for example, enable us to identify species and to plot the places where bats feed and the routes that bats take when they commute between roosting and feeding sites. Permanently stationed bat detectors can automatically monitor and map calls in real time. This is already being done by University College London in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London, for example.[22] It is easy to imagine such a scheme being expanded to cover a whole city, so that habitat networks for bats could be monitored and improved. As well as bats, many other species can be identified by sounds, from insects to birds, to whole ecosystems, so that work of Krause[23] and his natural soundscapes could be brought into the city, in a way that will help us to green the city in a more effective and informed way. Machine learning will mean that the identification and mapping of habitats, species and green infrastructure types using aerial photography, cameras and camera-traps with both visible and invisible wavelengths can be expanded and refined.
In conclusion, it seems that smart cities are coming. However, it is important that smart cities are as much about nature, health, and wellbeing as traffic flows, crime detection, and evermore efficient provision of utilities. Making the city more permeable to both wildlife and people is a process that could be informed by bringing sensors that monitor the movement of wildlife. Climate change adaptation using natural interventions is already on the agenda of many cities. However, the efficacy of green infrastructure types and combinations in providing cooling and absorbing rainwater will be significantly improved through both detailed and wide-scale real-time measurement of temperature, humidity, evapotranspiration rate and flows. Combining this data with maps of hardship and deficiency will help cities to become smarter in the way they prioritise greening efforts.
In 2008 the London Natural History Society celebrated its 150th anniversary with a conference on ‘London’s Natural History: past, present and future’. I was asked to consider future prospects. What changes might we expect in London’s natural history in fifty year’s time, and what are the prospects for the Society? Whilst I recognised that making predictions about future ecological changes is notoriously hazardous, I soon found that I had more concerns about the future of the Society. With an ageing membership and few young recruits the prospects were not looking good.
So I called my contribution ‘2058: Plenty of wildlife but where are the naturalists?’. If bodies like London’s Natural History Society were to survive it would require a revolutionary new approach and I suggested that this might be possible by means of the Internet. Four years later I am convinced that the Internet is not only crucial to the survival of natural history, but it will bring about a renaissance that offers great opportunities.
Those of us working in urban ecology today owe a great debt to the naturalists of the 19th Century who first investigated the flora and fauna associated with major cities. In the UK there has been a long tradition of botanical exploration which had its origins in the quest for medicinal herbs. Later the blossoming of natural history as part of a wider understanding and popularization of natural sciences led to the formation of numerous societies, from local field clubs to august bodies such as the Royal Society. The enormous growth of interest in natural history at the height of the industrial revolution led to new natural history societies being established in many British towns and cities such as Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol and London.
They were remarkably popular. During the 1860s onwards their field excursions attracted hundreds of participants. Manchester had 550 people attending one such gathering. These societies were subsequently instrumental in organizing the systematic recording of Britain’s natural history, and they produced a wealth of information about nature in and around the cities where their members lived. Amateur naturalists specializing in particular groups of organisms collected most of these records. Their taxonomic approach produced an important legacy of studies relating to individual cities, especially through distribution maps and atlases of birds and plants. Natural history societies were extremely important in documenting and recording the flora and fauna of their local areas, providing a vital template for later ecological studies that cut across taxonomic boundaries.
Britain was not alone. In the City of New York formal study of the flora began with John Torrey’s catalogue of plants in 1819. With creation of the New York (Bronx) Botanical Garden a new initiative was promoted under the aegis of the Torrey Botanical Club to collect plant species from the whole metropolitan area. Many species were collected from localities that have since been developed. Landscapes have changed, and natural habitats have been reduced, but the legacy of these early botanical investigations is still vitally important. John Kieran’s classic 1959 book on the Natural History of New York City could not have been written without the countless army of naturalists and other specialists who knew the intricacies of the city’s wildlife and wild spaces.
Precisely the same was happening in most developed countries. It was a time when individuals could pursue their interests in great depth, secure in the support of friends and colleagues around them in their local societies. These naturalists provided the backbone for our understanding of natural history.
But why does this pursuit of natural history by amateurs matter to present day urban ecology and the management of towns and cities? There are two main reasons. One is the wealth of information already alluded to. It is fair to say that most of what we know about the distribution of species comes from the work of amateur naturalists. The way information has been collected has been progressively refined and most modern studies are done in ways that make them directly applicable to broader urban ecological studies. Without the work of these dedicated naturalists our knowledge of urban ecology would be much reduced.
The second reason is the fact that local naturalists form an important constituency. They are the people who know which species occur where. They can have considerable influence on the planning and management of towns and cities. Their voice is vitally important in a world where large numbers of people are divorced from nature. When we talk about community involvement in biodiversity it is the informed naturalists who are the key players.
Looking ahead I am acutely aware that profound ecological changes will affect cities throughout the world over coming decades. As climate change really starts to bite it will become increasingly urgent to record and measure the biological components of such changes. There will be a continuing role for specialists in natural history, even more so than today; not only surveying, recording and cataloguing flora and fauna, but also alerting decision makers to the ecological consequences of new conditions, including new colonisers, and those that will be lost.
Central to all of this will be a crucial need for amateur naturalists who are good taxonomists.
Yet membership of natural history societies is gradually, but inexorably, getting older. The eminent naturalist Richard Fitter warned of the danger when he said, “if the London Natural History Society fails to recruit younger people to learn identification skills, the Society itself will become an endangered species.” Sadly, as we lose older members their skills and expertise go with them. Every natural history society is faced with the same dilemma. They all have a remarkable body of knowledge and expertise in their ageing membership. We need to capitalise on this great asset for the future. Action is required now to make the most of this expertise in training the next generation.
But it will require a radical shift of emphasis to meet the challenges ahead. First we need to attract younger members into natural history and then train them so that they become proficient naturalists.
But how do we do this?
A budding naturalist photographs a centipede in his school yard for identification on iSpot. Photo by David Goode.
The Internet is now beginning to provide answers. When the LNHS held its conference in 2008 the revolution in social networking was well underway and it already had implications for natural history. The increased use of digital and mobile-phone cameras led to a surge of natural history photography with thousands of people using web sites such as Flickr. Many photographs were posted by people who had relatively little knowledge of natural history, but others added notes confirming or correcting their identifications. The power of the Internet to stimulate interest in natural history was clearly demonstrated and I suggested to the LNHS that it might be used to bring in new blood.
Here was a great opportunity for natural history societies to step in and use their skills. They could aid verification by providing sound taxonomic expertise. A dedicated section of Flickr devoted to London’s flora and fauna might use LNHS specialists as mentors providing comments and guidance. Some initiatives of this kind were already underway. The Open Air Laboratories Network (OPAL) run by Imperial College London jointly with the UK National Biodiversity Network and the Natural History Museum already had a number of schemes up and running, including some in London. They were open to anyone with an interest in nature and were designed to inspire a new generation of field naturalists and at the same time encourage the development of citizen science. It seemed that the LNHS would do well to work with them.
The smartphone is the new butterfly net
The smartphone and apps revolution has transformed the digital landscape over the past few years and with it the prospects for natural history. We now have iSpot, the Open University’s wildlife spotting social network which has grown enormously since it was launched in 2009. It currently has 22,000 registered users who have made over 150,000 observations, resulting in over 7,000 species being identified. Most of these were identified within minutes of photos being posted on iSpot.
It has been said that the mobile phone is the 21st century equivalent of the butterfly net. We are moving into a different world.
Social networking of the kind promoted by iSpot offers the opportunity for anyone with a mobile phone to become a naturalist. It is a new kind of society, linked by a common interest and where beginners feel comfortable. They are encouraged to learn more by gaining credits for their competence. Its not unlike the badges earned by scouts, but here the end result is to produce competent naturalists who may well go on to become the expert taxonomists of the future. Professor Jonathan Silvertown, Director of iSpot, tells me that the results are shared with all the major wildlife agencies in the UK, so not only is it providing a learning opportunity but it also contributes to our ‘official’ body of knowledge. But iSpot is already operating on a much wider geographical basis than the UK and has plans to become a global network.
Why is this relevant to towns and cities? The fact is that most people live in urban areas and that is where young people will find their most immediate contact with nature. They don’t have to go off into the wilds to photograph unusual creatures. Indeed many photos are done with the support of teachers at schools in their local neighborhood. One of the commonest photos on iSpot is a species of ladybird now commonly found in houses and gardens, though it only recently arrived in the UK.
The prospects for community based science programmes are enormous. Mobile phones provide satellite location down to a few metres and the Internet can provide expertise and keys for identification of species. Already there are numerous apps for identifying birds, plants and many other groups of species. New York area parks have an app that can identify plants by taking a photo of the leaves. It has become possible to develop recording schemes using citizen science on a scale never contemplated before. They could be designed to investigate and record biological responses to climate change, using a large number of observers all contributing to the same data bank.
Similarly the public could be encouraged to record the spread of introduced pests and diseases or to catalogue newly colonising species; or simply to map the distribution of popular species in towns and cities. Every city could have an ID app for major groups such as plants, birds, butterflies, dragonflies, and other common insects. The US Department of Agriculture has produced a scheme called Open Tree Map allowing residents to record all the trees in a city. A fine example is Philly Tree Map, which aims to build a total inventory of Philadelphia’s urban forest. The power of the Internet is so enormous it takes us into completely new fields of activity that could be extremely productive.
The approach is very different from anything that natural history societies have traditionally done before, but it gives hope that the pursuit of natural history can be revitalised. It is possible too that the role of specialists or mentors will take on a new significance. Many naturalists will tell you that it was a particular teacher or enthusiast who set them on the road to natural history. The expertise of specialists in natural history societies could be one of our greatest assets in generating enthusiasm among the younger generation. Perhaps some of them will emerge to become Internet celebrities.
Predicting the future is full of uncertainties but we can be sure that the opportunities presented by the Internet have enormous implications for learning about the natural history and ecology of places where people live.
It may even ensure a future for the pursuit of natural history itself.
Every month we feature a Global Roundtable in which a group of people respond to a specific question in The Nature of Cities.
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Hover over a name to see an excerpt of their response…click on the name to see their full response.
Maria Aragão, Lisbon As far as plants are concerned and, since even the most naturalized of urban settings is man-made, it is of the utmost importance to have proper knowledge of plants.
Amy Bowen, Lincoln From a UTVC perspective, better knowledge of plants and, thereby, success of nature-based green cities can be catalyzed by science and innovation, collaboration, and knowledge mobilization. Urban forests are novel ecosystems and sound science is needed to underpin the entire value-chain.
Luis Camargo, Bogota Taking a big view perspective, the knowledge of plants should ultimately come from the day-to-day relation established with plants in the city. Appropriating our role as citizen naturalists is an essential aspect of this.
Martha Fajardo, Bogota Learning and respecting the ways of today’s indigenous and traditional peoples, and integrating them into environmental and developmental considerations, will prove indispensable for the survival of our biodiversities.
Andrew Grant, Bath Botanic gardens are places of science where an extraordinary diversity of plants representing multiple biomes and habitats inspire not only wonder in botany but wonder in the physical and emotional impact that can be generated by different plant species.
Richard Hallett, Durham Now, as we plan for the future, we are beginning to think about how to maximize the benefits trees and plants provide the city.
Mark Hostetler, Gainesville A continuum exists between highly manicured landscapes that contain mainly monoculture turfgrass and exotic plants to totally wild yards that contain mainly native plants. The horticultural industry, in my opinion, needs to investigate paths forward to shift towards more alternative landscape designs.
Nikara Mahadeo, Cape Town Rapid urbanisation poses significant challenges, but it also creates the opportunity to develop and design more resilient and sustainable cities, inspired by nature and biodiversity. The integration of nature-based solutions (NBS) in land-use planning and development is one such opportunity in cities.
Peter Massini, Robertsbridge The decisions as to which plants to use to best effect are often keenly contested between ecologists, landscape architects, arboriculturists, and horticulturists; all focusing on different aspects of the ‘performance’ and ‘purpose’ of the plants selected.
Darby McGrath, Lincoln From a UTVC perspective, better knowledge of plants and, thereby, success of nature-based green cities can be catalyzed by science and innovation, collaboration, and knowledge mobilization. Urban forests are novel ecosystems and sound science is needed to underpin the entire value-chain.
Matthew Morrow, New York A robust and intelligent information sharing system with input from plant producers, ecologists, botanists, restoration specialists, horticulturists, landscape architects, gardeners, foresters, and city planners could feasibly create a repository for shared information, the purpose of which would be to grow the collective knowledge of useful plants and plant communities for use in our urban greenspaces.
Max Piana, Amherst Now, as we plan for the future, we are beginning to think about how to maximize the benefits trees and plants provide the city.
Ryan Plummer, Lincoln From a UTVC perspective, better knowledge of plants and, thereby, success of nature-based green cities can be catalyzed by science and innovation, collaboration, and knowledge mobilization. Urban forests are novel ecosystems and sound science is needed to underpin the entire value-chain.
Mohan Rao, Bangalore The horticulture industry plays a vital role in mainstreaming the immense floral diversity that one could leverage to address not merely aesthetic considerations but those of resilience, diversity, and endemicity.
Ian Shears, Melbourne How can the horticultural or ‘green’ professional be the fundamentally important voice of the plants? This ‘voice’ is critical in providing the knowledge of plant needs for growth and health, and the knowledge of what the potential of the plant is to provide maximum benefits.
Keith Sacre, Cambridgeshire Does the horticultural industry have a role to play? Well, of course, it does, but it also has to develop an understanding of what nature-based green cities are and how horticultural and plant knowledge is critical to develop the ability to set specific plant knowledge in context.
Georgia Silvera Seamans, New York We can no longer devote public money and public lands to single-function plants. We cannot limit native understory species to natural areas.
Ernita van Wik, Cape Town Rapid urbanisation poses significant challenges, but it also creates the opportunity to develop and design more resilient and sustainable cities, inspired by nature and biodiversity. The integration of nature-based solutions (NBS) in land-use planning and development is one such opportunity in cities.
Mike Wells, Bath The expertise is out there, but the focus and coordination towards practical application in urban areas are rare. Perhaps a good starting point would be a series of international conferences to establish frameworks of required information and the basis for plant selection in urban landscape design in general.
Dr Audrey Timm is a horticultural scientist specialised in ornamental horticulture. Since joining International Association of Horticultural Producers (AIPH) as Technical Advisor in early 2019, Audrey leads their Green City initiative with the purpose of increasing the quality and quantity of living green in urban environments, and of nurturing a strategic shift in city form and function.
As urban and environmental practitioners and change-makers, whether in the public, private or NGO sectors, we work to respond to the global imperative to bring more nature into our cities, with a seemingly clear understanding of the science that underpins the urgency of the current moment. We know full well that nature provides many benefits which sustain our increasingly urban lives. We also know that this nature is diminishing at unprecedented rates and needs to be protected, conserved, and even restored as a matter of priority. Acknowledging the need to act now is an easy message to promote, and at the strategic planning level, awareness, and advocacy of the need for action are at an all-time high. But do we know what this action entails at a practical level?
We know that there is global recognition of the value of plants in providing solutions for common city problems. However, we propose that there is a common deficit in recognition of what this means in terms of moving from planning to implementation, from theory to practice, and from the strategic realm to the practical. This is often where we, as city shapers, are in danger of falling short.
If we accept the hypothesis that plants are the critical foundations of urban nature, then how do we go about ensuring we procure, prepare, and plant the right plants in the right places when implementing nature-based solutions? How can we enable better decision-making when it comes to plant selection and preparation? Is a closer engagement with the ornamental horticulture industry what is missing?
The global green cities community welcomes bold commitments by politicians, and strategic policy and planning visions of restoring significant areas of habitat or of planting impressive numbers of trees in and around cities in the coming years. We ask the question, however, whether these commitments consider how these ambitions are to be achieved. In many cases, plants need to be carefully selected and procured months, and even years, in advance of implementation, and need to be prepared and grown in such a way as to ensure they are fit for purpose. Where do we find stories of best practice in engaging the horticultural industry throughout the process? Do you know of examples of multidisciplinary cooperation that has ensured that the right plants were planted in the right places to deliver on the intended outcomes of an urban greening project?
Let’s think for a moment about how the global rise in attention and awareness of the benefits of nature-based solutions has strengthened connections, partnerships, and engagement with the ornamental horticulture industry. Are we able to effectively implement urban nature-based solutions and restore urban natural habitats without engaging these critical stakeholders – the breeders and producers of plants? If not, why not? Do we need to be?
Let’s take the Bosco Verticale project in Milan as an example. The two residential skyscrapers feature facades covered with the leaves of 800 trees, 4,500 shrub, and 15,000 other plants. The plants found on the façade make up the equivalent of more than two hectares of woodland and undergrowth concentrated into just 3,000 square meters of urban space – a multiplication factor of almost 7 times. We invite you to take a look at how this urban greening project provides nature-based solutions to a wide range of urban challenges:https://aiph.org/green-city/guidelines/case-studies/case-studies-bosco-verticale-milan/
It might seem obvious that careful plant selection made a significant contribution to the capacity of this project to deliver an impressive range of green solutions. What is less known is the fact that the selection of species was informed by a three-year research project, undertaken with horticulturalists, botanists, and ecologists, during which the plants were pre-cultivated in containers in a nursery to accustom them to the conditions they would be subjected to, while producing perfectly adapted root systems. Planting was then carried out progressively over a three-year period, as the building façades were completed, and was completed two years prior to the first residents of the towers moving in. In this example, the process of planning, selecting, producing, procuring, and planting took more than five years.
What does this mean in terms of our approach to planning and implementing urban nature-based solutions which harness the power of plants?
We invite respondents to consider the critical role of plants and the critical importance of careful planning and plant selection in enabling successful urban greening projects. We welcome stories of best practices where the careful selection of plants and engagement with suitable growers and producers of these plants has led to the implementation of effective nature-based solutions for specific urban challenges? How do we ensure that these consultations take place in advance of implementation so that plants are integral to the success of these solutions, and not just an afterthought?
Have you considered this in your work? If so, what has been your experience, and what lessons have you learned along the way? If not, how might these considerations strengthen and enrich your approach in the future?
We are interested to explore the knowledge gaps and identify where there is room for capacity building in ensuring that we, as practitioners, are sufficiently equipped to drive the transformative shift to urgent action for nature in cities.
Timothy is an urban development professional with a background in the social sciences and city and regional planning. In his role as a Green City Consultant at AIPH, the world’s champion for the power of plants, Timothy is responsible for progressing strategic partnerships within the Green City programme and for coordinating the AIPH World Green City Awards.
Portuguese Landscape Architect, educated in the United States. Currently the Technical Support to the Board of Directors of the Portuguese Association of Landscape Architects, a TNOC Festival 2022 Curator, running a small private practice, and raising two boys, two dogs, three cats, and three chickens.
As far as plants are concerned and, since even the most naturalized of urban settings is man-made, it is of the utmost importance to have proper knowledge of plants.
Actually, I believe that the success of nature-based green cities is only possible with a better knowledge of the entire urban ecological cycle, which also includes plants, in addition to air, water, soil, fauna, as well as considerations for environmental quality, sustainability, and human well-being within cities and towns. As the rate of urbanization intensifies throughout the globe, and the devastating effects of global warming can no longer be ignored, urban ecosystems and green corridors are a proven important piece of the city. They are the support, the infrastructure, to ensure that people have a healthy and sustainable place to live, work, and visit. The ecological connection between the countryside and the city must not only be restored, but it must be promoted and nurtured as if life in the city depended on it. Because, in fact, it does! Human connection to nature has been the basic support for our existence for millions of years and, in a world where the effects of climate change rule, it is of the utmost importance that cities lead the transition to more sustainable and resilient human living environments, where ecosystem services and biodiversity are promoted.
As far as plants are concerned and, since even the most naturalized of urban settings is man-made, it is of the utmost importance to have proper knowledge of plants. As landscape architects, and thus the professionals assigned to plan and design the exterior environment, we spend hours and hours in college learning about plants, their characteristics, and how they can be better suited. When planning for urban environments, we learn to avoid large canopies that may interfere with overhead cables, trees with aggressive root systems that may structurally damage sidewalks and underground infrastructures, or plants that are prone to cause allergies and to favor plants with low water requirements and low maintenance, just to mention a few. It is very important to stay updated on this matter as new cultivars are constantly appearing. And this is why it is so important to have a fluid communication between designers and producers. We (designers) need to know what is available in the market. I mean, what is the point of making a pretty plan if it cannot be implemented because the plant pallet chosen cannot be purchased, right? Or worse, forces the builder to have it shipped from other regions, or even countries as is the case in Europe, exponentially increasing the products’ ecological footprint and contributing even more to the fast-pacing increase of adverse impacts of climate change…. and higher probability of failure.
On the other hand, producers need to know what the designers want so that they can produce it. It is a symbiotic relationship that is greater than the sum of its parts. Landscape architects must be more assertive about native plants and be advocates for a more expressive presence of this group of plants, especially in the urban environment. Their benefits are enormous: they are better adapted to the existing local conditions, which means they require less maintenance and, therefore, have a smaller environmental and financial cost for the cities and their constituents; they more effectively contribute to lowering the temperature and, because they are part of the existing local ecosystem, there are most likely several species of plants and animals in the surroundings that depend on them to thrive and prosper; in addition, by using native plants we are reducing the introduction of potentially invasive plants which threaten the proper balance of the whole system. There is, of course, a place for the use of exotic ornamental plants and landscape architects must know the when and where. And, because we have been passed that knowledge, we have the professional and ethical obligation to be more assertive about the use of native plans and advocate for their use, especially in the urban environment.
Landscape architects have been given the knowledge and have been imparted with the responsibility to plan, design, and manage the exterior man-made environments, so we have the professional and ethical obligation to be more assertive and advocate for the importance of the naturalization of the urban environments, the ecological connection to the surrounding rural areas, the generalized use of green infrastructures in lieu of (the currently still) more standard (and less effective) systems, and the use of native plants.
Founder and Director of the Organization for Environmental Education and Protection (OpEPA). Luis is currently the Regional Latin America Vicechair of the IUCN Commission on Education and Communication.
Luis Camargo
Taking a big view perspective, the knowledge of plants should ultimately come from the day-to-day relation established with plants in the city. Appropriating our role as citizen naturalists is an essential aspect of this.
Reflecting on this prompt, I think that as citizens, our knowledge of plants comes from several sources, such as botanical, functional, emotional, and esthetic. Each direction serves a different function in the appropriation and incorporation of plants into our conception of nature-based green cities.
What are nature-based green cities? For me, the concept of a nature-based green city goes beyond the traditional conception of a city with parks and tamed nature corridors created primarily for recreation and the control of waterways. I imagine cities where multiple strategies are incorporated into the base conception of the city and how humans relate with nature within the city. Nature – biological corridors as part of the main green-urban structures, food gardens, smart nature buildings (green rooftops, green buildings, etc.), parks, urban protected areas, rewilded areas, natural waterways, wetlands, etc. and naturalized learning/playing spaces throughout the city.
The transition from traditional to nature-based green cities is not easy and requires understanding and political commitment. Cities must be re-molded to welcome nature back in. For this transition to occur, we must have better knowledge of plants as urban planners, as park managers, and as citizens in general. Taking a big view perspective, the knowledge of plants should ultimately come from the day-to-day relation established with plants in the city.
Appropriating our role as citizen naturalists is an essential aspect of this. Identifying different plants and their function in the same manner as we identify brands and their function would be a start. This would require not only access and contact with more plants and “natural spaces” but a “marketing” strategy in learning that allows every citizen to learn about and understand their natural environment (species, function, interrelations, and interdependencies).
City forests and biological corridors become a fundamental approach for access and contact. Stemming from these pockets of nature, green walkways that connect smaller parks and green areas full of key and diverse local species serve as bridges for fauna to move through the city, creating flows of non-human life. Green buildings are integrated, providing islands of green for birds and pollinators of all kinds.
There can be three types of spaces for human interaction within these green mazes: parks, nature classrooms, and food gardens. Parks as spaces for recreation can integrate planned, naturalized, and rewilded areas to ensure access to different expressions of nature. Inside parks or as intentional spaces, nature classroom created for formal and non-formal learning allows local schools and organizations to move out of the traditional classroom into plant-rich environments for learning, creating neutral spaces for learning encounters between groups allowing for learning ecosystems to emerge. Finally, food gardens in homes, rooftops, community gardens, and food forest strategies within the main green-city structures allow citizens to establish a more intimate relationship with the plant food sources that nourish us.
Martha Cecilia Fajardo, CEO of Grupo Verde, and her partner and husband Noboru Kawashima, have planned, designed and implemented sound and innovative landscape architecture and city planning projects that enhance the relationship between people, the landscape, and the environment.
LALI Re-orienting nature-based solutions with ancestral-cosmovision thinking.
Learning and respecting the ways of today’s indigenous and traditional peoples, and integrating them into environmental and developmental considerations, will prove indispensable for the survival of our biodiversities.
As a concept, Nature-Based Solutions (NbS), is a big IUCN call and “invention”. We appreciate the funding of timely initiatives by the European Commission (Horizon 2020), bringing together Latin American and European partners to strengthen international cooperation on NbS and ecosystem restoration providing knowledge in co-creating suitable “nature-based cities”.
Special emphasis on these EU policy agenda aims in ‘Innovating with nature’. However, at the Latin American Landscape Initiative, we find ourselves in a stage of inspiration on how to nurture and appropriate this vision for Latin America, making sure our collective brings in the cosmovision of ancestral peoples and local communities and a less utilitarian outlook on nature.
Latin America’s experience with nature dates to indigenous knowledge systems and values that travel through rural and urban settings. This vision sees spirituality, healthy landscapes, and ecosystems as vital for supporting human life and social cohesion. Learning and respecting the ways of today’s indigenous and traditional peoples, and integrating them into environmental and developmental considerations, will prove indispensable for the survival of our biodiversities.
Nearly half of Latin America’s indigenous population now live in urban areas, in areas that are less secure, less sanitary, and more susceptible to disaster. But, people-nature’s values, beliefs, which considers their voices, cultures, and identities are not sufficiently included in city planning, design, and implementation, then NbS can be unjust, hopeless and fail to provide multiple values, ethics for nature, beings, and society.
Latin America is a continent with historical and cultural unity and a vibrant and changing social and economic reality. In this vast territory with diverse morphologies, climates, ethnicity, and development patterns, there are also strong and lasting unifying ties, such as a common historical, indigenous past, and the bonds through which we built our present societies. In this context, the landscape is the tangible expression of these constants of unity within diversity. Inspiring by both the cosmovision of Latin American indigenous peoples and the European Landscape Convention we created the Latin American Landscape Initiative (LALI).
LALI comes as a declaration of fundamental ethical principles to promote the recognition, valuation, protection, management, and sustainable planning/design of Latin American landscapes through the adoption of agreements that recognize local, regional, and national diversity and values, tangible so much as intangible, of landscape, as well as principles and processes to safeguard it.
LALI work through clusters which translates itself as a network, a system that is nourished by cooperation, cocreation, pacts, and the charitable work of key people in Latin America. It grows and becomes stronger through its Clusters. The Ancestral Landscapes Cluster is one of those which aims to recognize, recover, and disseminate the values -tangible and intangible- of ancestral communities/landscapes, inhabited and given meaning by the different native peoples of Latin America, to contribute to their appreciation, understanding, and protection.
The understanding is embedded in a cosmology that reveres and considers nature as sacred and acknowledges humanity as a part of it. The Network invokes indigenous people’s values, asking the world to reevaluate our relationship to “Pachamama”; therefore, we can turn away from ruining, privatizing nature, to create solutions by re-sacralizing our relationship with Mother Earth.
This is part of the contribution that LALI and its Ancestral Landscape cluster, can give to the highly recognized nature-based solution concept to make better, greener equity and more sustainable cities.
Andrew formed Grant Associates in 1997 to explore the emerging frontiers of landscape architecture within sustainable development. He has a fascination with creative ecology and the promotion of quality and innovation in landscape design. Each of his projects responds to the place, its inherent ecology and its people.
Every nature-based green city needs a Botanic Garden for knowledge and inspiration
Botanic gardens are places of science where an extraordinary diversity of plants representing multiple biomes and habitats inspire not only wonder in botany but wonder in the physical and emotional impact that can be generated by different plant species.
‘imagination is more important than knowledge’ Albert Einstein
Knowing plants is not just about understanding how they live, their habits, and their homes but, if we are to create truly inspirational and beautiful nature-based green cities, then it is essential to have the creative vision for how to use them.
Botanic Gardens are typically the places where these elements come together. Places of science where an extraordinary diversity of plants representing multiple biomes and habitats inspire, not only wonder in botany, but wonder in the physical and emotional impact that can be generated by different plant species. It makes me think every green city needs a Botanic Garden.
Singapore has two Botanic Gardens which provide the home for specialist expertise training and for beautiful plant collections that define the very identity of Singapore as a City in a Garden or a City in Nature. In our Gardens by the Bay project, the second Botanic Garden, plants were the client. Whist we helped shape the environment for the plants, the detailed knowledge of the diversity of species came from the horticultural experts within the National Parks Board of Singapore. Having such centres of excellence places a focus on the value of plants in the community and builds local pride and horticultural skills.
My landscape architecture course included weekly teaching sessions at the wonderful Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh; an inspiring place of horticultural excellence and remarkable plants that has fed my imagination and understanding of how to use plants ever since.
Most landscape architects will have had a similar introduction to plants and planting design as part of their qualifications and training. This will involve an understanding of the soils, ground conditions, microclimate considerations, and maintenance that need to be factored in when considering selection of plants. Parallel to this technical awareness of plants is the need to know how to use them as part of a creative and ecological vision or concept. I was lucky to have my experience in horticulture at Edinburgh, but many landscape and ecology courses are less fortunate to have such resources and I fear many students are emerging with limited practical exposure to plants and how to use them. There are exceptions, of course. The University of Sheffield Landscape Department has an enviable core team of experts who have helped pioneer new approaches to urban planting whilst inspiring and teaching thousands of students from around the world using hands-on techniques and research.
Ultimately, this is all about creating the infrastructure for people to learn about plants, and how to use plants in defining the future environment, alongside the establishment or retention of special places dedicated to horticulture and the enhancement of green spaces in cities. Can we create a renewed interest in Botanic Gardens that is less about their heritage and more about their future role as places where we invest in the wonder of plants and in the skills and training that go with the optimum use and maintenance of plants in our future cities?
The challenge is that such places are typically underfunded and in decline rather than being beacons of plant science and wonder. We need a new focus on how we create and maintain such places and will require a much more integrated approach from governments, city councils, universities, and all parts of the landscape, ecology, and horticultural industries.
Dr. Richard Hallett, Research Ecologist, USDA Forest Service, NYC Urban Field Station Dr. Hallett (B.S. UW-Madison, M.S. and Ph.D. UNH)has spent his career studying tree and forest health in the northeastern U.S.
Richard Hallett and Max Piana
Now, as we plan for the future, we are beginning to think about how to maximize the benefits trees and plants provide the city.
We ask a lot of the plants, especially trees, that make up the green infrastructure of our cities. This is because the environmental conditions (soils, atmosphere, climate) in urban areas are typically very different from the conditions that plants evolved to grow in. Luckily, many of the plants that we use in urban environments are capable of adapting to and thriving in cities.
In our response, we will focus on trees in cities. The knowledge base for planting the right plants in the right places comes from:
Empirical evidence – urban foresters and arborists are keen observers of the urban environment and institutional knowledge can help inform urban greening strategies.
Research on urban ecosystems – rigorous studies have focused on specific species and urban environmental conditions and can be used to inform management decisions.
Research on rural ecosystems – Forest management has been studied for over 100 years in forested ecosystems around the world. This body of work is particularly relevant to how we might think about managing urban forested natural areas in cities.
Trees are typically long-lived and, when we invest in planting a tree in a city, the hope is that it will grow and thrive in that spot for several decades. This tree not only needs to establish itself in today’s challenging and complicated urban environment but will need to thrive in an environment that exists several decades into the future. This future environment will likely be warmer and wetter or dryer. Three important factors come to mind when thinking about the future of urban nature. These involve sourcing plants that are: 1) urban adapted; 2) climate adapted; and 3) ecosystem service adapted.
A paradigm shift is beginning in the urban forestry world as land managers start to think less about restoring to some previous condition and more about what the future might bring to a newly planted tree or forest. Urban forestry has never really focused on extracting forest products but rather has relied on the many benefits or ecosystem services trees and plants provide to urban residents. Now, as we plan for the future, we are beginning to think about how to maximize the benefits trees and plants provide the city. Can we select species or genotypes that are more salt-tolerant to plant in coastal zones that will experience more saltwater flooding? Are there species or genotypes that are particularly effective at removing water from the ground after a major storm event? Are there species that are better at surviving in the high temperatures found in the urban heat island and are there species that are better at cooling the environment?
The horticultural industry is already adept at breeding and selecting plants for desirable traits such as aesthetics or yield. Is it feasible to move towards a model that emphasizes regional needs by providing native and/or adapted plant stock that also works toward selective breeding to maximize critical ecosystem services like stormwater or heat island mitigation? Can economies of scale be created by establishing regional hubs including metropolitan land managers and plant producers to maximize the benefit that plants provide to cities? Are there ways to share knowledge focused on local propagation of planting stock via seed sourcing/sharing, clonal propagation, and/or the creation of seed orchards of adapted species?
Bringing together horticulturalists, urban forest managers, and scientists to focus on breeding, enhancing, and producing trees and plants that can maximize the ecosystem services provided to urban areas might be a way forward for future nature-based green cities.
Max Piana is a research ecologist for the USDA Forest Service, based in Amherst, MA. He currently co-leads the Urban Phytotechnology Project in Philadelphia and the Urban Silviculture Network, which spans eight cities in the northeast U.S.
Horticulture Industry: Shifting Conventional Norms in Cities
Figure 1. A relatively new Gainesville, Florida home with more natural landscaping. It has no lawn and does not require mowing. It conserved trees in the front yard and has native plants that were installed by the landscaper. Photo: Mark Hostetler)
A continuum exists between highly manicured landscapes that contain mainly monoculture turfgrass and exotic plants to totally wild yards that contain mainly native plants. The horticultural industry, in my opinion, needs to investigate paths forward to shift towards more alternative landscape designs.
I am going to take a slightly different angle on this roundtable prompt. When talking about eco-friendly yards and common spaces in green cities, design professionals, city planners, homeowners, and even the horticulture industry often say, “Well, it cannot be too messy!” My immediate thought is: What is too messy? Aesthetic preferences are in the eye of the beholder and are shaped by experiences, culture, societal norms, and values. A continuum exists between highly manicured landscapes that contain mainly monoculture turfgrass and exotic plants to totally wild yards that contain mainly native plants. The horticultural industry, in my opinion, needs to investigate paths forward to shift towards more alternative landscape designs.
Enter “cues to care theory.” Cues to care (Nassauer, 1995) is a phrase used to describe actions undertaken by humans that indicate a landscape is well cared for and meets cultural expectations for maintenance. According to this theory, there is a common expectation in societies that landscapes will be looked after, managed, and maintained to acceptable standards. This cues to care theory is used in the context of creating eco-friendly yards. If we can figure out how much minimum “cues” are needed to make a landscape acceptable, we can incorporate more native plants and wildness into yards. For example, are one trimmed hedge and 20% mowed lawn the expected ingredients?
Thus, what is needed is research that demonstrates what are the “cues” in landscape designs and how far can front/back yards and common spaces be pushed down the ecological continuum before people revolt? To date, very little appropriate research has been conducted to determine the cues needed for different cultures and situations (see more details from this blog) (Hostetler, 2020). From my experiences, landscapes tend to be dominated by conventional “cues” or designs by landscape architects and environmental horticulture professionals, even for eco-friendly landscapes. For example, ‘we need at least 50% mowed lawn’ is a cue that I have heard repeatedly.
To see greater adoption of eco-friendly landscapes in cities, there needs to be a movement in the horticulture industry to take chances. They need to try out different designs that have a reduced monoculture turfgrass footprint. Mavericks are there in the industry, but conventional inertia is quite strong. Perhaps the users (homeowners) are resisting, and subjective norms still perpetuate the adoption and management of conventional landscapes. But I also think the horticulture industry is not presenting enough alternative choices. An understanding of native plants that work well in different soil types will greatly aid in shifting the momentum. In fact, no plant will do well in sterile fill dirt that is typically used for grading on lots in new developments. The industry should push for compost-amended soils and for conserving the topsoil as much as possible.
Further, we do not know how malleable citizen preferences are, and we cannot “shift” preferences if most landscaping designs are based on mowed lawns and colorful vegetation. For example, if homeowners were presented with the environmental and economic costs of a manicured yard versus an alternative yard, perhaps they would be more willing to adopt a more eco-friendly yard. In particular, if an entire neighborhood, from the beginning, was designed with very little turfgrass and had lots of native plants, would not the homeowners in these neighborhoods have a different acceptance level? A new subjective norm? I bet so.
Ultimately, the goal is to have both attractive and ecologically functioning human-dominated landscapes. The challenge of shifting landscape preferences remains but the horticulture industry could play a significant role in shifting norms. Imagine, in your mind’s eye, patches of natural landscaping with complex vertical height structures that are bordered with landscaping rocks, trimmed hedges, etc. (all native plants). These bordering features would indicate human intent while simultaneously providing a more chaotic, natural landscape in the yard itself. Perhaps even educational signage is required to raise levels of awareness for novel yards (see neighborhood signs). Exploring peoples’ preferences when incorporating more natural landscaping needs to be researched and the environmental horticulture industry and maverick developers/homeowners need to try out new designs. Such studies and local examples will lead to the reduction of environmental impacts and create landscapes that are better for wildlife and humankind alike.
Nikara is a Professional Officer: Biodiversity, Nature and Health at ICLEI Africa. Nikara holds an MSc Environmental Sciences (University of KwaZulu-Natal) and an MPhil in Conservation Leadership (University of Cambridge).
Nikara Mahadeo and Ernita van Wyk
Rapid urbanisation poses significant challenges, but it also creates the opportunity to develop and design more resilient and sustainable cities, inspired by nature and biodiversity. The integration of nature-based solutions (NBS) in land-use planning and development is one such opportunity in cities.
Nature and biodiversity play a critical role in meeting societal needs, with urban communities depending significantly on intact and novel ecosystems to sustain them. Urbanisation, however, is one of the biggest threats and risks to native biodiversity, with residential; business; and industrial infrastructure readily displacing natural areas & species, including plants. It is currently estimated that globally, 2 in 5 plant species are threatened with extinction. This threat can negatively impact human well-being, particularly for those living in cities, as plants produce the air we breathe; food and medicines; cooling of cities, amongst other critical services.
Rapid urbanisation poses significant challenges, but it also creates the opportunity to develop and design more resilient and sustainable cities, inspired by nature and biodiversity. The integration of nature-based solutions (NBS) in land-use planning and development is one such opportunity in cities. In some instances, NBS can be more cost-effective than grey infrastructure alternatives, adding social and economic value over the longer term. Using plants in the implementation of NBS can have multiple benefits, as plants are fundamental to well-functioning ecosystems and are known to adapt to changing environments. For example, creating green open spaces by planting trees and other vegetation can support cooling; improve air quality; and increase biodiversity and beautification in cities. Urban areas with more diverse ecosystems will have greater resilience to shocks, whilst also addressing challenges associated with climate change; food and water security; and mitigate risks to public health; and reduce disaster risk.
In Africa, it is thought that NBS have not readily been used as much as they have in other parts of the world. However, many would argue that NBS solutions have long been a part of many African initiatives but have just not been termed so. Africa is one of the fastest urbanising regions of the world. This growth, however, threatens some of the richest biodiversity, including plants, across the continent. As a result, a significant proportion of African livelihoods are at risk, due to the dependency on ecosystem services, which this biodiversity provides.
Through the INTERACT-Bio Project, the Dar es Salaam City Council has recognised the value of integrating NBS into land-use and development planning. As part of the project, a catalogue on the City’s indigenous biodiversity, focusing primarily on plants, is being compiled. Dar es Salaam is located within the East African Coastal Forest biodiversity hotspot, however, nurseries and urban greening initiatives have traditionally grown and used exotic species. Therefore, the aim of the catalogue is to help create awareness in the City Council, nurseries, and the general public of the rich variety of indigenous coastal forest species that could be used in NBS initiatives, such as ecosystem restoration and urban greening. A good understanding and field knowledge of the local indigenous species was required to develop the catalogue, therefore suggesting that the use of plants in NBS does require the expert skills of horticulturalists, botanists, plant taxonomists, and the like. In addition, different species have different characteristics, therefore, this knowledge can be useful in understanding what ecosystem services different species provide. Using this information can ensure that the best combination of species is used in NBS, to ensure that the maximum ecosystem services benefit is derived. Furthermore, using a variety of species in NBS not only increases biodiversity, but also enhances the functional resilience of urban ecosystems. It is therefore critical that plant biodiversity is promoted in NBS, particularly in fast-growing cities, not only to ensure resilience and sustainability, whilst meeting development needs, but also to sustainably manage and restore ecosystems; and address social challenges, to improve human well-being and quality of life in cities.
Ernita is a Senior Professional Officer: Social-ecological systems at ICLEI Africa. Following initial training in ecology and conservation, Ernita’s interests and work have spanned the design and implementation of research and operational work in the fields of invasive species, adaptive management, biodiversity mainstreaming, and environmental stewardship, over a period of 24 years. Ernita holds a PhD in Environment and Development.
Peter is an experienced green infrastructure policy-maker and practitioner. After a 30-year career in both the third sector and public sector, latterly as Green Infrastructure Lead for the Greater London Authority, he now works as a consultant advising public and private sector clients.
Peter Massini
The decisions as to which plants to use to best effect are often keenly contested between ecologists, landscape architects, arboriculturists, and horticulturists; all focusing on different aspects of the ‘performance’ and ‘purpose’ of the plants selected.
It would seem axiomatic that plants (and the medium in which they grow) are the fundamental components of the nature-based solutions which, through urban greening, will help cities respond to the challenges of climate change, poor air quality, and biodiversity loss.
Yet despite this, the decisions as to which plants to use to best effect are often keenly contested between ecologists, landscape architects, arboriculturists, and horticulturists; all focusing on different aspects of the ‘performance’ and ‘purpose’ of the plants selected.
The reality is that all of these professionals can, and should, play an important role in designing and specifying nature-based solutions. The landscape architect will provide the framework and select plants that sit well within a designed landscape whilst the ecologist might champion native plants to complement the local ecology; but it is, perhaps, the arboriculturist and horticulturist who may have the most useful knowledge as to the suitability of different species and cultivars for specific conditions and needs.
In recent years in the UK, there has been increasing inter-disciplinary collaboration driven by requirements such as the Urban Greening Factor and Biodiversity Net Gain which demand outcomes that cannot (yet*) be delivered through the skills and expertise of a single professional discipline.
The Trees and Design Action Group (TDAG)[1] has been one of the driving forces, bringing together people and organisations to improve knowledge and good practice to support better collaboration in the planning, design, construction, and management of urban trees. It has been central to ensuring that the commercial part of the arboricultural industry (the suppliers and contractors) have had the opportunity to contribute their knowledge and expertise to help bridge the gap between policy and practice.
So, perhaps now is the time for a sister organisation to bloom, a Horticulture and Design Action Group (HDAG) – or Horticulture and Urban Greening Action Group (HUDAG) for those who prefer an alliterative acronym. A natural extension of the AIPH Green City initiative, the Action Group (or groups across different international domains) could become the focal point for collaborative ventures between academic institutions, public bodies, NGOs, and commercial companies aimed at providing detailed guidance and specifications on urban plants that complements TDAG’s resources on urban trees[2].
Would this not replicate other forums or initiatives? I don’t think so. In the UK at least, most guidance and training are issued by respective professional institutes (for landscape[3], ecology[4], and horticulture[5], for example). Sure, there is plenty of collaboration, but it isn’t providing, in my view, the specific skills and knowledge needed by a new breed of professionals, those specifically engaged with designing and delivering nature-based solutions in urban areas – ecological engineers, urban greening architects, and green infrastructure designers, to coin just a few. A better understanding of the performance of plants in an urban environment will be a core competency for these nature-based solutionists.
Darby McGrath is the Senior Research Scientist for Environmental Horticulture and Program Lead for the Plant Response & Environment at the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre. She has a MES and PhD from the University of Waterloo. She is also an adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo and Brock University.
Darby McGrath, Amy Bowen, and Ryan Plummer
From a UTVC perspective, better knowledge of plants and, thereby, success of nature-based green cities can be catalyzed by science and innovation, collaboration, and knowledge mobilization. Urban forests are novel ecosystems and sound science is needed to underpin the entire value-chain.
Cities are confronting a myriad of challenges, such as rapid urbanization, increasing disasters, more extreme weather events, and threats to ecosystem services. Nature-based solutions are capturing attention as an innovative response to these and other challenges. In the specific context of Canadian urban forests, this generally manifests as directives to increase canopy cover. While increasing canopy cover in urban areas is critically important, substantive difficulties exist to realizing this aspiration. We fully concur that success of nature-based green cities is only possible with a better knowledge of plants and respond to the questions posed by drawing upon our recent work with urban tree value-chains (UTVC) in Canada.
Where does the knowledge come from? Understanding the pathways by which trees go from nurseries to planting is essential if canopy cover targets are to be met efficiently and effectively. The analogy of a chain is employed to represent linkages among the actors involved with trees from their source to end. While it provides an appropriate starting point, UTVCs are complex, interdependent, and multi-level networks. UTVCs are understudied, with comprehending interactions and decision-making of actors involved identified as essential. Recent advancement in this regard has occurred in Ontario, where research revealed the UTVC to consist of multiple pathways, one based on the flow of products and the other based on the flow of knowledge and communication. Concerningly, urban forest governance in Canada is not comprehensively reflected in value-chain studies to date. It remains fragmented and multi-faceted, with a relative dearth of federal and provincial involvement, considerable municipal purview with diverse policy approaches, and extensive influence of private landowners.
Can the horticultural industry be more useful? Absolutely! Key actors in the UTVC come from the horticultural industry. The following scenario helps to understand the complexity of the UTVC and illustrates how the horticultural industry can be more useful. A city is updating their urban forest management plan. A key component of the plan is their projected tree plantings specifically, the objective of increasing tree diversity. This one objective has implications across the UTVC.
Has the city updated their soil specifications to support a diverse tree canopy? Are the soil suppliers prepared to provide the specified materials to support these trees?
Are landscape contractors aware of changes in the specifications and preparation techniques?
Has the city ensured that recommended trees are available in nurseries as finished stock?
Are the propagating nurseries prepared to meet these changing demands by their finishing nursery customers?
What of the tree care companies that will be maintaining trees through juvenility?
These questions pose common gaps in communication and evidence where actors from the horticultural industry can make key contributions.
From a UTVC perspective, better knowledge of plants and, thereby, success of nature-based green cities can be catalyzed by science and innovation, collaboration, and knowledge mobilization. Urban forests are novel ecosystems and sound science is needed to underpin the entire value-chain. Collaboration is required to remove barriers between actors and build collective capacity. Knowledge mobilization, which is reciprocal amongst value chain actors, provides a basis for decision support tools, evidence-based decision making, and science-informed policies. While approaches that bring these touchstones together are scarce, the Greening the Landscape Research Consortium is a recent example in Canada. It employs a research consortium model in response to challenges and opportunities with the urban forest value chain and serves to illustrate a novel way forward.
Amy Bowen is the Director of Consumer, Sensory and Market Insights at the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre. Amy has a PhD in Biological Sciences with a specialization in Plant Science, Oenology, and Viticulture from Brock University.
Ryan Plummer is Professor and Director of the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre (ESRC) at Brock University. In addition to research and teaching, Ryan has led the development of the ESRC and several associated programs – Minor in Environmental Sustainability, Master of Sustainability, and Ph.D. in Sustainability Science.
Matthew Morrow is the Director of Horticulture at Forestry Horticulture and Natural Resources, a division of the NYC Park's Department. In this role he works to educate and support the gardeners and gardens of the agency, as well as the various native flora and fauna of New York City.
A robust and intelligent information sharing system with input from plant producers, ecologists, botanists, restoration specialists, horticulturists, landscape architects, gardeners, foresters, and city planners could feasibly create a repository for shared information, the purpose of which would be to grow the collective knowledge of useful plants and plant communities for use in our urban greenspaces.
The phrase “If you don’t grow it, you don’t know it,” was oft-repeated by one of my horticulture mentors, as they firmly believed that, if a genus or species of plants was not planted by and maintained by persons themselves, then only a hypothetical knowledge of said plant could be had. I agree with this to an extent, which is why collaborative efforts as listed below are so important. The specific, detailed information that a botanical observer records concerning a species as it exists in the “wild”, should be synthesized with the observations of the person who has grown and maintained that plant in a different setting. A robust and intelligent information sharing system with input from plant producers, ecologists, botanists, restoration specialists, horticulturists, landscape architects, gardeners, foresters, and city planners could feasibly create a repository for shared information, the purpose of which would be to grow the collective knowledge of useful plants and plant communities for use in our urban greenspaces. This data, if supplied to growers in the horticulture industry who have an interest in the concepts and possibilities of ecological gardening, natural areas management, and restoration bring, could provide them with the impetus and financial recompense that they require to partner with those involved in the intelligent greening of our urban spaces. Further alloying this knowledge with tried-and-true gardening wisdom can lead to a macro environment where “Right Plant, Right Place” no longer needs to be stressed or thought of too much, as it will be a baked-in concept, suffused as a guiding philosophy throughout the entire process.
In my opinion, the commercial horticulture industry has many things to atone for: a promulgation of invasive species, the over recommendation of unnecessary, often problematic pesticides and fertilizers, and gatekeeping the aesthetic ideals of the horticulture world to guide consumption of the products produced by favored manufacturers. However, the expertise and ability the horticulture industry possesses to produce high-quality plants on a grand scale is vast, impressive, and could be applied to the purpose of growing and supplying species that serve ecological functions our urban natural areas and greenspaces demand. It is very important for the plants that we include in the public-facing spaces in our cities to be comprised not only of mostly native species and useful to a wide variety of life but to fulfill the requirements of materials in an urban infrastructure. Meaning, they must be safe, appropriate as to habit and size, and tolerant of urban conditions. Finally, but no less importantly, they should be beautiful (or inspiring, compelling, conducive to poetic thoughts, etc.).
I will here emphasize that the role of experienced, passionate, and thoughtful city gardeners, who act often as ambassadors for our gardens and landscapes, educating and inspiring the people who move through and around these spaces cannot be minimized. These interactions can lead to some of these folks asking of their garden centers and nurseries to stock plants that we want to use in our public greening projects, providing further incentive for the horticulture industry to prioritize production of these plants, as their market will have expanded. A benefit of this would be that home gardeners in our cities could be activated to working towards the same goals as our city agencies, will become de facto partners when it comes to nature-based solutions to urban greenspace issues. Though a general idea, the specific measures needed to increase the knowledge of plants and their importance to the future of our greenspaces begins with a conversation between a variety of people who have complementary special knowledge bases. To sum up, better knowledge of plants should come from everywhere.
Keith Sacre has a MSc in Arboriculture and Urban Forestry, a BSc in Arboriculture, a BSc in Social Science, and a post-graduate diploma in management studies. He is currently a director at Barcham Trees, a co-founder of Treeconomics, a founder member and trustee of the Trees and Design Action Group, and a trustee of the UK Arboricultural Association, and is a previous chair of the Association.
Keith Sacre
Does the horticultural industry have a role to play? Well, of course, it does, but it also has to develop an understanding of what nature-based green cities are and how horticultural and plant knowledge is critical to develop the ability to set specific plant knowledge in context.
If nature-based green cities are to be achieved with all the benefits associated, then it is essential that there is a better knowledge of plants. The urban forest has many benefits to offer and delivers extensive ecosystem services. These have been quantified and valued in the many i-Tree and other studies which have been carried out in the UK up until the present date. The studies underestimate the real value because services, such as health and well-being, are not currently included.
The studies have revealed, in general, that the urban forest is highly dependent on a relatively low number of tree species and faces many challenges.
Of these challenges, two are particularly important if the contribution trees make to nature-based green cities is to be, not only sustained, but enhanced into the future. The two challenges are climate change and the threat of alien pests and disease in the UK. An urban forest heavily dependent on relatively few species is vulnerable and lacks the resilience necessary to cope with either of these challenges.
To meet the challenges which the future holds the species diversity needs to be increased but the question of which species should be planted and in what numbers needs to be answered. This depends on a knowledge of trees and their characteristics. The tolerances of individual species must be known and understood so that appropriate selections are made. Knowledge of their natural environment is critical as the challenges of climate change are going to favour some species and not favour others. Some of which are already present in the population and are threatened as change occurs. There also has to be an understanding and knowledge of the growth characteristics of individual species and how they might impact the environment in which they are planted. It remains true that most landscape architects and others involved in the planting of trees work from a very limited palate which is unlikely to enhance the possibility of nature-based green cities delivering. This limited palate is driven by a safety-first approach and a serious lack of knowledge of what else is available and the capacity of nurseries to produce what is required.
Many tree-planting programmes are driven by numbers and percentage increases in canopy cover which are ill-informed and not strategically planned beyond one planting season. Yet there is an unwritten expectation that planting will ensure that the ecosystem services required will automatically follow. Tree species have different characteristics. Their age potential varies enormously with some approaching the end of their useful life after sixty or so years while others will live beyond a thousand years. Each species has the potential to deliver different ecosystem services at a different rate over a different period. If the potential of nature-based green cities is to be realised, then it is essential that greater tree and plant knowledge is utilised and put into practice.
There is much knowledge already in the public- domain but it is not widely utilised. Examples such as the Trees and Design Action Group’s Tree Species Selection Guide authored by Dr. Andrew Hirons from Lancaster University and Myerscough College need to be more widely promoted but this must be coupled with a desire and intention to use different species and understand why. The lazy approach to species selection is fuelled by a lack of knowledge and the need to meet narrow aesthetic objectives cast aside, and tree knowledge respected and valued.
Does the horticultural industry have a role to play? Well, of course, it does, but it also has to develop an understanding of what nature-based green cities are and how horticultural and plant knowledge is critical to develop the ability to set specific plant knowledge in context. It also requires a focus which is not entirely based on selling trees and plants irrespective of their capability to do the job required of them.
Georgia lives and breathes city trees--with experience in New Haven, Boston, Oakland, and NYC, and a dissertation about urban forestry policy in Northern California cities. Georgia is the founder of Local Nature Lab and directs Washington Square Park Eco Projects where she designs urban ecology programs for New Yorkers of all ages.
We can no longer devote public money and public lands to single-function plants. We cannot limit native understory species to natural areas.
Cities remain in the grip of ornamental bulb mania. Every fall, in New York City, there are calls to scatter bulbs in the understory and, every spring, our social media feeds fill up with photos of their brassy blooms. The City donates and plants bulbs, and seems just as besotted as the FOMO crowd. While the City’s Parks Department funds native species plantings, the lion’s share of resources is funneled to short-lived spectacles rather than to co-evolved species relationships.
What do tulips and daffodils do for our urban ecosystem? What relationships do they support besides being eye candy for people? What is the carbon footprint of growing and transporting ornamental bulbs? Confession: I like tulips. But we can no longer devote public money and public lands to single-function plants. We cannot limit native understory species to natural areas. All New Yorkers should have everyday exposure to plant biodiversity. Let’s plant native early spring bloomers–trout lily, spring beauty, mayapple. To those who might argue that certain species cannot thrive in certain urban environments, I do not accept these limits, and neither should you. I have seen native species growing in “unlikely” places. We should redesign and manage our cities to support more nature and greater ecological function everywhere.
The push for the “green” in nature-based green cities must come from public agencies. State and local governments must embrace their power as consumers and drive substantive changes in the horticultural marketplace. We have seen this change before. To seed the City’s MillionTreesNYC initiative, the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation (NYC Parks) directly contracted with three nurseries for their street tree procurement system (Jonnes 2016). Because of this one-to-one relationship, NYC Parks was guaranteed their preferred species as well as consistently high-quality plants (Stephens 2010). Pennsylvania imposed a phased ban on the sale of Callery pear effective February 2022 (PA Pressroom 2021).
Governments at all levels tout their sustainability plans but, as they relate to plants, these proposals are a form of shallow sustainability. We need ideas and on-the-ground projects that support deep resilience based on ecosystem functions. Cities and their proxies’ actors must become ecologically literate—total species richness is not enough. Native species outperform introduced species in terms of function even though from a distance they might appear structurally similar.
I do not want to see existing trees such as London plane trees or ginkgos removed to facilitate the planting of native species. We need to preserve our existing canopy. Mature trees absorb more particulate matter, store more carbon, and provide cultural benefits. Have you foraged and eaten ginkgo seeds? They are delicious! But when a plane tree or a ginkgo falls in a park, let’s replace these trees with native forest species. Oaks support many of our breeding bird populations (Narango et al. 2020) but other genera to consider in our parks are Carya, Fagus, and Betula (Doroski et al. 2020). The species choices we make for parks and streets can impact our natural areas; trees in our cultivated landscapes are a seed source for forested natural areas (Doroski et al. 2020).
There is even greater potential to increase native plant diversity by looking below the trees. I am proposing a radical transformation in the understory of our neighborhood parks. New Yorkers are familiar with the knockout rose and Russian sage pairing ubiquitous in many parks. We see ornamental cherries, non-native dogwoods, cherry laurel, Japanese aucuba, and mop-head hydrangea wherever we go. Our smaller parks don’t have plant identities. The sameness of the plant palette leads to fatigue, especially outside of the exuberance of spring flowering and fall color. Many of our parks are not remnant ecologies; however, if they are planted with native species, then they can satisfy the human demand for beauty, offer multi-seasonal liveliness, and function as high-quality habitat patches.
Dr Mike Wells FCIEEM is a published ecological consultant ecologist, ecourbanist and green infrastructure specialist with a global outlook and portfolio of projects.
The expertise is out there, but the focus and coordination towards practical application in urban areas are rare. Perhaps a good starting point would be a series of international conferences to establish frameworks of required information and the basis for plant selection in urban landscape design in general.
To answer the question of how we fill the knowledge gaps in the ability of plants to survive in cities and deliver vital urban ecosystem services, we need to understand the knowledge gaps. These include:
Knowledge of historical ecology. Often the list of species that occupied a site pre-urbanisation is unknown or challenging to compile.
Knowledge of autecology. For some plant species, there is extensive literature relating to a multitude of autecology characteristics, but the information is disparately spread across a very wide range of sources (and languages), in forms not readily accessible to the non-academic practitioner. But even for the most researched plant species, there are often large gaps in what is known about their full requirements. Information that might be needed includes intrinsic conservation value (e.g., rarity, threat status), germination, soil and plant husbandry requirements interdependencies and mycorrhizae, and positive and negative reactions with other plants (see e.g., Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, 2018). Also, when we create urban habitats as refuges of plant species that are both naturally rare and threatened, the autecological requirements may be particularly exacting and difficult to recreate and maintain in the urban realm. We also may need to consider the change in requirements, needs, form, appearance, and functions through the year and between years and successional interactions and characteristics. Intrinsic characteristics that are particularly important in a plant species’ ability to adapt to environmental change (e.g., C4 metabolism) are also crucial.
Knowledge of functional potential: To optimize our urban realm, we need to simultaneously consider the following for each plant species and then construct planting designs based on optimization of cumulative functions:
Faunal and floral support potential: Capacity to support native fauna and other flora (and the degree to which this depends on co-evolution, see e.g., Garland and Wells, 2021 in the Handbook of Urban Ecology.)
Capacity for ecosystem service provisioning, aesthetic appearance throughout the year, cultural significance, capacity for shade provision, ability to remove pollutants from air and water, wind sheltering and breeze harvesting functions, food provision, and carbon capture potential.
Techniques to optimize plant community design. We are now starting to look at the optimization of urban ecosystem services in ecological design, for example, using systems such as developed in Germany and elaborated into models such as Envi-Met or ESII and into certification systems such as Greenpass. However, the level of sophistication of these models in terms of taking on board the differences between plant species is currently limited.
At present, urban design practitioners are generally obliged to mentally integrate and extrapolate the multiple characteristics and functionalities of plants through the lens and limitations of professional experience when selecting species for urban design palettes. This frequently reduces palette richness.
To develop a truly holistic model for balancing all these factors in urban design would be an impressive achievement but it is clear that it can only be achieved by concerted and directed interdisciplinary endeavour.
Relevant parties will include plant ecologists, physiologists and socio-phytologists, conservation specialists, soil scientists, mycologists, horticulturalists, researchers into plant-animal interactions, urban historians, palaeobotanists and ecological historians, medical toxicologists and allergenic specialists, eco-climatologists, and computer modelling and Internet of Things (IOT) experts. The expertise is out there, but the focus and coordination towards practical application in urban areas are rare. Perhaps a good starting point would be a series of international conferences to establish frameworks of required information and the basis for plant selection in urban landscape design in general. The Urban Plant Selection and Nurture Project could be born and find its champions.
Mohan S Rao, an Environmental Design & Landscape Architecture professional, is the principal designer of the leading multi-disciplinary consultancy practice, Integrated Design (INDÉ), based in Bangalore, India
Images from Bangalore and Medellin: who is to say which is where?
The horticulture industry plays a vital role in mainstreaming the immense floral diversity that one could leverage to address not merely aesthetic considerations but those of resilience, diversity, and endemicity.
I distinctly remember the day I was walking in Medellin, Colombia and being ‘surprised’ at my own knowledge of plants – surprised because here I was, halfway across the planet from Bangalore, my home in India – and yet able to recognise and even name a large majority of plants one saw along streets, in home gardens, in every tended landscape. To be perfectly honest, I was quite thrilled for a few hours at least, showing off my knowledge to anyone who cared to listen. Mercifully, this elation quickly deflated; I started thinking about context and geography and the ubiquitous presence of a handful of specimens – shrubs, climbers, ground covers – across continents. Whether in large, formally designed landscapes or home gardens, the limited palette of plant material across geographies struck me as odd, something worth pondering about.
And this round table offers the perfect forum for further pondering. The phrase knowledge of plants in the provocation caught my attention – is it really knowledge of plants that is a barrier for the success of nature-based cities? Or is it something else, something deeper? Humanity’s knowledge of floral diversity, built up so diligently and painstakingly over the last three centuries, is extensive and comprehensive. The issue may be not so much in the knowledge as much as in the way it is leveraged. Limiting the discussion to the horticultural aspect of this knowledge, it is worth noting the horticultural industry – one dare says across the globe – is largely driven by aesthetic considerations; an aesthetic rooted in 19th-century ideals of nature, celebrating the exotic.
The challenges that humanity – and the planet – faces from issues like climate change, extreme weather events, and increasing urbanisation need to be tackled, urgently so. As landscape architects, planners, and designers, it is imperative that we consciously address the larger global issues, however, local one’s scale or area of intervention may be. Interventions in urban landscapes play a crucial role in addressing these challenges. A thoughtful deployment of native plant material can help address drought and flood cycles, enable habitat creation and protection for insects, birds, and pollinators, minimise the chemical load on soil and water systems, help tackle urban heat island effect, ameliorate the microclimate; the list is long and is only limited by one’s aspirations for positive change.
The horticulture industry plays a vital role in mainstreaming the immense floral diversity that one could leverage to address not merely aesthetic considerations but those of resilience, diversity, and endemicity. Like any other industry, the horticulture industry too is driven by perceived demands of the markets – specimens seen as the most in-demand are the ones that get the most attention in developing cultivars, in large scale propagation, and in maintaining large stocks. Concerted efforts by the industry to propagate (popularise?) endemic species with manifold advantages can ensure ecologically valuable species are more accessible to, not just landscape professionals, but to lay gardeners too. It is an important opportunity for the industry to shape the nature of the demand and popularise a more mindful and meaningful planting palette.
I am certain many will relate to the struggles one goes through in trying to source native plants specimens since they are rarely available in conventional nurseries and sourcing from the wilderness is increasingly difficult, if not impossible. While catering to conventional demands for the standardised aesthetic plant material, the industry could easily offer a selection of native specimens, catering equally to the casual enthusiast and the serious practitioner.
The horticulture industry invests substantial time and resources in research and development of cultivars that are hardier, less water-intensive, resistant to pests, etc. It is time for some of these efforts to be dedicated in identifying, nurturing, and propagating suitable endemic species; ones that could easily replace the current standard but limited palette. Such a move would go a long way in mainstreaming endemic flora in everyday horticultural practises. This would lead to popularising an entirely new spectrum of plant material which would meet the aesthetic / productivity demands of the designer and the gardener while sustaining a crucial link in sustaining local ecosystems.
Ian Shears is one of Australia’s leading experts in urban landscapes and urban forestry. He has specialised in Urban Landscapes for over 25 years and has worked for over a decade with the City of Melbourne. Ian and his teams have been credited with the development of some of Australia's most progressive environmental projects and polices.
Ian Shears
How can the horticultural or ‘green’ professional be the fundamentally important voice of the plants? This ‘voice’ is critical in providing the knowledge of plant needs for growth and health, and the knowledge of what the potential of the plant is to provide maximum benefits.
In recent times there has been a rethink and repositioning of the role of city greening, its importance to the health and wellbeing of the community, and the liveability of the city. Traditionally green components of cities were viewed from a heritage, aesthetic or amenity perspective. Changing climate, urban densification, urban heat island effect is placing significant pressure on the built fabric, services and people of the city. A healthy, resilient and thriving ‘green infrastructure’ is now recognised as playing a critical role in responding to these challenges and conferring environmental service benefits, urban cooling, health and wellbeing outcomes. The myriad benefits span economic, social and environmental and political domains, are interrelated, with each feeding cumulatively into the creation of resilient and sustainable urban landscapes.
The knowledge of the benefits of urban greening is well researched and documented. Translating this ‘benefit’ knowledge into on-ground (or on roof or wall) outcomes is critical to ensure successful outcomes, and to unleash the potential of having nature at the heart of urban planning and design. This transference of knowledge is in essence the ‘applied’ component of horticultural science.
The greening or ‘renaturing ‘of cities involves three distinct, interrelated applications of the idea. Expanding the use of green infrastructure, protecting and enhancing ecosystems and biodiversity, and providing people ways to immerse in nature. Each of these methods involves innovative practices used at multiple urban scales and applies to ‘green field’ locations or retrofitting dense built part of the city.
In unpacking each of these areas it becomes clear that there is a wide range of professional skill sets required to come together to imagine and realise ‘thriving’ outcomes. So how can the horticultural or ‘green’ professional be the fundamentally important voice of the plants? This ‘voice’ is critical in providing the knowledge of plant needs for growth and health, and the knowledge of what the potential of the plant is to provide maximum benefits.
Reflecting on what the ‘green voice’ is provides insight into what knowledge is needed, and how to input and embed the knowledge. The wide range of urban environments that plants will need to tolerate and thrive is expanding and plant knowledge will need to encompass this need. Ecological considerations and biophilic connections between people and nature are increasingly important considerations in urban settings.
Design, implementation, maintenance and evaluation are critical processes that green professionals and the horticultural industry are able to inform contemporary best practice in the wide range of urban greening projects. Provision of high quality climate ready plant materials is increasingly important. This is particularly important with long lived greening elements such as trees. Trees are vulnerable to increases in urban temperatures and determining how existing trees will fare is as critical as selecting new species to plant.
Of many green infrastructure elements, green roofs, walls and facades are becoming more common green components of cities, reflecting the paucity of urban space for more traditional greening. The horticultural industry is well placed to provide knowledge on planning, design and maintenance of these elements.
Another emerging field is nature immersion, understanding why nature improves happiness, health and creativity. Biophilic urbanism describes the need for human beings to connect with nature and the natural environment. Cities committed to a biophilic approach focus on increasing the amount and quality of nature that is present in the city – and on improving access to it.
Contemporary city greening is providing many opportunities for the horticultural sector and its players. Understanding what knowledge is needed and how to impart that knowledge strategically is a great opportunity.
As millions and billions are being spent on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) innovation investments, my thoughts are swimming toward not letting our weakest drown in the coming floods.
While the award-winning movie Parasite (2019) by Bong Joon-ho was iconic in many ways, a terrifying scene haunts me more often than others. The scene is one where the one of the central families of the movie, the Kims, rush back to their semi-basement apartment only to discover it is flooded with sewer water. The director then engraves into our minds the still frame of Ki-jung, the daughter of the Kim family, sitting on the lid of the toilet while smoking a cigarette to stop the sewage from backflowing into their apartment. What bothers me most is that this seemingly ridiculous scene is likely going to be the reality for thousands come 2030.
In the past few months, while diving into our work on climate risk issues in Malaysia, we found some uncomfortable data points that could turn the fiction of Parasite into reality. Greater Klang Valley, the city we do most work in, is slated to be impacted by sea level rise. By 2030, the models by Climate Central Organisation show that areas as far as 30 km inland from the coast will be at risk of annual floods (Figure 1).
Figure 1. 2030 Scenario of Annual Floods in Klang Valley, Climate Central Organisation (1)
Greater Klang Valley is a city formed along the Klang River. As sea level rises in the next 8 years, the areas that will be flooded also happen to be the locations that house the oldest neighbourhoods and population, as they are often also built closest to the river. More devastatingly, our data shows that the floods will disproportionately impact the lower income groups in their relatively affordable homes (Figure 2). Our conservative count shows a minimum of 8,000 families to be affected by sea level rise in Klang alone. While we worry about the elderly population in these locations, we also lose sleep over the young middle class who might be burdened with a 30-year mortgage on top of rising inflation. Are the floods going to send them spiraling into debt and poverty?
Figure 2. Distribution of home prices in areas within and outside of the 2030 annual flood zones. Date by Urbanmetry
How real are these models?
When presented with a less than ideal outcome, stakeholders often argue the veracity of the model. After all, weather forecasting is only accurate up to 5 days forward, 90% of the time. The confusion comes from the fact that these annual flood models don’t predict rainfall, the wind, or the temperature. It predicts how high the sea levels will rise and depending on where you are, will you be above or underwater.
While we debate the veracity of these models, if and when it would flood our neighbourhoods, keep in mind that most scientists believe that our sea level rise models underestimate the flooding problem we face. In the Climate Central models, only the low elevation areas would be at risk, albeit with the rising tides from the river. The model does not take into account the problem of rising groundwater. In a fascinating article “The Creeping Menace: Rising Groundwater”, Kendra Piere-Louis explains the risks of rising sea levels pushing groundwater up, flooding areas beyond the sea level rise models. In the same article, Professor Kristina Hill, an associate professor at University of California, Berkeley, was quoted to say that “We’ve way underestimated the flooding problem”.2
What can we do about it?
A fundamental dilemma of Climate Tragedies in old cities is the memories and history that will undoubtedly sink with it. Folks have strong emotional attachment to their homes hence they would understandably be reluctant to leave. Even if they can be convinced to uproot, once flooded, the monetary value of these assets and its ability to act as financing collateral diminishes. Often, the affected are left without a financially feasible option to relocate.
Our institutions and leaders have a moral obligation to exercise their resources to assess the risks at hand and generate a response plan to minimize the impact to its citizens. For preventive measures, local councils and state governments should integrate climate risk assessments as part of their development assessment plans, to be prioritized along with overall environment impact assessments and traffic impact assessments. This is to mitigate the heavy costs of relocation and post-disaster reliefs.
Recently, cities such as New York and Sydney are considering government buyouts of flood-prone homes. However, this process is often legally painful and expensive, making it difficult for emerging economies to consider. For governments who can’t afford a buyout, options under consideration include flooding and damages insurance that could cushion Climate Change impacts. Nonetheless, there is great urgency in innovative thinking on this subject to begin to build a safety net for these folks.
As millions and billions are being spent on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) innovation investments, my thoughts are swimming toward not letting our weakest drown in the coming floods.
Sea level rise during high tide by 2030 is modelled by Climate Central based on the IPCC’s AR6 Leading Consensus (IPCC 2021) model and Climate Central’s proprietary CoastalDEM land elevation model. The model assumes global emissions of heat-trapping pollution continue to rise at current trajectory with 95th percentile sensitivity.
I have lived in an array of fascinating cities, and visited a host of others. I have loved many (New York, Hong Kong, Harare and Berlin); been miserable in a few (London and Pretoria); oddly disappointed by some (San Francisco, Dublin and Sydney) overwhelmed by others (Shanghai and Cairo); and frankly terrified by at least two (Port Moresby and Lagos).
There is a growing impatience that 20 years after democratic elections in South Africa, Cape Town remains smugly indifferent to the vast gap in lived experiences within its city boundaries.
But there’s only one city I have ever really called home: Cape Town. When asked where I am from, I never say “South Africa,” always just “Cape Town.” Despite the fact that I have not lived there for the past 15 years, it remains my cultural and geographical touchstone. Last year, the New York Times and the Sunday Telegraph both named Cape Town as the most desirable city in the world to visit:
You can go almost anywhere to experience the city’s in-your-face beauty—adrenalin junkies plunge into the marine-rich waters around Dyer Island to go nose-to-nose with Great Whites; shoppers scour Woodstock for the latest in Afro-chic design, then quench their thirst with local craft beer; foodies are spoilt for choice in valleys carpeted with vines, where world-class chefs prepare Michelin-rated fare at bargain prices.[1]
And much of that is true. Each time I return to Cape Town, I think to myself, “it can’t be as beautiful as I remember.” But when I sweep over the curve of Mandela Boulevard, and begin the descent to the City Bowl, I always catch my breath in wonder. On the left, Table Mountain with a rolling white table-cloth of cloud; the pink evening sea-skyline broken only by the umbrella cranes of the harbor on the right, and our brooding Lion’s Head on Signal Hill peering down over the multi-colored houses of Bo-Kaap and District Six.
Sadly though, my home-city, like many a family home, is deeply dysfunctional. Putting on its Sunday best for visitors, it works hard to sweep undesirable realities under the carpet. In particular, this means hiding family members who can’t (or won’t) be part of its pretty facade, behind closed doors.
One of the most persistent legacies of apartheid is its geography. This is particularly true in Cape Town. Many descriptions of the city begin with a plane sweeping majestically over Table Mountain, and then effortlessly leap-frog into the natural beauty surrounding the Afro-chic of the city center. Hardly ever is a mention made of the informal settlements surrounding the airport: the tin shacks of Cross Roads, that are home to around one in four residents of Cape Town. No comment is made about the soul-destroying legacy of the ‘Coloured’ (mixed race) population group’s housing under apartheid: sullen, concrete hostels that pepper the sides of the highway into town, and continue to sustain the drug-fueled gangster culture that is largely responsible for making Cape Town one of the murder capitals of the world. Driving instructions to the ‘must visit’ Cape Wine Lands seldom refer to the dusty Cape Flats you’ll pass along the way—home to the estimated 100,000 gang members of Cape Town—or to Khyalitsha township, Cape Town’s Soweto, hidden behind barren windswept dunes. Little more than 20 minutes from the city center, they are a world apart from the ‘craft beers of Woodstock’ and the ‘Michelin-rated fare at bargain prices’.
Like white South Africans under apartheid, the geography of Cape Town enables visiting tourists the opportunity to see only what they want to. This is especially so for ‘gay Cape Town’. Centered around the tiny, privileged enclave of De Waterkant, the annual week-long Cape Town Pride celebrations are deservedly a firm fixture on the global gay agenda. On a continent in which 34 countries (out of a total of 52) outlaw homosexuality, five with the death penalty, Cape Town has come to be called the ‘Gay Mecca of Africa’. Embracing this designation is a conspicuous part of the city’s carefully curated global image of a city that celebrates diversity and prides itself on opportunity, equality and justice for all.
My vision of a ‘just Cape Town’, however, is one that shifts this from being (at best) an aspirational intention or (at worst) cynical marketing to something that is real and genuine for more than just the wealthy, mostly male, overwhelmingly white participants that currently flock from across South Africa and around the world to attend Pride events such as the Millionaire’s Ball and Beach Sports Day. Such activities suggest that the struggle for visibility, dignity, respect and safety are well and long won for queer people in the city. While this is true for the small minority that live and visit the city bowl and surrounding historically white suburbs, it is certainly not so for gay, lesbian and gender non-conforming township residents, squeezed into the less lauded and visited parts of greater Cape Town.
There is a growing impatience that 20 years after democratic elections in South Africa, Cape Town remains smugly indifferent to the vast gap in lived experiences within its city boundaries. During pride week, for instance, not even lip-service is paid to the fact that township based NGOs estimate that at least 10 lesbians are raped each week, to punish them for transgressing gender norms and boundaries. If even one of these vicious acts happened in or around De Waterkant, the response would an outraged howl for action. But most of these rapes happen behind the windswept dunes of Khayelitsha or in the darkened tin shacks of Cross Roads, so no speeches or protests are made about that devastating reality during Pride. No demands are made on the City Council to work towards improving policing, housing and transport for vulnerable sexual minorities who are protected, at least in name, by the national constitution, which however flawed still sets South Africa apart from the state-sanctioned homophobia of most countries on the continent.
For me, building a just Cape Town would involve transforming Pride from being a week of parties and celebrations to becoming a year-long campaign to make Cape Town a safe and welcoming space for all queer people. Central to such a process would need to be queer people themselves. Grassroots LGBTI organizations have a deep knowledge of challenges facing queer people outside of historically white apartheid Cape Town. Such knowledge is a critical resource to plot what is needed to transform Cape Town. The wealthy party crowd that makes up much of Pride has an enviable level of social capital that could open doors, networks and resources to profoundly influence urban planning and development in Cape Town. But experience has shown that being queer has not in itself provided enough cohesiveness or empathy to overcome the differences caused by other factors such as race, class, and gender. Repeated attempts to change Pride, almost since its inception, have collapsed in acrimony with organizers’ protests about the need to deliver on events that will appeal to essential corporate sponsors being dismissed amid accusations of racism and deliberate exclusion.
What might help to overcome this impasse? I think some of the most creative development and transformation approaches being explored in South Africa, and indeed across the continent and the global South, are focused on ways in which city (rather than national) policies can promote greater social integration and advancement for vulnerable and excluded groups. But I have found no documentation that looks at how sexual minorities can be included in this cutting edge thinking.
But then, neither have I have seen much evidence of LGBTI organizations linking their struggles to other equally compelling social justice issues. For instance, it’s an oft-cited statistic that in South Africa poor girls are more likely to be raped than to finish school, such is the pervasive endemic of gender based violence. In such a context, it makes little sense to seek solutions specifically for “lesbian rape”.
Hence, I am convinced that if we are to ever build a Cape Town that truly welcomes, celebrates and protects all her queer residents, that the starting point needs to be to a recognition that single-issue, identity politics simply doesn’t work in profoundly unequal and systemically violent cities. That in such spaces, addressing the needs of one vulnerable and marginalized group cannot hope to bring about the structural transformation that is required to ensure a life free of fear, stigma and discrimination.
So I recognize that for my vision of a just Cape Town to become a reality it will need to involve a real rainbow coalition of the marginalized, excluded, exploited and abused. n other words, a coalition with the capacity to speak to the needs of not only queer people, but also the aged, the homeless, the unemployed, victims of gender based violence (particularly women and children), and migrants.
From a centuries-old pear tree marking the remnants of a castle in the Czech Republic, to an urban perimeter of abandoned ammunitions dumps in Spain, to a tiny balcony in cramped New Delhi—places that people care about dot the globe. Stewards, often driven by place attachments, meanings, and memories, defy the forces quietly erasing these places—time, indifference, conflict, population growth. They act to preserve their places’ historical and biological heritage, demonstrating how important these places are to them and to the collective identity of their community.
Some form of collaborative governance appears to be universal across civic ecology practices.
Sharing stewards’ stories can inspire and offer insights into the actions people take to restore urban places. But how can one capture and share these stories? Given that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are often seen as a means of delivering knowledge from universities to the masses, a MOOC might seem an unlikely place to go looking for insights into how citizen stewards describe their work. But in our Reclaiming Broken Places: Introduction to Civic Ecology MOOC, we invited students to tell their own tales of stewardship through the lens of ten “civic ecology hypotheses,” which touch on biophilia, topophilia, ecosystem services, human-nature contact, networked governance, and resilience, among others. The MOOC students used the multi-media blogging platform Storify for their work; we have compiled a selection of their stories into an eBook coming out this spring.
Reading the stories provides a glimpse into stewardship practice around the world, a chance to understand the stewards’ special places and their connections to them. Here we share four stories: The Caved-in Castle from a village in the Czech Republic, the Waste Grounds surrounding Madrid, the Sparrow Balconies of India, and the Flowering Yurino Garden in Japan.
The Caved-in Castle, Holešov, Czech Republic
The Caved-in Castle embodies a piece of local history that has passed into legend. According to civic ecology steward (and MOOC student) Jana Karasová, all that remains of the castle today is a mound on the landscape. But the grounds—overgrown and abandoned—are being reclaimed, along with lingering memories of the castle’s heyday and a centuries-old wild pear tree. Boy scouts in the village of Holešov have adopted this area as their own, leading efforts to remove invasive species and keep the grass mowed, thus making the site accessible to town residents and helping to preserve local flora and fauna.
Wild pear tree. Photo: Jana Karasová
The villagers take pride in the site’s pear tree, which is thought to be over 300 years old and has been featured in historical accounts and legends. The local library and historical society joined the restoration effort, unearthing references to the castle and the tree, and government agencies and scientists are starting to help out, spurred by their interest in local biodiversity and the genetics of the wild pear. In addition to this small “governance network,” the community’s collective efforts have restored “social-ecological memories” of the castle and pear tree, created cultural ecosystem services related to the restoration activities themselves, and provided opportunities for learning about local plants and history.
Waste Grounds, Madrid
In 1912, nine enclosures were constructed around the city of Madrid to contain munitions dumps. Over time, these areas became the city’s “waste grounds”—piles of rubble dumped on the terrain and forgotten for decades. Recently, Professor María Auxiliadora Gálvez Pérez and colleagues in the San Pablo University Department of Architecture noticed how grasses, flowers, and even some shrubs and trees were beginning to reclaim the waste grounds. They brought students out to research and restore the area.
At the Archiprix urban design workshop, the students and faculty shared their vision of a middle-out urbanism that transgresses top-down and bottom-up approaches, and of imaginary pragmatics, which produces powerful images proposing imaginary solutions based on hard data. With their vision of the waste grounds transformed into community spaces and a biodiversity reserve, the students are trying to enlist the city government in protecting the sites, thus allowing the students to continue learning from and reclaiming the wasteland. They have compiled an “Atlas of the Waste Grounds” to document their projects, the wildlife, the social context, and the services provided by these neglected parcels of land.
Sparrow Balconies, New Delhi
Amidst the clamor of residential streets in congested New Delhi, sparrows sing and vines and trees burst out over the street below. Marisha Sharma is a participant in the national Greening of Balconies project, which is supported and encouraged by government initiatives and NGOs. In addition to planting small trees, shrubs, and vegetables, and composting food wastes, residents install bird houses to attract their newly-designated state bird, the House Sparrow. As neighbors see each other’s greened balconies, the practice spreads rapidly.
Sparrow balconies. Photo: Marisha Sharma
In comments that provoke thoughts about nature “doses” in dense cities, Sharma’s father talked about their apartment’s balcony: “Every morning I sit in the balcony full of plants, sipping tea with my wife. I keep my camera handy and capture the sparrows busy in their nest building and chick rearing activities. That half hour spent every morning with the sparrows empties the mind of all other material thoughts and worries. Thus, I start my day with full enthusiasm.” Her mother added: “Due to greenery, lots of birds visit my balcony, which gives me happiness. I also grow flowers which I use during my prayers in the temple, which gives me mental peace.”
Flowering Yurino Garden, Nishinomiya
We were particularly moved by the story of resilience and restoration told by the Flowering Yurino Garden through the eyes of Momoka Tamura. Twenty years ago, Nishinomiya, Japan suffered a devastating earthquake. Massive landslides killed 34 residents and destroyed dozens of houses. As reconstruction began, the government covered the landslide with concrete to prevent future tragedies. But the drab, gray material felt wrong, especially in a place where so many had died. Senior residents began to plant flowers on the hillside. They created the Yurino Garden, planting not just flowers but pumpkins and watermelons as a memorial to the souls of the deceased.
Yurino garden. Photo: Momoka Tamura
Tourists come to see this place every spring, marveling at the signature display of pink flowers, and perhaps getting ideas about how to implement similar projects locally. High school students volunteer and residents enjoy concerts and other community events in the garden. Reflecting Keith Tidball’s work on post-disaster greening, this place of devastation and sorrow has become a beautiful memorial to life—a place for healing and learning.
* * * * *
Our ten civic ecology hypotheses (see below) are what we have imagined based on years of observing, studying, and participating in stewardship practices. Through their stories, the MOOC students contested and confirmed our hypotheses. For example, they challenged our notions about “broken places” being the only sites where civic ecology practices occur. Whereas a landslide after an earthquake in Japan is a classic post-disaster “broken place,” it’s harder to apply the term “broken place” to an abandoned field with a pear tree and a mound that was once a castle in a Czech village. We also found through our MOOC that some form of collaborative governance entailing community organizations, non-profits, and government agencies appears to be universal across civic ecology practices, and is also a means for expanding the impact of these small scale stewardship and restoration activities.
As MOOC students share the stories of their practices, they both inspire and offer insights into why and how people steward urban places, and the larger meanings of these stewardship actions. And similar to how students implementing design projects in the waste lands surrounding Madrid are turning “imaginaries” into something pragmatic, we as scholars continue to both imagine and ground truth our ideas through research and teaching. Finally, just as the Madrid waste land restoration projects are a form of “middle-out urbanism” that transgresses top-down and bottom-up approaches, our MOOC has occupied a middle ground where experts and practitioners share knowledge and experience.
Marianne Krasny is professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Director of the Civic Ecology Lab at Cornell University, and leader of EPA’s national environmental education training program (“EECapacity”).
I may have (just) missed the 2015 International Year of Soils, so please forgive me for jumping on the soils bandwagon somewhat belatedly. Before I go further, a disclaimer—I am no expert on soils, having only relatively recently begun working on a multidisciplinary research project on carbon capture in urban soils, so what follows is an ecologist’s slant on how soils can be designed (or even engineered) to provide multiple ecosystem services in cities. One route by which this can be achieved is the widespread creation of Carbon Capture Gardens, and in this essay I will explore some of the science behind this idea and other ways of managing urban soils to benefit people and the planet.
Carbon sequestration in the soils of U.K.’s urban brownfields has the potential to meet 10 percent of the U.K.’s annual CO2 reduction target.
I focus mainly on soils in urban brownfield land—a term that is used to describe previously developed land in a vacant or derelict condition. Data on the prevalence of urban brownfield land is often rather scarce, but an article by Peleg Kremer and colleagues (here at TNOC) showed that vacant land (which includes non-brownfield land) typically makes up between 12.5 and 25 percent of U.S. cities. Brownfield land is particularly common in the ‘shrinking cities’ of the U.S. and Europe, where human depopulation in recent decades has led to serious challenges for city planners and urban governance. However, the contribution of brownfield land to urban green infrastructure, and human societal needs more broadly, is increasingly acknowledged.
Take Leipzig, for instance. Dagmar Haase and colleagues use the German city as a case study to propose a ‘nexus between urban shrinkage and the provision of ecosystem services,’ whilst Rebecca Salminen Witt has eloquently described the opportunities for reconnecting people with nature in the once neglected open spaces of Detroit. Equally, vacant land in cities can also have a role more fundamental to human well-being, such as the provision of shelter for the homeless. Even in economically prosperous cities, there is a constant turnover of brownfield sites as buildings are demolished and new developments appear in their wake. Often hidden behind tall fences, brownfields are a considerable opportunity for the provision of biodiversity and ecosystem services in cities, but they are very rarely managed strategically at a city scale for this purpose.
To return to soils, it is widely known (even to non-soil scientists) that soils are a major carbon reservoir, storing almost 80 percent of the carbon found in terrestrial ecosystems (around 2500 of 3170 gigatons). Accordingly, increasing attention is being paid to the crucial role that soils have in mitigating climate change through carbon sequestration. The majority of soil carbon occurs in organic matter (known as soil organic carbon, SOC) and, therefore, soil carbon management tends to focus on maintaining and enhancing SOC. However, soil carbon can also be present inorganically as soil inorganic carbon, called SIC. SIC formation, which occurs naturally in arid soils, involves the combination of CO2 with soil minerals (typically magnesium and calcium) to form carbonates in a process known as mineral carbonation. These carbonates are a stable and long-term store for carbon, but their role in climate change mitigation has been underappreciated. Indeed, the recent FAO report on the Status of the World’s Soil Resources is rather dismissive of SIC, stating: “in most cases changes in inorganic C stocks are slow and not amenable to traditional soil management practices. Hence inorganic carbon does not play a significant role in terms of management of ecosystem services”.
But perhaps they are wrong. Recent research by Carla Washbourne and others at Newcastle University suggests that the FAO may have been too hasty to disregard a role for SIC. Soil carbonate formation was measured over an 18-month period at Science Central, a large brownfield site in the heart of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, U.K. The result was striking: urban soils have a huge capacity to capture atmospheric CO2 and store it inorganically as calcium carbonate (calcite). Calcium availability is the key limiting factor, and this is provided abundantly in brownfield soils that contain demolition wastes such as concrete dust and lime. The carbon capture process is extremely rapid: a hectare of urban soil can sequester up to 85 tonnes of atmospheric CO2 per year. Scaling this up, appropriate management of <12,000 ha of urban land to maximise calcite formation could potentially remove 1 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere annually. To put that another way, the U.K. has 1.7 million ha of urban land and proactive management of 700,000 ha for mineral carbonation has the potential to meet 10 percent of the U.K.’s annual CO2 reduction target. But, what does ‘appropriate’ and ‘proactive’ management for carbonation in urban soils entail? How do we maximise rates of inorganic carbon capture in urban soils and are there important synergies or trade-offs with other urban ecosystem services?
To answer these questions, and others, colleagues and I began a novel new research project at the end of 2014: Sustainable Urban Carbon Capture: Engineering Soils for Climate Change (SUCCESS—an acronym that leaves no margin for failure). SUCCESS seeks new ways of designing a carbon capture function into engineered soils, including during the development of urban brownfield sites, green space around transport infrastructure, or in land remediation and restoration. The multidisciplinary team includes academics (soil scientists, a geotechnical engineer, an ecologist, and a sustainability scientist) and project partners from the public and private sectors who will assist with the wider application of our results. The project integrates controlled experiments and field surveys to explore the capacity for urban land designed to capture carbon to also provide other ecosystem services, such as biodiversity conservation, recreation, and flood mitigation.
From a geotechnical perspective, the formation of calcium carbonate could have a couple of conflicting effects on soil properties. On the one hand, we might see increased soil strength—a property that will be beneficial to engineers—but, at the same time, we may see decreased permeability as pore spaces in the soil are filled by calcium carbonate particles. This could result in a devastating trade-off between carbon capture and urban flood mitigation, particularly pertinent given the record levels of rainfall across the U.K. this winter.
Designing artificial urban soils
One way of exploiting the natural carbon capture potential of urban soils is to design artificial soils that are engineered to maximise the rate of calcium carbonate formation. To evaluate the best materials, and ways of mixing them, a series of experimental plots have been constructed at Newcastle University. This experiment makes use of two main carbon capture materials. We are familiar with the first—crushed concrete, a waste product from local demolition activities that mimics the substrates found on brownfield sites. The second material may be less familiar, as I haven’t yet mentioned that naturally occurring calcium silicate rocks can also provide a source of calcium for mineral carbonation. One such rock is dolerite (also known as diabase), a rock that occurs all over the world and is quarried in the northeast of England. So, the second carbon capture material used in the SUCCESS experiments is crushed dolerite fines. The advantage of using dolerite compared to concrete is that we can create a net carbon benefit—a great deal of CO2 is emitted in the manufacture of concrete, whilst dolerite fines are a byproduct of local quarrying activities. The experimental plots are now being monitored regularly to assess the rate of calcium carbonate formation as well as the geotechnical properties (e.g., strength, permeability) of the artificial soil.
Will plants grow on harsh soils engineered for carbon capture?
Designing an artificial soil for carbon capture is all well and good, but will plants be able to grow on it? Crushed concrete and dolerite fines are very low in nutrients and we need to know which plants are best at surviving in these harsh conditions. Of those plants that can survive, we are also interested in the ability of different types of plants to boost the carbon storage capability of the soil. For example, we may expect that woody species with deep roots will be the most effective at drawing CO2 into the soil, making it available for calcium carbonate formation.
We established a plant growth experiment in spring 2015 to examine: (i) which plant traits confer tolerance to harsh soils engineered for carbon capture; and (ii) which plant traits deliver a high carbon capture potential. Over 200 pots have been planted up with 25 different plant species that span a range of functional types, including grasses, trees, and herbaceous plants, as well as some species that are grown as energy crops.
The experiment will run for 18 months and ‘soil’ samples will be collected to examine the amount of carbon that has been captured in the different experimental treatments. At the end of the experiment, we will also look at the total growth of the plants in each pot as a measure of their performance over the course of the experiment. In addition to the controlled experimental work, field surveys across a variety of brownfield sites in Tyneside are exploring what explains variation in carbon capture within and between brownfield sites by combining soil sampling with vegetation surveys.
Multifunctional urban green spaces
Carbonation is one of a number of ecosystem services that can be included in the multifunctional design of urban soils. Delivering such multifunctionality is likely to result in conflicts between the best approaches for managing for different goods and services. To deal with these conflicts, it is important to be able to identify synergies or trade-offs between different ecosystem services, and a key part of SUCCESS is to explore how carbon capture co-varies with plant diversity and other ecosystem services, such as flood mitigation, pollination, and cultural services.
Quantifying ecosystem multifunctionality is difficult, and there have been relatively few attempts to do so in urban ecosystems. A notable exception is a recent study by Alison Holt and colleagues that identifies hotspots of urban ecosystem service provision across Sheffield, U.K. A key finding of this work is that these hotspots only appear at certain spatial scales, illustrating that optimising ecosystem service provision in cities requires holistic urban planning at the city level. This urban planning must also involve the strategic decision about whether to build on brownfield or greenfield (previously undeveloped) land. Building on urban brownfields is attractive, reducing urban sprawl as we strive to develop compact cities. Indeed, a recent study concluded that land sparing is crucial for the provision of urban ecosystem services. However, as Iain Stott and his co-authors acknowledge, ‘land sharing’—that is, the provision of accessible green space throughout a city—is also important if people are going to benefit from the ecosystem services and biodiversity on their doorsteps.
Whilst biodiversity in cities needs space, it also needs time. Beyond considering spatial dynamics, planning for urban biodiversity conservation also requires a temporal perspective. One of the reasons why urban brownfields are so important for biodiversity is that their constant creation and turnover provides a mosaic of sites at various stages of ecological succession at the city scale. Mira Kattwinkel and colleagues call for integrating the concept of ‘temporary conservation’ into urban planning, and their simulation model found that setting aside brownfields for 15 years before redevelopment maximised their conservation value. It would be very interesting to know how this period of time correlates with the provision of other ecosystem services—it may well be, for instance, that the formation of calcium carbonate in urban soils will saturate within such a time frame, but the necessary longitudinal data are lacking.
Of course, some urban brownfield sites have such a high nature conservation value that they warrant long-term protection. We don’t have many early successional habitats left in the U.K., and since 2007, ‘Open Mosaic Habitats on Previously Developed Land’ have been a priority habitat in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP). Despite this recognition, there remain few instances of biodiversity taking precedence over development when it comes to building on a prime brownfield site. The U.K. government has recently announced that they are relaxing planning permission restrictions for development on brownfields, with the exception of sites of ‘high environmental value,’ but they offer no definition of high environmental value, which potentially leaves important sites at risk from the vagaries of the planning system. The conservation value of brownfield sites is further complicated by the abundance of exotic plants that combine with natives to form ‘novel urban ecosystems.’ Exotic plants tend to polarise opinion, but most urban ecologists agree that insisting on native purity isn’t a viable option in urban landscapes. I’m sure that the pollinating insects visiting Buddleia davidii, an invasive exotic that thrives in British brownfields, would tend to agree. Equally, the novel substrates can support striking native species, such as bee orchids in Gateshead, England, that relish the chalk grassland analogue provided by brownfield land.
The provision of cultural ecosystem services in cities is arguably even more complex. For one, it is hard to manage the delivery of cultural services at the city scale in a dispassionate way, as people have significant connections with their local green spaces that can be lost forever if these sites are developed. Whilst plants or grasshoppers or pollinators can be maximised at the city scale through spatial and temporal urban planning, people aren’t quite so dispensable. For instance, a fascinating study of the ecology and community management of two post-mining sites in Yorkshire, U.K., clearly demonstrates that all brownfields have a story—a history—and this history still resonates in both current biodiversity and the provision of cultural ecosystem services. Many of these cultural services are inherently difficult to measure, or even intangible, such as sense of place or aesthetic appreciation of nature. Another challenge is that people’s preferences for cultural services can be subjective and locally distinctive, making it hard to extrapolate from city to city.
Application and implementation
In places such as the U.K., where population growth necessitates new housing, we must find ways of reconciling the biodiversity and ecosystem services provided by urban brownfields with the reality of redevelopment. High value sites should be protected, but in the majority of cases where development goes ahead, carbon capture, biodiversity and other ecosystem services can be retained and maximised through novel nature-based solutions such as carbon capture gardens. The SUCCESS experiments can be a forerunner to recommending designer plant communities in new urban developments or construction projects. Through collaboration with housing developers and landscape architects, there is a great opportunity to embed ‘designed experiments’ that can be retained and managed by the local community as carbon capture gardens or ‘pop-up parks,’ whilst still generating scientific data in the long term.
Such solutions should be bespoke and reflect both the local ecology and urban heritage of a given site. Where space is tight, a carbon capture function could be built into sustainable drainage systems or engineered into a green roof substrate. By being at the heart of new developments, such initiatives would also offer great potential for investigating public preferences for the design and management of vacant urban land and the links between urban biodiversity and human well-being. Other opportunities for engineering carbon capture provision in the built environment include construction projects associated with transport infrastructure such as highways, railways, and airports. Indeed, the tactical deployment of materials suitable for carbonation in areas of high CO2 emissions could maximise rates of carbon capture. Moreover, given that mineral carbonation rates often increase with temperature, we should also exploit any opportunities for applying this technology in tropical climates.
The recent COP21 in Paris was hailed by the Guardian newspaper as “the world’s greatest diplomatic success.” Whether it is anything more than a diplomatic success, only time will tell, but the historic agreement has given a renewed enthusiasm to efforts to tackle climate change. Reducing CO2 emissions will always be central to such efforts, but we also need to embrace nature-based solutions for sequestering the CO2 that we’ve already produced. A great benefit of enhancing mineral carbonation in urban soils, either through the appropriate management of brownfield land or the engineering of artificial soils, is that it is a passive form of carbon capture involving little or no energy input. Where such soils can also be designed to support an array of other ecosystem services, this technology becomes a real asset in the toolbox of a sustainable city.
There is not one magic framework that will tell the true story of community gardens, but it is crucial that we pay attention to the profound work occurring in community-managed garden spaces, and tell the story that does these efforts justice.
A team of practitioners and researchers at the Central Park Conservancy Institute for Urban Parks, NeighborSpace, Borderless, and USDA Forest Service – Northern Research Station met from September to November 2021 to discuss research on social infrastructure and urban green spaces, with the goal of translating academic literature into practical knowledge that can support nonprofits, community gardeners, foundations, and policymakers. Our aim is to better communicate the value of community-managed spaces and their stewards as critical social infrastructure. Starting from the synthesis of the literature and a case study of community gardens, we created a framework for diagramming visible and invisible systems that produce known benefits and outcomes that could be applied to multiple community-managed spaces.
Social infrastructure and stewardship
Social infrastructure is defined as “the physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact with each other in everyday life” (Klinenberg 2018, p. 5). We recognize that these are both physical spaces―such as parks, libraries, coffee shops, and sidewalks―as well as virtual spaces and social processes. In this essay, we turn our focus on less-visible social dynamics of how neighborhood leaders and stewardship groups operate because we think these dynamics and networks are critical in shaping community spaces but require better understanding.
We define stewardship broadly as any act of caring for the local environment and it often occurs through these six types of actions or functions: conservation, management, education, monitoring, advocacy, and transformation (Svendsen & Campbell 2008; Fisher et al. 2012; Connolly et al. 2013). It involves hands-on work such as digging in the dirt and planting trees, but also community organizing. Stewardship is distinct from land ownership. Anyone can be a steward, including civic groups without formal jurisdiction over a site. Research has found that civic stewardship groups activate green space to function as social infrastructure in a range of important ways. Stewards foster friendships, associations, and social cohesion. They create gathering spaces and enliven them with place-based and culturally relevant programming and engage in community organizing and planning (Campbell et al. 2021).
Practices by which stewards activate green space to function as social infrastructure. Adapted from Campbell et al. (2021). Illustrations by Borderless in collaboration with E. Mejia for Partnerships Lab/NeighborSpace
Community stewardship is not without tensions, challenges, and conflicts. In fact, mediating differences among community garden members has been identified by gardeners as one of the critical ways that they learn conflict resolution and strengthen democratic practice (Campbell et al. 2021). Further interrogating the power dynamics and decision-making processes that enable or constrain constructive conflict resolution is crucial to understanding the social function of civic groups.
Stewardship practices are critical building blocks for strengthening community capacity and well-being and fostering social resilience. If you better know and trust your neighbors, and can come together to organize and solve problems, you are better poised to adapt to future events. Indeed, decades of research has demonstrated the ways in which stewards often work in the context of disturbance and recovery cycles. Whether the disruption is slow-moving presses or fast-moving pulse events, stewards both prepare for and respond to disruptions caused by climate change, tornadoes, hurricanes, and pest invasions. And they also respond to social and political upheaval, such as the September 11, 2001 terrorist event, as well as chronic disinvestment, economic decline, and social and racial injustice (Campbell et al. 2019).
Stewards work to restore landscapes, enhance livelihoods, and support communities through acts of caretaking and claims-making. Research has found that stewardship can strengthen social resilience through fostering: place attachment, collective identity, social cohesion, social networks, and knowledge exchange (McMillen et al. 2016). Most recently, scholars have been examining stewardship during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we have found that stewardship groups exhibited learning and flexibility during the pandemic. Groups learned from previous disturbances (e.g., Superstorm Sandy) and adapted to COVID-19 and uprisings for racial justice (Landau et al. 2021). Clearly, stewardship groups are displaying an incredible amount of adaptive capacity and are a critical part of our social infrastructure that shapes the functions and meanings of our public realm.
Describing a framework for social Infrastructure visibility
Providing updated narratives about the real work of what it takes to “community manage” a space is part of our shared stewardship work. It is not only garden leaders who need a richer reflection on how community gardens function as social infrastructure. The general public, policymakers, and funders would be more powerful advocates if a more complete picture of community gardens was made more legible.
It was with this challenge in mind that NeighborSpace, as part of the Central Park’s Conservancy’s Partnership Lab, convened a working group, brainstormed, and discussed both content from selected literature and specific examples of NeighborSpace community-managed gardens. Out of these discussions emerged a design challenge to identify and organize key concepts in a way that integrated, analyzed, and visualized dimensions of social infrastructure happening in community-managed space. The first step was to identify a thematic structure that could serve as an umbrella for multiple layers and multiple gardens.
The framework that emerged focused on three connected themes:
Neighbors: This theme relates to organizational aspects of the community ― the core and consistent caretakers, and the community leaders who are “behind the scenes” organizing people (volunteers), building relationships with the broader community (partnerships), planning both the physical space and activities (maintenance and programming), and identifying resources to support the garden activities.
Place-keeping: This is often the theme that generally has more visibility ― how the space is protected and held for the neighborhood, how the physical features of the space reflect the values and aesthetics of the community of caretakers and stewards. This also refers to the spatial typology (e.g., small-scale gardens that are embedded in the neighborhood fabric), and their accessibility and communication system (signage and other “signs of care”).
Community connections: This theme refers to the network of relationships and support(ers) that neighbors from community-managed spaces seek to develop to engage their community assets and resources. The stronger the network and the capacity for collaboration with other community groups, organizations, and initiatives, the more community gardens create a sense of belonging and inclusion.
These themes led us to map the existing activities and the conditions supporting the activities and to define the values, principles, and outcomes that are supportive of community-managed spaces, particularly community gardens. The guiding questions for these layers, from inside the circle to out, are:
Activities: What diversity and range of activities occur in these spaces?
Conditions: What enables these activities to happen?
Values and Principles: What guides how or why activities happen?
Outcomes: What is the impact or the benefit of these activities and conditions guided by values and principles?
These themes and layers provided the template to compose statements describing the relationship between these elements. Below is an example organized by the aforementioned themes:
Neighbors come together to make informal decisions. This leads to a slow steady trust building. The informal decision-making is the condition that enables trust building as a principle; these influence, for instance, how planning, engaging, and/or organizing activities happen.
Neighbors care in public in multiple creative ways. Signage and art by neighbors create a sense of place. Caring in public is a condition of place-keeping that enables creating a sense of place as a principle; these influence, for instance, how beautification and cleaning activities happen.
Neighbors activate the garden through yoga, music, dance, and art. These activities build a recognized and accessible community venue. Diversity of activities is a condition of community connections that enables community gardens as community venues; these influence, for instance, how artmaking or exercising activities happen.
An important goal of our framework is to create a consistent narrative and visual language for specific gardens to share with multiple audiences, including stakeholders, foundations, media, government, and their own garden community to advocate for policies that support investment in community-managed space stewardship. This framework offers a step toward more comprehensively mapping and expanding the public visibility of community care.
Plotting Garden Care: A framework for social infrastructure visibility in community-managed open space with key elements of community connections, neighbors, and place-keeping. Diagram: Borderless for Partnerships Lab + NeighborSpace
Plotting Garden Care: Highlighting key components in the framework for social infrastructure visibility in community-managed open space, demonstrating activities, conditions, values, and outcomes. Diagram: Borderless for Partnerships Lab + NeighborSpace
Two versions of visualizations are available, a pamphlet prepared for a more concise explanation of community gardens as social infrastructure, as well as a deeper dive, prepared from the slide presentation presented at The Nature of Cities March 2022 conference, in collaboration with the authors of this paper.
Community care in community-managed open space: NeighborSpace in history and process
This framework was informed, inspired, and framed by the work of NeighborSpace, a 25-year-old urban land trust in Chicago and an umbrella organization for more than 130 open-space neighborhood projects across the city. NeighborSpace supports community leaders in their effort to bring together neighbors to activate, transform, and protect empty lots and underutilized open space. NeighborSpace, since its founding, has been an anchor for land protection and a unique national urban land trust model; its mission-driven long-term protection and constancy provides an important vantage point for observing changing stewardship models. The community projects that NeighborSpace helps support are community-managed, grassroot efforts that bring together collaboration among neighbors and local community groups and are predominantly mobilized and maintained by volunteers.
At the founding of NeighborSpace in 1996, NeighborSpace’s structure existed under two basic buckets― land acquisition and land monitoring, playing a minimal role in leadership development, fundraising, and programming. In the last ten years, however, garden groups have asked more urgently for navigation and training in these latter areas. This is a marked difference from the first decade of NeighborSpace; the mid 1990’s reflected a period in which several Chicago nonprofits prioritized community gardens, providing now non-existent financial support, programming, and maintenance. This emerging request for guidance also, perhaps, reflects that many who step into community garden leadership today have less experience with “third space” places -churches, social clubs, and other informal associations that engage in regular group decision-making. Additionally, group decision-making as a public practice of equity (or not, as often is the case) is something that many community-engaged leaders want to get better at in a thoughtful, accountable way.
In 2012, NeighborSpace’s organizational chart replaced “land monitoring” with “stewardship”, to more intentionally and organizationally “steward the stewards.” As part of this shift, NeighborSpace regularly surveys garden leaders about their garden’s “community health.” The responses are both broad and specific, and include requests for online fundraising tools, training in facilitating, decision-making and conflict resolution, opportunities to socialize with other garden leaders, favorite tools for the tool library (including video projectors and outdoor projection screens, ice cream makers, fire pits), and access to porta-potties. The most pressing requests from gardens groups are not what one might immediately think (how to yield more vegetables, for example); again and again, groups ask for better skills at navigating the way a community works together- how to successfully engage with governmental organizations, community groups, alderman, private businesses, neighbors, and other community gardeners.
In the surveys, garden leaders also share frustrations. They consistently observe that much of the general public does not understand how community management functions. Uninvolved neighbors, they report, tend to think garden leaders are getting paid, feel uninvited to the garden, and sometimes think the public effort of community gardens looks messy. Additionally, new gardeners who enter the gardening group are surprised by the tensions among the group. And, as it relates to this essay particularly, the leaders themselves often feel, because there are so few examples of community-managed processes, (i.e., the “warts and all” of public care) that they personally might be doing something wrong.
Sharing a more complete story, internal and external, of community-managed spaces
A key place to start a more complete story of community care is to investigate the pre-existing narratives and public perceptions of community gardens. The popular novella Seed Folks, for example, sets the traditional stage of what comes to mind when thinking of a community’s best self; a shared garden gives people from different races, socioeconomic statuses, skill levels, and ages the opportunity to share in work, grow food and conversation, and understand each other better. Each character gets an equal opportunity and a full chapter to share their story, and the vegetables and flowers are an idyllic background for the group photo at the end of the book.
In real life, the aspiration of community cohesion is an honorable and urgent thing; people do want opportunities to come together for group work in shared spaces, to be connected, to do a thing, and, yes, to take good pictures; and it can’t be denied, community gardens at the end of a workday are very photogenic. But community care is messier, more complicated, and shows up in many more ways than vegetables and flowers. Leaders spend time picking up litter from their parkway, practicing decision-making rules, hosting classes, counseling new gardeners, writing grants, building accessible spaces, negotiating with aldermen, coordinating local partners for events, and fixing fences, both literally and figuratively, between neighbors and each other. Community care is all of that, and future garden leaders are in a better position to “keep on caring” through the hard parts if the work they are doing is reflected back to them in affirming ways.
Intergenerational art project at South Merrill Community Garden’s public parkway growing bed. Photo credit: Natalie Perkins
To “keep on caring”, community gardens need to feel seen; the visual framework of community gardens as social infrastructure creates a shared place to build and say, “that’s us!” to not only gardeners themselves, but to funders, government entities, and policymakers. Funders often don’t fully understand truly what community gardens set the conditions for, undervaluing some things (community and neighbor connection, stormwater management, participatory decision-making), and overvaluing others (vegetable output). Policymakers and municipal departments, often brought together for collaborative open space projects that engage water, land, and asset departments could use these intersections to create productive dialogues that don’t often happen between city services. A truer understanding of how community-managed spaces function, for example, could mitigate enforcement of weed fines, feed funding back into the very community caring for these green spaces, and create relationships between residents and sanitation departments, all while offering a truer picture to all parties of what it means for a city to work together.
NeighborSpace has taken steps to address some of these issues of legibility quite practically. For the public, transparent processes, continued engagement, and clear invitation are key. For the garden leaders, continued check-ins, dialogues, and leadership training on decision-making and public programming are vital for leadership growth. For city leaders and funders, when doing site visits, opportunities to speak and see communities at work (not just the garden spaces themselves) are essential. In all cases, recognizing prior beliefs about community gardens is an important place to start. NeighborSpace sometimes tells new garden leaders, “You have to host harder than you think,” and that applies to NeighborSpace in its role as well. Community gardens are not well understood, so we have to keep explaining them harder than we think.
The public face of community gardens and the gap between what is happening and how it is being perceived needs attending to, and the framework provides opportunities for that. On the micro-level, this condition requires thoughtfulness on how the general public is invited in to participate, for example, and entails simple but often overlooked things like more explicit visitor-centered invitations on workdays (for example, signs in large font that say, “Talk to the person in the orange vest to get involved!”) On the macro-level, there is need for a national interrogation of why some people are involved more than others (who and how neighbors feel invited or available often reveals structural inequities that are reflected in the larger culture, but not talked about explicitly in community gardening), and how those with more time (and often more resources) inherit decision-making.
Creating visible opportunities for the general people to care for space simply by enjoying it with their family is an emerging model that makes community-managed space more available for those with less free time. Nature play and conservation trail gardens, with inviting language, where the primary activity allows for children to play in nature, and allows families with less free time to learn, enjoy nature, and maybe pick a weed, are emerging models for community-managed spaces. Another example of “caring by enjoying” encourages gardens to host events that invite non-garden people, for example, with backpack giveaways, coat drives, free haircuts, tasty food, and live music. This clear invitation creates a “goodwill gateway” to invite folks back for volunteer work and planting days.
Internal visibility is essential for garden leaders to continue the work they are doing in their community. New garden leaders, when provided a guide on “what to expect in community-management”, are less likely to be surprised when challenging things happen, and more likely to recognize it as an opportunity to exercise their community-management muscle. NeighborSpace provides an orientation for new garden leaders that is explicit, light in tone, and pragmatic about what will likely happen in a community garden. Generated by more seasoned leaders, this guide includes reflections on volunteers not showing up for workdays, vegetables getting stolen, and conflict resolution policies. This normalizing of likely occurrences ensures that when they happen, leaders are prepared, and sometimes even excited, to meet the challenges. This internal visibility goes a long way to creating a more resilient community group that feels supported and curious about the complicated nature of community-managed care.
Outward visibility to the bigger municipal and foundation players can be challenging, but there are opportunities to be proactive; NeighborSpace gets out ahead of future challenges by writing a yearly letter to commissioners about who NeighborSpace is, works with funders, writes letters to city department heads, and meets with aldermen to explain the nature of community-managed work and the value of this human and social infrastructure. It is still, unfortunately, the case, however, that the lion’s share of funding, both public and private, is focused on or limited to physical infrastructure, while there are fewer resources available for the human investment it takes to steward gardens. The cost of this gap between image and reality can leave some funders out of touch, and community stewards discouraged and overworked. Of utmost importance, then, is to continue filling in the blanks, and we hope other practitioners will be encouraged to grab this fill-in-the-blank baton, this unique framework, and diagram the true but sometimes invisible social infrastructure work going on “under the hood” of community gardening.
Conclusion
While NeighborSpace is working to “explain harder than we think,” it is still the case that a simplified story of community gardens can blunt the real work going on in community gardens. In turn, the resources available for advancing community-managed work (e.g., capital, urban agriculture) don’t always match the resources needed (e.g., community organizing, neighbor stewardship). There is not one magic framework that will tell the true story of community gardens, but it is crucial that we take seriously and pay attention to the profound work occurring in community-managed garden spaces and tell the story that does these efforts justice.
There are many claims in the literature that community gardens and related community-managed open space help to address issues of disconnection and isolation and set the conditions for improved community health. Here we’ve used an in-depth case study of NeighborSpace as a city-wide garden group to model and share some of the key drivers and outcomes of community-managed open spaces that are uniquely beneficial to our cities and towns. This experimental framework for social infrastructure visibility builds both a visual and structural language for allowing gardens to tell more complete stories.
Lindsay Campbell1, Robin Cline2, Ben Helphand2, Paola Aguirre2, Sonya Sachdeva2, Michelle Johnson1, Erika Svendsen1 New York1 and Chicago2
Robin Cline serves as Assistant Director of NeighborSpace, an urban open space land trust in Chicago. Robin is also the part-time executive director for the art group OperaMatic, a site-specific artist group that activates public spaces in Humboldt Park and Hermosa with participatory art.
For more than twenty years, Ben has focused on ways to help communities have a direct hand in the creation and stewardship of the built environment. He is the Executive Director of NeighborSpace, a nonprofit urban land trust dedicated to preserving and sustaining community-managed open spaces in Chicago.
Paola Aguirre Serrano is an urban designer and partner at Borderless since 2016. She has served as Commissioner of Chicago Landmarks and the Cultural Advisory Council of the City of Chicago, and currently serves in the Scholarly Advisory Committee for the National Museum of the American Latino. Paola received a B. of Architecture from the Institute Superior de Arquitectura y Diseño de Chihuahua, and M. of Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard School of Design.
Sonya Sachdeva is a computational social scientist with the US Forest Service in the greater Chicago area. She utilizes machine learning and other computational methodology to understand the socio-cultural factors that shape environmental values and behavior.
Dr. Erika Svendsen is a social scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station and is based in New York City. Erika studies environmental stewardship and issues related to hybrid governance, collective resilience and human well-being.
Acknowledgments: All Partnerships Lab participants and TNOC Summit Caring in Public attendees, including Laura Landau, Georgia Silvera Seamans, Natalie Campbell, Nora Almeida, Sophie Neuhaus, Sarah Fox Tracy, Bep Schrammeijer, Paula Acevedo, Pete Ellis, Gitty Korsuize, Tuba Atabey, Neda Puskarica-Stojanovic, Yaritza Guillen, Natalie Perkins, Staice Martin, Francesca Birks, Samantha Miller.
References
Campbell, Lindsay K., Svendsen, Erika, Johnson, Michelle & Laura Landau. (2021): Activating urban environments as social infrastructure through civic stewardship, Urban Geography, DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2021.1920129.
Campbell, Lindsay K.; Svendsen, Erika; Sonti, Nancy Falxa; Hines, Sarah J.; Maddox, David, eds. 2019. Green Readiness, Response, and Recovery: A Collaborative Synthesis. Gen. Tech. Rep. NRS-P-185. Newtown Square, PA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service. 358 p. https://doi.org/10.2737/NRS-GTR-P-185.
Connolly, James J., Svendsen, Erika S., Fisher, Dana R., & Campbell, Lindsay K. (2013). Organizing urban ecosystem services through environmental stewardship governance in New York City. Landscape and Urban Planning, 109(1), 76–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2012.07.001
Fisher, D. R., Campbell, L. K., & Svendsen, E. S. (2012). The organisational structure of urban environmental stewardship. Environmental Politics, 21(1), 26–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09644016.2011.643367.
Klinenberg, Eric. (2018). Palaces for the people: How social infrastructure can help fight inequality, polarization, and the decline of civic life. Crown Publishing.
Landau, Laura F.; Campbell, Lindsay K.; Svendsen, Erika S.; Johnson, Michelle L. 2021. Building Adaptive Capacity Through Civic Environmental Stewardship: Responding to COVID-19 Alongside Compounding and Concurrent Crises. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities. 3: 705178. 14 p. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2021.705178.
McMillen, Heather; Campbell, Lindsay K.; Svendsen, Erika S.; Reynolds, Renae. 2016. Recognizing Stewardship Practices as Indicators of Social Resilience: In Living Memorials and in a Community Garden. Sustainability. No. 775. 8(8): 26p. https://doi.org/10.3390/su8080775.
Svendsen, Erika, & Campbell, Lindsay. (2008). Understanding urban environmental stewardship. Cities and the Environment, 1(1), 1–32. https://doi.org/10.15365/cate.1142008.
A closer look at different types of social infrastructure helps to better understand challenges that stewards face and points to ways that strategies for visibility might support community investment and care.
As part of The Nature of Cities Festival, on 29 March 2022, a team of practitioners and researchers at NeighborSpace, Borderless, and the USDA Forest Service – Northern Research Station organized a seed session, entitled “Caring in Public,” to explore the building blocks of social infrastructure with a group of 27 participants from around the world. Starting from a synthesis of the literature and a case study of community gardens, we framed questions, synthesized concepts, and led an interactive exercise of diagramming visible and invisible systems that produce known benefits and outcomes that could be applied to multiple community-managed spaces.
The framework was built around the example of community gardens and focuses on three connected themes:
Neighbors: This theme relates to organizational aspects of the community ― the core and consistent caretakers, and the community leaders who are behind the scenes organizing people, building relationships with the broader community, planning both the physical space and activities, and identifying resources to support the community.
Place-keeping: This is how the space is protected and held for the neighborhood, how the physical features of the space reflect the values and aesthetics of the community of caretakers and stewards. This also refers to the spatial typology, and their accessibility and communication systems.
Community connections: This theme refers to the network of relationships and supporters that neighbors from community-managed spaces seek to develop to engage their community assets and resources. The stronger the network and the capacity for collaboration with other community groups, organizations, and initiatives, the greater the sense of belonging and inclusion.
These themes led us to map the existing activities and the conditions supporting the activities and to define the values, principles, and outcomes that are supportive of community-managed spaces, particularly community gardens.
Framework for social infrastructure visibility in community-managed open space with key elements of community connections, neighbors, and place-keeping. Diagram: Borderless for Partnerships Lab + NeighborSpace
We wanted to explore social infrastructure sites and systems, including community gardens, public libraries, alternative archives, street trees, and community fridges in order to test, refine, and reflect on our framework. To do so, we posed the following framing questions in our TNOC Seed Session:
What are the physical sites and spaces in your city that support civic life and community care?
Who are the groups and what are the governance structures that support these sites?
What are the values and principles shaping these collective spaces?
How do they do stewardship through specific practices and activities?
Following an introduction to the framework and a community garden example, participants selected community sites of interest to them (e.g., libraries, parks, urban farms, publicly accessible private spaces) and went into break-out groups on zoom to brainstorm components and processes of these social infrastructure sites and systems at work. They went through three rounds of brainstorming on the activities, conditions, values, and outcomes of these sites – quickly covering their virtual whiteboards in sticky notes.
Screengrab from break-out group brainstorming session on testing the framework, brainstorming activities, conditions, values, and outcomes of libraries as social infrastructure. The Nature of Cities Festival – Caring in Public Seed Session. 29 March 2022.
The aim was for participants to develop collaborative group models of various greenspace types and community spaces. By the end of the 90-minute session, we realized we were only just beginning to unfold key components and relationships in these spaces. The author team continued to meet and reflect after the session, sharing vignettes about our work, and observing patterns and differences across different sites and systems. This essay shares, reflects, and builds on what we learned throughout that process.
Different models and arrangements in social infrastructure, from publicly supported to community-managed to mutual aid
“Public” places exist on a spectrum of access from public rights of way to public parks and libraries to privately owned public spaces. Access to and possible uses of these spaces are shaped by who owns and manages them, as well as their location and enclosure (or lack thereof). For example, adults are sometimes not allowed in public playgrounds without a child, and university campuses within cities are often monitored by security guards who restrict access. Even in publicly managed parks and libraries, surveillance measures can make certain people excluded or unsafe ― specifically Black, Indigenous, and people of color, as well as queer people, folks with mental illness, and anyone from a community facing a history of police violence. These barriers can mean that the most marginalized are in some cases prevented from accessing the resources they need.
These spaces operate via different institutional structures and contexts ― well beyond the simple binary of ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’ organizing. They include government-supported spaces, to ones in collaboration with institutions and organizations, to those that are actively counter-institutional or that expand how we conceive of institutional contexts. Below, we present five vignettes written by individual authors who are embedded in the sites and systems of community gardens (our original case), public libraries, community archives, street trees, and community refrigerators. A closer look at these different types of social infrastructure helps to better understand particular challenges that stewards face and points to ways that strategies for visibility described above might be applied to support community investment and care.
Plotting Care in Chicago Community Gardens By Robin Cline and Ben Helphand
South Merrill Community Garden visualized using the framework – Neighbors, Place-keeping, and Community Connections. Borderless & Ellie Mejía for Partnerships Lab + NeighborSpace
We at NeighborSpace are witness to the shifting of community governance over time. As a long-term land trust, watching change is one of the unique vantage points of our organization. South Merrill Community Garden is a powerful example of the shifting yet constant social infrastructure of a community space and was a key garden to illustrate using the modeling system described here.
South Merrill Community Garden, located in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, is an art and wellness garden long focused on violence prevention, health programming, and community healing. The garden holds 40-plus years of community open-space use; as is the case with many community projects, the space holds the memories of different eras of effort. In 1984, children and adults of the Genesis Cooperative and the Merrill Square Co-op came together to revitalize a vacant space of a former apartment building. Families removed bricks by hand and dedicated this lot for residents of the block to grow food and get to know each other. In 1997, after several iterations of different community leadership, the garden became the 6th garden of the now 130 gardens that are protected by the land trust NeighborSpace. In 2006, the garden was transformed again, this time into a living memorial for 10-year-old student Troy Law, a gifted student who died as a result of domestic violence. Through the efforts of a Mrs. Emily Kenny, a Chicago Public School teacher from nearby O’Keefe Elementary School, the garden still stands, with Law’s memorial sculpture bringing community members together to both honor and heal the community. From 2006 to 2014, the garden functioned with the support of the women’s auxiliary board of a nearby Methodist Church, one member taking particular leadership and investment, as her apartment overlooks the garden. In 2015, the Genesis Cooperative, coming full circle, again stepped in to support leadership and support at this garden. Today, the garden functions as a memorial garden and a gathering garden; a space to honor community loss, heal, and celebrate intergenerational joy. The garden leadership at Merrill uses consistent and visible intergenerational and youth public programming to invite neighbors in and, because of this, neighbors look to this space as a place for resources, and recognize it as a community venue. At the founding moment of this garden’s history, the garden was mostly a food and flower garden, but as Natalie Perkins, one of the garden leaders, puts it “ We learned we are better at growing community than growing kale!” While educational vegetable beds are still active, the garden group has shifted its primary attention to public programming that includes youth programs, art and music classes, cooking demonstrations, and yoga and dance programming.
The garden is embedded in the neighborhood between two large apartment buildings, with one of the former garden leaders’ apartments looking directly over the garden. Another leader is an active member of a housing co-op across the street, which is home to a community room, allowing for indoor programming and meeting space during inclement weather. Leadership at this garden has touched many institutions; originally founded and supported by O’Keefe Elementary School, the garden was later adopted by the South Shore United Methodist Church Women’s Auxiliary Board, in partnership with the local block club and the Genesis Housing Cooperative. Neighbors and stakeholders include both a local chef and an architect who helped design and build an outdoor oven space, with the support of garden members. While the community organizations that have adopted this garden shift in a cycle of care, the garden is always handed off with some connection and history still intact, which creates constancy during changing times.
The leadership of the garden is rather informal; the leaders have known each other for quite some time, are familiar with and like each other, and acknowledge that decision-making is a slow and steady process. “It sometimes takes a long time for us to make decisions, but that’s okay,” says Dianne Hodges, co-garden leader and community activist. Some leaders have more time than others and are able to meet contractors, artists, or other program providers in the space. They have adopted the process of video recording these meetings instead of taking notes to make sure the conversations are captured in their entirety.
This garden has a welcoming entrance, with flower beds and seating in their public parkway, as well as art sculptures and hand-painted signs. The garden is locked during non-use periods, but it is still sometimes used in ways other than intended (sleeping, alcohol, some vandalism). The garden addresses this with direct communication, invitation, and consistent positive presence. Care and maintenance of the garden usually occur during public programming hours and is not necessarily a separate activity.
The garden is open to unique partnerships – because several of the garden leaders work with community organizations, they are always on the lookout for volunteer groups and programming partnerships. They partnered for several years working with a hospital comprehensive care program to bring patients to the garden for health and wellness programs. They also co-program with a nearby NeighborSpace garden down the block to cross-pollinate their programs and increase outreach to neighbors. The garden receives grants when available to bring in artists and special programs. Since this public-facing programming is a major priority of the garden, the garden looks for relevant community cohesion grants (for example, in Chicago, yearly grants such as the Safe and Peaceful Communities Fund) to help keep community gardens activated with free seasonal programming. Grants such as these, as well as shareable models and explicit illustration diagrams, support the emerging and urgent recognition that community gardens are important sites of social infrastructure.
Public Libraries Contain Multitudes By Natalie Campbell
Caption: Participants in the Public Interest Design Lab Fellowship view anti-freeway protest signs in The People’s Archive at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Washington DC, 2021. Photo: Imagine Photography
Early on in my work with my local public library system — the DC Public Library in Washington, D.C. — an artist observed: “there are so many opportunities to take something out from the library, but almost no chance for the community to put something in.” Over the years — in shifting roles as a contractor, Friends group volunteer, and now as an employee at a public library developing exhibitions — I have contemplated these words, and how to create opportunities for more diverse and visible forms of participation within our public institutions.
From volunteering to voting to public service employment, there are plenty of opportunities to participate in a library environment, but the idea that a public library could — like a community garden — be a community-run space is far from reality. Like public parks, public libraries sit at the restrictive end of the spectrum of access for stewards, and possibilities for participation are highly regulated, with a variation on the system and branch level. At the bottom, this is because public libraries are managed by a board of directors with a great degree of accountability to their public. User privacy and personal freedom are rigorously protected. Data and community input sessions are used in all aspects of facilities and service design. And, of course, public funding structures vary greatly and shape the realities of how we experience public space. As more of the commons have become enclosed, public libraries have increasingly absorbed other social services, often without increased funding or staff. Libraries are also cooling centers, Departments of Motor Vehicles, disaster relief stations, job training hubs, and emergency shelters. The position of the library as a one-stop social service center has made these spaces more precarious and constrained (Ettarh, 2018).
Applying our framework to my own experience helps to illuminate some of the factors impacting practices of stewardship and care within public libraries. First, regarding sites and place-keeping: In contrast to community gardens, the physical sites of public libraries generally don’t offer members of the public opportunities to participate directly in design or care. Open sight lines, wipe-clean surfaces, Hatch Act proscriptions against political speech, and visual guidelines aimed at accessibility, safety, and inclusion are all factors.
In terms of governance and funding structures, even within the typology of public libraries, there is a wide variance. Public libraries in the United States are often, but not always, funded by tax dollars, but in most cases draw also upon other funding sources — state and federal dollars, grants, donations, fees, and endowments. The proportion of these in any given system can vary widely. For example, while a library card holder in DC may book any meeting room for a free public event with a library card (in accordance with their guidelines), conference rooms at the Free Library of Philadelphia are only available for non-library events via event rentals. Different definitions of public space and levels of access are produced by these realities.
The most common way that stewardship is practiced in the DC Public Library system is through volunteers and Friends groups. At the DC Public Library, each library branch has its own, independent, volunteer organization, with different structures and bylaws, loosely organized through a central Federation. Similar to the politics of Parent Teacher Associations, Friends groups grapple with issues of inequity and uneven participation across the city — while some branches have no active Friends group at all, the most active Friends group in the system, the Friends of the Mt. Pleasant Library, raised more than $100,000 in a single year through a t-shirt campaign that tapped into the local punk subculture and went viral, shipping t-shirts to punk rock/library lovers nationwide.
As we proceed with examining barriers to access and the self-determined spaces that have sprung up to “fill the gaps”, it is important to note that, within these larger top-down entities, there is an entire ecosystem that contains a variety of smaller, collectively managed spaces and initiatives. Some examples that speak the spectrum of management include the New York Public Library’s storied Picture Collection, which staff and supporters have rallied to maintain as an open-access circulating collection; The Go-Go Archive and Punk Archive at the DC Public Library (collections with a high degree of donor involvement within the public library’s archival collection); the innovative artist residency, exhibition space, and makerspace, The Bubbler at Madison Public Library; San Francisco Public Library’s teen-designed and led space The Mix at SFPL, to name just a few. Such examples are more the exception than the rule, in institutions tasked with equitably providing a dizzying array of social services. Yet, both within these more collectively managed initiatives and beyond — despite the strains on the system and restrictions on use — I regularly observe a sense of public ownership that renders public libraries palpably, strikingly different from almost any other interior urban space. Given this, how can public libraries learn from stewardship support structures in play elsewhere in our society?
Some questions that arise in relation to our framework: How can libraries empower ‘neighbors’ to play increased roles in decision-making, in a way that is accessible and equitable? How can we increase opportunities for residents to directly shape library spaces through place-keeping in ways that are equitable and sustainable for staff under numerous pressures? How can we better nurture and mutually strengthen the community connections that are occurring in all levels of service on a daily basis?
An Alternative Archive is a Collection and a Collective By Nora Almeida
Image one: Interference Archive Propaganda Party with Brooklyn Eviction Defense, 2022 Image two: Interference Archive Wikipedia Editathon in collaboration with Wikimedia NYC, 2019, both by Nora Almeida
Alternative libraries and archives have emerged because of limitations and restrictions in municipally managed space. They are spaces that can support civic life and provide resources that you might not find in a public library or institutional archive or be set up in a rural area or underfunded neighborhood without adequate resources to meet community needs. Alternative libraries and archives vary widely in scope, focus, and type. They might be temporary, like the People’s Library which was created to support Occupy Wall Street activists. They might be itinerant pop-ups like Radical Reference, which emerged during the 2004 Republican National Convention to help protesters and later became an online volunteer reference service for information-seeking activists. They might provide access to non-traditional materials, like the Next Epoch Seed Library, which collects and “lends” the seeds of weeds that thrive in environmentally disturbed areas and publishes educational resources about urban ecology including open-access curricula.
Many self-determined, independent libraries and archives create social infrastructure to support specific publics, provide access to counter-histories that are typically under-represented in public libraries and municipal archives, and function as community centers and safe spaces. Interference Archive is one example. Founded in 2012 in Gowanus, Brooklyn, New York, the archive is a donation-supported, volunteer-run space that mounts public exhibitions, offers free workshops and cultural events, and provides access to materials created by social movement activists from all over the world (“About us”).
I started volunteering at the archive in 2015 after attending a film screening with a friend and viewing an exhibition about Tenant Organizing. During my first volunteer shift, I helped with an outdoor printmaking event organized in collaboration with Mobile Print Power, a multigenerational printmaking collective, and Combat Paper, an organization that works with veterans to transform military uniforms into paper as a method to process and share experiences of war. In the seven years I’ve spent as an archive volunteer, I’ve organized dozens of public programs and Wikipedia edit-athons, co-curated four exhibitions, worked with educators and organizations across the city to bring movement histories into classrooms and galleries, and collaborated with grassroots groups like the No North Brooklyn Pipeline Coalition and The Poor People’s Campaign to host propaganda parties where we produce materials ― buttons, posters, t-shirts, banners ― for use in current movement struggles.
In contrast to most archives, Interference Archive is open stacks and treats the cultural ephemera produced by activists as part of a common history we all share, which is reinforced by a “use as preservation” philosophy that privileges the sharing of ideas over the preservation (or fetishization) of artifacts. Exhibitions at the archive are intended to make social movement histories more accessible and to encourage visitors to open up boxes and start conversations about contemporary struggles for social justice. Many of the exhibitions and almost all of the public programs at the archive are collaborative and interactive; they often support ongoing struggles directly by providing a forum for organizers to share ideas or indirectly through alternative educational programming (Gordon, Hanna, Hoyer, Ordaz, 2016). The archive is a generative space that is actively invested in archiving the present and regularly hosts programs including training, workshops, and media-making events to create material for use by NYC activists in street demonstrations (Almeida and Hoyer, 2019).
What drew me to Interference Archive and has kept me engaged is the relationships I’ve made with other volunteers and activists across New York City. The non-hierarchical governance and transparent work structure makes it possible to co-organize meaningful public programs without the kind of bureaucracy that I face in my job as an academic librarian at a large public university. I’ve learned an enormous amount from the material in the archive which represents a wide array of ephemera produced by activists around the world. In the archive, you might find posters produced by Dutch Provo anarchists during the 1960s advocating for car-free cities, pamphlets and flyers made by counter-globalism activists during the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, educational pamphlets made by the Jane collective–an underground abortion network in Chicago founded in 1965, issues of the Black Panther newspaper from the early 1970s covering the Vietnam War, Black Liberation solidarity posters produced by the Fireworks Graphics Collective during the 1980s, flyers made by anti-nuclear activists in the 1990s at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the UK, and silk-screened t-shirts produced at the archive last week in collaboration with current organizers from Brooklyn Eviction Defense.
The sense of community the archive fosters ― among volunteers, across movement groups, and with visitors who range from students and scholars to curious passersby and activists ― is the product of the behind-the-scenes labor we all conduct to make decisions collectively and intentionally (even if they take a long time) and a commitment to support each other and new volunteers through transparent accountability structures that we’ve carefully developed over the past decade. The values and principles of the space are directly informed by the collective, non-hierarchical organizational structure practiced by many movement groups represented in our collection. Not unlike most self-managed spaces, we face limitations: our labor is unevenly donated and sometimes invisible, communication across a large volunteer network can be unwieldy, funding is precarious, and sometimes knowledge is lost as people cycle in and out of the network. These obstacles only reinforce the need for continual examination of social infrastructure models. After more than a decade, the archive has become more reflective of its own practices and limitations and is currently focused on developing programs to engage new publics that we aren’t currently reaching and refining organizational structures with an eye towards sustainability. Its role as a place made for and by the community, and the uniqueness of the collection material at the archive, means that it must, like any movement space, keep moving.
A Street Tree is a Place By Georgia Silvera Seamans
A person adding soil and compost to a recently expanded tree bed during a work day with Mission Greenbelt in San Francisco. Image courtesy of Georgia Silvera Seamans
It is easy to see a community garden as a place. You can enter and move through a garden. One can speak about spending time in and visiting a community garden. At first, it might be challenging to perceive a street tree as a place. Yet, when you consider these trees are often planted in demarcated areas of the sidewalk, they are physical places. Like a forest, they are also social spaces. Alone or with others, enabled by institutions or bucking conventions, you can do things in, with, and for a street tree. During my time as a community forester with the Urban Resources Initiative, a nonprofit housed within the Yale School of the Environment in New Haven, CT, most of the community groups I worked with created green spaces by planting street trees. Every group was composed of hyper-local residents with varying degrees of bonding and bridging ties who through stewardship strengthened their reliance on each other.
Acting out of a desire to reclaim their neighborhoods as beautiful, safe, verdant, spaces, residents applied for funding to develop and implement street tree planting plans. They collaborated with each other and with their community forestry resource person, scheduled workdays, showed up, dug and backfilled holes, and settled in their new trees with mulch and water. There were many such days throughout the summer. Each planting day and subsequent maintenance sessions were opportunities to display care, to deepen trust, and to embed new trees in the neighborhood’s canopy.
After digging in the soil with residents in New Haven, I moved to Boston where I stayed in urban forestry but had a more hands-off position managing the city’s street tree planting program. At that time, Boston planted trees based on residents’ requests for a new or replacement tree. I held a shovel a few times, posing in photos for corporate-sponsored plantings. Thankfully, selecting trees at a nursery was also part of the new job. It was an awesome responsibility to choose the trees for a city’s next arboreal cohort!
My next attempt at street tree care was with a trio of Honeylocust trees in New York City, but this engagement was short-lived. I was doing this work alone and didn’t have a community to lean on. I didn’t totally abandon the street trees in my neighborhood, though. I volunteered for the city’s 2015 Street Tree Census, the third decennial survey organized by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. I recruited a co-lead and we committed to a zone bounded by Houston Street, Sixth Avenue, 14th Street, and the Bowery. Annie and I participated in “train the trainer” workshops and hosted survey events for other volunteers. The census work was like a roving display of care. When we were out surveying trees, residents asked what we were doing which led to some fruitful conversations about the city’s urban forest.
Fast forward a few years and I had a plot on a university urban farm and several of the gardeners and the farm manager started talking about taking care of the adjacent street tree beds. We wanted to spread our resources beyond the farm’s fence and spruce up the public realm. These public trees were planted and left to negotiate space with human infrastructure, design, and other forms of mediated plant dispersal. We pulled spontaneous herbs, we cleaned up dog waste and garbage, and we sowed bulbs and native perennials. The location was challenging to care for. Without any fencing around the beds, the maintenance staff of the adjacent buildings piled heavy garbage bags on the new plants on trash collection days. People did not pick up pet waste. Litter blew into the beds. Squirrels ate the bulbs. We resolved to keep trying but then COVID-19 emerged, and our attention was diverted elsewhere. Two and a half years later, the garden community is slowly finding our footing. I enrolled in the Stewardship Team course offered by New York City Parks which reminded me of some of the resources available to care for public landscapes. I requested hundreds of daffodil bulbs, and one evening this fall, the main caretaker, a group of college students, and I picked up litter and planted one thousand bulbs at the farm’s edge and in adjacent street tree beds. This was a first step to rebuild our street tree care community. The next spring will be a time to consistently connect with our neighbors and reinvest in place-keeping. I want to mobilize the community around street tree care without attracting institutional interference and ideals of beauty.
Feeding Our Neighbors through Community Fridges By Laura Landau
Original fridge and fridge shelter painted by M.Silin for Collective Focus Resource Hub. Photo by M.Silin
Public spaces take on a new meaning and level of necessity in times of crisis. In my past research, I have studied many examples of how parks, community centers, and houses of worship serve as flexible spaces that can be activated into emergency meet-up spots, donation collection hubs, and organizing centers following a disaster. Scholars have found that community needs and the chain of events following a crisis are often the same, regardless of the specific type of disaster event. Emergencies simply heighten and expose existing needs. The onset of COVID-19 in New York City reactivated the networks of civic groups, community leaders, local businesses, and elected officials that had been formed in response to a variety of other acute and chronic disasters, from Superstorm Sandy to ongoing chronic racism and gentrification. In addition, the pandemic brought a surge of new responders in the form of mutual aid networks, many of which are committed to working outside of systems of public aid and charity models that have strict requirements for who can participate and what they are eligible to receive (Landau 2022). Many mutual aid efforts have focused on food insecurity, a reality that predated COVID-19 in New York City but has increased by 36%since the pandemic due to a combination of income loss, rising costs for food and rent, and health and safety risks.
Community refrigerators (fridges) are one example of mutual aid that use public space to connect people with food in a low-barrier way. They are often located on the sidewalk, a public right of way that anyone can reach. Unlike many government and non-profit food assistance programs, community fridges do not limit or monitor the level of need each person can demonstrate, or the type or amount of food each person can take. They are also set apart from other models by the way they are stocked and managed. Anyone can put food in the fridge, and anyone can take it. This practice models a core principle of mutual aid, that everyone has something to give and something they need. In practice, navigating this principle can be complex. The role of neighbors is unique in this form of social infrastructure, because community fridges are usually managed by networks of people that are not explicitly connected to larger, more formalized organizations and nonprofits that come with resources and management skills. This allows for a great deal of organizing flexibility, but also can lead to conflicts over place-keeping, since anyone can place a claim on the public right of way.
As part of my dissertation research, I interviewed representatives from mutual aid groups across New York City that were formed in response to COVID-19. Many of the groups I spoke with operate community fridges, often in gentrifying neighborhoods with large low-income communities of color. All of these fridges depend on the unpaid labor of local residents, but other entities, both public and private, still shape their practice.
When one mutual aid group decided they wanted to create and operate a community fridge, a local beloved restaurant offered to purchase the fridge and keep it on their sidewalk. Almost immediately after being set up, the fridge was vandalized and broken. The restaurant owners were not dissuaded by the incident, and they purchased a new fridge and installed it on a crate so that it couldn’t be tipped over. With the organizing power of the mutual aid group, they have now maintained the fridge for over a year and a half. Volunteers operate on a regular schedule to pick up leftover food from restaurants, grocery delivery services, and the local food co-op, and stock the fridge and adjacent pantry with a mix of fresh ingredients and prepared items. Another team of volunteers regularly cleans out the fridge to remove any food that has gone bad. A group of college students brings leftover food from the dining hall. The operation has not been without its challenges — there have been a few other vandalism incidents and some volunteers have suspected that certain people are removing everything from the fridge and selling some of the food — but more often than not people are respectful. Where a charity model might view these incidents as problems to solve, the mutual aid group prioritizes the community’s right to food and does not believe in policing access.
When something does require intervention, mutual aid groups rely on their skills and networks to mediate. Another mutual aid group that operates a community fridge witnessed some ongoing conflict over food. In accordance with their values, the group wanted to help de-escalate the conflict without getting the police involved and potentially endangering the community. Although they are careful about their relationships with government representations and have in the past turned down offers of support from elected officials who wanted their endorsement or a photo opportunity in exchange, they were able to use their connection to a different elected to hire a translator to decrease conflict over miscommunication at the fridge. Similarly, in a different neighborhood, a disgruntled neighbor called the police to try to get a community fridge and pantry removed from the sidewalk, and a council member stepped in to defend the mutual aid group. These are just a few examples of many that illustrate the interconnectivity and interdependence of the civic, public, and private sectors in shared spaces.
In addition to providing food, community fridges can serve as points of connection. One mutual aid group asked a local art student to paint their community fridge to beautify the sidewalk space and reflect the culture of the neighborhood. Another volunteer shared an experience of going to stock the fridge and seeing an older woman waiting. The volunteer asked if there was something specific she was waiting for and discovered that she was hoping for a specific pastry that was sometimes delivered from the local bakery. Not only was it in the delivery haul, but it turned out to be the volunteer’s favorite treat as well, and the two were able to share a nice moment reflecting on their similar taste. While the transient nature of community fridges and the goal of allowing people some anonymity as they take their food sets them apart from other sites of social infrastructure, the loose social ties formed on the sidewalk are a crucial part of what keeps people coming back and working toward a city where everyone has the food they need.
Reflections and future work
Let’s return to the questions we posed at the outset of this essay as illuminated by these cases:
What are the physical sites and spaces in your city that support civic life and community care?
Who are the groups and what are the governance structures that support these sites?
What are the values and principles shaping these collective spaces?
How do they do stewardship through specific practices and activities?
These vignettes reveal diverse forms of social infrastructures in our communities. These “third spaces” ― beyond the home and the workplace (be they public, private, or in-between) ― are vital sites for providing/receiving social services, interacting with neighbors, and participating in civic life. In discussing how to adapt our framework beyond the specific site type of community gardens, we felt that the framework has many of the key components of any social infrastructure system ― the actors, the values, and the activities. But we need to consider the constellation of ways in which these dimensions come together. We can ask: who is caring for and using space for what and why?
We grappled with how to better capture key differences in organizational structures and institutional contexts across a wide spectrum ― from publicly-funded and staffed facilities to mutual aid networks. These differences have real implications for the role of paid and unpaid labor, the power dynamics of decision-making, and the control of space. Governance questions — Who decides? Who funds? Who labors? Who cares? — are crucial to pose and make transparent when seeking to understand these dynamics. As the vignettes reveal, there is complexity even within a single site type as publicly-funded spaces can include “friends of” groups and community-organized programs and activities.
We also identified constraints, challenges, and limits on the use of spaces and social infrastructures. As discussed earlier, access to sites varies widely across public and private spaces, with a whole range of configurations that might be described as “quasi-public” or public for some people, some uses, and in some instances. Particularly where we see commercial ventures that require purchasing an item or a service (e.g., coffee shop, restaurant, bookstore) ― this presents barriers for those who cannot afford to pay to access that space. Some sites and systems present challenging tradeoffs. For example, is an “open street” that activates a city street for an outdoor restaurant a transformation that invites publicity and conviviality, or is it one that privatizes space and excludes some users? The answer, frustratingly, may be “both” ― and being attuned to subtle and not-so-subtle acts of inclusion and exclusion are critical. Access also depends on the identities and bodies of the users, with lower-income people, people of color, and unhoused people more frequently surveilled and policed within “public” spaces that sanction certain activities (e.g., sleeping, solicitation, vending).
In focusing on positive social benefits in our framework, these challenges can recede into the background ― and yet they can be some of the main factors that differentiate between systems. We must pose the questions: Who is seen as the public? Who is served? Who is left out? Given these questions, how might we build even more complete frameworks that both celebrate the hidden benefits, but also acknowledge challenges and conflicts ― including dimensions of inequity, inequality, and injustice that thread through these systems? Going forward, how do we recognize the multiple values of these social infrastructures, and how might we better support and enable them? What unique forms of support might be needed in the context of stresses ranging from fiscal crises to climate change to pandemics? Building on national conversations about deferred maintenance and needed upgrades to physical infrastructures, what would a comprehensive plan look like to support, grow, and transform social infrastructures to meet the needs of all people.
Lindsay Campbell1, Robin Cline2, Ben Helphand2, Paola Aguirre2, Sonya Sachdeva2, Natalie Campbell3, Nora Almeida1, Laura Landau1, Georgia Silvera Seamans1 New York1, Chicago2, Washington D.C.3
Acknowledgments: All Partnerships Lab participants and TNOC Festival Caring in Public attendees, including Erika Svendsen, Michelle Johnson, Sophie Neuhaus, Sarah Fox Tracy, Bep Schrammeijer, Paula Acevedo, Pete Ellis, Gitty Korsuize, Tuba Atabey, Neda Puskarica-Stojanovic, Yaritza Guillen, Natalie Perkins, Staice Martin, Francesca Birks, Samantha Miller
Robin Cline serves as Assistant Director of NeighborSpace, an urban open space land trust in Chicago. Robin is also the part-time executive director for the art group OperaMatic, a site-specific artist group that activates public spaces in Humboldt Park and Hermosa with participatory art.
For more than twenty years, Ben has focused on ways to help communities have a direct hand in the creation and stewardship of the built environment. He is the Executive Director of NeighborSpace, a nonprofit urban land trust dedicated to preserving and sustaining community-managed open spaces in Chicago.
Paola Aguirre Serrano is an urban designer and partner at Borderless since 2016. She has served as Commissioner of Chicago Landmarks and the Cultural Advisory Council of the City of Chicago, and currently serves in the Scholarly Advisory Committee for the National Museum of the American Latino. Paola received a B. of Architecture from the Institute Superior de Arquitectura y Diseño de Chihuahua, and M. of Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard School of Design.
Sonya Sachdeva is a computational social scientist with the US Forest Service in the greater Chicago area. She utilizes machine learning and other computational methodology to understand the socio-cultural factors that shape environmental values and behavior.
Natalie Campbell is a curator, exhibit developer, and part of the DC Public Library Exhibits team. She has consulted on art and exhibits at the DC Public Library since 2016, including the MLK Library’s permanent exhibit Up From the People. She studied Art History at Hunter College CUNY and has taught at the Corcoran School of Arts + Design at George Washington University and the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Nora Almeida is an urban swimmer, writer, performance artist, librarian, and environmental activist. She’s an Associate Professor in the Library Department at City Tech and a long-time volunteer at Interference Archive. She has organized media-making workshops, public events, and street performances across NYC.
Laura is currently pursuing a PhD in geography at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on the civic groups that care for the local environment, and on the potential for urban environmental stewardship to strengthen communities and make them more resilient to disaster and disturbance.
Georgia lives and breathes city trees--with experience in New Haven, Boston, Oakland, and NYC, and a dissertation about urban forestry policy in Northern California cities. Georgia is the founder of Local Nature Lab and directs Washington Square Park Eco Projects where she designs urban ecology programs for New Yorkers of all ages.
Almeida, Nora, and Jen Hoyer. 2020. “The Living Archive in the Anthropocene,” in “Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene,” eds. Eira Tansey and Rob Montoya. Special issue, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 1. DOI: 10.24242/jclis.v3i1.96.
A review of Naturaleza Urbana. plataforma de experiencias, edited by María Angélica Mejía. 2016. ISBN 978-958-8889-69-6. Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt, Bogotá. 208 pages. The Spanish version of the book can be downloaded here. An English version will be available in September.
In 2007, people living in towns and cities surpassed 50 percent of the world’s population for the first time in history. Urbanization increasingly affects both neighboring and faraway landscapes through habitat fragmentation, degradation of the soil, water and air contamination, solid waste disposal, surface sealing, and associated impacts.
Latin American cities, as complex arrangements, have been overlooked for too long by ecologists.
In Latin America, 80 percent of the population lives in cities, where demands for space and social and environmental pressures are high. Unfortunately, most human settlements and cities have grown chaotically, which is one reason why they frequently feature juxtapositions of rich and poor and planned and unplanned spaces, and are segregated both spatially and socially, with uneven availability and quality of green, blue, and gray infrastructures.
Although cities are the environments in which most Latin Americans live, studies on these multifaceted systems of patches, with their distinct geometries and distributions of built and open spaces, are very few in number across the region.
Latin American cities, as complex arrangements, have been overlooked for a long time by ecologists, who have preferred to focus their studies on natural ecosystems, attracted by the exuberance and uniqueness of pristine landscapes. On the other side, those responsible for the construction of the city—architects, engineers, planners and placemakers—built on the landscape without realizing that a city is a complex living ecosystem. This failure has added to the impact of urban residents’ daily actions on the metabolism of the city.
Naturaleza Urbana. plataforma de experiencias provides a new way to look at Colombian cities as holistic constructs. It shows that the country is a pioneer in the multidisciplinary and intra-disciplinary discussion on urban ecology, which aims to build livable and attractive cities.
This book, written in Spanish—an English version is due by August 2016—and created by the Humboldt Institute is a collective work called to integrate different visions for managing urban biodiversity through a variety of experiences based on multiple social and ecological Colombian realities.
The book would never have happened without the willingness of more than 80 authors who belong to civil organizations, local governments, universities, and research institutes, to share interesting initiatives to preserve, restore, assess, and use urban nature. They achieve this task via 36 case studies delivered within 13 thematic categories, through which the book integrates nature, ecosystem services, management, and urban planning. Most of these examples come from a variety of Colombian cities: Bogotá, Cali, Florencia, Manizales, Medellín, Popayán, Quibdó, Riohacha, Turbo, and Villavicencio. Some case studies also describe the importance of periurban areas, mountains, and wetlands. The book also includes some exemplary descriptions of ecological restoration and rehabilitation, conservation of biodiversity, and knowledge exchange carried out in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), four African cities, and the United States.
Each experience is presented independently of the rest; the book starts with a fundamental context and ends with an array of key learnings. One can read the book from start to finish, or select one experience without losing understanding of the social-ecological integrative approach proposed.
Naturaleza Urbana. plataforma de experiencias is exquisitely designed and illustrated and elegantly edited. It is written in an entertaining and easy to read style that makes it accessible to all readers.
This landmark, timely book should prove extremely useful for Latin Americans. Almost all the experiences detailed here can be applied to many cities sharing similar problematic situations; in this sense, it is an ideal reference book for everyone from policy planners, to students, to citizens. With this release the Humboldt Institute invites a wider readership to the exchange of ideas that makes cities better places to live.
The author begins by taking us through his process: he located people with stature in the fields of policy, planning, and architecture (just to name a few), and asked them to identify a project (not their own) that gives them hope for the years that lie ahead. These segments read, at times, like program notes for the Aspen Ideas Festival. The anecdotes are fragmentary—like something overheard at a dinner party—but they are also relatively direct, theory-less, and straightforward: use green spaces to capture stormwater, build hospitals with gardens, transform industrial wastelands into parks, build libraries in poor areas, and the list goes on…
Chapter one in this book is “imagining a sustainable city”, but it curiously fails to mention that much of the early and current literature on the topic describes “ecological” cities. If I came to this book without much of a background in the topic, I could read it from cover to cover (and gain a lot of useful information) but remain unaware of the breadth and depth of the international ecocity movement and the various manifestations of ecocity ideas that have contributed to shaping and informing sustainable city initiatives for over three decades. Ecocities is a term that has been used to describe municipal programs that aim to make a city sustainable, to make claims of urban ascendancy based on sustainability, and as a label for visionary ideas about what the ultimate sustainable city might be like.
LALI comes as a declaration of fundamental ethical principles to promote the recognition, valuation, protection, management, and sustainable planning/design of Latin American landscapes through the adoption of agreements that recognize local, regional, and national diversity and values, tangible so much as intangible, of landscape, as well as principles and processes to safeguard it.
LALI work through clusters which translates itself as a network, a system that is nourished by cooperation, cocreation, pacts, and the charitable work of key people in Latin America. It grows and becomes stronger through its Clusters. The Ancestral Landscapes Cluster is one of those which aims to recognize, recover, and disseminate the values -tangible and intangible- of ancestral communities/landscapes, inhabited and given meaning by the different native peoples of Latin America, to contribute to their appreciation, understanding, and protection.
What do tulips and daffodils do for our urban ecosystem? What relationships do they support besides being eye candy for people? What is the carbon footprint of growing and transporting ornamental bulbs? Confession: I like tulips. But we can no longer devote public money and public lands to single-function plants. We cannot limit native understory species to natural areas. All New Yorkers should have everyday exposure to plant biodiversity. Let’s plant native early spring bloomers–trout lily, spring beauty, mayapple. To those who might argue that certain species cannot thrive in certain urban environments, I do not accept these limits, and neither should you. I have seen native species growing in “unlikely” places. We should redesign and manage our cities to support more nature and greater ecological function everywhere.
I have lived in an array of fascinating cities, and visited a host of others. I have loved many (New York, Hong Kong, Harare and Berlin); been miserable in a few (London and Pretoria); oddly disappointed by some (San Francisco, Dublin and Sydney) overwhelmed by others (Shanghai and Cairo); and frankly terrified by at least two (Port Moresby and Lagos).
Latin American cities, as complex arrangements, have been overlooked for a long time by ecologists, who have preferred to focus their studies on natural ecosystems, attracted by the exuberance and uniqueness of pristine landscapes. On the other side, those responsible for the construction of the city—architects, engineers, planners and placemakers—built on the landscape without realizing that a city is a complex living ecosystem. This failure has added to the impact of urban residents’ daily actions on the metabolism of the city.
The book would never have happened without the willingness of more than 80 authors who belong to civil organizations, local governments, universities, and research institutes, to share interesting initiatives to preserve, restore, assess, and use urban nature. They achieve this task via 36 case studies delivered within 13 thematic categories, through which the book integrates nature, ecosystem services, management, and urban planning. Most of these examples come from a variety of Colombian cities: Bogotá, Cali, Florencia, Manizales, Medellín, Popayán, Quibdó, Riohacha, Turbo, and Villavicencio. Some case studies also describe the importance of periurban areas, mountains, and wetlands. The book also includes some exemplary descriptions of ecological restoration and rehabilitation, conservation of biodiversity, and knowledge exchange carried out in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), four African cities, and the United States.
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